IUPUI/Herron/IMA Summer I Term, 2004

A Cultural History of French Impressionism

History B421/H509 (V651/V654)

Herron H495 (V061)

Thursdays: 5:45-8:25 p.m. Faculty: Dr. Kevin C. Robbins

Saturdays: 10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m. Associate Professor of History

DeBoest Lecture Hall, IMA Office Phone: 274-5819

E-Mail: krobbin1@iupui.edu

Office Hours: By Appointment

This course on the cultural history of French Impressionism will combine required text and documentary readings, gallery visits at the IMA, slide lectures, video and musical performances to give students intensive and extensive exposure to French urban socio-cultural and socio-political trends (primarily in nineteenth-century Paris) contextualizing the dramatic history and development of the Impressionists and their art work. This course is designed to give students a deeper understanding of the conflicted and rapidly changing world in which one important phase of French artistic expression took place. No prior art history course requirements apply to this class nor will students be expected to master the finer points of art analysis (iconography, connoisseurship, etc.). However, students may certainly address such topics if they so desire in their required course written work.

The prime objective here is to develop, in an engaging, memorable, multi-media fashion, an historical appreciation of Impressionism’s social, political, and cultural milieu. This should encourage students to look at famous, even iconic modern paintings with fresher, sharper eyes primed to see the commentary these images provide on the dynamic, violent, and rapidly modernizing urban society that produced them. This is not a “fine art” course, but rather a socio-cultural and socio-political history of an important artistic movement requiring students to know, through intensive reading, writing, and viewing, those structures and hot conflicts in nineteenth-century French urban life critical to the development of Impressionism as a recognized style of modern painting. We are not here to worship art nor to distance it from ourselves by considering it as a product of pure “genius” somehow isolated from the contentious “real world” in which the artist actually lived. Art in the context of its very dynamic time and place will be the objective of our knowledge. As peculiar realists, Impressionist artists constructed ambitious, contentious, politically, and morally charged visions of nineteenth-century French society, urban and rural. This course aims to help you understand how these visions got made and what they tell us about the artists who made them and the world in which the artists lived and to which they continually responded in their work.

Course meetings will involve illustrated, multi-media lectures by the instructor, gallery tours at the IMA, and class discussions of all assigned readings.

READINGS: Texts for this course are listed below. Multiple copies of these books are available at the IUPUI Bookstore (Cavanaugh Hall, Basement) and at the IMA Museum Shop. Note: texts are available at the IMA Shop to class participants at a 10% discount. All required texts may also be purchased from online book dealers such as Amazon.com, etc. All students should purchase their own copies of these excellent and well-illustrated books. STUDENTS SHOULD ALWAYS BRING THE DENVIR AND HERBERT BOOKS TO CLASS WHEN THESE ARE SLATED FOR READING AND DISCUSSION. WE MAY REFER IN DETAIL TO THEIR ILLUSTRATIONS.

Denvir, Bernard, (ed.). The Impressionists at First Hand. Thames and Hudosn, London, 1987.

Herbert. Robert. Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society. Yale Univ. Press, 1988.

Nord, Philip. Impressionists and Politics: Art and Democracy in the Nineteenth Century.

Routledge, 2000.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS: Regular attendance at all course meetings: lectures, discussions, gallery tours, etc. For such a short, intensive class, regular attendance is essential. Attendance rosters will be circulated at all class sessions so be sure that your name is on them. Students will be penalized for inconsistent, poor attendance. All students must complete all assigned readings by the date they are listed on the syllabus. This is a history class, not just art history, so just looking at the paintings alone will never be good enough. We are after the historical con-text of these artists and their works and that is found through simultaneous consideration of text, image, and sound. SO READ AND LOOK ANEW! Completion required of a take-home mid-term exam. Completion required of one course paper (10 pages in length) on a relevant topic given by the instructor or generated by the student with the instructor’s express approval. GRADUATE STUDENTS will complete a 20-page essay on a topic generated or approved by the instructor. All students will complete a final take-home essay exam. Also required: informed participation by all students in all class discussions. Be Prepared! The Instructor Will Call on YOU frequently in discussion sessions for your opinions on all course readings. "I didn't do the reading" or "I don't know" or "I don't have my book" are all very bad answers and you will surely suffer for these.

GRADING: Mid-Term: 15% of final mark. Course paper: 45% of final mark. Final Exam: 25% of final mark. Class participation 15% of final mark. Graduate Students: Mid-Term 10%, Course Paper 60%, final exam 15%, class participation 15%.

IMPORTANT SUPPLEMENTARY COURSE RESEARCH MATERIALS: The instructor has compiled a variety of textual and visual materials complementary to the main themes of this history course. Students should first consider the IMA’s European painting galleries, graphic arts collections, and decorative arts collections (with their stock of impressionist works) as primary sources of visual information about Impressionism. Visit the galleries often. Find your research objects or topics in those art works. Specific course research materials include printed primary documents (like English editions of artists’ letters and other personal papers), biographies of key artists, secondary sources by historians and other commentators of various periods on the work of the Impressionists, and general histories of France in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A representative sample of such materials can be found at a research carrel maintained for this course in the IMA’s Reference Library, (main floor, north side of building). These materials are a good preliminary orientation to potential research sources and may be consulted in the IMA’s library (but not checked out) during normal museum hours. The instructor has also placed on reserve at the Herron School of Art Library (16^th and Pennsylvania Streets) several good videos devoted to the lives and works of the main French artists under study, including Manet, Monet, and Degas. These videos may be checked out of the library for home viewing and sharply evoke the French and Parisian milieus in which these artists worked. Students are free to use these videos and others as additional supplementary research materials. Music of the era appropriate to conjure up the cultural milieu of the Impressionists includes the classical works of Debussy, Fauré, Frank, Offenbach, Ravel, and Saint-Saens. The popular tunes of the dance halls and ballades of the café-concerts can be sampled through recordings like those of Edith Piaf. Literature highly relevant to the Impressionists' world includes the poetry of Baudelaire and Mallarmé, and the grand novels of Balzac, Flaubert, Huysmans, Proust, and Zola (especially The Stomach of Paris or The Ladies' Paradise. (If you don’t already have enough to read, then read some more!--Knowing Impressionism has to be a multi-media experience!)

