The Creative Spirit: 1550-Present

1550-Present

Elizabeth Cook

Cook

BOISE

The Creative Spirit: 1550-Present by Elizabeth Cook is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

Contents

- Introduction ~ The Creative Spirit

- 1. Chapter 1: The Protestant Reformation

- 2. Chapter 2: Global Voices for Reform

- 3. Chapter 3: The Counter Reformation ~ Reaffirmation and Renewal

- 4. Chapter 4: National Sovereignty~ Command, Control and Royal Absolutism

- 5. Chapter 5: Travel and Exploration

- 6. Chapter 6: Dutch Masters and the Birth of the Modern Art Market

- 7. Chapter 7: The Enlightenment!

- 8. Chapter 8: Romanticism

- 9. Chapter 9: Shaping a New Imperialism

- 10. Chapter 10: Realism ~ The Eyes of Photography, Literature, and Painting

- 11. Chapter 11: Modernism

- 12. Chapter 12: Freud and the "in-between" World

- 13. Chapter 13: War and the Arts

- 14. Chapter 14: Liberation, Freedom and Promises not fulfilled

- 15. Chapter 15: Globalism and Identity

- Appendix

1

Introduction ~ The Creative Spirit

To study the humanities is, in essence, to study creativity.  The humanities is a single category that contains an enormous amount of material.  It is comprised of the visual arts, architecture, literature and poetry, music, religion, dance, philosophy… all the ways that human beings use the arts to express ideas and explore meaning.  The search for meaning is timeless.  We do it.  People in the past did it.  What is new?

What is new is the insight we can garner from examining how human beings in different times and places used these art forms as a mode of inquiry, a way of expressing desire, love, connection, fear, hatred, hope …. yes, just like us.

For example, let’s take a look at a print by Albrecht Durer.  As you can see, the title of this work is in the upper left corner:  Melencolia.  That is melancholy, to us.  Melancholy is a state of mind one can fall into quite easily.  We’ve all been there.  It is a kind of sadness, a form of inactivity where you just can’t get yourself moving in any direction.  But look closely at how Durer explores this state of mind via images that have symbolic impact.  Imagine that the large figure is a human being.  A human being with wings!  He/she is poised, cheek in hand, pen at the ready, waiting for inspiration that … just… doesn’t…. come.  Ponder the notion that human beings have wings but they often don’t use them.  Frozen assets, perhaps?  Even this person’s “genius,” the little winged being next to him, simply cannot get moving.  They are both surrounded by things, tools, a ladder, a wheel, a scale, forms that are associated with math and geometry, tools for building, money, a vista and horizon.  And in the state he is in, melancholy, he simply cannot move.  Look above his head.  Time is running out!  Notice the grid of numbers.  This is known as the “Magic Square” because no matter which direction you go to add up the numbers, across, diagonally, up, down… the numbers always add up to 34.  This Magic Square has also cleverly presented the year of this work, which was 1514.  So in this image, Durer has presented a keen examination of the state of melancholy.  It’s not just sadness.  It is a state of inertia when you are surrounded by extraordinary gifts and potential, but you just can’t see them.

We can all identify with this.  But look at the horizon.  The sun is rising.  There is a rainbow.  Are these symbols of hope?  There is a French saying, allors que je respire, je l’espere.  So long as I breathe, I hope.  That is timeless as well.

Please view and listen to Florence and the Machine as she expresses the feeling of loneliness, fear, and a kind of melancholy that comes with being an artist:

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://boisestate.pressbooks.pub/thecreativespirit/?p=274

I feel like I’m about to fall
The room begins to sway
And I can hear the sirens
But I can’t walk away

Grab me by my ankles
I’ve been flying for too long
I couldn’t hide from the thunder
In the sky full of song

In what ways can you identify with this?  Is a contemporary song easier for you to make connections with?

What are the ways these two works of art, the print from 1514 and the song from 2018, might converse with each other?

As we begin our journey into creativity from 1550 to the 21st century, remember that to study history is, in many ways, a study of our world today.

1

Chapter 1: The Protestant Reformation

Learning Objectives (Sidebar)

Type your learning objectives here.

- First

- Second

In many ways, the essence of the Protestant Reformation can be witnessed in this extraordinary event from OUR time, the “briefcase man in Tiananmen Square”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qq8zFLIftGk

In this, we saw a singular man stand up against a force much greater than himself.  Those tanks were more than tanks.  They represented the Old Order, one that was resistant to any kind of democratic change or shift.  When protesters hit Tiananmen Square in June of 1989 to rally for change, the government called in the army.  This man, this anonymous ‘everyman,’ took and stand and said, “no.”

Martin Luther~ A Cry for Reform in Christianity

This painting by Anton von Werner entitled Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms (1877) shows a moment of defiance.  Martin Luther was not facing tanks.  Rather, he was facing the Catholic Church.  His ideas about what it meant to be a Christian came in conflict with the longstanding dictum of the Church.  When he was called to

testify at the Diet of Worms in 1521, to renounce all his beliefs, it is said he stated, “Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. May God help me. Amen.”

Please read more about the Protestant Reformation here, through Smarthistory, parts 1-4:

https://smarthistory.org/europe-1300-1800/reformation-and-counter-reformation/

After reading the above chapters about the Protestant Reformation, let’s consider how art, precisely the visual arts, can articulate ideas with great impact.  Sometimes, a work of art just says it better!  Perhaps because it relies on nuance, on personal connections and associations, or because it calls upon the imagination in unique ways.  Art can work in very clever ways.  For example, consider how art can promote ideas about protest and reform.  And let’s not go to a museum.  Let’s go to the street and the work of graffiti artist, Banksy:

Banksy is a contemporary street artist.  Not much is known about him because anonymity is his modus operandi.  His work seems to just appear and it has done so in many countries.  It is often whimsical and humorous.  Oftentimes, it is political.  He uses his art to comment on contemporary issues.  The above work is a great example.  This work appeared several years ago during the Syrian migrant crisis.  It shows birds, who are known for their migratory tendencies, who are where they are because of migration, banding together to ban a single bird that has just arrived.  Notice the statements on their placards.  Banksy creates a very provocative parallel here.  His art is a fine example of a picture saying a thousand words.

16th Century Visual Arts~ Allegory and Insight

During the Protestant Reformation, many artists used their skill and insight to create works that spoke volumes.  A fine example is artist, Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553).  He was a German artist, print maker, painter, and one who used his craft to explore ideas that might have been considered too controversial to explore in more conventional ways.  Please read this chapter on one of his works that encapsulated the issue at the crux of the Protestant Reformation: How DOES one achieve salvation?

https://smarthistory.org/cranach-law-and-gospel-law-and-grace/

Protestant Intellectual and Spiritual Inquiry~ The Impact on 17th Century English Literature

In looking at a sampling of 17th Century English Literature, we get to see how these art forms, literature and poetry, played a role in Intellectual Inquiry in Protestant England.  That is, intellectual inquiry that is in many ways the nature of the protestant approach to the kind of study and prayer that became the basis of one’s personal relationship with god.  If you recall the section on Luther, I hope you remember that this is one of the most important tenets that he called for in his reforms.  That the individual is his own priest… the individual is responsible for his own salvation.  A life of faith is not between the individual and the institution of the Church.  Rather, it is between the individual and God.

The Protestant way includes:

- Private devotion over public ritual. Going to church is a wonderful, communal experience.  Communal worship.  But one’s own reading and meditation is very important in coming closer to God.

- Necessitates the rise of literacy rates. According to James Melton in his book “The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe” The rate of literacy increased more rapidly in more populated areas and areas where there was mixture of religious schools. The literacy rate in England in the 1640s was around 30 percent for males, rising to 60 percent in the mid-18th century. This increase was part of a general trend, fostered by the Reformation emphasis on reading the scripture and by the demand for literacy in an increasingly mercantile society. The group most affected was the growing professional and commercial class, and writing and arithmetic schools emerged to provide the training their sons required.

- Printing and publishing houses play crucial role in one’s ability to create a personal library

- Home is a great place for study, reflection, conversation, examination of all things sacred and secular

- English Protestants embraced a ‘puritanism’ which advocated a ‘purity’ of worship, the importance of doctrine over dogma, and a simple morality based on scriptural imperatives

- Rise of the ‘vernacular’: the language of the people, conversational, informal, not purposefully lofty or elevated. It’s real.  It’s language you would use when talking to a friend.  However, when we look at some vernacular work of this time it still seems rather ‘literary’ and elevated.

John Milton is considered one of the most magnificent and glorious of English poets.  Born in London on December 9, 1608. Father was disinherited for becoming a Protestant. The Milton family kept company with artists and progressive thinkers.  And this contributed to John Milton developing a stunning intellectual acumen.At age 17, John began his studies at Christ’s College, Cambridge;  finished BA in 1629, MA in 1632. Afterwards he travels through Europe. Home becomes a boarding school of sorts that took in money for lodging and tutoring.

1642 Milton begins work on Paradise Lost, modeled on the Greek model of tragedy.  Paradise Lost examines aspects of the Judeo-Christian narrative in a liberal thinking way.  Milton was interested in the paradoxes of Christianity.  Wanted answers to questions like, if God is all-knowing how is one living one’s life via free will possible?

Here is a link to Milton’s Paradise Lost ~ Paradise_Lost_  As you can see, it is a massive work.  But read through the first two pages to get a sense of Milton’s style.

The poem begins with the theme of disobedience in the story of the fall of Lucifer.  Lucifer was one of the archangels and apparently God’s favorite.  That is, until he ‘dared raise his eyebrows to God’ in a show of pride.

He is thrown out of heaven.  But gone is the creepy goat-headed satan type.  This Lucifer is splendid, beautiful, smart, willy … in fact, we kind of like him.  He’s a lot…like us.

Down in hell, surrounded by minor demons he makes the most of this situation when he says its better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.

The story of Adam and Eve he addressed the idea that we are “free to fall” and examines the
Issue of freedom and justice in the biblical narrative.  And though it is written in poetic form, it’s a work that forces you to slow down and take it bit by bit.  Because the reward, the heightened intellectual argument of Milton’s is fascinating.

Now the bible was for centuries and centuries the go to book , the primary source for the Christian narrative and ethical and moral imperatives.  Luther insisted that it be translated into vernacular languages.  But in 1604, King James had the foresight to create a bible in English that was a work of literature.  A book one would enjoy reading.  He brought together a group of scholars and translators and over a period of 7 years, this committee created the King James bible.  It was a work of literature that brought English, the language, up new heights!

Lastly, John Donne was ‘one of the most eloquent voices of religious devotionalism’.  Born and raised Catholic, he turned to Protestantism.  Eventually he became an Anglican priest.  He used his writing acumen to create little “meditations” that are sort of like personal sermons.  He also used the poetic form of the sonnet for the same purposes.

Please read: Death Be Not Proud

A classic, “Death Be Not Proud” reminds the reader that death is kind of wimpy.  Not something to fear.  That sleep and chemicals like poppies can produce the same effect.  In other words, it’s not singular in its strength if it can be duplicated.  Eternal life, gotten via god’s grace, erases the potency, the fear and the threat of death.

“Death shall be no more; Death thou shalt die.”  Those final words give the individual, whose faith is strong, the ability to triumph over death through the Christian promise of resurrection and eternal life.

2

Chapter 2: Global Voices for Reform

The arts and humanities are unique in that they are disciplines that allow for a multitude of expressive forms.  Language is not generally used in the visual arts and yet it is here where we can discover the most convincing arguments and the most nuanced perspectives. In this Chapter we will look at the ways that artists used their work to voice an opinion that was contrary to the status quo or maybe merely a point of view that was unconventional and therefore dangerous.  The three artists we will look at are:

- Kabir

- Peter Bruegel the Elder

- Hieronymus Bosch

We begin this chapter here, with an image.  This is a print done in 1825, of the Indian poet, Kabir.  He is at his loom, patiently creating a textile out of singular threads.  Weaving is an art form, to be sure; however, Kabir’s true artistry was in his poetry.  Think of the ways that weaving mimics poetry.

(Kabir weaving. print. 1825.)

During the 15th century in India, there lived a great reformer who was critical of the “established” religions of Hinduism and Islam.  His name was Kabir and he used poetry as his weapon to express what he saw as hypocrisy within these religions and their leaders.  Very much along the lines of other reformers like Socrates, Jesus Christ, Muhammad, and Martin Luther, he saw very clearly that when religious belief becomes institutionalized, it loses its way.  It can lose its ultimate purpose, which is to show the path toward enlightenment.

The wiki page for Kabir gives us a good sense of historical context:  Kabir

From the Guttenberg project we have much of Kabir’s work translated and presented:  GP Kabir

Please read the introduction to get a sense of Kabir’s life and work.  Then scroll down to read the first 5 poems listed.

Here is an example of the boldness of Kabir’s poetry:

I. 13. mo ko kahân dhûnro bande

O servant, where dost thou seek Me?
Lo! I am beside thee.
I am neither in temple nor in mosque: I am neither in Kaaba nor
in Kailash:
Neither am I in rites and ceremonies, nor in Yoga and
renunciation.
If thou art a true seeker, thou shalt at once see Me: thou shalt
meet Me in a moment of time.
Kabîr says, “O Sadhu! God is the breath of all breath.”

In this poem are striking parallels to Martin Luther’s call for reform in Christian practice of his day.  Written in first person, it is the voice of God.  That in itself is quite bold!  God, or The Divine, has been called by an individual (Kabir).  Where are You?  God responds by saying that He/She in not to be found in temples, mosques, in ceremonies or practices.  Rather, He says, I can be found in “moment of time.”  In fact, right here, right now.  As you breathe, I am here.

Kabir was a mystic.  His work represented a very progressive approach to religious practice.

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Peter Bruegel the Elder was a Flemish Renaissance painter who is known for his genre paintings and prints.  When you think of Renaissance art you might think of works that present lofty subject matter.  Scenes from the biblical narrative, moments from mythology, grand aristocratic portraits or historical scenes.  However, the term “genre painting” refers to s subject matter that is, well, common.  Genre art is scenes of everyday life.  Everyday people doing what they do.  Later on when we get to the Dutch Golden Age you will see how influential Peter Bruegel’s work was on the Dutch masters.

This painting is a fine example of Bruegel’s work.  It is entitled Blind Leading the Blind (1568) and in it you see it depicts the Biblical parable of the blind leading the blind from the Gospel of Matthew 15:14, and is in the collection of the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples, Italy.

The painting reflects Bruegel’s mastery of observation. Each figure has a different eye affliction, including corneal leukoma, atrophy of globe and removed eyes. The men hold their heads aloft to make better use of their other senses. The diagonal composition reinforces the off-kilter motion of the six figures falling in progression. It is considered a masterwork for its accurate detail and composition.  Bruegel painted The Blind the year before his death. It has a bitter, sorrowful tone, which may be related to the establishment of the Council of Troubles in 1567 by the government of the Spanish Netherlands. The council ordered mass arrests and executions to enforce Spanish rule and suppress Protestantism. The placement of Sint-Anna Church of the village Sint-Anna-Pede has led to both pro- and anti-Catholic interpretations, though it is not clear that the painting was meant as a political statement.

Peter Bruegel the Elder. Blind Leading the Blind. 1568.

Can a poet from the 20th century give us some insight into this Renaissance painting?  Perhaps.  Here is the poem “The Parable of the Blind” by Puerto Rican American poet, William Carlos Williams (1883-1963):

This horrible but superb painting
the parable of the blind
without a red

in the composition shows a group
of beggars leading
each other diagonally downward

across the canvas
from one side

to stumble finally into a bog

where the picture
and the composition ends back
of which no seeing man

is represented the unshaven
features of the des-
titute with their few

pitiful possessions a basin
to wash in a peasant
cottage is seen and a church spire

the faces are raised
as toward the light
there is no detail extraneous

to the composition one
follows the others stick in
hand triumphant to disaster

What is particularly evocative and terrifying, frankly, of the idea that leaders and followers are both lost?  Listen to this song by Mumford and Sons.  The video has closed captions so you can read the lyrics:

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://boisestate.pressbooks.pub/thecreativespirit/?p=51

Peter Bruegel the Elder used painting to express a unique and provocative point of view.  He was prolific, indeed.  Here is the wikipedia page that gives you a context for his life and some other examples of his work.  As you peruse this entry I want you to pay particular attention to the sections on his genre works as well as the piece The Procession to Calvary.

Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516) was a Netherlandish/Dutch painter whose work was considered so odd that it took centuries for art historians to take it into serious consideration.  His work shows an active imagination… THAT is an understatement!  It is fantastical.  Something out of science fiction.  It suggests knowledge of the occult and alchemy.  It alludes to Christian dogma.  It defies a clear category.  Perhaps this is why Bosch tends to be a favorite of students in my classes.

The wiki page on Bosch, though short, gives you some interesting background.  Please read this to get a sense of his life and some of his major works:  Bosch

Here is his painting Christ Before Pilate (1520).  “Reading” a painting is all about close observation.  What is being emphasized?  In what ways are the figures arranged?  How is light and dark used for effect?  What elements of visual rhetoric do you detect?  From the Christian narrative, this is the moment when Jesus Christ is brought before the Roman governor Pontius Pilate.  Jesus has been accused of causing insurrection, rabble rousing, causing trouble in the Roman province of Judea.  He is brought before Pilate to recant, to state his case.

The soft face of Jesus is encompassed by the harsh and rather ugly faces of those who are condemning him.  Is there an ironic twist here?  In creating this stark visual contrast, is Bosch prompting us to think about the irony of Christ’s sacrifice, which was intended for the salvation of all, being for the souls of such hideous and deplorable characters as we see here?

Bosch’s work gives us a world of ideas to contemplate.  And we will never know what his intent was.  He left no diaries, journals or explanations of his work.  However, intention aside, what is truly remarkable for us is that these works still speak to us of ideas and concepts that are so much a part of the human experience.  We can indeed gain great insight from these early Renaissance voices.

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Chapter 3: The Counter Reformation ~ Reaffirmation and Renewal

The Protestant Reformation prompted so much change across western Europe.  In so many ways it upset the longtime monopoly that the Catholic Church had on the spiritual, social and political lives of people living under the Christian mantle.  As we saw in the previous chapter, it brought forth the belief that salvation was a private matter.  In essence, it is between the individual and God.  One’s salvation does not rely on sacraments, priests, tithing, or attending mass.  Rather, the road to salvation is gotten through grace.  And God’s grace is given to all.  Grace is an enigmatic concept.  But in Christian terms, grace refers to a “supernatural gift” that God gives to humans that exists to aid them in the intellectual, emotional and spiritual journey toward salvation.  Luther insisted that individuals, through contemplation and reading the Bible coupled with God’s grace, can be responsible for their own path to God.

The trouble for the Catholic Church was that Luther’s reforms basically made the Church redundant, unnecessary.  After all, the Church was a powerful institution.   The first global corporation, really.  It had its own military, its own canon law, its own bank.  It had a clear hierarchy, societal and political presence.  The Church was extremely wealthy.  Yes, it was a powerhouse.  So when Luther’s 95 Theses was published and disseminated, the appeal spread like wildfire.  The Catholic Church had to respond.

You’ve heard the expression “Go big or go home”?  That sums up the Catholic Church’s response to the Protestant Reformation.  In this chapter we will look at the Counter Reformation.  In many ways it wasn’t really a reformation.  Rather, it was a reaffirmation of the righteousness of Catholicism.  Throughout the middle ages, the Church had used art and architecture for educational, aesthetic, architecture and political means.  During the Counter Reformation, the Church really “goes big.” 🙂

Who has the keys to heaven?  The Catholic Church.  The Counter Reformation saw the Church use art, architecture, music and exploration to ensure that Christians understood that only St. Peter and the Church have the key:

Rubens. Saint Peter.

From SmartHistory, here is a great lecture to give you an overview of the Counter Reformation.  It has closed captioning so be sure to turn those on if that is helpful:

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://boisestate.pressbooks.pub/thecreativespirit/?p=81

IGNATIUS LOYOLA AND THE  JESUITS

From Spain came a man whose stance belief and religious approach encapsulated the spirit of the Counter Reformation.  He had the perfect name: Ignatius.  From the Latin, ignis = fire; lightening; ignite.  And indeed he took a fiery approach to Christianity and was firmly committed to spreading its appeal and more importantly, seeking out those whose ideas and practices were contrary and thus dangerous.  Loyola established The Society of Jesus, known as The Jesuits.

To Loyola, reason and discipline functioned together to aid the individual toward a closer relationship with God.  That individual effort coupled with the sacraments of the Church were the only path to salvation.  It was strict, zealous, and you could even say, militaristic.  To get a sense of this it helps to read a section from the Spiritual Exercises.  In this digital translation, scroll down to read pages 22-24.  In this section, Loyola is offering some methods that one can use to prepare oneself for the sacrament of confession.  Confession is a Catholic practice in which the individual meets with a priest, confesses “sins” and is thus absolved of them through completing the penance that the priest prescribes, usually a series of prayers.  Loyola insists that one must go into this sacrament with a completely clean conscience and a clear understanding of what he terms “bad thought.”  He writes:

I presuppose that there are three kinds of thoughts in me: that is, one my
own, which springs from my mere liberty and will; and two others, which come from
without, one from the good spirit, and the other from the bad.

In addition, this Wiki page gives you a good overview of the Spiritual Exercises:  Spiritual Exercises

As he continues, he points out the relationship between thought, word and deed, and he does so in a methodical and, to his mind, a reasoned fashion.  In this one example you can get a sense of the sensibility of Ignatius Loyola.  He embodies the ethos and pathos of the Counter Reformation.  The Catholic Church’s response to the spread of Protestantism was varied.  The Council of Trent met between 1545-1563 to create a plan for reform and rejuvenation of the Church’s presence and power.  The concepts and dogma that were refined during Trent set the stage for what remain staunch tenets of faith.

