Painted Perceptions: Claude Monet and Edgar Degas, and Impressionism

Industrialization, Urbanization Karl Marx ( ), Communist Manifesto (1848) - Dialectical materialism - Critique of capitalism - Advocacy of proletarian revolution

Charles Darwin ( ), On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859) Modernism Baudelaire: “Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent.”

Clement Greenberg: The essence of Modernism lies … in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself – not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence. … Realistic, illusionist art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art. M used art to call attention to art. The limitations that constitute the medium of painting – the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of pigment – were treated by the Old Masters as negative factors that could be acknowledged only implicitly or indirectly. Modenist painting has come to regard these same limitations as positive forces that are to be acknowledged openly. Impressionism

Claude Monet, Saint-Lazare Train Station, Oil on canvas, 2’ 5 3/4” x 3’ 5”. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Plein-air painting Show, 1874: “Impressionism”

Right: Claude Monet, Saint-Lazare Train Station, Oil on canvas, 2’ 5 3/4” x 3’ 5”. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Left: Edouard Manet, Railroad (Gare St-Lazare), 1873, Oil on canvas, 36 x 45 in, Nat. Gal. of Art, D.C.

PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR, Le Moulin de la Galette, Oil on canvas, approx. 4’ 3” x 5’ 8”. Louvre, Paris.

EDGAR DEGAS, Ballet Rehearsal, Oil on canvas, 1’ 11” x 2’ 9”. Glasgow Museum, Glasgow (The Burrell Collection).

EDGAR DEGAS, Ballet Rehearsal, Oil on canvas, 1’ 11” x 2’ 9”. Glasgow Museum, Glasgow (The Burrell Collection). Sculptures of dancers by Degas: “Spanish Dance”, “Little Dancer of 14 Years Old” (Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans), “Grande Arabesque” All in National Gallery of Art, D.C.

EDGAR DEGAS, Ballet Rehearsal, Oil on canvas, 1’ 11” x 2’ 9”. Glasgow Museum, Glasgow (The Burrell Collection). Photography

Timothy O’Sullivan, A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, July 1863, 1863, New York Public Library Louis-Jacques-Mande’ Daguerre ( ) and William Henry Fox Talbot ( ), the invention of the first practical photographic process, 1839

Torii Kiyonaga, Two Women, Woodblock Print Japonisme Commander Matthew Perry ( )

Mary Cassatt, The Bath, ca. 1892, oil on canvas.

Mary Cassatt, Woman Bathing, , color drypoint & aquatint, National Gallery of Art, D.C. Kitagawa Utamaro, Japanese color woodblock print, c.1795, Chicago Art Institute