Case Study: The Culture of the Belle Epoque
Belle Époque literally means "Beautiful Age" and is a name given in France to the period from roughly the end of the Franco-Prussian War (1871) to the start of World War I (1914). This is picked out because the standards of living and security for the upper and middle classes increased, leading to it retrospectively being labelled as a golden age by them compared to the humiliations that came before, and the devastation of the end which completely changes Europe's mindset.
The lower classes did not benefit in the same way, or to anywhere near the same extent. The Age equates loosely to the “Gilded Age” of the USA, and can be used in reference to other western and central European countries for the same period and reasons (e.g. Germany).
Belle Époque literally means "Beautiful Age" and is a name given in France to the period from roughly the end of the Franco-Prussian War (1871) to the start of World War I (1914). This is picked out because the standards of living and security for the upper and middle classes increased, leading to it retrospectively being labelled as a golden age by them compared to the humiliations that came before, and the devastation of the end which completely changes Europe's mindset.
The lower classes did not benefit in the same way, or to anywhere near the same extent. The Age equates loosely to the “Gilded Age” of the USA, and can be used in reference to other western and central European countries for the same period and reasons (e.g. Germany).
Life was seen to be changing very, very fast, and the upper and middle classes were able to afford and benefit from these changes. The quality and quantity of food improved, with consumption of old favourite’s bread and wine up 50% by 1914, but beer grew 100% and spirits tripled, while sugar and coffee consumption quadrupled. Personal mobility was increased by the bicycle, numbers of which rose from 375,000 in 1898 to 3.5 million by 1914.
Fashion became an issue for people beneath the upper class, and previous luxuries like running water, gas, electricity and proper sanitary plumbing all gravitated downwards to the middle class, sometimes even to the peasantry and lower class. Transport improvements meant that people could now travel further for holidays, and sport became an increasing pre-occupation, both for playing and watching. The life expectancy of children rose.
Mass entertainment was transformed by venues like the Moulin Rouge, home of the Can Can, by new styles of performance in the theater, by shorter forms of music and by the realism of modern writers. Print, long a powerful force, grew in even greater importance as technology brought prices down still further and education initiatives opened up literacy to ever wider numbers.
You can imagine why those with money, and those looking back, saw it as such a glorious moment.
Fashion became an issue for people beneath the upper class, and previous luxuries like running water, gas, electricity and proper sanitary plumbing all gravitated downwards to the middle class, sometimes even to the peasantry and lower class. Transport improvements meant that people could now travel further for holidays, and sport became an increasing pre-occupation, both for playing and watching. The life expectancy of children rose.
Mass entertainment was transformed by venues like the Moulin Rouge, home of the Can Can, by new styles of performance in the theater, by shorter forms of music and by the realism of modern writers. Print, long a powerful force, grew in even greater importance as technology brought prices down still further and education initiatives opened up literacy to ever wider numbers.
You can imagine why those with money, and those looking back, saw it as such a glorious moment.
Guiding Question:
Reading: For this case study you are to analyze Chapter 22 and review the sources provided below. You are expected to be able to answer the guiding question in full depth with specific historical evidence and supporting details.
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Topics for Discussion
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Sources
Source 1: The Eiffel Tower
Constructed from 1887–89 as the entrance to the 1889 World's Fair, it was initially criticized by some of France's leading artists and intellectuals for its design, but it has become a global cultural icon of France and one of the most recognizable structures in the world. |
Source 2: Silent Films
The cinema industry was founded during the Belle Epoque in France. The first pioneers were Louis Lumière, Georges Méliès, Charles Pathé and Léon Gaumont. On 28th December 1895, the first paid public performance of motion pictures taken by Louis Lumière's (1864-1948) cinematograph had been held in the Indian Salon of the Grand Café, 14 boulevard des Capucines, in Paris. It was La Sortie des usines Lumière (Leaving off work at Lumière's factory). In spring and summer of that year, Lumière made a lot of such short films he became famous for. |
Source 3: BBC "La Belle Epoque" - Paris 1914
Did Parisians ever have the feeling that they were living through the last days of an era - what we know of now as La Belle Epoque? I doubt it. For one thing, the expression "La Belle Epoque" - which, after all, doesn't mean much more than the good old days - wouldn't even have occurred to them. The phrase doesn't appear until much later in the century, when people who'd lived their gilded youths in the pre-war years started looking back and reminiscing.