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://boisestate.pressbooks.pub/thecreativespirit/?p=81

Now that we have a sense of the Jesuit theological point of view and the role that played in individual practice of the faith, we turn to look at the influence of the movement.  The Jesuits understood very well that Protestantism was taking hold in some parts of Europe and indeed spreading at alarming rates.  The Jesuits took on an evangelical mode: ardent, zealous, determined, self righteous.  The Society of Jesus understood one way to combat the spread of Protestantism was to go abroad and convert other peoples to Catholicism.  Unfortunately, these “conversions” were more often than not, forced conversions.  The Jesuits had the most success in central and south Americas. They also had campaigns to the Orient, namely Japan, where they struggled to get momentum and were eventually kicked out.  This encyclopedia page is a rich resource and gives you a solid overview of the many directions the Jesuits went and some of their strategies in these different continents.  Pay special attention to the sections on Mexico and South American countries:

Jesuits in North America

In 1632, Bernal Diaz del Castillo’s memoirs were published.  This True History of the Conquest of New Spain is a first hand account of Spain’s domination of what became known as the Spanish Americas.  This conquest was a combination of religious zeal, political impetus, and the so-called Age of Conquest.  Diaz’s account of the civilizations they encountered there is full of awe for not only the wealth displayed, but also the sophistication of the architecture, the complexity of their cosmology, the dignity of the indigenous people, and the order and productivity of their cities.  His first-hand account countered the prejudiced view of the time that these people were savages, i.e., not Christian, and thus it was Spain’s spiritual duty to open their eyes to the “truth.”  Please scan through this digital text and you are more than welcome to read whatever sections catch your interest.  However, two chapters that provide a fascinating counterpoint are: Part 1, Chapter VIII, “Description of the Court and the City,”  and Part II, Chapter 1, “Tlascala, 1520, Subjugation of the Neighboring District by the Spaniards.”  Please read those here:  Diaz del Castillo

THE BAROQUE

In this lecture, I give you an historical overview of the ways the Baroque functioned within the context of the Counter Reformation:

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://boisestate.pressbooks.pub/thecreativespirit/?p=81

The important takeaways on this lecture is to keep in mind that the Baroque was a style and a rhetoric.  Baroque art had specific characteristics.  It is known for its dramatic qualities, its movement, its sensuality (in some cases), its reverence for Classical associations.  But Baroque art also has a definite rhetorical message.  And that message is one of power, wealth, influence and longevity.

This is a link to a great online academic source, Boundless Art History.  Please read:

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-arthistory/chapter/painting-of-the-baroque-period/

The art of music during this period was also inspired by the stylistic impact of the Baroque.  In this online book, entitled Understanding Music: Past and Present by Clark, Heflin, Kluball, and Kramer, there is a chapter on Baroque music.  Please open this pdf and scroll to pages 73-114.  Please read the historical overview of the rise of Baroque music paying special attention to the points we have covered in this chapter thus far.  On page 89 begins the subsection on “The Rise of the Orchestra.”  Please read that carefully noting how different instruments were developed as well as the “design” of the orchestra.  These together made for an extraordinary new sound!

Unfortunately many of the music links in this book are broken.  I do want you to listen to the marvelous Vivaldi, though.  Here is an excerpt from The Four Seasons.  This is the piece, Spring.  Notice how Vivaldi recreates the sounds of Spring, the melting of ice, the rebirth of the earth, the sounds of birds…..  and with the Master, Itzhak Perlman!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKthRw4KjEg

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Chapter 4: National Sovereignty~ Command, Control and Royal Absolutism

Religious Divide and Clear Borders

The Reformations, Protestant and Counter, created a religious divide throughout Europe.  The Christian experience had broadened, in a sense.  Protestants embraced the Lutheran ideas that allowed them to take a lead role in their own salvation and practice of their faith.  Catholics refused these new perspectives and instead found spiritual comfort in the history and traditions of the Catholic Church.  There was bound to be some political turmoil.  And indeed there was.  The Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) resulted in a reshaping of European borders but also brought forth a degree of religious tolerance.

“The Thirty Years’ War, which raged from 1618 until 1648, embroiled most of Europe in a conflict that dramatically changed not only the map but also the balance of European power. By the end of the war much of Germany was in ruins, the Habsburgs were no longer masters of the continent, and the wars of religion which had ravaged Europe since the early 16th century were finally over. The immediate cause of the conflict was a crisis within the Habsburg family’s Bohemian branch, but the war also owed much to the religious and political crises caused by the Reformation and the competition between monarchs, particularly the Habsburgs of the Holy Roman Empire, various German princes, and the monarchs of Sweden and France.

One of the most significant issues that led to the Thirty Years’ War was the Protestant Reformation. That movement was both religiously divisive and politically destabilizing. It is difficult to separate religion and politics, for at the time they were intertwined. What began as an attempt to correct abuses within the Catholic Church eventually led to a number of violent conflicts within that institution as well as between nations. For example, among the various German principalities, many vied against their overlord, the Catholic Holy Roman
emperor, for control over religion. In September 1555, the contending parties met and concluded an agreement, the Peace of Augsburg. An important aspect of the peace was the principle of cuius regio, eius religio (Latin for “whose district, his religion”), which granted each state’s ruler religious freedom within his state. States that were Protestant would remain so, while states that were Catholic would likewise remain Catholic. Though that peace did much to reduce the warfare that had plagued Germany for nearly 50 years, it
sanctioned freedom of religion only for Catholics and Lutheran Protestants—any prince favoring such other Protestant sects as Calvinism did not enjoy similar freedom. …

With the Peace of Westphalia, signed in 1648, the Thirty Years’ War came to an end. There were several outcomes of the war that forever changed Europe. First, the Peace of Westphalia brought to a close the wars of religion that had followed in the wake of the Reformation. Second, because Germany had served as the principal battleground of the war, it was devastated and even depopulated throughout much of its territory.  That widespread destruction affected Germany in a number of ways, but perhaps most significantly, it further
fragmented an already politically divided region. While other countries worked toward greater unification, the German states remained independent—they would not be united until some 200 years after the Thirty Years’ War. Third, the Habsburg dynasty, while it survived, no longer ruled as vast or powerful a territory as it had previously. New states, such as the Dutch Republic, and those that had weathered the war far more successfully, like France, came into new prominence. Exhausted by war and with agriculture, industry, and towns in ruins, most Europeans were disgusted with the cost of religious factionalism and began to embrace a new era of religious toleration.”

The above three paragraphs are taken from this online source.  If you would like to read the entire overview, it is attached here:

Thirty Years War

The principle of national sovereignty was firmly established in the Treaty of Westphalia, which laid out clear terms that European states had a sort of autonomy.  That is, the states and their leaders were able to exercise independent and supreme authority over their territories, their people, and their religious practice.  The outcome was that some countries chose a religious “majority” preference, but then also allowed for others.  A good example is France, which maintained Catholicism as the “official” Christian faith of the realm, but also allowed for Protestant factions to practice.

And it was difficult to keep track of the Protestant factions that arose during the 17th century.  The very basis of Protestantism, as put forth in Luther’s teachings, was that the individual was in charge of his/her own salvation.  A Christian did not need an institution, a priest, a pope, a prescribed set of sacraments, tithing, or any other practice that is not clearly written out in the scriptures.  A Christian simply needed to read the bible and adhere to its message.  Well, this just opens the doors to a multitude of interpretations of Christian experience and dogma.  Lutheranism, Calvinism, Baptists, Anabaptists, …. there arose many factions of Protestant Christianity.  (Note: to this day there are well over a thousand Christian “churches” or practices. And, of course, on the other hand, just ONE Catholic Church.  Because as we saw in the Counter Reformation, the Church really did not budge.)

Absolutism: The Rise of Divine-Right Rulers

As mentioned in the previous section, some countries rose out of the devastation of the Thirty Years War reinvigorated.  France was one of them.  King Louis XIV, who reigned from 1643 to his death in 1715 (72 years!), apparently had all the leadership qualities necessary.  On the other hand, maybe it was not a case of leadership qualities at all!  Rather, it was a case of Divine Right rule.  The essence of Divine Right rule is the belief that one becomes God’s representative on earth.  King Louis XIV was believed to have decreed “L’etat c’est moi!”  That is, “I AM the STATE!”  And true to his command, he was in charge of everything: government, the Court, economics, the Church, and in many interesting ways, the arts.

Here is a famous portrait of him, looking glorious, by Hyacinthe Rigaud, circa 1701.  The online source for the photo is below.

Hyacinthe Riguad. King Louis XIV. 1701.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hyacinthe_Rigaud_-_Louis_XIV,_roi_de_France_(1638-1715)_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

King Louis XIV was quite a strategist and his reign was very successful on all fronts.  The Wikipedia page offers a solid overview of his life and reign, but here is just a sampling:

Louis began his personal rule of France in 1661, after the death of his chief minister, the Italian Cardinal Mazarin.[3] An adherent of the concept of the divine right of kings, Louis continued his predecessors’ work of creating a centralised state governed from the capital. He sought to eliminate the remnants of feudalism persisting in parts of France and, by compelling many members of the nobility to inhabit his lavish Palace of Versailles, succeeded in pacifying the aristocracy, many members of which had participated in the Fronde rebellion during Louis’ minority. By these means he became one of the most powerful French monarchs and consolidated a system of absolute monarchical rule in France that endured until the French Revolution.

Louis also enforced uniformity of religion under the Gallican Catholic Church. His revocation of the Edict of Nantes abolished the rights of the Huguenot Protestant minority and subjected them to a wave of dragonnades, effectively forcing Huguenots to emigrate or convert, and virtually destroying the French Protestant community.

The Sun King surrounded himself with a dazzling constellation of political, military, and cultural figures such as Mazarin, Colbert, Louvois, the Grand Condé, Turenne, Vauban, Boulle, Molière, Racine, Boileau, La Fontaine, Lully, Charpentier, Marais, Le Brun, Rigaud, Bossuet, Le Vau, Mansart, Charles, Claude Perrault, and Le Nôtre.

During Louis’ long reign, France was the leading European power, and it fought three major wars: the Franco-Dutch War, the War of the League of Augsburg, and the War of the Spanish Succession. There were also two lesser conflicts: the War of Devolution and the War of the Reunions. Warfare defined the foreign policy of Louis XIV, and his personality shaped his approach. Impelled “by a mix of commerce, revenge, and pique”, Louis sensed that warfare was the ideal way to enhance his glory. In peacetime he concentrated on preparing for the next war. He taught his diplomats that their job was to create tactical and strategic advantages for the French military.[4]

Source:    Louis XIV

Classical Ballet~ The King Dances!

My lecture here will give you a quick overview of the early history of Classical ballet and its origins in Louis XIV’s court:

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://boisestate.pressbooks.pub/thecreativespirit/?p=105

Louis XIV understood that the arts were powerful.  Dance, literature, sculpture, architecture, painting …. these were all forms of human expression, true.  But they could also be used to express power and control.  Controlling what is seen is also, in a way, controlling thought.  At least that was one of the principles that drove Louis’ quest for dominion over the arts.

One of the outcomes of Louis’ strict ideas about dance became what is referred to as Classical ballet.  Here it is in its purest form, in the ballet Les Sylphides:

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://boisestate.pressbooks.pub/thecreativespirit/?p=105

Louis XIV was a grand patron of the arts!  Within the sphere of the Court, he was a true arbiter of fashion, manners, style, and even cuisine.  He loved all these elite delights and within his Court, they all evolved in interesting ways.  But again, Louis’ firm grip of control was on them all.  Visual art, namely painting, would experience an intriguing ‘choke hold’ that would last well into the 19th century.

Academic Art~ Poussin, Lorrain, and Aristocratic Portraiture

Louis XIV dictated standards.  In order to ensure that those standards were consistently met, he established government-sponsored institutes who job it was to oversee artistic endeavors and make sure that no artist was thinking outside the box or coloring outside the lines 🙂

At the beginning of his reign, Louis took over the helm of the French Royal Academy of Language and Literature (this had been established in 1635 by his father, Louis XIII).  Louis founded the Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1648.  In 1661, he initiated the Academy of Dance (as you saw in the previous lecture).  The Academy of Sciences was born in 1666.  The Academy of Music was established in 1669.  The Academy of Architecture in 1671.  All of these “academies” functioned to patronize the arts but also to control them.  Where did these ‘standards of beauty and excellence’ come from?  They came from a 17th century understanding of ancient Greece and Rome, the “Classical period.”  Thus a new term was born as well: Neoclassicism.

Neoclassical art hearkened to the Classical world by use of visual references.  Neoclassical style revels in the aesthetics of Classical art.  The clear and accurate proportion of the human body, the fashions, the sense of civic duty and higher ethical aspirations.  Neoclassical art often took contemporary persons and placed them in anachronistic settings.  A great example of this is Francois Girardon’s Apollo Attended by the Nymphs (ca. 1666-1672).  This was commissioned by Louis XIV for the Versailles grounds.  And it features himself as Apollo, the Sun King.

For a larger view of this sculpture, go HERE

Two artists’ works embrace these components:  Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) and Claude Lorrain (1600-1682).

Please read these two sections from theartstory.org to give you some background and a look at key paintings by these two artists:

Poussin

Lorrain

Absolute Power Beyond Europe: Art as Rhetoric

Power…

https://smarthistory.org/power-comparisons-and-connections/

This article by Smarthistory offers some very intriguing parallels for our consideration.

5

Chapter 5: Travel and Exploration

Evliya Celebi: Travels Through the Ottoman World

Evliya Celebi statue

When we think of travel and exploration that occurred during the 16th and 17th centuries, our thoughts might go to the highlights of western European history, the so-called “Age of Discovery.”  See here for Encyclopedia Britannica review of the major routes and explorers: Age of Discovery

But obviously, exploration happened on a global scale.  This section introduces you to Evliya Celebi, a traveler and “blogger” of the 17th century.  His travelogue, known as Seyahatname or The Book of Travels, is a remarkable combination of personal observation, myth, and literary license.  Nevertheless, it is an extraordinary work that takes the reader on a tour of the Ottoman world.

Celebi was born March 25, 1611, in Unqupani, which is modern day Istanbul, Turkey.  His father was a goldsmith and his mother grew up as a slave girl in the palace of Ahmed I.  Oddly enough, both of their positions enabled them to be well-connected in society and governmental realms.  He received a fine religious education and graduated from a school for Koran recitation.  Celebi frequented intellectual circles and lectures.  In 1636, he began his studies in the arts and sciences at the Palace School.  He was known for his wit, his ability to entertain, his musicianship, his knowledge of the Koran and his ability to tell a great story!  In 1638 he becomes a member of the state cavalry, which sends him off on various missions throughout the Ottoman Empire.  During this tenure, he writes of what he sees and experiences.

E.Ç.’s great travelogue Seyahatname is a first person narrative in ten volumes, which combines the autobiography of its author with the most extensive geographical description of the Ottoman world. The Seyahatname serves as a source for linguistic investigations in that it includes information about various foreign languages and for the development of Ottoman prose. Although most authors have exploited the Seyahatname in one way or another, the fact remains that “the fundamental unit of the Seyahatname is the entire work … It has a unified plan and style.” Its quasi-symmetrical structure using the descriptions of Istanbul (vol. 1) and Cairo (vol. 10) as “frame-books” as well as frequent cross-references within the work indicate that the Seyahatname was composed with the help of a diary or other provisional notes.

The descriptions of towns (evsaf) follow a standard scheme and includes in most cases information concerning the town’s history (including the legendary pre-Islamic past and the date of Muslim conquest), fortifications, mosques and other Islamic foundations with special attention to commercial buildings and bath-houses, as well as its inhabitants, their manners, speech and clothing, excursion spots, etc. Though the figures E.Ç. gives in his account are mostly limited to Muslim population, he also makes references to Christian and Jewish institutions, particularly to conspicuous monasteries and churches beyond the Ottoman core lands (e.g., in Echmiadzin [Üç Kilise], Košice [Kaşa], and Vienna [Beç]).

There are blank spaces throughout the work, including paragraphs lacking names, numbers as well as headings. Other chapters describe only a small number of Friday mosques, skip the other buildings and special features altogether, but concentrate on “talismans” (mutasalamat) and sacred and holy places (ziyaretgah). A striking aspect is E.Ç.’s predilection for statistical surveys which combine in many cases realistic numbers for inhabitants, buildings, etc. However, he sometimes also includes noisome exaggerations contradicting his own descriptions.”

E.Ç. was concerned not only with the physical and monumental surface of the Ottoman world but also with a fuller understanding of the “Ottomanness” of the well-protected domains. He clearly discriminates the Ottoman Rum elite from the other subjects of the Sultan, a feature which is particularly noticeable in the tenth volume of the Seyahatname focusing on Egypt.

During his stay in hundreds of towns and cities and thousands of villages E.Ç. seems to have been in contact with almost the complete leading class of his era, including sultans, grand viziers, provincial governors, military leaders, and an immense number of local notables. Important personalities among these are Ottoman sultans such as Murad IV (1032-49/1623-40), İbrahim (1049-58/1640-48) and Mehmed IV (1058-99/1648-87) and rulers like Mehmed Giray Han and Abdal Han of Bidlis (d. 1065/1665?). Paşas such as Ketenci Ömer (d. > 1035/1625-26), Defterdarzade Mehmed (d. 1066/1656), Silahdar Murtaza (d. ?), Qara Mehmed (d. 1095/1684), Özdemir Osman (d. ?), İpşirli Mustafa (d. 1065/1665), Köprülü Mehmed Paşa (d. 1072/ 1661) and Kethuda İbrahim (d. ?) played a major role as his protectors. E.Ç. spent 12 years in the service of Melek Ahmed Paşa and followed this kinsman during his governorships at Sofia (Sofya), Diyarbekr (Diyarbakır), Van, Osijek (Özi) and Bosnia (Bosna).

Seyahatname is a valuable source for many aspects of Ottoman politics, society, and culture. Even though E.Ç. compares his work with that of “other historians” and is classified by Bursalı Mehmed Tahir and Franz Babinger among others as a historian, nonetheless, the Seyahatname cannot be regarded as a ‘history.’ Yet, the quality of the work as a first-rate ‘historical source’ is beyond question. According to Murphey and Dankoff E.Ç.’s “partisan remarks enrich rather than distort our understanding of Ottoman realities. Moreover, precisely by recording controversial and deeply felt contemporary opinion Evliya’s account achieves its unique standing and value as a source for the study of seventeenth-century Ottoman society and politics.” E.Ç. does not hesitate to decry Ottoman corruption, oppression and injustice both implicitly (by comparing the conditions during his time with those in previous decades, for example, with the age of Süleyman) and explicitly.

Despite his general superior attitude toward non-Muslims, E.Ç. concedes that the Europeans are better skilled in building fortifications and complains about the decay of Islamic pious foundations in comparison with flourishing Christian institutions such as as a monastery at Chios.

Source:

OttomanHistorians~ Celebi

The Transatlantic Slave Trade

Please read this article by Dr. Christa Clarke:

Historical overview: from the 1600s to the present

by DR. CHRISTA CLARKE

Figure: Seated Portuguese Male, 18th century, Nigeria, Court of Benin, Edo peoples, brass, 12.7 x 5.1 x 6 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Western trade with Africa was not limited to material goods such as copper, cloth, and beads. By the sixteenth century, the transatlantic slave trade had already begun, forcibly bringing Africans to the newly discovered Americas. Slavery had existed in Africa (as it did elsewhere in the world) for centuries prior to the sixteenth, and many socially stratified African societies kept slaves for domestic work. The sheer number of slaves traded across the Atlantic, however, was unprecedented, as over 11 million Africans were brought to the Americas and the Caribbean over a period of four centuries. Driven by commercial interests, the slave trade peaked in the eighteenth century with the expansion of American plantation production, and continued until the mid-nineteenth century. While Europeans primarily profited from the slave trade, certain West African kingdoms, like Dahomey, also grew wealthy and powerful by selling captives of war. By the late eighteenth century, the slave trade began to wane as the abolitionist movement grew. Those who survived the forced migration and the notorious Middle Passage brought their beliefs and cultural practices to the New World.

Within this far-flung diaspora, certain cultures—such as the Yoruba and Igbo of today’s Nigeria, and the Kongo from present-day Democratic Republic of Congo—were especially well represented. African slaves brought few, if any, personal items with them, although recent archaeological investigations have yielded early African artifacts, like the beads and shells found at the African burial grounds in New York’s lower Manhattan, which date to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The influence of Africans in the Americas is perhaps best seen in diverse forms of cultural expression that have enriched our society tremendously. Architectural elements such as open-front porches and sloped hip-roofs reflect African influence in the Americas. The religious practices of Haitian Vodou have roots in the spiritual beliefs of Dahomean, Yoruba, and Kongo peoples. Some elements of cuisine in the American South, such as gumbo and jambalaya, derive from African food traditions. Certain musical forms, such as jazz and the blues, reflect the convergence of African musical practices and European-based traditions.

Figurative Harp (Domu), 19th-20th century, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mangbetu, wood, hide, twine, brass ring, 67.3 x 21.6 x 30.5 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Although the slave trade was banned entirely by the late nineteenth century, European involvement in Africa did not end. Instead, the desire for greater control over Africa’s resources resulted in the colonization of the majority of the continent by seven European countries. The Berlin Conference of 1884–85, attended by representatives of fourteen different European powers, resulted in the regulation of European colonization and trade in Africa. Over the next twenty years, the continent was occupied by France, Belgium, Germany, Britain, Spain, Italy, and Portugal. By 1914, the entire continent, with the exception of Ethiopia and Liberia, was colonized by European nations.

The colonial period in Africa brought radical changes, disrupting local political institutions, patterns of trade, and religious and social beliefs. The colonial era also impacted cultural practices in Africa, as artists responded to new forms of patronage and the introduction of new technologies as well as to their changing social and political situations. In some cases, European patronage of local artists resulted in stylistic change (for example the harp, left) or new forms of expression. At the same time, many artistic traditions were characterized as “primitive” by Westerners and discouraged or even banned.

Although African artifacts were brought to Europe as early as the sixteenth century, it was during the colonial period that such works entered Western collections in significant quantities, forming the basis of many museum collections today. African artifacts were collected as personal souvenirs or ethnographic specimens by military officers, colonial administrators, missionaries, scientists, merchants, and other visitors to the continent. In many of these instances of collecting, objects were gathered through voluntary trade.

In one extreme instance, an act of war initiated by Britain against one of its colonies, thousands of royal art objects were removed from the kingdom of Benin following its defeat by a British military expedition in 1897 (image below). European nations with colonies in Africa established ethnographic museums with extensive collections, such as the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, the Völkerkunde museums in Germany, the British Museum in London, and the Musée de l’Homme in Paris (now housed at the Musée du Quai Branly). In the United States, which had no colonial ties to Africa, the nascent study of ethnography motivated the formation of collections at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Field Museum in Chicago. In 1923, the Brooklyn Museum became the first American museum to present African works as art.

