The site visit report for this course engages students' learning outside the classroom and outside the textbook. It enables students to have visual analogues that supplement their reading of the texts and enable them to see some artifacts of the cultures that they are reading about. The guide below identifies the relevant galleries and objects through which Dr. Long will guide students in the tours that he will offer. [Point and click here for information about the Chrysler Museum by visiting its Web site.]
You will enter the museum through its main entrance and pay the fee for admission. As a result of two decades of cutbacks in state and federal funding (the price we pay for electing politicians who promise us tax reductions without telling us how we will have to pay later for services), admission is no longer free.
[Point and click here for a map of the galleries on the second floor.]
By way of contrast, in order to understand the transition from the medieval to the modern world view, start in the first medieval gallery, looking at the lat 14th-early 15th century Catalonian (Spanish) Scenes from the Life of St. John the Baptist. Notice the lack of realism and the ahistoricism of its representation of human figures. Medieval artists were not naive or ignorant; they were more interested in the idea of the human than in the real human form. The figures are not rendered with realism. Also, notice that the artist has clothed and housed the figures in the costume and architecture of his (or her) own time. St. John's disciples even sport the tonsure (shaved head) of medieval monks!
Compare this form of visual representation to any of the biblical paintings three galleries ahead in the Renaissance and Baroque (16th and 17th Centuries), where bodies were rendered realistically and situated in more historically accurate settings.
You will notice the prevalence of religious themes in late Renaissance and Baroque art (ca. 1500-1700), but they are treated more realistically than they had been in the Middle Ages (ca. 500-1500). Medieval art tended to treat human subjects and scenery less realistically and more symbolically. Renaissance and Baroque art, however, tends toward greater visual realism. The human figures look like real people, not abstracted or idealized forms. This empiricism is the result of Europeans' greater interest in sensory evidence and authority.
Medieval painting also tended to depict biblical scenes as though they occurred in the Middle Ages, with biblical figures housed in castles and wearing medieval costumes, what is called an anachronism. Renaissance and Baroque art, however, attempts to depict biblical figures with some historical accuracy. This historicism is a product of Renaissance humanism's recognition of cultural and historical differences.
In this gallery amid the religious subjects there are two noteworthy secular subjects: Giovanni de Lutero's (called Dosso Dossi) Learned Man of Antiquity (ca. 1520-22) (left end of the gallery) and Pietro della Vecchia's Portrait of Erhard Weigel (1649) (right end of the gallery), which are significant in that the emerging European hero is the scholar/scientist/mathematician. We will continue to see this secularizing tendency throughout the World Literature course.
You will notice the empirical realism of art in the early scientific age, particularly that of the Dutch. Empirical observation is observation with one or more of the five senses. Science is based on empirical observation (the observation of physical phenomena). This represents an attitude toward the material physical world that emphasizes the human capacity of reason.
The subjects in Antonie Palamedesz's Elegant Company in an Interior (1673) are neither heroes, nor mythological figures, nor aristocrats nor saints. Although stylishly dressed they are apparently the employees and customers of a brothel. This "domestic" scene is treated with realism and detail (notice the dogs fighting over a bone) but without overt moralizing.
The Stone Cartouche with Virgin and Child Encircled by a Garland of Flowers (Jan Philips van Thielen and Erasmus II Quellinus) represents an architectural carving surrounded by realistic flowers, which are painted with what we might consider photographic accuracy. Although "camera" photography as we know it had not been invented, this age was familiar with a technology known as the "camera obscura" whereby a small aperture opening into a dark room projected the image of the lighted room on the other side of the wall. It was one way that late Renaissance and Baroque artists were exploring visual realism.
The Surgeon by David Teniers the Younger provides both visual and thematic realism. Visually it provides a detailed and recognizable depiction of a provincial barber-surgeon's practice, but the fact that Teniers has decided to show us this scene (instead of an aristocratic, biblical, or heroic setting and figures) is exemplary of thematic realism, a turn to an examination of everyday life.
