This essay takes a creative "time travel" approach to surveying Western art history from the eighteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. Beginning with Neoclassical painting, it examines Sir Joshua Reynolds's "Portrait of a Black Man" and Jacques-Louis David's "The Death of Marat" for their ideological dimensions. It then moves to Impressionism, analyzing Whistler's "Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket" and Monet's "Nymphéas" series for questions of artistic intention and perception. Finally, the essay explores Surrealism through Meret Oppenheim's "Object" and Salvador Dalí's provocative 1954 painting, probing the role of the subconscious, gender, and symbolism in avant-garde art.
This essay takes a creative journey through Western art history, moving from the eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century by visiting artists at the very moments they completed their most significant works. Along the way, it interrogates the ideological, perceptual, and psychological dimensions of some of the most iconic paintings and sculptures in the Western canon.
Our first stop is the eighteenth century, where we investigate Neoclassical painting. We visit Sir Joshua Reynolds as he works on his 1770 oil on canvas "Portrait of a Black Man." The heroic structure of the painting invites the question of whether it carries an ideological message — specifically, whether it asserts the humanity of its subject against the evils of slavery, which was still widely practiced at the time. We should also consider whether the portrait depicts Dr. Samuel Johnson's servant Francis Barber. Johnson's progressive opposition to slavery, and his generous treatment of Barber — to whom he left his estate — might well explain why this figure is rendered so heroically on canvas.
We then visit Jacques-Louis David as he works on his stark 1793 Neoclassical oil on canvas "The Death of Marat." David's political purposes in this painting are worth interrogating closely. His portrait of the dead Marat lying in his bathtub, for instance, conspicuously avoids depicting the reason why Marat was bathing when he died: he suffered from a horrible and disfiguring skin disease. By omitting this detail, David transforms Marat into a martyred saint of the French Revolution, suppressing physical ugliness in favor of political idealization.
The time machine moves next to the later nineteenth century, where we investigate Impressionist painting. Our first stop is London in 1875, to interrogate the American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler about his oil on canvas study "Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket." Of particular interest is the famous lawsuit Whistler filed against the art critic John Ruskin, who accused him of "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face" with this audacious painting. We also ask Whistler whether he would classify the work as Impressionist at all. He may well have considered it straightforward realism — fading fireworks in a night sky do, in fact, resemble the painting's appearance — yet chose so obscure a subject in order to illustrate a Wildean principle of art for art's sake.
We then move to Claude Monet's garden at Giverny, where we attempt to catch him completing his 1897–98 Nymphéas — one of his famous water lily paintings, now housed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Monet is a textbook Impressionist painter, but a compelling question arises: did his deteriorating eyesight, specifically the cataracts he developed in later life, have any influence on his signature style of loose, shimmering brushwork? His vision problems may have reinforced, or even intensified, the dissolution of firm outlines that defines his mature work.
"Oppenheim and Dalí on subconscious symbolism and gender"
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