Plaque: Equestrian Oba and Attendants, 1550-1680, Nigeria, Court of Benin, Edo peoples, brass, 49.5 x 41.9 x 11.4 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Independence movements in Africa began with the liberation of Ghana in 1957 and ended with the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa during the 1990s. The postcolonial period has been challenging, as many countries struggle to regain stability in the aftermath of colonialism. Yet while the media often focuses on political instability, civil unrest, and economic and health crises, these represent only part of the story of Africa today. From its many urban centers to more tradition-based rural villages, Africa is increasingly entering the global marketplace. The proliferation of systems of communication, such as computers and cell phones, throughout Africa has facilitated increased interaction with other parts of the world. As Africa moves into the twenty-first century, hope lies in its natural and human resources and the commitment of many Africans to work toward a stable and prosperous future.

Martin Rakotoarimanana, Mantle (Lamba Mpanjakas), 1998, Madagascar, Antananarivo or Arivonimamo, Imerina village, silk, 274 x 178.1 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

In spite of Africa’s political, economic, and environmental challenges, the postcolonial period has been a time of tremendous vigor in the realm of artistic production. Many tradition-based artistic practices continue to thrive or have been revitalized. In Guinea, the revival of D’mba performances in the 1990s, after decades of censorship by the Marxist government, is one example of cultural reinvention. Similarly, in recent years, Merina weavers in the highlands of Madagascar have begun to create brilliantly hued silk cloth known as akotofahana, a textile tradition abandoned a century ago.

Photography, introduced on the continent in the late nineteenth century, has become a popular medium, particularly in urban areas. Artists like Seydou Keïta, who operated a portrait studio in Bamako, Mali, in the colonial period, set the stage for later generations of photographers who captured the faces of newly independent African countries. It is also important to mention developments in modern and contemporary African art. During the colonial period, art schools were established that provided training, often based on Western models, to local artists. Many schools were initiated by Europeans, such as the Congolese Académie des Arts, established by Pierre Romain-Desfossé in 1944 in Elisabethville, whose program was based on those of art schools in Europe. Less frequently, the teaching of modern art was initiated by indigenous Africans, such as Chief Aina Onabolu, who is credited with introducing modern art in Nigeria beginning in the 1920s. Since the mid-twentieth century, increasing numbers of African artists have engaged local traditions in new ways or embraced a national identity through their visual expression.

Artists in today’s Africa are the products of diverse forms of artistic training, work in a variety of mediums, and engage local as well as global audiences with their work. In recent decades, contemporary artists from Africa, both self-taught and academically trained, have begun to receive international recognition. Many artists from Africa study, work, and/or live in Europe and the United States. Kenyan-born Magdalene Odundo, for example, was trained as an artist in schools in Kenya and in England, where she now lives. The burnished ceramic vessels she creates, which are purely artistic and not functional, embody her diverse sources, including traditional Nigerian and Kenyan vessels as well as Native American pottery traditions of New Mexico. The work of contemporary African artists like Odundo reveals the complex realities of artistic practice in today’s increasingly global society.

© 2006 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (by permission)

https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/slav/hd_slav.htm

The “Invention of America” Through Art

Inventing “America,” The Engravings of Theodore de Bry

by DR. LAUREN KILROY-EWBANK

Theodore de Bry’s Collected travels in the east Indies and west Indies

In the center of this image we see a finely-dressed Christopher Columbus with two soldiers. Columbus stands confidently, his left foot forward with his pike planted firmly in the ground, signaling his claim over the land. Behind him to the left, three Spaniards raise a cross in the landscape, symbolizing a declaration of the land for both the Spanish monarchs and for the Christian God.

Theodore de Bry, Christopher Columbus arrives in America, 1594, engraving, 18.6 c 19.6 cm, from Collected travels in the east Indies and west Indies (Collectiones peregrinationum in Indiam occidentalem), vol. 4: Girolamo Benzoni, Americae pars quarta. Sive, Insignis & admiranda historia de primera occidentali India à Christophoro Columbo (Frankfurt am Main: T. de Bry, 1594) (Rijksmuseum)

Unclothed Taínos, the indigenous peoples of Hispaniola, walk toward Columbus bringing gifts of necklaces and other precious objects. Further in the background, on the right side of the print, other Taínos, with arms raised and twisting bodies, flee in fear from the Spanish ships anchored offshore.

This print from 1592, by the engraver Theodore de Bry, presents Columbus and his men as the harbingers of European civilization and faith, and juxtaposes them with Tainos, who are presented as uncivilized, unclothed, and pagan. This print, along with hundreds of others de Bry made for his 27 volume series, published over more than forty years, Collected travels in the east Indies and west Indies (1590–1634), affirm and assert a sense of European superiority, as well as invent for Europeans what America—both its land and its people—was like.

Though de Bry is most famous for his engravings of European voyages to the Americas (and Africa, and Asia), he never actually traveled across the Atlantic. It is not surprising then that de Bry’s depiction of the indigenous peoples of the Americas was a combination of the work of other artists who had accompanied Europeans to the Americas (artists were often brought on journeys in order to document the lands and peoples of the Americas for a European audience) as well as his own artistic inventions. For instance, he adapted (without credit) some of the images created by Johannes Stradanus, a well-known illustrator who created early images of the Americas. In his Collected travels in the east Indies and west Indies, de Bry republished (and translated into multiple languages) the accounts of others who had spent time traveling around the globe, and created more than 600 engravings to illustrate the volumes. The engraving above of Columbus and the Taínos comes from volume 4 of the Collected travels in the east Indies and west Indies. This volume reprinted the accounts of the Milanese traveler Girolamo Benzoni, who himself had drawn on the accounts of Columbus in his own writings.

The volumes of the Collected travels in the east Indies and west Indies that treat the voyages across the Atlantic to the Americas are known as the Grands Voyages, while the Petit Voyages (small voyages), were those to Africa and Asia.

Documenting America

De Bry’s copperplate engravings were among the first images that Europeans encountered about the peoples, places, and things of the Americas, even if he began making them almost a century after Columbus’s initial voyage. In the engraving with Columbus on the shoreline, the barely clothed Taínos resemble Greco-Roman sculptures, especially their poses and musculature. De Bry apparently had no interest in documenting the actual appearance of the Taínos.

Left: Apollo Belvedere, c. 150 C.E., Roman copy of an original bronze statue of 330-320 B.C.E. (Vatican Museums) (photo: Tetraktys, CC BY-SA 3.0); right: detail. Theodore de Bry, Christopher Columbus arrives in America, 1594, etching and text in letterpress, 18.6 c 19.6 cm (Rijksmuseum)

De Bry’s Collected travels belongs to the genre of travel literature, which had been popular since the Middle Ages. Accounts of the Americas became wildly popular after Columbus’s first voyage. For example, Columbus’s 1493 letter to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel (who had helped finance the voyage) was published in seventeen editions by 1497, and often included woodcuts depicting select moments of his voyage.

De Bry and his audiences

De Bry was a Protestant, and fled Liège (today in Belgium) where he was born to avoid persecution. He made his way to Frankfurt, which is where he started work on Grands Voyages. After his death in 1598, his family continued his work and finished the remaining volumes in 1634. Interestingly, different versions of the Grands Voyages catered to different Christian confessional groups. The volumes in German were geared towards Protestants, while those in Latin appealed to Catholics. De Bry created images that he could market to either audience, but he made changes to the texts to appeal more to either Catholics or Protestants. Psalms that Calvinists felt encapsulated their beliefs or longer passages criticizing Catholic beliefs or colonial practices were omitted from Latin versions, which were often filled in with more engravings duplicated from other parts of the text.

General subjects of the Grands Voyages engravings

Theodore de Bry, Indians pour liquid gold into the mouth of a Spaniard, 1594, from Collected travels in the east Indies and west Indies (Collectiones peregrinationum in Indiam occidentalem)

While some of de Bry’s prints in Grands Voyages focus on the exploits of famed European navigators like Columbus, others show indigenous groups and their customs. Some of these images display the atrocities that occurred in the wake of Europeans’ arrival, violent conquest, and colonization. Indigenous peoples are fed to dogs, hanged, or butchered. Still others depict native responses to the European invasion, such as drowning Spaniards in the ocean or pouring liquid gold into invaders’ mouths.

John White, The town of Secoton (bird’s-eye view of town with houses, lake at the top, fire, fields and ceremony), 1585-1593, watercolour over graphite, heightened with white (British Museum)

Travels to Virginia

The Grands Voyages (the section on cross-Atlantic voyages) begins with a reprint of an earlier text by the English colonist Thomas Hariot, A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590). It also includes translations of this text into Latin, German, and French. De Bry’s accompanying engravings were based on watercolors by John White, who had settled on Roanoke Island, North Carolina in 1585 and who had created paintings while there. His watercolors document clothing, dwellings, and rituals of the eastern Algonquian peoples.

Even though Virginia and North Carolina were colonized by Europeans after they had seized other areas in the Americas, de Bry placed them in the first volume of his Grands Voyages. This may be because he had visited London just after Hariot’s book was published in 1588, and was given both that text and the watercolors of White. De Bry was clearly not interested in a providing a chronological account of European exploration and colonization.

One of White’s paintings represents the town of Secoton, with people going about their daily life activities. In the right foreground people dance in a circle. Corn grows in neat rows. Dwellings line a road. In his engraving, de Bry made several changes to White’s watercolor. He expanded the village and removed the textual inscriptions that identified important features of the village (instead incorporating a separate key).

Theodore de Bry, Bird’s-eye view of a native American village (Secoton), 1590, engraving (after the watercolor by John White above) for  volume 1 of Collected travels in the east Indies and west Indies which reprinted Thomas Hariot, A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia, of the commodities and of the nature and manners of the naturall inhabitants (British Library)

For his engravings, de Bry also transformed watercolors White had created of Scottish Picts (an ancient pagan indigenous peoples of Scotland who lived in a loose confederation of groups and who painted their bodies). But why include a discussion of Picts in a book on the Americas?

Theodore de Bry, A Young Daughter of the Picts, 1590, engraving (after a watercolor by  Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues — originally attributed to John White) for Collected travels in the east Indies and west Indies which reprints Thomas Hariot, A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia, of the commodities and of the nature and manners of the naturall inhabitants (British Library)

Hariot’s text states that “Some picture of the Picts which in the old time did inhabit one part of the great Britain,” which according to him “show how that the inhabitants of the great Britain have been in times past as savage as those of Virginia.”[1] White compares them to the Algonquian peoples to suggest that Europe has its own history of uncivilized, pagan people. Despite attempting to reconcile the Algonquian peoples with the Picts in Europe, the manner in which he compares them—as savages—speaks to a presumed European superiority.

Theodore de Bry, Indians worship the column in honor of the French king, 1591, engraving for Collectiones peregrinationum in Indiam occidentalem, vol. 2: René de Laudonnière, Brevis narratio eorum quae in Florida Americae provincia Gallis acciderunt (Frankfurt am Main: J. Wechelus, 1591) (Rijksmuseum)

Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, Laudonnierus et rex athore ante columnam a praefecto prima navigatione locatam quamque venerantur floridenses, gouache (New York Public Library)

Travels to Florida

Volume 2, published in 1591, focused on French voyages to Florida, and was based on the accounts of the French colonist René Goulaine de Laudonnière. De Bry created engravings based on the watercolors of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, who was part of the French expeditions to Florida that were headed by Jean Ribault in 1562 and Laudonnière in 1564. One of the engravings adapted from Le Moyne’s watercolors shows the Timucua worshipping a column that had supposedly been erected by Ribault. The most prominent figure, identified as chief Athore, stands next to Laudonnière, who has followed him to see the sight. The other Timucua kneel, while raising their arms in gestures of reverence in the direction of the column, itself decorated with garlands. Before it, offerings of food and vegetables abound. De Bry made several notable changes to the print, such as adjusting Athore’s features to look more European, with raised cheekbones and an aquiline nose. Le Moyne’s earlier watercolor had also Europeanized the Timucua peoples: he paints them with the same complexion as Laudonnière, but with even blonder hair.

Cannibalism in Brazil

Theodore de Bry, engraving depicting cannibalism in Brazil for volume 3 of Collected travels in the east Indies and west Indies which reprinted Hans Staden’s account of his experiences in Brazil, 1594 (British Library)

Cannibalism was (and remains) commonly associated with certain indigenous peoples of the Americas. In de Bry’s series, his third volume recounted Hans Staden’s experiences of cannibalism in Brazil. De Bry’s engravings for this volume were among the most well-known in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, in large part because of their gruesome and sensationalistic character. Note that de Bry’s print, “Indians pour liquid gold into the mouth of a Spaniard,” may also depict cannibalism among the figures shown in the background.

Theodore de Bry, engraving depicting cannibalism in Brazil for volume 3 of Collected travels in the east Indies and west Indies which reprinted Hans Staden’s account of his experiences in Brazil, 1594 (British Library)

Staden, a German soldier who traveled to South America, had been captured in 1553 by the Tupinambá, an indigenous group in Brazil. After his return to Europe in 1557, he wrote about Tupinambá customs, family life, and cannibalism, describing how the Tupinambá practiced it ceremonially, especially eating their enemies. Staden’s initial book included simple woodcuts, but de Bry’s updated engravings proved far more popular and enduring in the European cultural imagination. Perceptions of indigenous Brazilians were shaped by these images, and reinforced the notion that the Tupinambá, and others like them, were depraved, primitive, and sinful.

One of his images depicts naked adults and children drinking a broth made from a human head and intestines, visible on plates amidst the gathering of people. Another depiction of the Tupinamba shows a fire below a grill, upon which body parts are roasted. Figures surround the grill, eating. In the back is a bearded figure, most likely intended to be Staden. Hand-colored versions of de Bry’s prints emphasize the disturbing subject of the images even more.

Cannibalism would come to be closely associated with peoples of the Americas. De Bry would even use images of cannibals to serve as the engraved frontispiece to volume 3. Showing the Tupinambá eating human flesh exoticized them, and justified European control.

Other volumes and the legacy of de Bry

The fourth, fifth, and sixth volumes of the set focus on Girolamo Benzoni’s accounts, such as Historia Mondo Nuovo, with part 6 discussing the atrocities committed against the indigenous population of Peru. Parts 7 to 12 incorporated the travel accounts of Ulricus Faber, Sir Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh, José de Acosta, Amerigo Vespucci, John Smith, and Antonio de Herrera among others. Like the volumes that came before them, de Bry provided numerous images to increase readers understanding of the narratives.

The Grands Voyages, and the entire Collected Travels, relate more generally to the forms of knowledge and collecting popular at the time. Like a cabinet of curiosity, de Bry’s project organized information in text and images so that readers could come to know the Americas. The volumes seek to provide encyclopedic knowledge about the Americas, much as the objects did in a curiosity cabinet. De Bry’s many prints were important resources for Europeans who sought to better understand the Americas. It allowed readers to take possession of these distant lands and peoples, where they could become participants in the colonial projects then underway, allowing them to feel a sense of dominance over the peoples and lands across the Atlantic—lands which many in Europe would never see firsthand. These often inaccurate images and narratives supported a sense of superiority, with Europeans positioned as more civilized and advanced, and the American “others” as less so. De Bry’s images of America would cement for Europeans a vision of what America was like for centuries to come.

[1] “Some Pictvre of the Pictes which in the olde tyme dyd habite one part of the great Bretainne,” which according to him “showe how that the inhabitants of the great Bretainne haue been in times past as sauuage as those of Virginia.” 67. Thomas Hariot, with illustrations by John White, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590).

Additional resources:

Early Images of Virginia Indians: The William W. Cole Collection at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture

Picturing the New World: The Hand-Colored de Bry Engravings of 1590

White Watercolors and de Bry engravings, on Virtual Jamestown

De Bry engravings of the Timucua, on Florida Memory

Columbus reports on his first voyage, 1493

Kim Sloan, ed., European Visions, American Voices, British Museum Research Publication 172 (2009).

Bernadette Bucher, Icon and Conquest: A Structural Analysis of the Illustrations of de Bry’s Great Voyages (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1981).

Michael Gaudio, Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1991).

Michiel van Groesen, “The de Bry Collection of Voyages (1590–1634): Early America reconsidered,” Journal of Early Modern History 12 (2008): 1–24.

Michael van Groesen, Representations of the Overseas World in the de Bry Collection of Voyages (1590–1634) (Leiden: Brill, 2008).

Maureen Quilligan, “Theodore de Bry’s Voyages to the New and Old Worlds,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 41, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 1–12.

Cite this page as: Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank, “Inventing “America,” The Engravings of Theodore de Bry,” in Smarthistory, May 18, 2019, accessed January 27, 2020, https://smarthistory.org/engravings-theodore-de-bry/.

Getting Real: Equiano’s “Travels”

Olaudah Equiano led one of the most intriguing existences in the last century of the transatlantic slave trade. Born in 1745 to the chieftain of an Igbo village in Nigeria, he was kidnapped and sold into slavery at the age of 11. By the time he was 21 he had served England’s navy in its war against the French and worked on trading ships in the West Indies and the southern United States, surviving the countless dangers of sea and slavery. He acquired the slave name Gustavus Vassa, later buying his way out of bondage. Equiano managed to save enough money to purchase his freedom, after which he continued to work as a sailor, participating in an early expedition to the Arctic Ocean and visiting the eastern Mediterranean Sea. The ex-slave also aided the abolitionist cause while in London. He was appointed to a post on a project for the black poor going to Sierra Leone, a colony founded by Britain in Africa for freed slaves. He himself did not travel to Sierra Leone, though he had earlier attempted, unsuccessfully, to be ordained and sent to Africa as a missionary. In fact, Equiano left the Sierra Leone project after a conflict with white participants. He and other blacks in England went on to form the Sons of Africa, a group that would enter into public debate on issues such as slavery. His memoir was published in 1789, as the international debate over slavery reached its zenith; both his condemnations of slavery and his unflinching descriptions of slave life proved to be valuable ammunition for the abolitionist cause.

Equiano “Travels”

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Chapter 6: Dutch Masters and the Birth of the Modern Art Market

This chapter features an overview of a few genres of northern Baroque, or Dutch, painting.  Dutch domestic genre paintings, portraiture and still life are categories of secular art that come into popularity in the Protestant north.

It’s important to note that Calvinism is the embraced denomination of Protestantism in parts of northern Europe.  The main tenets of this faith are predestination (the belief that your life is already plotted out by an all-knowing God, your salvation is as well.  Calvin maintained that one demonstrates one’s favor in God’s eyes via hard work and a serious work ethic.  The notion “To work is to pray” is Calvinist.  This is crucial to understanding Calvinism because he promoted the idea that successful people were obviously more in the favor of God’s eyes.  This led to a rather ruthless view of the poor.  They are people you would help, certainly, but there is a limit.  To Calvin, you show your adoration of God by working very hard and being successful.

And then ironically he opposed ornamentation as a kind of vanity.  As far as art goes, he was okay with it so long as it served a didactic purpose.  Art that is productive, in a sense.  It teaches something.

The Dutch Reformed Church: Architecturally, ‘strict doctrine and whitewashed spaces’ …

(Pieter Saenredam, Interior or the Choir of Saint Bavo’s in Haarlem. 1660.)

Calvinism, like most protestant factions, believed that individual prayer and meditation were crucial.  Thus these empty spaces and white walls invited contemplation.  A stark contrast to the Baroque churches of the Catholic south!

Jan Steen

Jan Steen was a successful Dutch painter.  In his self portrait, you see a confident and sincere gaze… and a focus on the artist’s hands:

But I wanted to show you his work as an example of didacticism in art.

His “The Drawing Lesson” is a genre scene.  And it seems pretty harmless and benign.  But Dutch art invites you in… because there’s so much going on!  In this a young girl is working with her male tutor.  The chaperone is… her little brother?  That’s all?  Hmmmm…this is rather risqué.  Are we concerned that she is looking at a male nude statue and that a cupid form is floating above?

Steen’s “Burgher of Delft” is a typical portrait.  A wealthy burgher, merchant, dressed modestly as is his daughter, magnanimously considering giving alms to the poor.

But Steen’s “The world turned upside down” is an example of didacticism.  The focal point of this painting is the face of the woman. She seems inebriated, loose, slatternly.  She is tickling the thigh of the drunken rogue sitting next to her.  All around them is weird stuff.  A duck on a shoulder, a basket of stuff suspended and about to fall, a pig coming in, trash on the floor, a sleeping nanny, kids getting into stuff.  Chaos.  The world turned upside down.  Why?  How? Well, what takes center stage?  A woman who has lost her decorum and respectability.  The lesson?  Morality resides in women… and when they let that go.  Voila!  This is what happens.

Jan Vermeer

Jan Vermeer is another artist worth taking a quick look at.   His View of Delft demonstrates that fascination with landscape (Dutch landschap which meant landform).  Vermeer worked very slowly and in plein air.  He worked in ‘real light’ either outside or in.  This view of Delft, a major port in the 17th century, shows attention to detail and atmosphere.  The quality of blue that is the sky and the way he captured the moisture in the clouds.  The water mirroring this activity.

Vermeer created merely 40 works in his time.  He took his time.  A master of capturing all facets of light.  The Girl with a Pearl Earring.

Women were a favorite subject.  Whether reading letters, drinking wine, doing embroidery, dressing.  We also see his love of scientific gadgetry.  Scales, globes, measuring devices, maps….  Please listen to this analysis of Woman Holding a Balance:

https://smarthistory.org/johannes-vermeer-woman-holding-a-balance/

Rembrandt

Rembrandt is undoubtedly a name that comes to mind when one thinks of Dutch art of the Baroque period.  He was a painter, an etcher and a draughtsman.  He lived from 1606-1669, most of his life spent in Amsterdam.  His early years he worked under several different tutors but the turning point for his development as an artist came when he spent about 6 months working with Pieter Lastman.  From that time he worked toward his very distinct treatment of his subject matter, with exaggerated gestures, naturalistic expression, unique lighting effects and glossiness.