We have left the still-religious world of 17th-century Europe and entered the Age of Enlightenment. First you will notice that there are few Christian works in this gallery. While artists still painted conventional religious scenes and figures, during the 18th century European art was increasingly secular (i.e. concerned with this world, not the next world). Instead, Europeans were fascinated with the ancient Greco-Roman past in depictions of Classical mythology (such as Sebastiano Ricci's The Contest Between Apollo and Pan (ca. 1685), Antoine Coysevox's statues (post-1702), and Charles-Joseph Netoire's Psyche Gathering the Fleece [ca1750]) and appropriation of Classical architectural forms. This Neo-Classicism imagined an early European world free of the Christian sectarian violence that had characterized the two centuries prior to the 18th century, a pagan Greece and pagan Rome characterized by the rationalism of democratic Athens or republican Rome. Call to mind that the American founders and revolutionaries were similarly inclined and for this reason most public buildings (the Capitol in Washington, DC, or the Virginia Statehouse in Richmond) looked like Greek or Roman temples.
In this gallery we also see an emerging cultural trend: the Romantic idealization of rural life, called pastoralism, which is typified in François Boucher's Pastorale (ca 1735). Neither the vegetables nor the rural children are dirty, as one might have expected. Nature is depicted as benignly innocent, although notice the impending storm and the awesome mountains that convey something of nature's sacred power. Notice also that secular subjects include portraiture, something virtually unheard of in the Middle Ages, though the portrait subjects are clearly heroic, affluent, or aristocratic.
Again you will notice the proliferation of personal portraiture, a shift from the medieval and Renaissance preoccupation with heroic, aristocratic, or religious subjects, a trend that we will see in literature as it becomes increasingly democratized and less elitist.
You will notice a striking contrast in the subjects of art in this gallery from that in the 18th-century gallery: in the numerous scenes from common life (a man struggling against alcoholism, a tobacco pipe, a mother and infant) or scenes of agricultural workers, you are seeing Romanticism's fascination with quotidian human affairs rather than with depictions of heroic or aristocratic action. One result of this tendency is the increasing depictions of common life in literature as well, even the unpleasant aspects of life. Charles-Emile Jacque's Shepherd and His Flock (1880) represents a trend of the later nineteenth century, a realistic (rather than idealized) portrait of rural life; notice the weathered man, the dirty sheep, and the threatening storm (a far cry from Boucher's Pastorale).
Here you will see art depicting three aspects of 19th-century cultural life: medievalism (a nostalgic look backward at the Catholic Middle Ages), orientalism (European's fascination with and exoticising of the Near East and Far East), and the rise of the bourgeoisie (the tendency for prosperous merchants to become art patrons, replacing aristocrats).
Medievalism. Gustave Dorés The Neophyte (ca 1866) and Jean Paul Laurens's The Late Empire: Honorious (1880) are in various ways evocations of medieval Catholic Europe. The 19th century's medievalism took many forms: gothic fiction, Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris (known to us as The Hunchback of Notre Dame), a fascination with ruined abbeys and churches, a desire for retrieving a national past.
Orientalism. Jean-Louis Gérôme's Excursion of the Harem (1869) is an exotic and idealized depiction of the Near East, in what is known as "orientalism." Since the Middle Ages, Europeans had been fascinated by the Middle East and Asia (as we still are today, testified to by the popularity of martial arts films, Asian foods, and Eastern spirituality, as well as our anxieties about Islam), which they also attempted to colonize.
Bourgeoisie. One portrait in this gallery depicts bourgeois prosperity, Pierre August Cot's Portrait of a Lady (ca. 1879). Increasingly the middle classes became the patrons and consumers of visual and literary art, and thus also their subjects. In the literature of realism (such as Flaubert's Madame Bovary), the class consciousness, insecurity, and hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie would become narrative themes. Franz von Stuck's portrait, Beethoven (no date), reminds us of the Romantic invention of the idea of the artist as a brooding genius.