COURSE OUTLINE AND READING ASSIGNMENTS

(READINGS TO BE COMPLETED ON THE DAY THEY ARE LISTED)

Thur. 5/13 Course Introduction. Distribution of Syllabus. Outline of Course Methods

and Objectives. Impressionism and the Culture of Contrasts. Opening Lecture on The Parisian Establishment I, Nineteenth-century French Socio-Economic Realities, Power Politics, and Urban Form. The "Real World" of the Impressionists.

Sat. 5/15 Lecture: The Parisian Establishment II, The Official Salon as a French Cultural

Institution Challenged by the New Artists and the New Art of City Life.

Readings: Herbert, Impressionism, Preface and Chapt. 1, pp. xiii-32.

Discussion: Herbert’s history of Impressionism and the Impressionists as

Urbane Outsiders.

Thur. 5/20 Lecture: The Impressionists as Habitués of the Parisian Urban World:

Instantaneous Imagery in the Age of Paper.

Readings: Herbert, Impressionism, Chapt. 2, pp. 33-57; Denvir,

Impressionists at First Hand, Introduction and Documents, 1855-1871,

pp. 7-45. Impressionist Autobiographies. Pay Attention.

Discussion: Denvir Documents and the first-hand history of Impressionism.

Graduate Students Must Have Research Topic Selected/Approved Now.

Sat. 5/22 Lecture: The Impressionists and Places of Pleasure Where Leisure Gets

Bought and Sold in the Modern Metropolis.

Readings: Herbert, Impressionism, Chapt. 3, pp. 59-91; Denvir,

Documents 1871-73, pp. 65-83.

Discussion: What is Entertaining about Pictures of Entertainment?

Thur. 5/27 Lecture: Dealings in Uncertainty: Impressionist Painting, Risks, and

the Risqué in Urban Life.

Readings: Herbert, Impressionism, Chapts. 4-5, pp. 93-193; Denvir,

Documents, 1874-76, pp. 84-107.

Discussion: How did the Impressionists get a life? Making friends, losing

friends, hanging out in cafes, getting a living, playing the ponies, looking

for love, finding abuse, going public.

Undergraduate Students Must Have Final Paper Topic Selected/

Approved Now.

Sat. 5/29 Gallery Tour IMA Impressionist Collections.

Lecture: New Modes of Artistic Expression and the Material Culture of

Impressionism.

Readings: Herbert, Impressionism, Chapt. 6, pp. 195-263; Denvir,

Documents, 1877-1881 and 1882-1885, pp. 107-155.

Discussion: Painting Where? Painting What? Painting How?

Take-Home Mid-Term Exam Distributed in Class.

Thur. 6/3 Lecture: The Impressionists and Modern Landscape Painting.

Readings: Herbert, Chapt. 7, pp. 268-302; Denvir, Documents, 1886-1894

and 1895-1920, pp. 156-206.

Discussion: Patriarchs and Sea-Side Promoters? The aging of Impressionism.

Take-Home Mid-Term Exam Due Back in Class. LATE PAPERS

FAIL!

Sat. 6/5 Lecture: The Impressionist Interior: Fashioning the Self and Salon Psychology.

Readings: Herbert, Conclusion, pp. 303-306.

Gallery Tour: IMA Post-Impressionist Collection, The Impact and Visual

Legacy of Impressionism.

Thur. 6/10 Lecture: What are the Politics of Impressionism? Revisions of Our Visions.

Readings: Nord, Impressionists and Politics, Introduction and Chapt. 1,

pp. 1-35

Discussion: The Utility and Insights of Politicizing Painting. Looking at

Impressionism in a Harsher Light?

PAPER DRAFTS SHOULD BE UNDERWAY

Sat. 6/12 Final Paper Research and Writing Opportunity.

NO CLASS NO CLASS NO CLASS NO CLASS

Thur. 6/17 Lecture: What is the Painting of French Republican Life?

Readings: Nord, Impressionists and Politics, Chapt. 2, pp. 36-68.

Discussion: Modes of Exhibition, Modes of Cultural and Political

Protest.

Final Undergraduate and Graduate Papers Due in Class. LATE

PAPERS FAIL!

Sat . 6/19 Lecture: The Crisis or Crises of Impressionism: Fame, Factions, Feuds,

and Feeble-Mindedness(?) in The Movement.

Readings: Nord, Impressionists and Politics, Chapt. 3, pp. 69-107.

Discussion: Pissarro's the Anarchist, Degas an Anti-Semite, and Renoir

only likes dumb women who can't read. So who are the Impressionists

now and what do they stand for--individually or collectively?

Take-Home Final Exam Distributed in Class.

EXAM DUE BACK TO INSTRUCTOR BY TUE., JUNE 22, NOON!

ELECTRONIC SUBMISSION ACCEPTABLE. HARD COPY

PREFERRED. HARD COPIES TO INSTRUCTOR'S MAILBOX:

IUPUI CAMPUS, CAVANAUGH HALL, 425 UNIVERSITY BLVD.

ROOM 504M.