Source 4: Artistic Movements
Impressionism: Let There Be Color and Light
Impressionism: Let There Be Color and Light
The movement known as Impressionism marked the first total artistic revolution sine the Renaissance. Born in France in the early 1860’s, in its purest form it lasted only until 1886, but it never the less determined the course of most art that followed. Impressionism radically departed from tradition by rejecting Renaissance perspective, balance composition, idealized figures, and chiaroscuro. Instead, the Impressionists represented immediate visual sensations through color and light.
Their main goals was to present and “impression,” or the initial sensory perceptions recorded by an artist in a brief glimpse. They built on Leonardo’s observation that a person’s face and clothes appear green when walking through a sunlit field. Color, they discovered, is not an intrinsic, permanent characteristic of an object but changes constantly according to the effects of lights, reflection, or weather on the object’s surface.
To meet the challenge of portraying such fleeting qualities of light, they created a distinctive short, choppy brushstroke. These brightly colored spots formed a mosaic of irregular daubs throbbing with energy like the pulse beat of life or the shimmer of light on water. At close range, the Impressionist’s’ daubs of pure color side by side looked unintelligible, causing critics to charge they “fired paint at the canvas with a pistol.” At a distance however, the eye fused separate streaks of blue and yellow, for instance, into green, making each hue seem more intense than if mixed on a palette. Even their painted shadows were not gray or black (the absence of color which they abhorred) but composed of many colors.
The Movement: Impressionism arose around 1862 when Renoir, Monet, Bazille, and Sisley were students in the same Parisian studio. Exceptionally close-knit because of their common interest in painting nature out-of-doors, they took excursions together to paint with the Barbizon artists. When urged by a teacher to draw from antique casts, the young rebels dropped formal course work. The claimed Manet as their hero, not for his style but for his independence. Rejected by the gatekeepers of officialdom, in 1874 the Impressionists decided to show their work as a group—the first of eight cooperative shows.
Their work differed drastically from the norm both in approach and technique. Painting from start to finish in the open air was their modus operandi; the usual method of sketching outside, then carefully finishing a work in the studio was, for them a heresy. Their use of light and color rather than meticulously drawn from a guiding principles was also considered shocking. This new work had no discernible narrative content; it didn’t rehash history bur portrayed instead a slice of contemporary life or a flash snapshot of nature. And how unkempt the Impressionist version of nature appeared! Landscapes were supposed to be artificially arranged with harmoniously balanced hills and lakes. Composition for the Impressionists seemed nonexistent, so overloaded was one side of the canvas, with figures chopped off by the picture frame.
The work was considered so seditious that a cartoon showed a pregnant women barred from entering the Impressionist exhibit, lest here exposure to such “filth” injure her unborn child. A newspaper solemnly recounted how a man, driven insane by the paintings, rushed out to bite innocent bystanders. The art critics were even crueler. One claimed Renoir’s “Nude in the Sun” made the model’s flesh look putrid. They called Monet’s dark daubs “tongue lickings” and pronounced his technique “slapdash.” Not until the 1880’s were Impressionist painters accepted and acclaimed.
Their main goals was to present and “impression,” or the initial sensory perceptions recorded by an artist in a brief glimpse. They built on Leonardo’s observation that a person’s face and clothes appear green when walking through a sunlit field. Color, they discovered, is not an intrinsic, permanent characteristic of an object but changes constantly according to the effects of lights, reflection, or weather on the object’s surface.
To meet the challenge of portraying such fleeting qualities of light, they created a distinctive short, choppy brushstroke. These brightly colored spots formed a mosaic of irregular daubs throbbing with energy like the pulse beat of life or the shimmer of light on water. At close range, the Impressionist’s’ daubs of pure color side by side looked unintelligible, causing critics to charge they “fired paint at the canvas with a pistol.” At a distance however, the eye fused separate streaks of blue and yellow, for instance, into green, making each hue seem more intense than if mixed on a palette. Even their painted shadows were not gray or black (the absence of color which they abhorred) but composed of many colors.