He loved biblical subject matter and this work, The Stoning of St Stephen from 1625, is one of his first most important works because in this you can see how he conceptualized the composition of the work in a way that was very different.  Layered, really.  And has wildly gesturing people, captures the horror and chaos of the stoning, and uses a light/dark contrast that suggests a polarity.  On the left of the work you can see the figure of Saul of Tarsus, who ordered the stoning and he is barely recognizable in the ‘shadow’ of his sin… and in the light you see the heinous crime.  The light might suggest a kind of beauty and righteousness in this martyrdom.  And what adds an interesting twist to this is that Saul eventually converts to Christianity and becomes one of its most ardent defenders.

Much of Rembrandt’s early work was portraiture.  Wealthy patrons and people of renown or reputation that used portraiture as a symbol of success and respectability.

Please watch my lecture here:

Marie van Oosterwyck

Marie van Oosterwyck was one of the most talented of Holland’s female artists, or really any I should say.  Drawing on the tradition of realism and naturalism she infused her work with minute detail.  Her Vanitas is a good example.  Vanitas is a genre of its own.  It literally means “vanities” and refers to all the things we put our minds and effort to that are transitory.  They’re a lot of fun, but they are fleeting.  They take our minds away from the harder work…. Spiritual work.  And meanwhile, time ticks away.  All these things represent fleeting pleasures and interests.  The skull, the moth, the money, the books, science, the half eaten corn, the half drunk wine and even the flowers are dying.  The hourglass reminds us that time is ticking… set your mind to what matters, the salvation of your soul.  It’s so protestant.  Really.

Dutch Still Life

Please listen to two art historians doing a visual analysis of Jan van Huysum’s Vase with Flowers:

https://smarthistory.org/jan-van-huysum-vase-with-flowers/

I also love the food of Dutch still life.  Scrumptious, luscious, expensive, gorgeous yummy exotic foods.  It was common to these sorts of paintings in dining rooms, the images accompanying daily feasts and representing abundance.  Another common element that appeared in Dutch still life paintings was tulips.  Tulips were highly prized.  They were exotic imports from Turkey and it was discovered that the types could be tampered with and made into amazing specimens.  But again, tulips are one flower that get more beautiful as they start dying.  And nearly dead tulips were often put into still life.

Beautiful, yes.  Symbolic, yes.  Didactic, yes.  That is Dutch art.

7

Chapter 7: The Enlightenment!

“Every man has a property in his own person.  This nobody has a right to, but himself.”  ~ John Locke

“If the abstract rights of man will bear discussion, those of women, by parity of reasoning, will not shrink from the same test.” ~ Mary Wollstonecraft

The span of history known widely as the Enlightenment, refers to a period in western Europe hallmarked by intellectual and philosophical inquiry.  Also known as the “Age of Reason,” the period between 1650 to 1800, the Enlightenment is often regaled on somewhat superficial terms simply because of the weight and associations of the term itself.  The term “enlightenment” suggests that all of a sudden, someone flipped the light switch on throughout all of Europe.  The scales fell from people’s eyes and all of a sudden REASON led the way toward greater things.  Freedom, equality, independence and sovereignty!  These are grand ideas, indeed, and they were at the forefront of intellectual treatises of this period.  Some saw clearly the connection between education and a successful democracy.  Some were willing to test the limits of the notion of Natural Law, which was often used as the rationale for revolution.  Some, like early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, were fearless in pointing out what she saw as the hypocritical stances of men praising the primacy of reason and its relation to freedom.  In Of Civil Government (1690), John Locke demonstrated the intellectual current of the time claiming that God gave man the world and reason is the faculty man uses to put himself in the advantage.  Man has certain natural rights, over his body, his labor, and the products of that labor.  As stated in the quote that begins this chapter, every man has sovereignty over his own body, and in essence, over his own life.  In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft pointed out that the rights and freedoms so cavalierly hailed during her time, simply did not carry over to include women.  The “Rights of Man” seem to exclude others… and thus, true freedom has not really arrived.

The Enlightenment is known for certain advancements in science, government and society.  Literacy rates in some western European countries grew impressively. Education was once considered a privilege for only the upper class. However, during the 17th and 18th centuries, “education, literacy and learning” were gradually provided to “rich and poor alike”.  The literacy rate in Europe from the 17th century to the 18th century grew significantly. The definition of the term “literacy” in the 17th and 18th centuries is different from our current definition of literacy. Historians measured the literacy rate during the 17th and 18th century centuries by people’s ability to sign their names. However, this method of determining literacy did not reflect people’s ability to read. This affected the women’s apparent literacy rate prior to the Age of Enlightenment mainly because, while most women living between the Dark Ages and the Age of Enlightenment could not write or sign their names, many could read, at least to some extent.

The rate of illiteracy decreased more rapidly in more populated areas and areas where there was mixture of religious schools. The literacy rate in England in the 1640s was around 30 percent for males, rising to 60 percent in the mid-18th century. In France, the rate of literacy in 1686-90 was around 29 percent for men and 14 percent for women, it increased to 48 percent for men and 27 percent for women. The increase in literacy rate was more likely due, at least in part to religious influence, since most of the schools and colleges were organized by clergy, missionaries, or other religious organizations. The reason which motivated religions to help to increase the literacy rate among the general public was because the bible was being printed in more languages and literacy was thought to be the key to understanding the word of God.  “By 1714 the proportion of women able to read had risen, very approximately, to 25%, and it rose again to 40% by 1750. This increase was part of a general trend, fostered by the Reformation emphasis on reading the scripture and by the demand for literacy in an increasingly mercantile society. The group most affected was the growing professional and commercial class, and writing and arithmetic schools emerged to provide the training their sons required”.  The impact of the Reformation on literacy was, of course, far more dramatic in Protestant areas. Therefore, literacy rates in predominantly Protestant Northern Europe rose much more quickly than those in predominately Catholic southern Europe. The Jesuits, who were the product of the Catholic Reformation (Counter Reformation) contributed moderately to increased literacy in Catholic regions.

Newtonian science, natural “rights,” a literate middle class with upward aspirations, educational reform …. These components of the Enlightenment are fascinating on their own.  But it is even more interesting to study how these ideas meshed and became the groundwork for our modern age.

Thomas Hobbes and John Locke ~ Two Perspectives on Human Nature and Reason

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was an English philosopher, considered to be one of the founders of modern political philosophy.  Hobbes is best known for his 1651 book Leviathan, which expounded an influential formulation of social contract theory.  The social contract theory, which examined and promoted the idea of a contract, written and agreed upon by both the ruler and the ruled, is the only way to safe gain the long term productivity and strength of a nation.  Hobbes insisted that the sovereign of a nation plays a key role in this contract, or he even uses the word “covenant” which has a certain association to the idea of the sacred.  The true aim in government should be toward the Commonwealth.  In Chapter 17: Of the Causes, Generation, and Definition of a Commonwealth, he wrote:

“For the Lawes of Nature (as Justice, Equity, Modesty, Mercy, and (in summe) Doing To Others, As Wee Would Be Done To,) if themselves, without the terrour of some Power, to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our naturall Passions, that carry us to Partiality, Pride, Revenge, and the like. And Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure a man at all. Therefore notwithstanding the Lawes of Nature, (which every one hath then kept, when he has the will to keep them, when he can do it safely,) if there be no Power erected, or not great enough for our security; every man will and may lawfully rely on his own strength and art, for caution against all other men. And in all places, where men have lived by small Families, to robbe and spoyle one another, has been a Trade, and so farre from being reputed against the Law of Nature, that the greater spoyles they gained, the greater was their honour; and men observed no other Lawes therein, but the Lawes of Honour; …”

Locke insisted that the sovereign, as a figurehead, represents authority and the will and means to keep the “natural passions” of man in check.  A covenant, a sacred commitment toward the common good, the Commonwealth, needs some element of leadership and example to ensure the maintenance of law and order.

The online Gutenburg edition of The Leviathan is linked here. Primary sources like this are so valuable.  Though Locke’s writing style may be challenging as it is lodged in the rhetorical style of the age, it is interesting reading nonetheless.  There are two sections to explore:  Part II, Chapter 17: Of the Causes, Generation, and Definition of a Commonwealth and Chapter 30: Of the Office of the Sovereign Representative.

Leviathan

John Locke  (born August 29, 1632, in Wrington, Somerset, England—died October 28, 1704, High Laver, Essex), was an English philosopher whose works lie at the foundation of modern philosophical empiricism and political liberalism. He was an inspirer of both the European Enlightenment and the Constitution of the United States. His philosophical thinking  was close to that of the founders of modern science, especially Robert Boyle, Sir Isaac Newton, and other members of the Royal Society. His political thought was grounded in the notion of a social contract between citizens and in the importance of toleration,  especially in matters of religion. Much of what he advocated in the realm of politics was accepted in England after the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 and in the United States after the country’s declaration of independence in 1776.  More on his life and works can be found here.

Though in agreement with Hobbes about the concept of a social contract, Locke refuted Hobbes point of view that man is by nature aggressive and self-serving.  He insisted that man is born tabula rasa, a “blank slate.”  Man is not born with any traits whatsoever.  It is environmental influences that make a man’s character.  (And yes, do please note the prevalence of the word “man” and its underpinnings.) It is society that makes the man.  If this is true, and rational, then it only follows that society as a whole benefits through a social infrastructure that gives individuals access to education and opportunity.  In Of Civil Government (1690), Locke puts forth so many ideas that modern democratic principles are grounded in:

“TO understand political power right, and derive it from its original, we must consider, what state all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.

A state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another; there being nothing more evident, than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection, unless the lord and master of them all should, by any manifest declaration of his will, set one above another, and confer on him, by an evident and clear appointment, an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty.”

The social contract concept is one of mutual respect and mutual advantage.  A government for the people, by the people, where everyone, even the leader, follows the rules.

Here is the link for the primary text on Project Gutenburg: Of Civil Government.  Please scroll to the following sections:  Chapter II: Of the State of Nature, Chapter V: Of Property, Chapter VIII: The Beginnings of Political Societies, and Chapter XVIII: Of Tyranny.

Thomas Jefferson and Enlightenment Values

John Locke’s work traveled widely and was read and discussed throughout Europe and North America.  His views on religious tolerance, social and educational reform, the limited power of the sovereign, and the importance of individual and political freedom, were embraced by American politician, writer, architect, Thomas Jefferson.  Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), was was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. He previously served as the second vice president of the United States from 1797 to 1801. The principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was a proponent of democracy, republicanism, and individual rights, motivating American colonists to break from the Kingdom of Great Britain and form a new nation; he produced formative documents and decisions at both the state and national level.

Although Jefferson is regarded as a leading spokesman for democracy and republicanism in the era of the Enlightenment, some modern scholarship has been critical of Jefferson, finding a contradiction between his ownership and trading of many slaves that worked his plantations, and his famous declaration that “all men are created equal”. Although the matter remains a subject of debate, most historians believe that Jefferson had a sexual relationship with his slave Sally Hemings, a mixed-race woman who was a half-sister to his late wife and that he fathered at least one of her children. Presidential scholars and historians generally praise Jefferson’s public achievements, including his advocacy of religious freedom and tolerance in Virginia.  To read a full overview of Jefferson’s life and career, click here.

It is clear, when reading the introduction of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence (1776), that there are traces of European Enlightenment ideas and ideals and that they are woven together in this treatise that speaks of Natural Law, Natural Rights, social contract and the RIGHT to revolution:

“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,— That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.— Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”

Read the entire Declaration: here.

What About Women?~ Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was an English writer, philosopher, and advocate of women’s rights. Until the late 20th century, Wollstonecraft’s life, which encompassed several unconventional personal relationships at the time, received more attention than her writing. Today Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life and her works as important influences.

During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children’s book. Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason.

The Gutenburg Project, again, gives us this very important primary text.  Here is A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.  Please read the Introduction and Chapter 1.  Pay attention to Wollstonecraft’s use of natural law and rights as she gives a testimony for the true reasons behind the commonly held of the time that women are by nature inferior to man.  It is clear to Wollstonecraft, in her adherence to Lockean thought, that environment, society and education (or lack of), are the crucial components that contribute to intelligence.  Wollstonecraft posits the idea that “the mind has no sex” and that human potential is stymied by societal and governmental inequities as they pertain to women.

The Philosophes and the Rise of the Salon!

In this painting The Salon of Madam Geoffrin, there is a glimpse inside a popular practice of Enlightenment France, of middle to upper class individuals making their homes into places where free-thinkers, poets, artists, philosophers and politicians could gather to discuss “modern” ideas.  Madam Geoffrin was a French salon holder who has been referred to as one of the leading female figures in the French Enlightenment. From 1750–1777, Madame Geoffrin played host to many of the most influential Philosophes and Encyclopédistes of her time. Her association with several prominent dignitaries and public figures from across Europe has earned Madame Geoffrin international recognition. Her patronage and dedication to both the philosophical men of letters and talented artists that frequented her house is emblematic of her role as guide and protector. In her salon on the Rue St. Honore, Madame Geoffrin demonstrated qualities of politeness and civility that helped stimulate and regulate intellectual discussion. Her actions as a Parisian salonnière exemplify many of the most important characteristics of Enlightenment sociability.

The ideas and ideals of the Enlightenment were summed up in a massive work, a “monumental literary endeavor,” that was the combined thirty-five volume work of noted contributors.  Largely the editorial result of Denis Diderot (1713-1784), it was hailed as the largest collection of philosophical, scientific, historical and humanities-based writings and inquiry.  Around 200 individuals contributed a mass of over 72,000 entries on a wide range of subjects.

The Encyclopedie

Enlightenment Themes

In this lecture, I give an overview of key themes.  Please watch:

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Chapter 8: Romanticism

This brief interview, from PBS News Hour, provides a starting point for Romanticism:

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Why should every student in America read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden?  Essentially, because Thoreau’s life, experience, will and notions of individual freedom and the responsibility that come with that freedom continue to be relevant in our contemporary social and political conversations.  Thoreau was a Romantic, an American Romantic.  But what does that mean?  In this chapter we look at the Romanticism movement in Europe and North America.

The Romanticism Movement ~ The Ideal Vehicle of Poetry

Romanticism was an artistic, literary, musical and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850. Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as glorification of all the past and nature, preferring the medieval rather than the classical. It was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution,  the aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment, and the scientific rationalization of nature—all components of modernity. It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography, education, and the social sciences.  It had a significant and complex effect on politics, with romantic thinkers influencing liberalism, radicalism, conservatism and nationalism.

The movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as apprehension, horror and terror, and awe—especially that experienced in confronting the new aesthetic categories of the sublimity and beauty of nature. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, but also spontaneity as a desirable characteristic (as in the musical impromptu). In contrast to the Rationalism and Classicism of the Enlightenment, Romanticism revived medievalism,  and elements of art and narrative perceived as authentically medieval in an attempt to escape population growth, early urban sprawl, and industrialism.

Although the movement was rooted in the German Sturm und Drang movement, which preferred intuition and emotion to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, the events and ideologies of the French Revolution were also proximate factors. Romanticism assigned a high value to the achievements of “heroic” individualists and artists, whose examples, it maintained, would raise the quality of society. It also promoted the individual imagination as a critical authority allowed of freedom from classical notions of form in art.

Here is a Beginner’s Guide to Romanticism via SmartHistory:

https://smarthistory.org/europe-19th-century/romanticism/romanticism-a-beginners-guide/

With these basic tenets in mind, we turn to the English Nature Poets.

The Romantic Perspective: Poetry Gives Access to Self, Feeling, and Nature

(c) The Wordsworth Trust; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the  Romantic Age in English Literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads (1798).  Wordsworth’s magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semi-autobiographical poem of his early years that he revised and expanded a number of times. It was posthumously titled and published by his wife in the year of his death, before which it was generally known as “the poem to Coleridge”. Wordsworth was Britain’s poet laureate from 1843 until his death from pleurisy on 23 April 1850.

The second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in what is now named Wordsworth House in Cumberland, part of the scenic region in northwestern England known as the Lake District. The beauty of the Lake District made an immeasurable impact on his sensibility.  It was a place of quiet and beauty, a sacred space, which is a theme that interlaces through much of his work.  William’s sister, the poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was close all his life, was born the following year, and the two were baptized together. They had three other siblings: Richard, the eldest, who became a lawyer; John, born after Dorothy, who went to sea and died in 1805 when the ship of which he was captain, the Earl of Avergavenny, was wrecked off the south coast of England; and Christopher, the youngest, who entered the Church and rose to be Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Wordsworth’s father was a legal representative of James Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale and, through his connections, lived in a large mansion in the small town. He was frequently away from home on business, so the young William and his siblings had little involvement with him and remained distant from him until his death in 1783. However, he did encourage William in his reading, and in particular set him to commit large portions of verse to memory, including works by Milton, Shakespeare and Spenser. William was also allowed to use his father’s library. William also spent time at his mother’s parents’ house in Penrith, Cumberland, where he was exposed to the moors, but did not get along with his grandparents or his uncle, who also lived there. His hostile interactions with them distressed him to the point of contemplating suicide.  More on Wordsworth’s life and career can be found here.

Please read [I wandered lonely as a cloud]

In this poem, Wordsworth tells of his experience wandering the fields by the lake.  He is lonely, the solitary poet, seeking inspiration.  In the natural beauty, though, he realizes that he is not alone.  He is not this disconnected vapor, like a cloud.  He is actually in good company.  A field of daffodils, dancing with but outshining the grass, is his company.  They and the moment are his inspiration.  The poet’s inspiration is found in the smallest things.  He also realizes that the memory of that moment is his forever.

Please read “The World is Too Much With Us”

This is a sonnet, a 14 line poem that poses a problem or question and the beginning and then works through it.  The last two lines provide the new insight gotten through this method of inquiry.  In this poem, Wordsworth declares that the world, or think of it as “worldly cares,” are a detrimental preoccupation for us.  The tyranny of the clock and time, getting things, spending money, trying to keep up, these things wear us out.  In all our possessions we really do not have anything truly worthwhile if we have given up our souls.  He longs for a previous type of existence, perhaps even pagan times when the imagination was free.

Please read “Mutability”

As the title suggests, this poem is about change, the nature of change, its inevitability, and how we should never fear what is natural.  The word ‘dissolution’ can be understood in terms of the conclusion of  life and one is also invited to understand it in terms of a rise and fall of decadence, a tearing down of one’s potential because of intemperance.  Wordsworth is being rather philosophical when he claims that Truth is a constant, but our images of it are hindered by our own lack of faith, imagination and inability to keep our appetites in check.

You are invited to peruse more of Wordsworth’s poems here, via the poetryfoundation.org site: William Wordsworth

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge (21 October 1772 – 25 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He also shared volumes and collaborated with Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, and Charles Lloyd. He wrote the poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as the major prose work Biographia Literaria. His critical work, especially on William Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture. Coleridge coined many familiar words and phrases, including suspension of disbelief. He had a major influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson and on American transcendentalism.

Throughout his adult life Coleridge had crippling bouts of anxiety and depression; it has been speculated that he had bipolar disorder, which had not been defined during his lifetime. He was physically unhealthy, which may have stemmed from a bout of rheumatic fever and other childhood illnesses. He was treated for these conditions with laudanum, which fostered a lifelong opium addiction.  For more on his life and career, see here.

Coleridge’s poems often have a broody tone and are often rather fantastical.  In true Romantic fashion, he longed for states of mind that were beyond his reach and he looked to dreams and narcotics to help him on this quest.  Some of his most intriguing poems are the result of opium-induced dreams.

Please read “Kubla Khan”

Here are some ways (analysis) to think about this poem.  Coleridge composed his poem, Kubla Khan is a state of semi-conscious trance either in the autumn of 1797 or spring of 1798 and published in 1816. The whole poem is pervaded by an atmosphere of dream and remains in the form of a vision. The vision embodied in Kubla Khan was inspired by the perusal of the travel book, Purchas His Pilgrimage. Coleridge had taken a doze of opium as an anodyne, and his eyes closed upon the line in the book, “At Zanadu Kubla Khan built a pleasure palace.” But this opened his creative vision, and the poem of about 200 lines was composed in this state of waking dream. On being fully awake, he wrote the poem down. The theme of the poem is unimportant. It describes the palace built by Kubla Khan, the grandson of Ghengis Khan, the great rule of central Asia.

This poem is the finest example of pure poetry removed from any intellectual content. Being essentially of the nature of a dream, it enchants by the loveliness of its color, artistic beauty, and sweet harmony. Its vision is  wrought out of the most various sources –oriented romance and travel books. Its remote setting and its delicate imaginative realism renders it especially romantic. The supernatural atmosphere is evoked chiefly through suggestion and association. The musical effect of the poem is unsurpassed. The main appeal of the poem lies in its sound effects. The rhythm and even the length of the lines are varied to produce subtle effects of harmony. The whole poem is bound together by a network of alliteration, the use of liquid consonants, and onomatopoeia. The judicious use of hard consonants has given occasionally the effect of force and harshness.

“Kubla Khan” invites us into ‘suspension of disbelief,’ into the world of dreams and imagination. Which, to Coleridge and other Romantics, is a place of rich wonders and it behooves us all to be fearless enough to be willing to look.

Please read “Cristabel”

This rather gothic poem is fascinating and much critical work has been done on it.  Since it is such a lengthy poem, you may find it easier to read an analysis in tandem with reading the poem:  analysis of Cristabel

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Percy Bysshe Shelley (4 August 1792 – 8 July 1822) was one of the major English Romantic poets, who is regarded by some as among the finest lyric and philosophical poets in the English language, and one of the most influential. A radical in his poetry as well as in his political and social views, Shelley did not see fame during his lifetime, but recognition of his achievements in poetry grew steadily following his death. Shelley was a key member of a close circle of visionary poets and writers that included Lord Byron, John Keats, Leigh Hunt, Thomas Love Peacock and his own second wife, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein.

Shelley’s close circle of friends included some of the most important progressive thinkers of the day, including his father-in-law, the philosopher William Godwin, and Leigh Hunt. Though Shelley’s poetry and prose output remained steady throughout his life, most publishers and journals declined to publish his work for fear of being arrested for either blasphemy or sedition. Shelley’s poetry sometimes had only an underground readership during his day, but his poetic achievements are widely recognized today, and his political and social thought had an impact on the Chartist and other movements in England, and reach down to the present day. Shelley’s theories of economics and morality, for example, had a profound influence on Karl Marx; his early – perhaps first – writings on nonviolent resistance influenced Leo Tolstoy, whose writings on the subject in turn influenced Mahatma Gandhi, and through him Martin Luther King Jr. and others practicing nonviolence during the American civil rights movement.

