This art history video discussion examines Lucus Cranach the Elder's "Adam and Eve", 1526, oil on panel (Courtauld Gallery, London).
NINETEENTH-CENTURY ART HISTORY is an extensive field of study that intersects with diverse areas of the humanities and social sciences. New research continues to expand our understanding of the era’s modernist ideation and cultural production. The aim of Creating the Modern is to facilitate access to the research by providing an online platform readily available to learners interested in examining the relationships between art, society and culture at the dawn of modernism.
Creating the Modern comprises ten chapters structured around general and specialized topics within an overarching chronology. In addition to addressing the era’s revolutionary aesthetic and stylistic developments, the e-publication engages issues relevant to nineteenth-century art within its socio-political context. Topics such as class and gender, academism and the avant-garde, the reception and consumption of progressive art, the culture of spectatorship, psycho-social illness, Eurocentrism, and religious and racial prejudice encourage a multi-faceted understanding of how the narrative of nineteenth-century art is a narrative intrinsically attached to the problematics, and promise, of emerging modernity.
The source material for Creating the Modern was gathered and collated exclusively from online publications, facilitating access and use and affording students and scholars across disciplines opportunities for further research and knowledge production. Extracts from original sources include texts by art historians, artists, philosophers, critics, and theorists, providing an expanded context of the artistic, literary, scientific, and social conditions that informed modern art. As an Open Education Resource (OER), Creating the Modern permits no-cost re-use, re-purpose, adaptation, and redistribution by others.
Artist unknown, Crowned Nun Portrait of Sor María de Guadalupe, c. 1800, oil on canvas (Banamex collection, Mexico City) Speakers: Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank and Dr. Beth Harris. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Willard Metcalf, Havana Harbor, 1902, oil on canvas, 46.5 x 66.4 cm (Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1992.49), a Seeing America video Speakers: Dr. Katherine Bourguignon, Curator, Terra Foundation for American Art, and Dr. Steven Zucker. Created by Beth Harris, Smarthistory, and Steven Zucker. Find learning related resources here: https://smarthistory.org/seeing-america-2/
A conversation with Sarah Alvarez, Director of School Programs, Art Institute of Chicago, Beth Harris, and Steven Zucker in front of a Face Jug from Edgefield county, South Carolina, c. 1860, stoneware and alkaline glaze, 13.3 cm high (The Art Institute of Chicago 2006.84) A Seeing America video. Created by Smarthistory.
Near Eastern Languages and Cultures graduate student Sara Brumfield recounts her experience working at the UCLA Library's Center for Primary Research and Training, where she described and translated two collections of cuneiform tablets. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
What most American students learn about as Custer's Last Stand was the last great victory for the Lakota people. Henry Oscar One Bull/Tȟatȟáŋka Waŋžíla (Hunkpapa Lakota), Custer's War, c. 1900, 39 x 69 inches (irregular), pigments, ink on muslin (Minneapolis Institute of Art) A Seeing America video Speakers: Dr. Jill Ahlberg Yohe, Associate Curator of Native American Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art and Dr. Steven Zucker. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker. Find learning related resources here: https://smarthistory.org/seeing-america-2/
Met curator Yelena Rakic on reading into Cylinder seal and modern impression: nude bearded hero wrestling with a water buffalo; bull-man wrestling with lion from Mesopotamia, c. 2250–2150 B.C.E. . Created by The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Cyrus Cylinder is one of the most famous objects to have survived from the ancient world. It was inscribed in Babylonian cuneiform on the orders of Persian King Cyrus the Great (559-530 B.C.E.) after he captured Babylon in 539 B.C.E. It was found in Babylon in modern Iraq in 1879 during a British Museum excavation. Cyrus claims to have achieved this with the aid of Marduk, the god of Babylon. He then describes measures of relief he brought to the inhabitants of the city, and tells how he returned a number of images of gods, which Nabonidus had collected in Babylon, to their proper temples throughout Mesopotamia and western Iran. At the same time he arranged for the restoration of these temples, and organized the return to their homelands of a number of people who had been held in Babylonia by the Babylonian kings. Although the Jews are not mentioned in this document, their return to Palestine following their deportation by Nebuchadnezzar II, was part of this policy. The cylinder is often referred to as the first bill of human rights as it appears to encourage freedom of worship throughout the Persian Empire and to allow deported people to return to their homelands, but it in fact reflects a long tradition in Mesopotamia where, from as early as the third millennium B.C.E., kings began their reigns with declarations of reforms.
Paul Cézanne, Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses), c. 1894-1905, oil on canvas, 127.2 x 196.1 cm (The National Gallery, London). Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1902-04, oil on canvas, 73 x 91.9 cm (Philadelphia Museum of Art). Speakers: Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Cézanne, Still Life with Apples, 1895-98 (MoMA). Speakers: Beth Harris and Steven Zucker. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Plaster Cupid, oil on canvas, c.1895 (Courtauld Gallery, London) Speakers: Beth Harris, Rachel Ropeik, and Steven Zucker For more: http://smarthistory.org/Cezannes-Still-Life-with-Apples.html. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Paul Cézanne, The Red Rock, c. 1895, oil on canvas, 91 x 66 cm (Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris). Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
The first commercially successful photographic process was announced in 1839, the result of over a decade of experimentation by Louis Daguerre and Nicéphore Niépce. Unfortunately, Niépce died before the daguerreotype process was realized, and is best known for his invention of the heliograph, the process by which the “first photograph” was made in 1826. Daguerreotypes are sharply defined, highly reflective, one-of-a-kind photographs on silver-coated copper plates, usually packaged behind glass and kept in protective cases. The daguerreotype process is demonstrated in this chapter. This project is made possible by a grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services, grant number MA-10-13-0194.
Salvador Dalí, Metamorphosis of Narcissus, 1937, oil on canvas, 51.1 x 78.1 cm (Tate Modern, London) Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker.
Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory, 1931 (The Museum of Modern Art) Speakers: Sal Khan & Steven Zucker. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Beth Harris, Sal Khan and Steven Zucker discuss the Damien Hirst sculpture, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, and issues of interpretation. Created by Beth Harris, Steven Zucker, and Sal Khan.
This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:
"Vincent van Gogh once compared this impressionist masterpiece to a “Japanese dream”—a reflection of his love for Japanese prints but perhaps a comparison that has proven all too fitting. Because the thing about dreams is, their details tend to fade. A combination of natural aging and the buildup of grime has dulled van Gogh’s _Field with Irises near Arles_ over the past 130 years. Fortunately, those changes are not completely irreversible. Modern experimental art technology has given a team of Dutch researchers unprecedented access to the artist’s full color palette. Enabling them to not only digitally recreate van Gogh’s landscape in its original color—but also, to reproduce the very paints he used from scratch. Using the same techniques forensic scientists use to reconstruct a crime scene, the team first determined the chemical makeup of each dab of paint in the work..."
The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.
This art history video discussion examines Jacques-Louis David's "Oath of the Horatii", oil on canvas, 1784 (Musee du Louvre).