With the invention of photographic technology earlier in the century and its proliferation in the second half of the century, visual artists felt less compelled to adhere to the canons of realism and instead began to experiment with visual representations that depicted impressions, emotions, moods, tones, memories. Paul Cezanne's Bather and Rocks (1860-66), Pierre August Renoir's The Daughters (1882) and Edgar Degas' Dancer (ca. 1895) are all typical of French Impressionism, the desire to represent the fleeting sensory moment that photography could not depict. As the French poet Stephane Mallarmé would write: Le sens trop precis rature ta vague litterature--"Too precise a meaning rubs an erasure across your mysterious literature."
Similarly, employing scientific principles of optical physics (which understood white light as a combination of different colors), pointilist artists (such as Henri Edward Cross in Excursion (1895) and Maximilian Luce in The Footbath (1894)) used discrete color points to make the visual impression. Artists were moving away from recognizable visual representation and moving toward increasing abstraction. This would also occur in literature among the Modernists.
In literature and art, writers and artists began to explore less representational and more symbolic imagery. In Paul Gaugin's The Loss of Virginity (1890-91) the artist juxtaposes a series of discordant and disconcerting images: the pale, naked almost deathly woman, the single plucked flower, the fox on her shoulder, and the procession of peasants in the background. You can see how these symbols in visual art prepare us for abstract poetry and Freudian concepts of symbols of the subconscious. The painting has an almost dreamlike or hallucinogenic feel.
Modernism is the name given to a host of different literary, performative, and visual art forms of the first half of the twentieth century. In this first gallery look closely at the statues clustered around the middle of the room. Artists increasingly imagined themselves as the "frontal assault" in a war against convention and conformity. This avant-garde took it upon themselves to experiment with new forms and to risk the inability of audiences to understand their work. As photography claimed the space for representational realism, visual arts became increasingly abstract and more demanding upon its audiences. The same occurred in literature, whose forms we will see would become ever more challenging to the common reader. In Jacques Lipchitz's Seated Figure (1916), Alexander Archipenko's Geometric Figure No. 1 (1914), and Jean Arp's Human Concretion (1934), human forms are rendered as geometric abstractions, whose only representational reference is their title.
Interestingly, however, these forms were also influenced by the growing availability of indigenous arts from Africa, Latin America, and Native America. As we will see when we conclude the tour, African tribal art came to the attention of European artists as a result of colonial trade, but brought a freshness and immediacy. This fascination with simpler, tribal forms is known as primitivism and is based on Rousseau and other Romantic's belief in the essential purity and goodness of humans in a state of nature.
This objects in this section of several galleries might be more correctly called "Post-Modern" art. If Modernism is the term we apply to literary, performative, and visual art of the first half of the 20th century, Post-Modernism is the term for that of the second half. Post-modernism has also been called "the Art of Exhaustion" in that there is a sense that "Everything has been already been done that can be done; all we can do now is ironically quote the past." This irony or distance between the art and its audience is typical of post-modernity; contrast that to the sincerity or sentimentalism of 18th and 19th-century art. This art is hip, self-conscious, self-referential (that is, it always reminds you that you are looking at something artificial), and gestures with a wink or "quotation marks" (as in my "so-called" life). Its characteristics include
Post-modern art vacillates between two extremes: it is either hot or cool, it can be fiercely confrontational, engaged on behalf of a social cause or it can be hip, cool, apathetic, and humorous. Hot post-modern art is socially engaged in the issues of the day; cool post-modern art is ironic, aloof, and detached.
The Chrysler's African collection is thin and not very well labeled, representing one of Walter Chrysler's least passionate interests. However, it does give you a clear sense of the stylized, ritual forms in indigenous arts that inspired Modernist sculptors in the 20th century. Analogously, the African novelist Chinua Achebe in Things Fall Apart and the Afro-Caribbean Derek Walcott in Omeros would both appropriate their own tribal mythologies and fashion them into modern pieces for both modern Africans or Afro-Caribbeans as well as for Euro-Anglos.
This page updated on January 26, 2006