Shelley’s work is noted for it intensity and melancholy.  He was an unconventional thinker and a prolific writer.  He was truly fearless and trusted his intellect and heart.  He wrote treatises on the necessity of Atheism and against what he saw as the “outdated institution” of marriage.  He truly was a genius with metaphor and his poetry can be very challenging because of it!  He drowned at the age of 29, in a boating accident in the Gulf of Spezia, Italy.  His body washed ashore several days after the accident and he was cremated on the beach.  Supposedly, his heart was removed and can be visited in the Protestant cemetery in Rome.

Please read “Ode to the West Wind”

In many ways, this poem is the pinnacle of the Romantic sensibility.  It is an ode, which is a poetic genre where something or someone is praised.  In this case, it is the wind.  The wind is mighty, powerful.  It brings the seasons, moves the waves, causes the minute and the mighty to change.  It has tremendous power but it cannot be seen.  One can only view the effects of its presence.  As you read this poem, you realize that the wind is not the subject matter after all.  The wind is a metaphor for the imagination, the creative spirit.  Immeasurably powerful.  We do not see it, but we know it exists because of what the imagination produces: art, poetry, music, philosophy.

Find more of Shelley’s work via poetryfoundation.org: Shelley

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American Romanticism

The ideas of the Romanticism movement in Europe made their way across the Atlantic.  And it makes sense!  After all, in the imagination of many, North America was still an Eden, a paradise, an unspoiled land that could provide a spiritual grounding in a world that was speeding toward modernity.  Please read these essays on Romanticism in the United States.  These essays are short and lively, and they provide background on artists, like Thomas Cole and Alfred Bierstadt, who captured so perfectly the unspoiled American landscape.  There are also some videos!

https://smarthistory.org/americas-before-1900/united-states-19th-century/romanticism-in-the-united-states/

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American Literature

This chapter initiated with a brief conversation about the importance of reading the work of Henry David Thoreau.  Just having a sense of who this man was, what he wrote, and the principles that he lived by, is an exercise in the Romantic sensibility.  Remember that the Romantic perspective is one that embraces individuality, independence, self reliance.  The Romantic finds the sacred not in church services, but in a hike in the woods.  The Romantic seeks to set clear ethical and moral principles and then live by them.

Here is an online edition of Thoreau’s Walden.  I invite you to read the introduction and then the first two chapters.  In chapter 1, he tells the reader his motivation for moving to the woods.  He expresses ideas gleaned from his studies in addition to what he has observed of “modern life” that is ironically, brutish.  In chapter 2, he recounts his daily routine and his principles of living with economy.  He writes:

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”

Walden

On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

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Romanticism in Music

The height of Romanticism in music.  Beethoven’s Ode to Joy!

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Chapter 9: Shaping a New Imperialism

British Imperialism as Octopus (cartoon).  Source: wiki commons

This cartoon from a 19th century British periodical captures perfectly both the activity and ethos of New Imperialism.  In the center, the center of the world no less, is England.  Characterized by a dapper looking, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, upper class man, England literally and figuratively has its tentacles holding on to all continents.  His expression is smug, as if it is his right and perhaps even his duty to place his white hands on other countries.  In doing so, England is asserting itself and it is doing so because of its desire to not only be the Empire on which the sun never sets, but also to set forth a mission to “civilize” other nations.

In historical contexts, New Imperialism characterizes a period of colonial expansion by European powers, the United States, and Japan during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The period featured an unprecedented pursuit of overseas territorial acquisitions. At the time, states focused on building their empires with new technological advances and developments, expanding their territory through conquest, and exploiting the resources of the subjugated countries. During the era of New Imperialism, the Western powers (and Japan) individually conquered almost all of Africa and parts of Asia. The new wave of imperialism reflected ongoing rivalries among the great powers, the economic desire for new resources and markets, and a “civilizing mission” ethos.

The “civilizing mission” ethos has been used throughout history, from the middle ages and into the 20th century.  It can be understood as a rationale for intervention or colonization, purporting to contribute to the spread of civilization, and used mostly in relation to the Westernization of indigenous peoples, the search for cheap (or free) labor, and the exploitation of natural resources.  As Karl Marx points out, the civilizing mission is also a guise for the spread of capitalism.

In terms of British New Imperialism, a poem by Rudyard Kipling describes the vantage point of the colonizers and defends their mission.

“The White Man’s Burden”

Take up the White Man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

Take up the White Man’s burden—
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain.
To seek another’s profit,
And work another’s gain.

Take up the White Man’s burden—
The savage wars of peace—
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man’s burden—
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper—
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go make them with your living,
And mark them with your dead!

Take up the White Man’s burden—
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard—
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:—
“Why brought ye us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?”

Take up the White Man’s burden—
Ye dare not stoop to less—
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloak your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your Gods and you.

Take up the White Man’s burden—
Have done with childish days—
The lightly profferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!

Source: White Man’s Burden

Kipling’s poem expresses imperialist ideology.  That is, the racial superiority of white Europeans (and North Americans) over dark-skinned people, the idea that this is a heroic deed and one that is thus sanctified by God, and the sort of condescending paternal relationship to non-European cultures.  Social Darwinism, a social theory loosely based on Charles Darwin’s theories of the natural world, was widely popular and had a clear impact on how Europeans imagined the dynamic between white races and “others.”

Though Kipling dedicated this poem to the United States on its annexation of the Philippines in 1899, it expresses keenly the same sensibility behind British, French and German colonial land-grabs as well.

For even more insight on the civilizing mission ethos, this cartoon by Victor Gilliam, which appeared in Judge magazine in 1899, is stark in its caricature of native peoples as “new caught” and “half-devil and half-child.”

This cartoon shows Uncle Sam and John Bull (the United States and England) carrying their new-found “possessions” up a steep incline.  The hill they are climbing include broad steps, or boulders, on which are written the various vices (barbarism, oppression, cruelty, ignorance, etc.) that must be overcome on the path toward “civilization.”  But one wonders whether there is some irony embedded in this image.  For a clearer view, please click on the below link:

WMB cartoon

New Imperialism and the sort of “manifest destiny” ethos and justification set the stage for industrialism, the spread of capitalism, the growth of nationalism and ultimately the violence of the first World War.  This chapter explores the ideas that fueled that progression.

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The Industrial Revolution marked a period of development in the latter half of the 18th century that transformed largely rural, agrarian societies in Europe and America into industrialized, urban ones. Goods that had once been painstakingly crafted by hand started to be produced in mass quantities by machines in factories, thanks to the introduction of new machines and techniques in textiles, iron making and other industries. Fueled by the game-changing use of steam power, the Industrial Revolution began in Britain and spread to the rest of the world, including the United States, by the 1830s and ‘40s. Modern historians often refer to this period as the First Industrial Revolution, to set it apart from a second period of industrialization that took place from the late 19th to early 20th centuries and saw rapid advances in the steel, electric and automobile industries.

In this segment from the online History channel, please read the overviews of the growth of industrialism due to new technologies, the railroad, production techniques and the impact that all of this had on the working class.

For even more insight on these issues, please view this lecture from the Khan Academy:

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Alt link: here

The idea that there is a human cost in all this progress was at the core of various calls for reform.  The boom of industrialization created a polarization of the world: the oft referred to “haves and have-nots.”  This phrase encapsulates Marxist Theory, a somewhat radical social and economic theory that had an enormous impact on the 19th and 20th centuries.

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Marxism: “Let the ruling classes tremble…”

“The worker of the world has nothing to lose but their chains.  Workers of the world, unite!”  Karl Marx

As a university student, Karl Marx (1818-1883) joined a movement known as the Young Hegelians, who strongly criticized the political and cultural establishments of the day. He became a journalist, and the radical nature of his writings would eventually get him expelled by the governments of Germany, France and Belgium. In 1848, Marx and fellow German thinker Friedrich Engels published “The Communist Manifesto,” which introduced their concept of socialism as a natural result of the conflicts inherent in the capitalist system. Marx later moved to London, where he would live for the rest of his life. In 1867, he published the first volume of “Capital” (Das Kapital), in which he laid out his vision of capitalism and its inevitable tendencies toward self-destruction, and took part in a growing international workers’ movement based on his revolutionary theories.

Please view this lecture on Marx, his life and work:  Historychannel

In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels present their social theory which was largely based on their observations of the lives of the working class in Britain.  The modern production practices had a demeaning effect on workers, sapping their physical, emotional and spiritual reserves.  Marx observed:

“Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.

The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.”

Here is the link to the entire Communist Manifesto.  I invite you to read the Introduction and Chapter 1: The Bourgeois and the Proletarians.  How does Marx describe the lives of these two classes?  What details does he use?  What sort of rhetorical strategies are apparent?

Communist Manifesto

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Women of the World, Unite!: The Dawn of Organized Suffrage

Image: Suffragettes, London.  1912.  link

In England, John Stuart Mill became an unexpected champion for women’s rights and the social reform necessary to fulfill the promises of freedom made through revolutions of the previous century.  JS Mill was a British philosopher, political economist, and civil servant. One of the most influential thinkers in the history of classical liberalism, he contributed widely to social theory, political theory, and political economy. Dubbed “the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century”, Mill’s conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state and social control.

In 1851, Mill married Harriet Taylor after 21 years of intimate friendship. Taylor was married when they met, and their relationship was close but generally believed to be chaste during the years before her first husband died in 1849. The couple waited two years before marrying in 1851. Brilliant in her own right, Taylor was a significant influence on Mill’s work and ideas during both friendship and marriage. His relationship with Harriet Taylor reinforced Mill’s advocacy of women’s rights. J. S. Mill said that in his stand against domestic violence, and for women’s rights he was “chiefly an amanuensis to my wife”. He called her mind a “perfect instrument”, and said she was “the most eminently qualified of all those known to the author”. He cites her influence in his final revision of On Liberty, which was published shortly after her death. Taylor died in 1858 after developing severe lung congestion, after only seven years of marriage to Mill.

Between the years 1865 and 1868 Mill served as Lord Rector of the University of St. Andrews. During the same period, 1865–68, he was a Member of Parliament for City and Westminster.  He was sitting for the Liberal Party. During his time as an MP, Mill advocated easing the burdens on Ireland. In 1866, Mill became the first person in the history of Parliament to call for women to be given the right to vote, vigorously defending this position in subsequent debate. Mill became a strong advocate of such social reforms as labour unions and farm cooperatives. In Considerations on Representative Government, Mill called for various reforms of Parliament and voting, especially proportional representation, the single transferable vote, and the extension of suffrage. In April 1868, Mill favored in a Commons debate the retention of capital punishment for such crimes as aggravated murder; he termed its abolition “an effeminacy in the general mind of the country.”  source

The Subjection of Women is a fascinating read.  It is also a challenging one because it is highly intellectual and full of the 19th century rhetorical writing style!  However, the strength of this work lies in Mill’s insistence that this be a kind of scientific or philosophical study.  The ideas that women should have rights that thus did not confine them to the traditional and conventional ideas of chasteness, propriety, motherhood, a dutiful wife …. all emblems of a social status quo in patriarchy.  In one section, Mill expresses the dynamic of the master/slave relationship.   As Mill sees it, there are two types of slave, the unwilling one and the willing one.  Women remain “willing slaves” simply because there are no other options for them in a society that leaves them with no human rights and at the whim of the men in their lives:

“All causes, social and natural, combine to make it unlikely that women should be collectively rebellious to the power of men. They are so far in a position different from all other subject classes, that their masters require something more from them than actual service. Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments. All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite. [Pg 27]They have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds. The masters of all other slaves rely, for maintaining obedience, on fear; either fear of themselves, or religious fears. The masters of women wanted more than simple obedience, and they turned the whole force of education to effect their purpose. All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men; not self-will, and government by self-control, but submission, and yielding to the control of others. All the moralities tell them that it is the duty of women, and all the current sentimentalities that it is their nature, to live for others; to make complete abnegation of themselves, and to have no life but in their affections. And by their affections are meant the only ones they are allowed to have—those to the men with whom they are connected, or to the children who constitute an additional and indefeasible tie between them and a man. When we put together three things—first, the natural attraction between opposite sexes; secondly, the wife’s entire dependence on the husband, every privilege or pleasure she has being either his gift, or depending entirely on his will; and lastly, that the principal object of human pursuit, consideration, and all objects of social ambition, can in general be sought or obtained by her only through [Pg 28]him, it would be a miracle if the object of being attractive to men had not become the polar star of feminine education and formation of character. And, this great means of influence over the minds of women having been acquired, an instinct of selfishness made men avail themselves of it to the utmost as a means of holding women in subjection, by representing to them meekness, submissiveness, and resignation of all individual will into the hands of a man, as an essential part of sexual attractiveness. Can it be doubted that any of the other yokes which mankind have succeeded in breaking, would have subsisted till now if the same means had existed, and had been as sedulously used, to bow down their minds to it?”

Please see the entire work here, paying special attention to pages 26-28.   In addition, the wiki page on The Subjection of Women is also helpful for an overview of his argument:

The Subjection of Women

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Meanwhile, in the United States,

Susan B. Anthony (L) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (R)

CREDIT: Library of Congress

The woman suffrage movement actually began in 1848, when a women’s rights convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York. The Seneca Falls meeting was not the first in support of women’s rights, but suffragists later viewed it as the meeting that launched the suffrage movement. For the next 50 years, woman suffrage supporters worked to educate the public about the validity of woman suffrage. Under the leadership of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other women’s rights pioneers, suffragists circulated petitions and lobbied Congress to pass a constitutional amendment to enfranchise women.

At the turn of the century, women reformers in the club movement and in the settlement house movement wanted to pass reform legislation. However, many politicians were unwilling to listen to a disenfranchised group. Thus, over time women began to realize that in order to achieve reform, they needed to win the right to vote. For these reasons, at the turn of the century, the woman suffrage movement became a mass movement.

Alice Paul

CREDIT:  Library of Congress

In the 20th century leadership of the suffrage movement passed to two organizations. The first, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), under the leadership of Carrie Chapman Catt, was a moderate organization. The NAWSA undertook campaigns to enfranchise women in individual states, and simultaneously lobbied President Wilson and Congress to pass a woman suffrage Constitutional Amendment. In the 1910s, NAWSA’s membership numbered in the millions.

The second group, the National Woman’s Party (NWP), under the leadership of Alice Paul, was a more militant organization. The NWP undertook radical actions, including picketing the White House, in order to convince Wilson and Congress to pass a woman suffrage amendment.

In 1920, due to the combined efforts of the NAWSA and the NWP, the 19th Amendment, enfranchising women, was finally ratified. This victory is considered the most significant achievement of women in the Progressive Era. It was the single largest extension of democratic voting rights in our nation’s history, and it was achieved peacefully, through democratic processes.

College day in the picket line

CREDIT: Library of Congress

Link to source

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10

Chapter 10: Realism ~ The Eyes of Photography, Literature, and Painting

“If I could tell a story in words, I wouldn’t lug around a camera.”  ~ Lewis Hine

Lewis Wickes Hine (September 26, 1874 – November 3, 1940) was an American sociologist and photographer. Hine used his camera as a tool for social reform. His photographs were instrumental in changing child labor laws in the United States.

Hine was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, on September 26, 1874. After his father was killed in an accident, Hine began working and saved his money for a college education. He studied sociology at the University of Chicago, Columbia and New York University. He became a teacher in New York City at the Ethical Culture School, where he encouraged his students to use photography as an educational medium. Hine led his sociology classes to Ellis Island in New York Harbor, photographing the thousands of immigrants who arrived each day. Between 1904 and 1909, Hine took over 200 plates (photographs) and came to the realization that documentary photography could be employed as a tool for social change and reform.

In 1907, Hine became the staff photographer of the Russell Sage Foundation; he photographed life in the steel-making districts and people of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for the influential sociological study called The Pittsburgh Survey.

Child laborers in glasswork. Indiana, 1908

Little Lottie, a regular oyster shucker in Alabama Canning Co. (Bayou La Batre, Alabama, 1911)

In 1908 Hine became the photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), leaving his teaching position. Over the next decade, Hine documented child labor, with focus on the use of child labor in the Carolina Piedmont, to aid the NCLC’s lobbying efforts to end the practice.  In 1913, he documented child laborers among cotton mill workers with a series of Francis Galton‘s composite portraits.

Hine’s work for the NCLC was often dangerous. As a photographer, he was frequently threatened with violence or even death by factory police and foremen. At the time, the immorality of child labor was meant to be hidden from the public. Photography was not only prohibited but also posed a serious threat to the industry.[5] To gain entry to the mills, mines and factories, Hine was forced to assume many guises. At times he was a fire inspector, postcard vendor, bible salesman, or even an industrial photographer making a record of factory machinery.  Source

Please watch this lecture on Hine’s work:

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://boisestate.pressbooks.pub/thecreativespirit/?p=169

The lens of the camera saw the world in an objective way, with an undercurrent of narrative that was both provocative and effective.  Realism is noted for its objectivism, its portrayal of the human experience devoid of melodrama and sentimentalism.  The 19th century in Europe and North America saw the growth of interest in the lives of everyday people.  In addition, there grew an interest in issues of gender, class, and social and cultural forces that systemically exploited and degraded people.  The arts provided a vehicle for expression and examination of these issues.

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Literary Realism

Literary realism is part of the realist art movement beginning with mid-nineteenth-century French literature (Stendhal), and Russian literature (Alexander Pushkin) and extending to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.  Literary realism attempts to represent familiar things as they are. Realist authors chose to depict everyday and banal activities and experiences, instead of using a romanticized or similarly stylized presentation.

Broadly defined as “the representation of reality”, realism in the arts is the attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, without artificiality and avoiding artistic conventions, as well as implausible, exotic and supernatural elements.

Realism has been prevalent in the arts at many periods, and is in large part a matter of technique and training, and the avoidance of stylization. In the visual arts, illusionistic realism is the accurate depiction of lifeforms, perspective, and the details of light and colour. Realist works of art may emphasize the ugly or sordid, such as works of social realism, regionalism, or kitchen sink realism.

Please read the following selections from “Chapter Two: Realism” in this online textbook here.

Read:

2.2 Introduction

2.2.1 Local Color

2.2.2 Regionalism

2.3 Mark Twain and selections

2.8 Kate Chopin and selections

2.10 Charles Waddell Chestnutt and selections

Learning Outcomes
After completing these selections in this chapter, you should be able to:
• Describe the post-Civil War context of American culture at the time Realistic writing came into prominence.
• List the features of American Literary Realism.
• List the features of the two sub-movements that preceded Realism: Local Color and Regionalism.
• Identify stylistic elements of Local Color, Regionalism, and Realism in literary selections.
• Identify major distinctions and differences among the literary styles of Local Color, Regionalism, and Realism.
• Analyze the ways in which women’s literature develops in this period.
• Analyze themes in an early work by an African-American writer.

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Realism in Painting

Realism, in the arts, the accurate, detailed, unembellished depiction of nature or of contemporary life. Realism rejects imaginative idealization in favour of a close observation of outward appearances. As such, realism in its broad sense has comprised many artistic currents in different civilizations. In the visual arts, for example, realism can be found in ancient Hellenistic Greek sculptures accurately portraying boxers and decrepit old women. The works of such 17th-century painters as Caravaggio, the Dutch genre painters, the Spanish painters José de Ribera, Diego Velázquez, and Francisco de Zurbarán, and the Le Nain brothers in France are realist in approach. The works of the 18th-century English novelists Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett may also be called realistic.Realism was not consciously adopted as an aesthetic program until the mid-19th century in France, however. Indeed, realism may be viewed as a major trend in French novels and paintings between 1850 and 1880. One of the first appearances of the term realism was in the Mercure français du XIXe siècle in 1826, in which the word is used to describe a doctrine based not upon imitating past artistic achievements but upon the truthful and accurate depiction of the models that nature and contemporary life offer the artist. The French proponents of realism were agreed in their rejection of the artificiality of both the Classicism and Romanticism of the academies and on the necessity for contemporaneity in an effective work of art. They attempted to portray the lives, appearances, problems, customs, and mores of the middle and lower classes, of the unexceptional, the ordinary, the humble, and the unadorned. Indeed, they conscientiously set themselves to reproducing all the hitherto-ignored aspects of contemporary life and society—its mental attitudes, physical settings, and material conditions.Realism was stimulated by several intellectual developments in the first half of the 19th century. Among these were the anti-Romantic movement in Germany, with its emphasis on the common man as an artistic subject; Auguste Comte’s Positivist philosophy, in which sociology’s importance as the scientific study of society was emphasized; the rise of professional journalism, with its accurate and dispassionate recording of current events; and the development of photography, with its capability of mechanically reproducing visual appearances with extreme accuracy. All these developments stimulated interest in accurately recording contemporary life and society.

Painting

Gustave Courbet was the first artist to self-consciously proclaim and practice the realist aesthetic. After his huge canvas The Studio (1854–55) was rejected by the Exposition Universelle of 1855, the artist displayed it and other works under the label “Realism, G. Courbet” in a specially constructed pavilion. Courbet was strongly opposed to idealization in his art, and he urged other artists to instead make the commonplace and contemporary the focus of their art. He viewed the frank portrayal of scenes from everyday life as a truly democratic art. Such paintings as his Burial at Ornans (1849) and the Stone Breakers (1849), which he had exhibited in the Salon of 1850–51, had already shocked the public and critics by the frank and unadorned factuality with which they depicted humble peasants and labourers. The fact that Courbet did not glorify his peasants but presented them boldly and starkly created a violent reaction in the art world.

The style and subject matter of Courbet’s work were built on ground already broken by the painters of the Barbizon School. Théodore Rousseau, Charles-François Daubigny, Jean-François Millet, and others in the early 1830s settled in the French village of Barbizon with the aim of faithfully reproducing the local character of the landscape. Though each Barbizon painter had his own style and specific interests, they all emphasized in their works the simple and ordinary rather than the grandiose and monumental aspects of nature. They turned away from melodramatic picturesqueness and painted solid, detailed forms that were the result of close observation. In such works as The Winnower (1848), Millet was one of the first artists to portray peasant labourers with a grandeur and monumentality hitherto reserved for more important persons.

