16 questions · Art
When Jacques-Louis David exhibited his “Oath of the Horatii” in Paris in 1785, crowds pressed in front of it: three brothers stretching out their hands to their father to swear an oath, clear, severe and antique. Neoclassicism wanted to paint virtue. Soon Romanticism answered with feeling and longing, and Caspar David Friedrich set a tiny monk before an empty sea. German painters mockingly called the Nazarenes moved to Rome in 1810 and lived in a monastery almost like monks, while the landscape painters of the Barbizon school set up their easels in the middle of the forest of Fontainebleau. Around 1850 Gustave Courbet wanted to paint only what he saw: two stone breakers by the roadside. That was Realism, and many Parisians were outraged. In London young painters founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. In 1874 the critic Louis Leroy mocked Monet’s picture “Impression, soleil levant” and so unwittingly gave Impressionism its name. Georges Seurat and Paul Signac then built their pictures from thousands of dabs of colour, and Pointillism was born. In 1910 Roger Fry grouped Cézanne, Gauguin and van Gogh together as Post-Impressionism. Around the turn of the century things grew mysterious: Symbolism painted dreams and myths, Arnold Böcklin his “Isle of the Dead”, and the Nabis around Bonnard named themselves after the Hebrew word for prophets. Alphonse Mucha swept the lines of Art Nouveau across his posters. In 1905 a critic called Matisse and Derain “wild beasts”, and Fauvism was born. That same year Kirchner, Heckel and Schmidt-Rottluff founded Die Brücke in Dresden, and in Munich Kandinsky and Franz Marc gathered Der Blaue Reiter. Expressionism no longer wanted to show what the world looks like, but how it feels. Sixteen questions guide you through this thrilling century of painting.
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Neoclassicism
Clear lines, serious heroes and virtue instead of playfulness: the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum had fired the enthusiasm.
💡 Did you know? In this style the sculptor Antonio Canova portrayed Napoleon’s sister Pauline Borghese as a half-naked Venus.
Romanticism
Besides Friedrich, William Turner and Eugène Delacroix are among its great painters.
💡 Did you know? Friedrich later painted over ships in “The Monk by the Sea”, making the sea even emptier.
Nazarenes
Friedrich Overbeck and Franz Pforr founded the Brotherhood of St Luke in Vienna in 1809; the nickname came from their long hair worn in the manner of Jesus.
💡 Did you know? In Rome they lived almost like monks in the abandoned monastery of Sant’Isidoro.
Barbizon school
It is named after a village on the edge of the forest and is seen as a forerunner of painting in the open air.
💡 Did you know? Millet’s “The Gleaners” of 1857 shows poor peasant women and was felt in Paris to be a political provocation.
Realism
In 1855 Courbet opened his own pavilion next to the World’s Fair for his rejected paintings.
💡 Did you know? “The Stone Breakers” was destroyed near Dresden in 1945 during the Second World War.
Pre-Raphaelites
They wanted to return to the clear, detailed painting before Raphael.
💡 Did you know? For Millais’s “Ophelia” the model Elizabeth Siddal lay for hours in a bathtub and caught a bad cold.
Impressionism
Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro painted fleeting light with quick, visible brushstrokes.
💡 Did you know? Leroy was alluding to Monet’s picture “Impression, soleil levant”.
Pointillism
Georges Seurat developed the technique from the colour theories of the chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul.
💡 Did you know? Seurat worked for about two years on “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”.
Post-Impressionism
The three went their own ways: Cézanne towards solid form, Gauguin towards flat colour, van Gogh towards expression.
💡 Did you know? The exhibition outraged many London visitors at the time.
Symbolism
The poet Jean Moréas published the movement’s manifesto in the newspaper “Le Figaro” in 1886.
💡 Did you know? Böcklin painted the “Isle of the Dead” in five versions.
Art Nouveau
The name comes from a Paris gallery; in Germany the style was called Jugendstil after a Munich magazine.
💡 Did you know? In Vienna it was known as the Secession style, in Italy as Stile Liberty.
Fauvism
The painters used pure, garish colours, quite independent of the natural colour of things.
💡 Did you know? The critic Louis Vauxcelles saw a Renaissance-style sculpture among the paintings and quipped: “Donatello among the wild beasts”.
Expressionism
It flourished above all in Germany, roughly between 1905 and 1920.
💡 Did you know? Munch made “The Scream” in several versions, as a painting, a pastel and a lithograph.
Die Brücke
With garish colours and angular woodcuts it became the nucleus of German Expressionism.
💡 Did you know? Emil Nolde was briefly a member too.
Der Blaue Reiter
Besides Kandinsky and Marc, August Macke and Gabriele Münter belonged to the circle.
💡 Did you know? Marc loved horses, Kandinsky riders, and both liked blue: that is how Kandinsky later explained the name.
Nabis
The starting point was a small picture by Sérusier from 1888, “The Talisman”, painted under Gauguin’s guidance.
💡 Did you know? Within the group Bonnard was nicknamed “the very Japanese Nabi”.
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