Subject: gentilhomme gentleman duellist
Culture: French bourgeoisie
Setting: Troisième République / Belle Époque / Fin-de-Siècle, France late 19th-early 20thc
Dallas Museum of Art > Cartier and Islamic Art: In Search of Modernity *
* Kimbell Art Museum
"GUSTAVE CAILLEBOTTE French, 1848-1894 On the Pont de l'Europe 1876-77 Oil on canvas ...
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the city of Paris underwent a massive architectural revolution. New avenues and boulevards were constructed, whole new neighborhoods rose up, and vast new train stations were erected to link the capital with the suburbs and with the world beyond. Artists and writers took note of these transformations and the effect that the new patterns of urban life had on the citizens of Paris.
"In a series of paintings from the years around 1875, Gustave Caillebotte explored the new spaces of the city, showing men and women walking along rain-soaked pavement, crossing bridges, staring out of windows, or standing on balconies above busy streets. The most radical of all these paintings is the Kimbell's On the Pont de l'Europe, which shows three men on a massive bridge that spanned the rail yards of the Gare Saint-Lazare, one of the principal stations of Paris. Huge girders of iron crisscross the composition, just beyond a cast-metal balustrade that separates the space of the street from the activity below. Through its openings, Caillebotte offers glimpses of the station roof at right, the curving network of steel rails, and the rooftop of the newly opened Opera to the left.
"The subject of the painting is the action of the public space -- the interaction of pedestrians on a street, the views of each other and their surroundings taht city life affords. But Caillebotte, to underscore the anonymity of the industrialized city, deliberately thwarts the interaction. None of the figures looks at the other, nor at the viewer, and their view of the station is only a series of vignettes, broken and reorganized to stree the fragmentation of modern life."
Kimbell Art Museum *
"ÉDOUARD MANET French, 1832-1883 Portrait of Georges Clemenceau 1879-80 Oil on canvas ...
Two radicals -- one of art and the other of politics -- are linked in this forceful portrait. It is not known when Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929) met Manet; the future politician left for America as a newspaper correspondent in 1865, the year in which Manet first exhibited his shocking nude Olympia in Paris. Following his return in 1869, Clemenceau entered the tumultuous French political world as a radical leftist. Manet, who often painted his friends as themselves, seems to have sought out political figures around 1879, when he initiated this portrait of Clemenceau, who had visited his studio. The rostrum at the bottom of the Kimbell painting was probably intended to indicate Clemenceau's incumbency
at the time in the Chamber of Deputies.
"Manet typically exasperated models with his insatiable need to revise, and he never finished the portrait of Clemenceau, begun on two different canvases of identical size. Closely related photographs of Clemenceau, found among the papers of both artist and sitter,
suggest that the deputy was seldom available to pose in person.
"Manet's widow gave both incompletely realized portraits to the politician as keepsakes. Later, in 1905, Clemenceau sold one of the versions to an American collector, Louisine Havemeyer of New York, who later gave the painting to France; shortly afterwards he sold the other (now the Kimbell version) to the Parisian dealer Ambroise Vollard. When he became prime minister of France in 1906, Clemenceau ordered Manet's Olympia to be transferred to the Louvre, thus granting old master status to the controversial painter of modern life."