Another major French artist often associated with the realist tradition, Honoré Daumier, drew satirical caricatures of French society and politics. He found his working-class heroes and heroines and his villainous lawyers and politicians in the slums and streets of Paris. Like Courbet, he was an ardent democrat, and he used his skill as a caricaturist directly in the service of political aims. Daumier used energetic linear style, boldly accentuated realistic detail, and an almost sculptural treatment of form to criticize the immorality and ugliness he saw in French society.

Daumier, Honoré: At the Palais de JusticeAt the Palais de Justice, pen and ink, wash, black chalk, watercolour, and gouache on paper by Honoré Daumier, c. 1850; in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, Petit Palace, Paris.Giraudon/Art Resource, New York

Pictorial realism outside of France was perhaps best represented in the 19th century in the United States. There, Winslow Homer’s powerful and expressive paintings of marine subjects and Thomas Eakins’s portraits, boating scenes, and other works are frank, unsentimental, and acutely observed records of contemporary life.

Realism was a distinct current in 20th-century art and usually stemmed either from artists’ desire to present more honest, searching, and unidealized views of everyday life or from their attempts to use art as a vehicle for social and political criticism. The rough, sketchy, almost journalistic scenes of seamy urban life by the group of American painters known as The Eight fall into the former category. The German art movement known as the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), on the other hand, worked in a realist style to express the cynicism and disillusionment of the post-World War I period in Germany. The Depression-era movement known as Social Realism adopted a similarly harsh and direct realism in its depictions of the injustices and evils of American society during that period.

Socialist Realism, which was the officially sponsored Marxist aesthetic in the Soviet Union from the early 1930s until that country’s dissolution in 1991, actually had little to do with realism, though it purported to be a faithful and objective mirror of life. Its “truthfulness” was required to serve the ideology and the propagandistic needs of the state. Socialist Realism generally used techniques of naturalistic idealization to create portraits of dauntless workers and engineers who were strikingly alike in both their heroic positivism and their lack of lifelike credibility.

Here is a succinct lecture that goes over the stylistic elements of Realism:

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://boisestate.pressbooks.pub/thecreativespirit/?p=169

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Chapter 11: Modernism

“It’s ugly, but is it art?”
― Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution

“Traditionally, artists suffered for their art, now it’s the audience.”
― Marcel Duchamp

Modernism is both a philosophical movement and an art movement that, along with cultural trends and changes, arose from wide-scale and far-reaching transformations in Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among the factors that shaped modernism were the development of modern industrialism and the rapid growth of cities, followed then by reactions to the horrors of World War I. Modernism also rejected the certainty of Enlightenment thinking, although many modernists also rejected religious belief.  Instead, modernists explored secular morality.  That is, a set of moral and ethical standards not affixed to historical periods, tradition or religious institutions.

Modernism, in general, includes the activities and creations of those who felt the traditional forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, philosophy, social organization, activities of daily life, and sciences were becoming ill-fitted to their tasks and outdated in the new economic, social, and political environment of an emerging fully industrialized world. The poet Ezra Pound‘s 1934 injunction to “Make it new!” was the touchstone of the movement’s approach towards what it saw as the now obsolete culture of the past.

A notable characteristic of modernism is self-consciousness and irony concerning literary and social traditions, which often led to experiments with form, along with the use of techniques that drew attention to the processes and materials used in creating a painting, poem, building and other works of art.  Modernism explicitly rejected the ideology of realism, which focused on idea that sense perception, and our cognition of such, is what provides us with knowledge of things “as they really are.”  But there seems to be a built-in contradiction there.  Reality is supposed to be an absolute, independent of anything.  Is that not what “truth” is?

Modernists explored the individual experience.  They felt that to truly liberate the mind and spirit, one had to unshackle themselves from the bonds of history, tradition, social and religious institutions.  It was a Brave New World, indeed.

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Friedrich Nietzsche ~ Madman and Prophet

Friedrich Nietzsche (15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, composer, poet, cultural critic, and scholar of Latin and Greek whose work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history.  He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest ever to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel, Switzerland, in 1869 at the age of 24.  Nietzsche resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade.  In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties.  He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Nietzsche died in 1900.

Nietzsche’s writing spans philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction while displaying a fondness for aphorism and irony.  Prominent elements of his philosophy include his radical critique of truth in favor of perspectivism; his genealogical critique of religion and Christian morality and his related theory of master–slave morality; his aesthetic affirmation of existence in response to the “death of God” and the profound crisis of nihilism;  his notion of the Apollonian and Dionysian; and his characterization of the human subject as the expression of competing wills, collectively understood as the will to power.  He also developed influential concepts such as the Übermensch and the doctrine of eternal return.  In his later work, he became increasingly preoccupied with the creative powers of the individual to overcome social, cultural and moral contexts in pursuit of new values and aesthetic health.  His body of work touched a wide range of topics, including art, philology, history, religion, tragedy, culture, and science, and drew early inspiration from figures such as philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer,  composer Richard Wagner, and writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

After his death, his sister Elisabeth became the curator and editor of Nietzsche’s manuscripts, reworking his unpublished writings to fit her own German nationalist ideology while often contradicting or obfuscating Nietzsche’s stated opinions, which were explicitly opposed to antisemitism and nationalism. Through her published editions, Nietzsche’s work became associated with fascism and Nazism; 20th century scholars contested this interpretation of his work and corrected editions of his writings were soon made available. Nietzsche’s thought enjoyed renewed popularity in the 1960s and his ideas have since had a profound impact on 20th and early-21st century thinkers across philosophy—especially in schools of continental philosophy such as existentialism, postmodernism and post-structuralism—as well as art, literature, psychology, politics and popular culture.  Source

Reading Nietzsche’s work is not easy, let alone understanding it.  However, to Nietzsche, struggle in all forms is not only beneficial but necessary to be fully actualized as a human being.  Physical, intellectual, moral… all these aspects of one’s life must involve not just dealing with adversity but seeking it out.  After all, Nietzsche’s best known phrase, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” is a credo to apply in all facets of one’s life.

On this note, here is Nietzsche articulating the idea that true intellectual prowess is the for the few who are willing to do the work:

“If this writing be obscure to any individual, and jar on his ears, I do not think that it is necessarily I who am to blame. It is clear enough, on the hypothesis which I presuppose, namely, that the reader has first read my previous writings and has not grudged them a certain amount of trouble: it is not, indeed, a simple matter to get really at their essence. Take, for instance, my Zarathustra; I allow no one to pass muster as knowing that book, unless every single word therein has at some time wrought in him a profound wound, and at some time exercised on him a profound enchantment: then and not till then can he enjoy the privilege of participating reverently in the halcyon element, from which that work is born, in its sunny brilliance, its distance, its spaciousness, its certainty.”  (from section 8 in the Preface to The Genealogy of Morals)

Nietzsche, as stated previously, wrote with a sort of poetic punch!  A metaphor-rich, parabolic stream of consciousness!  One of the challenges of reading Nietzsche is that he does not present philosophical argument in the usual way, the reasoned-discourse style of tradition.  But then, that disregard for tradition and its fashions of proper method of inquiry is one of the hallmarks of MODERNISM.

Please read the following excerpts from The Genealogy of Morals:

From the Preface, read sections 1, 2, and 3.  Then, from “The First Essay: Good and Bad”, read sections 1, 2, and 3.

Consider these questions in your reading:

- What is the tone in which Nietzsche addresses his reader?

- Is it clear what Nietzsche is proposing to examine in this text?

- To Nietzsche, what is the problem with concepts like “good and bad” or “good and evil”?

- What is the value of morality that is not affixed to religious belief?

The Genealogy of Morals

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Modern Art: Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism

Vincent Van Gogh.  Starry Night.  Source

Modern art includes artistic work produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the styles and philosophy of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of experimentation.  Modern artists experimented with new ways of seeing and with fresh ideas about the nature of materials and functions of art. A tendency away from the narrative, which was characteristic for the traditional arts, toward abstraction is characteristic of much modern art. More recent artistic production is often called contemporary art or postmodern art.

Modern art begins with the heritage of painters like Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec all of whom were essential for the development of modern art. At the beginning of the 20th century Henri Matisse and several other young artists including the pre-cubists Georges Braque, André Derain, Raoul Dufy, Jean Metzinger and Maurice de Vlaminck revolutionized the Paris art world with “wild”, multi-colored, expressive landscapes and figure paintings that the critics called Fauvism. Matisse’s two versions of The Dance signified a key point in his career and in the development of modern painting.[3] It reflected Matisse’s incipient fascination with primitive art: the intense warm color of the figures against the cool blue-green background and the rhythmical succession of the dancing nudes convey the feelings of emotional liberation and hedonism.

Initially influenced by Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin and other late-19th-century innovators, Pablo Picasso made his first cubist paintings based on Cézanne’s idea that all depiction of nature can be reduced to three solids: cube, sphere and cone. With the painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), Picasso dramatically created a new and radical picture depicting a raw and primitive brothel scene with five prostitutes, violently painted women, reminiscent of African tribal masks and his own new Cubist inventions. Analytic cubism was jointly developed by Picasso and Georges Braque, exemplified by Violin and Candlestick, Paris, from about 1908 through 1912. Analytic cubism, the first clear manifestation of cubism, was followed by Synthetic cubism, practiced by Braque, Picasso, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Albert Gleizes, Marcel Duchamp and several other artists into the 1920s. Synthetic cubism is characterized by the introduction of different textures, surfaces, collage elements, papier collé and a large variety of merged subject matter.

The notion of modern art is closely related to modernism.

Please read this series of short and informative essays on Impressionism:

https://smarthistory.org/europe-19th-century/impressionism/impressionism-a-beginners-guide/

The Modernist attack on established notions of art and aesthetics continued through the last quarter of the 19th century and well into the 20th century.  Please read these short essays and view the paintings of Fauvism and Expressionism:

https://smarthistory.org/modernisms-1900-1980/fauvism-expressionism/

Please focus on the following learning outcomes to guide your reading:

- How are these three art styles similar?  In what ways can you detect the Modernist approach?

- How did these art styles get their names?  These stories/anecdotes give great insight into the style and the artists who thrived in that style.

- If you were to select one work from each style that best represents the style AND modernism, what would they be?

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Modern Dance

Modern dance is often considered to have emerged as a rejection of, or rebellion against, classical ballet. Socioeconomic and cultural factors also contributed to its development. In the late 19th century, dance artists such as Isadora Duncan, Maud Allan, and Loie Fuller were pioneering new forms and practices in what is now called aesthetic or free dance for performance. These dancers disregarded ballet’s strict movement vocabulary, the particular, limited set of movements that were considered proper to ballet, and stopped wearing corsets and pointe shoes in the search for greater freedom of movement.

Here is a piece choreographed by Isadora Duncan.  Please note the quality of movement and how it differs from classical ballet of chapter 4.

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://boisestate.pressbooks.pub/thecreativespirit/?p=171

Isadora Duncan once wrote, “The dancer’s body is simply the luminous manifestation of the soul.”  To Duncan, dance was pure joy and it follows that it should be individual, expressive and pleasurable.  It should be natural, a delightful melding of human movement and music.  Duncan believed that classical ballet was far too restrictive and damaging to the body.  No turn out, toe shoes and academic movement for Isadora!

Modern dance was and continues to be very experimental.  One rather fantastical example of this, one that had the audience horrified and appalled, was Vaslav Nijinsky’s L’apres-midi d’un faune (The Afternoon of a Faun).   In 1912, Nijinsky brought together the poem by Stephane Mallarme and music by Debussy into a work that would truly pave the way for extraordinary new visions for the world of dance.

The poem by Stephane Mallarme is about a faun, a mythological half-human, half-goat, that wakes in a forest after having a dream.  At least he thinks it was a dream.  Or maybe it wasn’t.  His dream then comes to life and he enters into this world of imagination and fantasy.

From “L’apres midi d’un faune” (1876):

These nymphs I would make last.
So rare
Their rose lightness arches in the air,
Torpid with tufted sleep.
I loved: a dream?
My doubt, thick with ancient night, it seems
Drawn up in subtle branches, ah, that leave
The true trees, proof that I alone have heaved
For triumph in the roses’ ideal folds.
Look, perhaps …
are the women which you told
Ones your mythic wishing-sense has schemed?
Faun, the illusion, when the fountains teemed,
Fled her cold, blue eyes – she untouched.
But the second, full of sighs, say you how much
Like a hot day’s breath she thrilled your fleece?
If not? Through this still, slack-flesh peace
That would, if heated, choke the fresh morning,
No stream goes but that my flute is pouring,
Over assent-sprayed groves; the solo breeze
– Agile from my double pipe – it is eased:
To shower down the sound in arid rain
And then, on the unrippled world-plane,
Be breath – visible, serene, man-sent –
Of inspiration, lodged in firmament.  ….

The poem, the music of Claude Debussy and the choreography of Nijinsky:

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://boisestate.pressbooks.pub/thecreativespirit/?p=171

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Chapter 12: Freud and the "in-between" World

Paul Klee. Senecio. 1922.

“Only children, madmen, and savages truly understand the ‘in-between’ world of spiritual truth.”

~ Paul Klee

In Paul Klee’s painting Senecio (Latin. “Old Man”), we encountered the gaze of a man.  Through the use of geometric forms, Klee gives us the impression that his eyebrows are raised in interest, as if he is just as curious about you, the viewer, as you are of him.  And yet, he is truly just paint, color and form.  But there is something mesmerizing about this portrait.  It’s so simple and yet it  connects with the viewer in a profound way.  The inner psyche of this old man, is it confused or menacing?  What are we to make of his piercing gaze?

Paul Klee ( 18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940) was a Swiss-born artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color theory, writing about it extensively; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci‘s A Treatise on Painting for the Renaissance.  He and his colleague, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture in Germany. His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.  More on Klee’s life and works here.

When writing about his creative process, Klee stated, “Everything vanishes around me, and works are born as if out of the void.  Ripe, graphic fruits fall off.  My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will.”  In this quote, Klee describes a stream of consciousness approach.  To Klee, the creative impulse is so strong and it arises from deep within him.  He is essentially a mere conduit for something that seeks to be born.  His rational mind is taking a second place to another consciousness that lies deep within him.

It is a powerful and provocative idea.  And it parallels the theories of Sigmund Freud.  Perhaps no figure in the western world has been more influential in areas outside of his original discipline, which was psychiatry, than Sigmund Freud.  Freudian theory, though largely dismissed today, went on to have immeasurable influence on the arts.

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Sigmund Freud.  Photo by Max Halberstadt.

Sigmund Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst.  This method of dialogue resulting in qualitative “evidence” is considered more of a clinical investigation than a scientific approach.  However, methodology aside, Freud’s ideas about the psyche, dreams, inhibitions and desire are rather fascinating.  His work delved into that “in-between” world which so enthralled Paul Klee.

Freud was born to Jewish parents in the town of Frieberg, in what was part of the Austrian Empire.  He qualified as a doctor of medicine in 1881 at the University of Vienna.  Upon completing his habilitation in 1885, he was appointed a docent in neuropathology and became an affiliated professor in 1902.  Freud lived and worked in Vienna, having set up his clinical practice there in 1886. In 1938, Freud left Austria to escape the Nazis. He died in exile in the United Kingdom in 1939.

In founding psychoanalysis, Freud developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association and discovered transference, establishing its central role in the analytic process. Freud’s redefinition of sexuality to include its infantile forms led him to formulate the Oedipus complex as the central tenet of psychoanalytical theory.  His analysis of dreams as wish-fulfillments provided him with models for the clinical analysis of symptom formation and the underlying mechanisms of repression. On this basis Freud elaborated his theory of the unconscious and went on to develop a model of psychic structure comprising id, ego and super-ego.   Freud postulated the existence of libido, a sexualised energy with which mental processes and structures are invested and which generates erotic attachments, and a death drive, the source of compulsive repetition, hate, aggression and neurotic guilt.   In his later works, Freud developed a wide-ranging interpretation and critique of religion and culture.  Source.

To understand Freud’s theory of the Tripartite Psyche, read here.  As you read pay special attention to Freud’s claim that human beings are largely compelled in their actions through visceral impulses, like appetite and sex.  This idea runs counter to the rather lofty and positive belief that grace and innate goodness are what make up the inner life.  Freud rejected any religious associations like the idea that human beings are made in the image of God or that they are “born good.”  Rather, he believed that childhood experiences are largely responsible for our psychic development.

Freud also insisted that we learn at a very young age to hide or resist our ID impulses.  The Superego is comprised of our experiences and socializing effects of society and culture and it acts as a sort of moral monitor.  The Ego is a guise we put on, again, largely due to what we have learned gets the results we want!  So, there is a built-in falseness, in a sense.

Where do we find the truth about ourselves?  Well, in various states of mind/being when the Ego and Superego are less powerful:  dreams and/or intoxication!

To get a sense of Freud’s ideas, take a look at the introduction and first chapter in Dream Psychology.

Consider these questions as you read Freud:

- What can the study of the mind reveal that the study of the body cannot?

- Why has the medical world resisted the study of the mind?

- How does Freud explain how shadows of our experience make their way into our dreams?

Dream Psychology

Freud’s ideas were so provocative in his time.  Many were horrified that he so boldly eviscerated Christian ideas.  And yet, so very many artists, writers, philosophers saw a light of truth in his ideas.  Freudian theory launched a revolution not just in the world of psychology, but in the world of the arts.

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“The Mind” in Literature

The impact of Freudian ideas was vast and it changed the direction of literature in exciting and shocking ways.  Freud had a pessimistic view of humanity.  His theories disconnected humanity from the idea of an innate, God-given moral compass.  His theories also suggested that humans are largely motivated by animal instincts.

What is the human mind?  And, as Billie Eilish asks, “when we all fall asleep, where do we go?”  🙂

Influenced by Freudian theories, writers began to explore the psychic life of characters in extraordinarily new ways.  Marcel Proust (10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time; earlier rendered as Remembrance of Things Past), published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927. He is considered by critics and writers to be one of the most influential authors of the 20th century.

Begun in 1909, when Proust was 38 years old, À la recherche du temps perdu consists of seven volumes totaling around 3,200 pages (about 4,300 in The Modern Library’s translation) and featuring more than 2,000 characters. Graham Greene called Proust the “greatest novelist of the 20th century”, and W. Somerset Maugham called the novel the “greatest fiction to date”.  André Gide was initially not so taken with his work. The first volume was refused by the publisher Gallimard on Gide’s advice. He later wrote to Proust apologizing for his part in the refusal and calling it one of the most serious mistakes of his life.

Proust died before he was able to complete his revision of the drafts and proofs of the final volumes, the last three of which were published posthumously and edited by his brother Robert. The book was translated into English by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, appearing under the title Remembrance of Things Past between 1922 and 1931. Scott Moncrieff translated volumes one through six of the seven volumes, dying before completing the last. This last volume was rendered by other translators at different times. When Scott Moncrieff’s translation was later revised (first by Terence Kilmartin, then by D. J. Enright) the title of the novel was changed to the more literal In Search of Lost Time.  source

There are two Freudian techniques that Proust employs in the work:  free association and stream of consciousness.  In free association, Proust tries to free experience from time, space, and even the mechanics of writing.  He is interested in memory, how we hold onto some memories and why.  In stream of consciousness, Freud’s technique of allowing the patient the process of following a thought without censure, Proust is able to chase after a memory in a very unique way.

From the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, entitled Swann’s Way, there is a notable scene involving tea and a cookie.  Proust writes:

“Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines,’ which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?”

In this quick episode is a mystery.  While having tea, he dips his madeleine into the tea and tastes it.  Suddenly, a flood of sensation happens.  What is it?  What did the taste of the cookie unlock?  To what memory is this taste sensation linked and why does it remain in his psyche?  As Proust progresses in the book, he uses free association and stream of consciousness techniques almost as if it is HE who is on Freud’s couch, following a thought fearlessly, wherever it leads him.  As Proust continues:

“And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated panel which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.”  Swann’s Way

Proust claimed that “the past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which the material object will give us) which we do not suspect.

Artists like Salvatore Dali were fascinated by things “outside the realm.”

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Please read this article on dadaism and surrealism, paying special attention to the work of Duchamps and Dali:

https://smarthistory.org/modernisms-1900-1980/dada-and-surrealism/

Let these questions guide your reading:

- In what way was the Dada Movement and anti-movement?

- What was the Dadaist credo?  How was that manifest in Dada art?

- Define surrealism and note how it may have been influenced by Freudian ideas.

- Which work by Dali best represents the mind? 🙂

Frida Kahlo (6 July 1907 – 13 July 1954) was a Mexican painter known for her many portraits, self portraits, and works inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico. Inspired by the country’s popular culture, she employed a naïve folk art style to explore questions of identity, postcolonialism, gender, class, and race in Mexican society.[1] Her paintings often had strong autobiographical elements and mixed realism with fantasy. In addition to belonging to the post-revolutionary Mexicayotl movement, which sought to define a Mexican identity, Kahlo has been described as a surrealist or magical realist.

Born to a German father and a mestiza mother, Kahlo spent most of her childhood and adult life at La Casa Azul, her family home in Coyoacán, now publicly accessible as the Frida Kahlo Museum. Although she was disabled by polio as a child, Kahlo had been a promising student headed for medical school until a traffic accident at age eighteen, which caused her lifelong pain and medical problems. During her recovery, she returned to her childhood hobby of art with the idea of becoming an artist.

Her work was influenced greatly by her accident and also the other “great accident of her life,” Diego Rivera.  Please read this article on Kahlo, noting how she uses her art to look into her own psyche and feelings:

https://smarthistory.org/frida-kahlo-introduction/

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Chapter 13: War and the Arts

As the 19th century drew to a close, there was a sense of optimism in the air.  In fact, the first decade of the 20th century in the west is also known as La Belle Epoque, the beautiful age.  However, nationalism had been brooding and building throughout Europe, there were blatant contrasts between the rich and the poor, and as capitalism and industrialism continued to flourish and spread, the outcome was not positive.  In fact, many of these factors led Europe and North America into “the war to end all wars.”