The Movement: Impressionism arose around 1862 when Renoir, Monet, Bazille, and Sisley were students in the same Parisian studio. Exceptionally close-knit because of their common interest in painting nature out-of-doors, they took excursions together to paint with the Barbizon artists. When urged by a teacher to draw from antique casts, the young rebels dropped formal course work. The claimed Manet as their hero, not for his style but for his independence. Rejected by the gatekeepers of officialdom, in 1874 the Impressionists decided to show their work as a group—the first of eight cooperative shows.
Their work differed drastically from the norm both in approach and technique. Painting from start to finish in the open air was their modus operandi; the usual method of sketching outside, then carefully finishing a work in the studio was, for them a heresy. Their use of light and color rather than meticulously drawn from a guiding principles was also considered shocking. This new work had no discernible narrative content; it didn’t rehash history bur portrayed instead a slice of contemporary life or a flash snapshot of nature. And how unkempt the Impressionist version of nature appeared! Landscapes were supposed to be artificially arranged with harmoniously balanced hills and lakes. Composition for the Impressionists seemed nonexistent, so overloaded was one side of the canvas, with figures chopped off by the picture frame.
The work was considered so seditious that a cartoon showed a pregnant women barred from entering the Impressionist exhibit, lest here exposure to such “filth” injure her unborn child. A newspaper solemnly recounted how a man, driven insane by the paintings, rushed out to bite innocent bystanders. The art critics were even crueler. One claimed Renoir’s “Nude in the Sun” made the model’s flesh look putrid. They called Monet’s dark daubs “tongue lickings” and pronounced his technique “slapdash.” Not until the 1880’s were Impressionist painters accepted and acclaimed.
Post-Impressionism
Post-Impressionism, like impressionism, was a French phenomenon that included the French artists Seurat, Gauguin, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec and the Dutchman van Gogh, who did his major work in France. Their careers spanned 1880 – 1905, after Impressionism had triumphed over academic art. The Post-Impressionists’ styles derived from their forerunners’ breakthroughs. Instead of the “brown gravy” of historical painting done in feebly lit studios, their canvases shone with rainbow-bright color patches. Yet the Post-Impressionists were dissatisfied with Impressionism. They wanted art to be more substantial, not dedicated wholly to capturing a passing moment, which often resulted in paintings that seemed slapdash and unplanned.
Their response to this problem split the group into two camps, much like the Neoclassical and Romantic factions earlier in the century. Seurat and Cezanne concentrated on formal, near-scientific design—Seurat with his dot theory and Cezanne with his color planes. Gauguin, van Gogh, and Lautrec, like latter-day Romantics, emphasized expressing their emotions and sensations through color and light. Twentieth-century art, with its extremes of individual styles from Cubism to Surrealism, grew out of these two trends.
Their response to this problem split the group into two camps, much like the Neoclassical and Romantic factions earlier in the century. Seurat and Cezanne concentrated on formal, near-scientific design—Seurat with his dot theory and Cezanne with his color planes. Gauguin, van Gogh, and Lautrec, like latter-day Romantics, emphasized expressing their emotions and sensations through color and light. Twentieth-century art, with its extremes of individual styles from Cubism to Surrealism, grew out of these two trends.
Self-Portrait
Van Gogh did nearly forty self-portraits in oil, more than any artist except his fellow Dutchman Rembrandt. His aim in portraits was to capture the essence of human life so vividly that 100 years later, the portraits would seem like “apparitions.” In his self-portraits the artist’s presence seems so intense one has the impression of a tormented spirit haunting the canvas
“Self-portrait with a Straw Hat” reflects the Impressionist influence. Van Gogh said he wanted “to paint men and women with something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize.” The whirlpool of brushstrokes encircling his head has that effect. The later “Self-portrait with Bandaged Ear,” done two weeks after the disastrous quarrel with Gauguin and self-mutilation, shows van Gogh’s unflinching self-revelation. Using very few colors, van Gogh concentrates all agony in the eyes. “I prefer painting people’s eyes to cathedrals,” he wrote, “for there is something in the eyes that is not in the cathedral.” |
Source 5: Edvard Munch: What a Cigarette Means