In this lecture I give you a quick overview and talk about the role the arts played in patriotic zeal:

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://boisestate.pressbooks.pub/thecreativespirit/?p=290

Wilfred Owen’s poem Dulce Et Decorum Est is still relevant.  Please read it here: Owen

This glimpse of the horror of war was in stark contrast with the tidy and romantic view of the war… and of patriotism.  From Smarthistory, here is another synopsis of this period and the artistic responses to it:

https://smarthistory.org/british-art-and-literature-during-wwi/

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Ironically enough, the “war to end all wars” did not.  In fact, hindsight shows us that WWI and the aftershocks and after-effects, set the stage for a century very heavy with war.

The Russian Revolution was a period of political and social revolution across the territory of the Russian Empire, commencing with the abolition of the monarchy in 1917, and concluding in 1923 after the Bolshevik establishment of the Soviet Union, including national states of Ukraine, Azebaijan and others, and end of the Civil War.

It began during the First World War, with the February Revolution that was focused in and around Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg), the capital of Russia at that time. The revolution erupted in the context of Russia’s major military losses during the War, which resulted in much of the Russian Army being ready to mutiny. In the chaos, members of the Duma, Russia’s parliament, assumed control of the country, forming the Russian Provisional Government. This was dominated by the interests of large capitalists and the noble aristocracy. The army leadership felt they did not have the means to suppress the revolution, and Emperor Nicholas II abdicated his throne. Grassroots community assemblies called ‘Soviets‘, which were dominated by soldiers and the urban industrial working class, initially permitted the Provisional Government to rule, but insisted on a prerogative to influence the government and control various militias.

A period of dual power ensued, during which the Provisional Government held state power while the national network of Soviets, led by socialists, had the allegiance of the lower classes and, increasingly, the left-leaning urban middle class. During this chaotic period, there were frequent mutinies, protests and strikes. Many socialist political organizations were engaged in daily struggle and vied for influence within the Duma and the Soviets, central among which were the Bolsheviks (“Ones of the Majority”) led by Vladimir Lenin. He campaigned for an immediate end of Russia’s participation in the War, granting land to the peasants, and providing bread to the urban workers. When the Provisional Government chose to continue fighting the war with Germany, the Bolsheviks and other socialist factions exploited the virtually universal disdain towards the war effort as justification to advance the revolution further. The Bolsheviks turned workers’ militias under their control into the Red Guards (later the Red Army), over which they exerted substantial control.[1]

The situation climaxed with the October Revolution in 1917, a Bolshevik-led armed insurrection by workers and soldiers in Petrograd that successfully overthrew the Provisional Government, transferring all its authority to the Soviets. They soon relocated the national capital to Moscow. The Bolsheviks had secured a strong base of support within the Soviets and, as the supreme governing party, established a federal government dedicated to reorganizing the former empire into the world’s first socialist state, to practice Soviet democracy on a national and international scale. Their promise to end Russia’s participation in the First World War was fulfilled when the Bolshevik leaders signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany in March 1918. To further secure the new state, the Bolsheviks established the Cheka, a secret police that functioned as a revolutionary security service to weed out, execute, or punish those considered to be “enemies of the people” in campaigns consciously modeled on those of the French Revolution.

Soon after, civil war erupted among the “Reds” (Bolsheviks), the “Whites” (counter-revolutionaries), the independence movements, and other socialist factions opposed to the Bolsheviks. It continued for several years, during which the Bolsheviks defeated both the Whites and all rival socialists. Victorious, they reconstituted themselves as the Communist Party. They also established Soviet power in the newly independent republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia and Ukraine. They brought these jurisdictions into unification under the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1922. While many notable historical events occurred in Moscow and Petrograd, there were also major changes in cities throughout the state, and among national minorities throughout the empire and in the rural areas, where peasants took over and redistributed land.

In all of this, rich voices arise!  The creative spirit is fearless, as exemplified in the life and art of Varvara Stepanova:

https://smarthistory.org/stepanova-the-results-of-the-first-five-year-plan/

Questions to consider:

- In what ways did Stepanova use her art to express patriotism?

- What is photomontage?  In what ways can it be effective rhetorically?

- How would you compare/contrast this to Soviet Realism?  (This was mentioned in a previous chapter so to remind you, click here Soviet/Socialist Realism)

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And on to World War II:

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://boisestate.pressbooks.pub/thecreativespirit/?p=290

One of the most profound works of the 20th century is Elie Wiesel’s Night.  Wiesel was a Romanian Jew who was shipped along with his family to the concentration camp, Auschwitz.  Night is a memoir that recounts his experience.  It is also a work in which a character asks, in the midst of unspeakable horror, “Where is God?”  How could this happen and what’s more, how could God allow it?  In a crisis of faith, a character speaks:

“Because He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves? Because He kept six crematoria working day and night, including Sabbath and the Holy Days? Because in His great might, He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death? How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers end up in the furnaces? … But now, I no longer pleaded for anything. I was no longer able to lament. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused.”

On the afternoon of April 26, 1937, during the Spanish Civil War that pitted the republican forces against the Fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco, the German Air Force (in cahoots with the Fascist government) dropped bombs on Guernica, a small Basque town in northeast Spain.  After reading of this monstrous deed, Pablo Picasso sought to express it visually.  This becomes Guernica (1937):

For a better image and explication, see here.

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The Communist Revolution in China

The Communist Party of China was founded in 1921, during the May Fourth Movement, which Mao Zedong referred to as the birth of communism in China.[10]

After a period of slow growth and alliance with the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party), the alliance broke down and the Communists fell victim in 1927 to a purge carried out by the Kuomintang under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek.[11] After 1927, the Communists retreated to the countryside and built up local bases throughout the country and continued to hold them until the Long March. During the Japanese invasion and occupation, the Communists built more secret bases in the Japanese occupied zones and relied on them as headquarters.

Some historians have traced the origins of the 1949 Revolution to sharp inequalities in society. John Peter Roberts, for instance, writes that under the Qing dynasty, high rates of rent, usury and taxes concentrated wealth into the hands of a tiny minority of village chiefs and landlords. He quotes the statistic that “Ten percent of the agricultural population of China possessed as much as two-thirds of the land”.[4] Many of these historians also argue that China was under heavy colonialist pressure by the Western powers and the Japanese and “Century of Humiliation” starting with the Opium Wars and including unequal treaties, the Boxer Rebellion. This group concludes that extreme internal inequality and external aggression led to a rise in nationalism, class consciousness and leftism among vast swaths of the population.[citation needed]

After internal unrest and foreign pressure weakened the Qing state, a revolt among newly modernized army officers led to the Xinhai Revolution, which ended 2,000 years of imperial rule and established the Republic of China.[5] Following the end of World War I and October Revolution in Russia, labor struggles intensified in China. Workers were fighting for better wages. In Shanghai alone, there were over 450 strikes between 1919 and 1923.[6]

The French historian Lucien Bianco, however, is among those who question whether imperialism and “feudalism” explain the revolution.[7] He points out that the Chinese Communist Party did not have great success until the Japanese invasion of China after 1937. Before the war, the peasantry was not ready for revolution; economic reasons were not enough to mobilize them. More important was nationalism: “It was the war that brought the Chinese peasantry and China to revolution; at the very least, it considerably accelerated the rise of the CCP to power.”[8] The communist revolutionary movement had a doctrine, long-term objectives, and a clear political strategy that allowed it to adjust to changes in the situation. He adds that the most important aspect of the Chinese Communist movement is that it was armed.

Totalitarian control thus began in China.  Artist Li Hua created this woodblock print to express the dehumanization:

Li Hua Roar! (1936)  source

Questions to consider:

- Describe what is happening in this image.

- What is the role of the knife on the ground?

- In what ways is this work similar to Edvard Munch’s Silent Scream?

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Where IS God? ~ Sartre and Existentialism

Please watch this lecture on Sartre and his philosophy, courtesy of The School of Life:

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://boisestate.pressbooks.pub/thecreativespirit/?p=290

Sartre’s primary idea is that people, as humans, are “condemned to be free”.[86][full citation needed] This theory relies upon his position that there is no creator, and is illustrated using the example of the paper cutter. Sartre says that if one considered a paper cutter, one would assume that the creator would have had a plan for it: an essence. Sartre said that human beings have no essence before their existence because there is no Creator. Thus: “existence precedes essence”.[86] This forms the basis for his assertion that because one cannot explain one’s own actions and behavior by referring to any specific human nature, they are necessarily fully responsible for those actions. “We are left alone, without excuse.” “We can act without being determined by our past which is always separated from us.”[87]

Sartre maintained that the concepts of authenticity and individuality have to be earned but not learned. We need to experience “death consciousness” so as to wake up ourselves as to what is really important; the authentic in our lives which is life experience, not knowledge.[88] Death draws the final point when we as beings cease to live for ourselves and permanently become objects that exist only for the outside world.[89] In this way death emphasizes the burden of our free, individual existence.

As a junior lecturer at the Lycée du Havre in 1938, Sartre wrote the novel La Nausée (Nausea), which serves in some ways as a manifesto of existentialism and remains one of his most famous books. Taking a page from the German phenomenological movement, he believed that our ideas are the product of experiences of real-life situations, and that novels and plays can well describe such fundamental experiences, having equal value to discursive essays for the elaboration of philosophical theories such as existentialism. With such purpose, this novel concerns a dejected researcher (Roquentin) in a town similar to Le Havre who becomes starkly conscious of the fact that inanimate objects and situations remain absolutely indifferent to his existence. As such, they show themselves to be resistant to whatever significance human consciousness might perceive in them.

He also took inspiration from phenomenologist epistemology, explained by Franz Adler in this way: “Man chooses and makes himself by acting. Any action implies the judgment that he is right under the circumstances not only for the actor, but also for everybody else in similar circumstances.”[90]

This indifference of “things in themselves” (closely linked with the later notion of “being-in-itself” in his Being and Nothingness) has the effect of highlighting all the more the freedom Roquentin has to perceive and act in the world; everywhere he looks, he finds situations imbued with meanings which bear the stamp of his existence. Hence the “nausea” referred to in the title of the book; all that he encounters in his everyday life is suffused with a pervasive, even horrible, taste—specifically, his freedom. The book takes the term from Friedrich Nietzsche‘s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where it is used in the context of the often nauseating quality of existence. No matter how much Roquentin longs for something else or something different, he cannot get away from this harrowing evidence of his engagement with the world.

The novel also acts as a terrifying realization of some of Immanuel Kant‘s fundamental ideas about freedom; Sartre uses the idea of the autonomy of the will (that morality is derived from our ability to choose in reality; the ability to choose being derived from human freedom; embodied in the famous saying “Condemned to be free”) as a way to show the world’s indifference to the individual. The freedom that Kant exposed is here a strong burden, for the freedom to act towards objects is ultimately useless, and the practical application of Kant’s ideas proves to be bitterly rejected.

Also important is Sartre’s analysis of psychological concepts, including his suggestion that consciousness exists as something other than itself, and that the conscious awareness of things is not limited to their knowledge: for Sartre intentionality applies to the emotions as well as to cognitions, to desires as well as to perceptions.[91] “When an external object is perceived, consciousness is also conscious of itself, even if consciousness is not its own object: it is a non-positional consciousness of itself.”

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Chapter 14: Liberation, Freedom and Promises not fulfilled

“The permutations of English corruption in India were endless.”

~ Paul Scott The Jewel in the Crown

Francis Bacon. Head VI. 1949.

From the mid-century on, writers, thinkers, and artists sought modes of expression that were in many ways assaults on tradition and convention.  Even the discipline of history, which was long held to be objective (as if that is even possible) was scrutinized.  New methods of inquiry led to “revisionist history,” resulting in many myths and romanticized notions about historical events to fall away.

In the area of religion, Sartre’s atheist ideas sought to find a secular morality, one that was grounded in how we develop our sense of right and wrong that is not connected to some eternal reward (or punishment).  All we have is right now.  Shouldn’t we be good for the sake of goodness and not just because we get a reward for it?  To Sartre, being “end game” oriented can separate a person from his/her own sense of morality.

Art at mid-century went in countless directions.  Let’s listen to two art historians talk about Abstract Expressionism in the work of Jackson Pollock:

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://boisestate.pressbooks.pub/thecreativespirit/?p=306

And one whose work can be very challenging, Mark Rothko:

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://boisestate.pressbooks.pub/thecreativespirit/?p=306

Questions to consider:

- Define Abstract Expressionism.  What does it have in common with previous art genres?

- In a mid-century world noted for its growing impersonal and mechanical modality, what were these artists seeking in work that was so very spontaneous?  AND, odd?

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Anticolonialism

Muhammad Iqbal ( 9 November 1877 – 21 April 1938), widely known as Allama Iqbal, was a poet, philosopher and politician, as well as an academic, barrister and scholar.  in British India who is widely regarded as having inspired the Pakistan Movement. He is called the “Spiritual Father of Pakistan.”  He is considered one of the most important figures in Urdu literature, with literary work in both Urdu and Persian.

His poetry covers a broad base of themes.  He was skeptical of modernism and wary of imperialism.  After living most of his life under the British Imperial yoke, he had an astute perspective that came through in his poetry:

“Revolution”  (1938)

Death to man’s soul is Europe, death is Asia

To man’s will: neither feels the vital current.

In man’s hearts stirs a revolution’s torrent;

maybe our old world too is nearing death.

If you are interested, you may peruse more of Muhammad Iqbal poems.

The Indian Independence Movement was a series of activities with the ultimate aim of ending the British rule in India. The movement spanned a total of 90 years (1857–1947).

The first nationalistic revolutionary movement emerged from Bengal. It later took root in the newly formed Indian National Congress with prominent moderate leaders seeking only their fundamental right to appear for Indian Civil Service examinations in British India, as well as more rights, economical in nature, for the people of the soil. The early part of the 20th century saw a more radical approach towards political self-rule proposed by leaders such as the Lal, Bal, Pal triumvirate, and Aurobindo Ghosh, V. O. Chidambaram Pillai.[1] The last stages of the self-rule struggle from the 1920s onwards saw Congress adopt Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi‘s policy of non-violence and civil disobedience, and several other campaigns. Nationalists like Subhash Chandra Bose, Bhagat Singh, Bagha Jatin, Surya Sen preached armed revolution to achieve self-rule. Poets and writers such as Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Subramania Bharati, Rabindranath Tagore, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and Kazi Nazrul Islam used literature, poetry, and speech as a tool for political awareness. Feminists such as Sarojini Naidu promoted the emancipation of Indian women and their participation in national politics.[1] B. R. Ambedkar championed the cause of the disadvantaged sections of Indian society within the more significant self-rule movement. The period of the World War II saw the peak of the campaigns by the Quit India Movement led by Congress and the Indian National Army movement led by Subhash Chandra Bose with the help of Japan.[1]

The Indian self-rule movement was a mass-based movement that encompassed various sections of society. It also underwent a process of constant ideological evolution. Although the underlying ideology of the campaign was anti-colonial, it was supported by a vision of independent capitalist economic development coupled with a secular, democratic, republican, and civil-libertarian political structure. After the 1930s, the movement took on a strong socialist orientation. The work of these various movements ultimately led to the Indian Independence Act 1947, which ended the suzerainty in India and the creation of Pakistan. India remained a Dominion of the Crown until 26 January 1950, when the Constitution of India came into force, establishing the Republic of India; Pakistan was a dominion until 1956 when it adopted its first republican constitution. In 1971, East Pakistan declared independence as the People’s Republic of Bangladesh.

The 20th century is noted for global independence movements.  Khan Academy gives a quick synopsis:

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://boisestate.pressbooks.pub/thecreativespirit/?p=306

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Civil Rights Movement

The civil rights movement (also known as the American civil rights movement and other terms)[b] in the United States was a decades-long struggle by African Americans to end legalized racial discrimination, disenfranchisement and racial segregation in the United States. The movement has its origins in the Reconstruction era during the late 19th century, although the movement achieved its largest legislative gains in the mid-1960s after years of direct actions and grassroots protests. The social movement’s major nonviolent resistance campaigns eventually secured new protections in federal law for the human rights of all Americans.

After the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery in the 1860s, the Reconstruction Amendments to the United States Constitution granted emancipation and constitutional rights of citizenship to all African Americans, most of whom had recently been enslaved. For a period, African Americans voted and held political office, but they were increasingly deprived of civil rights, often under Jim Crow laws, and subjected to discrimination and sustained violence by whites in the South. Over the following century, various efforts were made by African Americans to secure their legal rights. In 1954, the separate but equal policy which aided the enforcement of Jim Crow laws was weakened with the United States Supreme Court‘s Brown v. Board of Education ruling and other subsequent rulings which followed.[1] Between 1955 and 1968, acts of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience produced crisis situations and productive dialogues between activists and government authorities. Federal, state, and local governments, businesses, and communities often had to respond immediately to these situations, which highlighted the inequities faced by African Americans across the country. The lynching of Chicago teenager Emmett Till in Mississippi, and the outrage generated by seeing how he had been abused, when his mother decided to have an open-casket funeral, mobilized the African-American community nationwide.[2] Forms of protest and/or civil disobedience included boycotts, such as the successful Montgomery bus boycott (1955–56) in Alabama; “sit-ins” such as the Greensboro sit-ins (1960) in North Carolina and successful Nashville sit-ins in Tennessee; marches, such as the 1963 Birmingham Children’s Crusade and 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches (1965) in Alabama; and a wide range of other nonviolent activities.

At the culmination of a legal strategy pursued by African Americans, the U.S. Supreme Court began, in 1954 under the leadership of Earl Warren, to find unconstitutional many of the laws that had allowed racial segregation and discrimination to be legal in the United States.[3][4][5][6] The Warren Court made a series of landmark rulings such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States (1964), and Loving v. Virginia (1967) which banned segregation in public schools and public accommodations, and struck down all state laws banning interracial marriage.[7][8][9] The rulings also helped bring an end to the segregationist Jim Crow laws prevalent in the Southern states.[10] In the 1960s, moderates in the movement worked with Congress to achieve the passage of several significant pieces of federal legislation that overturned discriminatory practices and authorized oversight and enforcement by the federal government. The Civil Rights Act of 1964,[11] which was upheld by the Warren Court in Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States (1964), expressly banned discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in employment practices; ended unequal application of voter registration requirements; and prohibited racial segregation in schools, at the workplace, and in public accommodations. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 restored and protected voting rights for minorities by authorizing federal oversight of registration and elections in areas with historic under-representation of minorities as voters. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 banned discrimination in the sale or rental of housing.

African Americans re-entered politics in the South, and across the country young people were inspired to take action. From 1964 through 1970, a wave of inner-city riots in black communities undercut support from the white middle class, but increased support from private foundations.[12] The emergence of the Black Power movement, which lasted from about 1965 to 1975, challenged the established black leadership for its cooperative attitude and its practice of nonviolence. Instead, its leaders demanded that, in addition to the new laws gained through the nonviolent movement, political and economic self-sufficiency had to be developed in the black community.

Many popular representations of the movement are centered on the charismatic leadership and philosophy of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolent resistance. However, some scholars note that the movement was too diverse to be credited to any one person, organization, or strategy.

Here is the most important text in the nation-wide debate over civil rights:  Letter from Birmingham Jail

Questions to guide your reading:

- To whom is the letter addressed?

- How does King present his own character, his own ethical bias?  What examples does he use and HOW DOES HE USE THEM?

- Would you characterized this letter as an emotional appeal or a rational appeal?  Why is a rational approach more effective?

- In what ways does King use Christian ideas and mores?

- So ultimately, if he is addressing this letter to “men of God” and using rationale ensconced in Christian values, how might it be possible for his audience to refute his argument?

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The Women’s Movement

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”  ~ Declaration of Independence

These words are a political stance, a reminder of a promise in the age of Enlightenment.  When a tyrannical power is in place, and stands in the way of equality, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it is not just a right, it is a duty to abolish that tyrannical power.  Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded the United States of this promise.  And, the women’s movement pursued the fulfillment of that promise as well.

The online Encyclopedia Britannica offers an excellent overview of the movement, its major voices, and its successes and failures.  Please read here.

Questions to guide your reading:

- When and why was the National Organization of Women (NOW) formed and how did it get its cue from the civil rights movement?

- What were some various types of discrimination women experienced?

- The Women’s Movement had several waves and manifestations.  It wasn’t all radical.  But, how did the “Bitch Manifesto” fit into all this?

- The initial main goal for NOW was the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).  What did the ERA ensure?

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Feminism in Poetry and Art

Here is a poem by Anne Sexton:

“Self in 1958”   (1966)

What is reality?

I am a plaster doll; I pose

with eyes that cut open without landfall or nightfall

upon some shellacked and grinning person,

eyes that open, blue, steel, and close.

Am I approximately an I. Magnin transplant?

I have hair, black angel,

black-angel-stuffing to comb,

nylon legs, luminous arms

and some advertised clothes.

I live in a doll’s house

with four chairs,

a counterfeit table, a flat roof

and a big front door.

Many have come to such a small crossroad.

There is an iron bed,

(Life enlarges, life takes aim)

a cardboard floor,

windows that flash open on someone’s city,

and little more.

Someone plays with me,

plants me in the all-electric kitchen,

Is this what Mrs. Rombauer said?

Someone pretends with me—

I am walled in solid by their noise—

or puts me upon their straight bed.

They think I am me!

Their warmth? Their warmth is not a friend!

They pry my mouth for their cups of gin

and their stale bread.

What is reality

to this synthetic doll

who should smile, who should shift gears,

should spring the doors open in a wholesome disorder,

and have no evidence of ruin or fears?

But I would cry,

rooted into the wall that

was once my mother,

if I could remember how

and if I had the tears.

In this poem, Sexton expresses how women are socialized to fulfill rolls.  And these are often rolls to which they have no vocation, no interest or desire.  But it’s much easier to just go with the flow, to be the perfect doll.  The result of this “pretending” is a dislocation with the self.  Before she knows it, she is looking at her life from the outside, as if she is watching a stranger.

Now read this poem by Adrienne Rich:

“Translations”  (1972)

You show me the poems of some woman
my age, or younger
translated from your language

Certain words occur: enemy, oven, sorrow
enough to let me know
she’s a woman of my time

obsessed

with Love, our subject:
we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls
baked it like bread in our ovens
worn it like lead on our ankles
watched it through binoculars as if

it were a helicopter
bringing food to our famine
or the satellite
of a hostile power

I begin to see that woman
doing things: stirring rice
ironing a skirt
typing a manuscript till dawn

trying to make a call
from a phonebooth

The phone rings unanswered
in a man’s bedroom
she hears him telling someone else
Never mind. She’ll get tired.
hears him telling her story to her sister
who becomes her enemy
and will in her own time
light her own way to sorrow

ignorant of the fact this way of grief
is shared, unnecessary
and political.

To Rich, certain words are just a part of women’s lives:  oven, enemy, sorrow.  But the most powerful one is love, and that may not be a good thing.  Think of how she characterizes love and what it is supposed to promise women.  The narrator of the poem sees herself from the outside, doing mundane things.  But one of those things is calling her ex.  The phone rings in his bedroom where he is with another woman.  He paints a negative picture of her and this woman becomes her enemy.  And on it goes.  Women against women.  Until this conditioning ends where women are taught and conditioned through various media to see themselves not on their own value but as they compare to other women, the women’s movement cannot get any real traction.  At least that was one of the ideas that Simone de Beauvoir explored in her work, The Second Sex.

Questions to guide your reading of these two poems:

- These are both considered feminist poems.  Articulate what makes them part of that genre?

- Are you surprised by their message?  Did you imagine feminist concerns in another way?

- One feminist credo was, “The Personal is Political.”  What does that mean?

Marlene Dumas, Models

by DR. TOM FOLLAND

Models, 1994, 100 drawings, watercolor and ink-wash on paper, each 24 7/16 x 19 11/16 inches / 62 x 50 cm (Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven), installation view of the solo exhibition “Measuring your Own Grave,” 2008, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, copyright Marlene Dumas © 2016

Painting Photography~ Rethinking models and beauty

The work of South African artist Marlene Dumas exists on a continuum between painting and photography. Simply put, she paints from photographic images. Or as she herself puts it: “I don’t paint people, I paint images.” Her sources range from the personal to the pornographic; from the medical to the political. Consisting of eerily rendered bodies and heads in thin washes of paint, ink or chalk, Dumas’s paintings approximate the genre of portraiture but her figures are stripped of any kind of individualizing features. Dumas’s portraits are, instead, rendered with a kind of dispassionate morbidity that is redolent of violence. A body or head in often sickly or garish colors and in broadly contoured outlines appears against a faint or blank backdrop. That her paintings seem bent on obliterating their photographic origins and reducing the figure to a lifeless prop, suggests that there is a profoundly social resonance to her work.

Single sheet from Marlene Dumas, Models, 1994, watercolor and ink wash on paper, 62 x 50 cm (Van Abbemuseum)

Models, 1994, is a case in point: it conjures up a catalogue of the dead and/or missing—an all too frequent reference point that underlines the global contemporary. Arranged in the form of a grid, Models presents 100 female faces as if they were the carefully laid out heads of a morgue. Positioned on blank surfaces and retaining only a minimum of individualized features, each “model” stares frontally or is rotated to profile or three-quarter pose. Faces vary from light skinned to dark and some have pastel colored eyes, but these are not the warms blues, greens and browns one might expect: lavender or lime-green instead serves to only heightens the disconcerting appearance of these disembodied figures. Who are these so-called “models?” As Dumas describes it: “There are pictures of the insane, pictures of fashion models, you have pictures of my friends…” In her description, as in her painting, Dumas gives them equal treatment: one becomes virtually indistinguishable from the other.

Against Beauty

To unravel the meaning of this work, we might start with the title. What are we to make of it? Surely it is ironic. “Model” has a number of meanings—prominent among them is the life model, a venerable tradition in studio art. But Dumas dispenses with this approach; her models are not sourced from life. They are taken from polaroids (the friends she mentions), book illustrations (the “insane”) and other sundry sources where clippings are readily available. The grim visages on display, casually acquired but so carefully reworked, suggest that Dumas is also not interested in idealized forms of beauty, as “model” might also suggest. Fashion models are the unobtainable standard of idealized female bodies in contemporary culture and have long been a site of intervention for feminist art. The term “model” in both popular culture and art history functions as an indicator of the “beautiful”—it means the female body perpetually displayed for the presumed male viewer.

One of the faces in Models is taken from an image of the feminist author Simone de Beauvoir and although it should not be taken as an overt symbol, it is clear that Dumas’s critical interrogation of the “beautiful” is part of a feminist lineage in art that includes, to take only but a few examples, the photo-documented performance Carving—A Traditional Sculpture (1971) by Eleanor Antin, the photo-text work of Lorna Simpson (“Twenty Questions (A Sampler) (1986), the self-portraits of Cindy Sherman or even the 1990s performances by Vanessa Beecroft where standing live models (actual models) were posed clad in heels with little else and faced an often awkward audience. But unlike her feminist counterparts who abandoned or rejected painting, Dumas compels us to consider the specific social force painting might have in contemporary culture. “I wanted to give more attention to what the painting does to the image, not only to what the image does to the painting” (as quoted in “Who is Marlene Dumas?” from Tate).

There is a deconstructive impulse in Dumas’s work: she de-eroticizes the pornographic imagery she appropriates; she de-personalizes portraits of friends; she turns the image of a celebrity icon like Naomi Campbell into something strange and unrecognizable. Even her portraits of children tack towards the monstrous.

Troubling and compelling

Comparisons are often made to the German painter Gerhard Richter (his notable series on the imprisoned Bader-Meinhof terrorist group for example) as well as to Dumas’s contemporary Lucs Tuyman whose faded paintings (indeed they look as if they are drained of color) seem to speak to a contemporary painting’s inability to fully invoke scenes of political life. But Dumas’s works provoke strong reactions. Is it because they speak so forcefully of violence done to persons? Persuasive arguments have been made that tie her work to the culture of apartheid she witnessed growing up as an Afrikaans-speaking Dutch descendant whose only access to the world was through print imagery (television did not come to South Africa until 1976). This certainly is a factor that underlines her work. But images of the dispossessed, the missing, and tortured are fairly routine fare in contemporary life.

Dumas’s troubling images are compelling not because of the haunting figures they construct but because of her transformation of once discrete categories of portraiture into something almost unrecognizable. For example, we expect “model” as a term to not stray too far from a conventional meaning, and as an image we expect the subject to hew to certain conventions. In the interplay between photography and painting that exists in Dumas’s work, the traditional function of portraiture is negated. It once served, in the history of oil painting, to commemorate the social status of an individual, to provide visual evidence of a marriage, or document the social bonds of family. In the nineteenth century photography usurped that job. The modern photographic portrait was supposed to capture something of the inner truth of the subject—one’s psychological being. The poetic reveries of Juliet Margaret Cameron or the individualized studio portraits of Felix Nadar became the standard bearer for a newly emergent bourgeois identity where self trumped community. Photography’s ability to capture likeness was soon harnessed by emerging ethnographic, psychological and jurisprudential discourses—criminals, and the insane all came under the powerful scientific gaze of the camera’s lens.

The artist and critic Allan Sekula once described, in an influential essay, two exemplary modes of photographic representation, regimes of visibility one might say that determined, rather than represented, identity. One is honorific: the respectable bourgeois portrait. The other is repressive: the cold mug shot of the criminal. In Dumas’s painted portraits the subject that emerges is at once both and neither of these. In an increasingly uncertain global culture, Dumas paints the indeterminacies and terrors of social identity.

Cite this page as: Dr. Tom Folland, “Marlene Dumas, Models,” in Smarthistory, March 9, 2016, accessed February 18, 2020, https://smarthistory.org/marlene-dumas-models/.

15

Chapter 15: Globalism and Identity

Shirin Neshat. Rebellious Silence. 1994.

Globalism refers to various systems with scope beyond the merely international. It is used by political scientists, such as Joseph Nye, to describe “attempts to understand all the interconnections of the modern world — and to highlight patterns that underlie (and explain) them.”[1] While primarily associated with world-systems, it can be used to describe other global trends. The term is also used by detractors of globalization such as populist movements.

The term is similar to internationalism and cosmopolitanism.

From the discipline of political science, here are some definitions of globalism:

Paul James defines globalism, “at least in its more specific use […] as the dominant ideology and subjectivity associated with different historically-dominant formations of global extension. The definition thus implies that there were pre-modern or traditional forms of globalism and globalization long before the driving force of capitalism sought to colonize every corner of the globe, for example, going back to the Roman Empire in the second century AD, and perhaps to the Greeks of the fifth-century BC.”[2]

Manfred Steger distinguishes between different globalisms such as justice globalism, jihad globalism, and market globalism.[3] Market globalism includes the ideology of neoliberalism. In some hands, the reduction of globalism to the single ideology of market globalism and neoliberalism has led to confusion. For example, in his 2005 book The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World, Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul treated globalism as coterminous with neoliberalism and neoliberal globalization. He argued that, far from being an inevitable force, globalization is already breaking up into contradictory pieces and that citizens are reasserting their national interests in both positive and destructive ways.

Alternatively, American political scientist Joseph Nye, co-founder of the international relations theory of neoliberalism, generalized the term to argue that globalism refers to any description and explanation of a world which is characterized by networks of connections that span multi-continental distances; while globalization refers to the increase or decline in the degree of globalism.[1] This use of the term originated in, and continues to be used, in academic debates about the economic, social, and cultural developments that is described as globalization.[4] The term is used in a specific and narrow way to describe a position in the debate about the historical character of globalization (i.e. whether globalization is unprecedented or not).

It has been used to describe international endeavours begun after World War II, such as the United Nations, the Warsaw Pact, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union, and sometimes the later neo-liberal and neoconservative policies of “nation building” and military interventionism between the end of the Cold War in 1991 and the beginning of the War on Terror in 2001.

Proponents of globalism believe in global citizenship; that is, the problems of humanity can be resolved with democratic globalism. Democratic globalism is the idea that all people matter, no matter where they live, and that universal freedom and human rights can be fostered for all mankind.[5] World citizens believe in civic globalism[6] and that by thinking globally and acting locally they can effect positive change across all barriers.

Arguments against globalism are similar to those moved against globalisation, among which loss of cultural identity, deletion of community history, conflict of civilization, loss of political representation and collapse of the democratic process in favour of a globally managed open society.[7] However, the term “globalist” has also been used as a pejorative for political enemies, on the left within the context of the 1990s anti-globalization movement and protests, and on the right as a pejorative of “cosmopolitans” or those who favor internationalist projects over national ones. For example, during the election and presidency of United States president Donald Trump and members of his administration used the term globalist on multiple occasions. The administration was accused of using the term as an anti-Semitic “dog whistle”, to associate their critics with a Jewish conspiracy.

Globalism and Identity

The very theory of Globalism suggests that boundaries are perhaps more fluid.  Within the concept of “identity,” that idea provokes reflection on how one’s place, culture, ethnicity and sense of self is affected by these fluid boundaries.  How do we see ourselves?  How are we seen and understood by others?

Shirin Neshat is a contemporary Iranian visual artist best known for her work in photography, video, and film (such as her 1999 film Rapture),which explore the relationship between women and the religious and cultural value systems of Islam. She has said that she hopes the viewers of her work “take away with them not some heavy political statement, but something that really touches them on the most emotional level.” Born on March 26, 1957 in Qazin, Iran, she left to study in the United States at the University of California at Berkeley before her the Iranian Revolution in 1979. While her early photographs were overtly political, her film narratives tend to be more abstract, focusing around themes of gender, identity, and society. Her Women of Allah series, created in the mid-1990s, introduced themes of the discrepancies of public and private identities in both Iranian and Western cultures. The split-screened video Turbulent (1998) won Neshat the First International Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1999. The artist currently lives and works in New York, NY. Her works are included in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others.  Source: Shirin Neshat

The image that opens this chapter is from her Women of Allah series. In Rebellious Silence, the central figure’s portrait is bisected along a vertical seam created by the long barrel of a rifle. Presumably the rifle is clasped in her hands near her lap, but the image is cropped so that the gun rises perpendicular to the lower edge of the photo and grazes her face at the lips, nose, and forehead. The woman’s eyes stare intensely towards the viewer from both sides of this divide.

Shirin Neshat’s photographic series “Women of Allah” examines the complexities of women’s identities in the midst of a changing cultural landscape in the Middle East—both through the lens of Western representations of Muslim women, and through the more intimate subject of personal and religious conviction.

While the composition—defined by the hard edge of her black chador against the bright white background—appears sparse, measured and symmetrical, the split created by the weapon implies a more violent rupture or psychic fragmentation. A single subject, it suggests, might be host to internal contradictions alongside binaries such as tradition and modernity, East and West, beauty and violence. In the artist’s own words, “every image, every woman’s submissive gaze, suggests a far more complex and paradoxical reality

behind the surface.” [1]

Shirin Neshat, Rebellious Silence, Women of Allah series, 1994, B&W RC print & ink, photo by Cynthia Preston ©Shirin Neshat, courtesy Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

The Women of Allah series confronts this “paradoxical reality” through a haunting suite of black-and-white images. Each contains a set of four symbols that are associated with Western representations of the Muslim world: the veil, the gun, the text and the gaze. While these symbols have taken on a particular charge since 9/11, the series was created earlier and reflects changes that have taken place in the region since 1979, the year of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

The veil is intended to protect women’s bodies from becoming the sexualized object of the male gaze, but it also protects women from being seen at all. The “gaze” in this context becomes a charged signifier of sexuality, sin, shame, and power. Neshat is cognizant of feminist theories that explain how the “male gaze” is normalized in visual and popular culture: Women’s bodies are commonly paraded as objects of desire in advertising and film, available to be looked at without consequence. Many feminist artists have used the action of “gazing back” as a means to free the female body from this objectification. The gaze, here, might also reflect exotic fantasies of the East. In Orientalist painting of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for instance, Eastern women are often depicted nude, surrounded by richly colored and patterned textiles and decorations; women are envisaged amongst other beautiful objects that can be possessed. In Neshat’s images, women return the gaze, breaking free from centuries of subservience to male or European desire.

ience to male or European desire.

Shirin Neshat, Faceless, Women of Allah series, 1994, B&W RC print & ink, photo by Cynthia Preston ©Shirin Neshat, courtesy Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussel)

Most of the subjects in the series are photographed holding a gun, sometimes passively, as in Rebellious Silence, and sometimes threateningly, with the muzzle pointed directly towards the camera lens. With the complex ideas of the “gaze” in mind, we might reflect on the double meaning of the word “shoot,” and consider that the camera—especially during the colonial era—was used to violate women’s bodies. The gun, aside from its obvious references to control, also represents religious martyrdom, a subject about which the artist feels ambivalently, as an outsider to Iranian revolutionary culture.  Source: Rebellious Silence

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Chinua Achebe (16 November 1930 – 21 March 2013) was a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic. His first novel Things Fall Apart (1958), often considered his masterpiece, is the most widely read book in modern African literature.

Raised by his parents in the Igbo town of Ogidi in southeastern Nigeria, Achebe excelled at school and won a scholarship to study medicine, but changed his studies to English literature at University College (now the University of Ibadan). He became fascinated with world religions and traditional African cultures, and began writing stories as a university student. After graduation, he worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service (NBS) and soon moved to the metropolis of Lagos. He gained worldwide attention for his novel Things Fall Apart in the late 1950s; his later novels include No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the People (1966), and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). Achebe wrote his novels in English and defended the use of English, a “language of colonisers”, in African literature. In 1975, his lecture “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” featured a criticism of Joseph Conrad as “a thoroughgoing racist”; it was later published in The Massachusetts Review amid some controversy.

When the region of Biafra broke away from Nigeria in 1967, Achebe became a supporter of Biafran independence and acted as ambassador for the people of the new nation. The civil war that took place over the territory, commonly known as the Nigerian Civil War, ravaged the populace, and as starvation and violence took its toll, he appealed to the people of Europe and the Americas for aid. When the Nigerian government retook the region in 1970, he involved himself in political parties but soon resigned due to frustration over the corruption and elitism he witnessed. He lived in the United States for several years in the 1970s, and returned to the U.S. in 1990, after a car crash left him partially disabled.

A titled Igbo chief himself,[5] Achebe’s novels focus on the traditions of Igbo society, the effect of Christian influences, and the clash of Western and traditional African values during and after the colonial era. His style relies heavily on the Igbo oral tradition, and combines straightforward narration with representations of folk stories, proverbs, and oratory. He also published a large number of short stories, children’s books, and essay collections.

Upon Achebe’s return to the United States in 1990, he began an eighteen-year tenure at Bard College as the Charles P. Stevenson Professor of Languages and Literature. From 2009 until his death, he served as David and Marianna Fisher University Professor and Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University.

A prevalent theme in Achebe’s novels is the intersection of African tradition (particularly Igbo varieties) and modernity, especially as embodied by European colonialism. The village of Umuofia in Things Fall Apart, for example, is violently shaken with internal divisions when the white Christian missionaries arrive. Nigerian English professor Ernest N. Emenyonu describes the colonial experience in the novel as “the systematic emasculation of the entire culture”.[167] Achebe later embodied this tension between African tradition and Western influence in the figure of Sam Okoli, the president of Kangan in Anthills of the Savannah. Distanced from the myths and tales of the community by his Westernised education, he does not have the capacity for reconnection shown by the character Beatrice.[168]

The colonial impact on the Igbo in Achebe’s novels is often effected by individuals from Europe, but institutions and urban offices frequently serve a similar purpose. The character of Obi in No Longer at Ease succumbs to colonial-era corruption in the city; the temptations of his position overwhelm his identity and fortitude.[169] The courts and the position of District Commissioner in Things Fall Apart likewise clash with the traditions of the Igbo, and remove their ability to participate in structures of decision-making.[170]

The standard Achebean ending results in the destruction of an individual and, by synecdoche, the downfall of the community. Odili’s descent into the luxury of corruption and hedonism in A Man of the People, for example, is symbolic of the post-colonial crisis in Nigeria and elsewhere.[171] Even with the emphasis on colonialism, however, Achebe’s tragic endings embody the traditional confluence of fate, individual and society, as represented by Sophocles and Shakespeare.[172]

Still, Achebe seeks to portray neither moral absolutes nor a fatalistic inevitability. In 1972, he said: “I never will take the stand that the Old must win or that the New must win. The point is that no single truth satisfied me—and this is well founded in the Igbo world view. No single man can be correct all the time, no single idea can be totally correct.”[173] His perspective is reflected in the words of Ikem, a character in Anthills of the Savannah: “whatever you are is never enough; you must find a way to accept something, however small, from the other to make you whole and to save you from the mortal sin of righteousness and extremism.”[174] And in a 1996 interview, Achebe said: “Belief in either radicalism or orthodoxy is too simplified a way of viewing things … Evil is never all evil; goodness on the other hand is often tainted with selfishness.”

Source: Chinua Achebe

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The Gorilla Girls

Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into the Met. Museum?
1989
Guerrilla Girls
Purchased 2003 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/P78793

“If you’re in a situation where you’re a little afraid to speak up, put a mask on. You won’t believe what comes out of your mouth.”

More quotes

In 1985, a group of vigilantes wearing gorilla masks took to the streets. Armed with wheat paste and posters, the Guerrilla Girls, as they called themselves, set out to shame the art world for its underrepresentation of women artists. Their posters, in the words of one critic “were rude; they named names and they printed statistics. They embarrassed people. In other words, they worked.” In addition to posters (now highly-valued works of art), billboards, performances, protests, lectures, installations, and limited-edition prints make up the Guerrilla Girls’ varied oeuvre. Their unorthodox tactics were instrumental in making progress. The group is still going strong, reminding the art world that it still has a long way to go. Referring to themselves as “the conscience of the art world,” wherever discrimination lurks, the Guerrilla Girls are likely to strike again.

As their reputation has grown, they have encompassed targets beyond the art sphere, like Hollywood, right wing politicians, and same-sex marriage. They have collaborated with institutions that once shunned them, including the Tate Modern and MoMA, and yet their tactics remain as radical as ever. In a 2012 interview they revealed, “We’ve been working on a weapon, an estrogen bomb…If you drop it, the men will drop their guns and start hugging each other. They’ll say, ‘Why don’t we clean this place up?’ In the end, we encourage people to send their extra estrogen pills to Karl Rove; he needs a little more estrogen.”

The 1989 piece titled “Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into the Met. Museum?” addresses the sexualization of women’s bodies in highly regarded paintings and artwork, and how ironically, “85% of the nudes are female” in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (an art museum in New York City), while “less than 5% of the artists in the modern art section are female”.

“Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into the Met. Museum?” is notable for many reasons. Firstly, this is one of the first posters produced by the Guerrilla Girls’ that uses a variety of eye-catching colors as opposed to previous posters which were black and white, or utilized one color. This piece uses grayscale in addition to the bright colors pink and yellow, which almost create the illusion of vibration when juxtaposed. Secondly, up until this point the Guerrilla Girls’ posters made effective use of text based posters. But this poster incorporates imagery in addition to statics the Guerrilla Girls gathered while spending a day surveying the Met. They parodied a famous nude painting of a woman, La Grande Odalisque by Jean-August-Dominique Ingres, by taking the naked figure laying back in a relaxed position and placing a gorilla head over her face. Third, it really showed the boldness and passion for equal representation that the Guerrilla Girls possessed, as they went after the Met with the intention of shaming and humiliating such a prestigious art institution.

This poster also demonstrated their advertisement minded design in their choice of colors to get people’s attention, the bold typeface used, and use of color text to emphasize important elements of the statistics. Making it even more advertisement-like, the Guerrilla Girls paid for the poster put on the sides of New York City buses in the advertising spaces, until an outraged public caused the bus companies to disallow it from being shown. People were shocked, as they deemed the figure indecent and suggestive.

The work has been described as “iconic”(Seiferle), as it encompasses the style of the Guerrilla Girls: humor, use of facts and statistics, and advertisement style that can be found in so many of their works.

Sources Cited:

Manchester, Elizabeth. “Do women have to be naked to get Into the Met.Musem?.” Tate.org.uk, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/guerrilla-girls-do-women-have-to-be-naked-to-get-into-the-met-museum-p78793.

Seiferle, Rebecca. “The Guerrilla Girls Artist Overview and Analysis.” TheArtStory.org, http://www.theartstory.org/artist-guerrilla-girls.htm.

Source:  Guerilla Girls

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