Books by Marnin Young
Through Vincent's Eyes: Van Gogh and His Sources, 2022
vincent van gogh's art virtually defines the emergence of the avant-garde in the nineteenth centu... more vincent van gogh's art virtually defines the emergence of the avant-garde in the nineteenth century. In his own lifetime, famously, critics and collectors, to say nothing of the public, largely overlooked his work. Today, his art towers over the cultural landscape. To see the crowds milling around Starry Night in New York or Paris is to see an artist far ahead of his time. Van Gogh's own taste in art, however, can seem oddly discordant with his avant-garde ambitions and accomplishments. Jules Breton and Jules Dupré, to name but two of his favorite painters, are more consistent with what we would now call academic art. Relying on conventional modes of representation, their art was largely oriented toward a middle-class audience. How to make sense, then, of this disjunction between avant-garde practice and seemingly backward-looking taste? The easiest explanation is chronological. While isolated in a Dutch and Belgian context, Van Gogh's access to the new art emerging in Paris was limited. Barbizon painters and The Hague School were among his primary touchstones. After arriving in the French capital in early 1886, his horizons broadened. His paintings quickly adopted a more colorful palette associated with Impressionism and a controlled, pointillist brushstroke derived from the Neo-Impressionists. "He is trying hard to put more sunlight in them," wrote his brother Theo in May 1886. 1 The heightened color and expressive brushwork of 1888 followed logically. But this account, however accurate its broad-brush rendering, fails to recognize van gogh's realism Marnin Young When people conceive of realism in the sense of literal truth-namely precise drawing and local colour. There's something other than that.-Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh,
The late 1870s and early 1880s were watershed years in the history of French painting. As outgoin... more The late 1870s and early 1880s were watershed years in the history of French painting. As outgoing economic and social structures were being replaced by a capitalist, measured time, Impressionist artists sought to create works that could be perceived in an instant, capturing the sensations of rapidly transforming modern life. Yet a generation of artists pushed back against these changes, spearheading a short-lived revival of the Realist practices that had dominated at mid-century and advocating slowness in practice, subject matter, and beholding. This book looks closely at five works by Jules Bastien-Lepage, Gustave Caillebotte, Alfred-Philippe Roll, Jean-François Raffaëlli, and James Ensor, artists who shared a concern with painting and temporality that is all but forgotten today, having been eclipsed by the ideals of Impressionism. This study situates later Realism for the first time within the larger social, political, and economic framework and argues for its centrality in understanding the development of modern art.
Papers by Marnin Young
Nonsite.org, 2019
Edited by Bridget Alsdorf and Marnin Young, with the editorial assistance of Luke Naessens, this ... more Edited by Bridget Alsdorf and Marnin Young, with the editorial assistance of Luke Naessens, this is the second in a series of issues on nineteenth-century art. Contents: Alex Potts, “Social Theory and the Realist Impulse in Nineteenth-Century Art"; Hollis Clayson, “The Ornamented Eiffel Tower: Awareness and Denial”; Margaret Werth, “Mallarmé and Impressionism in 1876”; Michelle Foa, “The Making of Degas: Duranty, Technology, and the Meaning of Materials in Later Nineteenth-Century Paris”'; Allison Morehead, “Modernism and the Green Baize"; Jennifer Olmsted, “In Defense of Painting: Delacroix’s Lion Hunt at the 1855 Exposition Universelle.”
Nonsite.org, 2018
Edited by Bridget Alsdorf and Marnin Young, with the editorial assistance of Luke Naessens, this ... more Edited by Bridget Alsdorf and Marnin Young, with the editorial assistance of Luke Naessens, this is the first in a series of issues featuring new scholarship on nineteenth-century art. Contents: T. J. Clark, "What Hegel Would Have Said About Monet"; Richard Shiff, "Cézanne Photographic"; Susan Sidlauskas, "The Medical Portrait: Resisting the Shadow Archive"; Cordula Grewe, "Secrets of a Mystery Man: Wilhelm Schadow and the Art of Portraiture in Germany, circa 1830"; Samuel Raybone, "Gustave Caillebotte’s Interiors: Working Between Leisure and Labor."
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Art History, Feb 2014
Although a popular success when Jules Bastien-Lepage first showed it at the Paris Salon of 1878, ... more Although a popular success when Jules Bastien-Lepage first showed it at the Paris Salon of 1878, Les Foins (Haymaking) immediately prompted a critical skirmish over the legacy and meaning of realism. At the centre of the debate was the painter’s troubling representation of an immobile, exhausted haymaker, ‘absorbed in some vague thought’, as one critic put it. Underlying the critical division, this essay argues, was the painting’s problematic attempt to make an enduring and temporally-extended picture – a picture consistent with the mid-century realism of Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet – out of the historically shifting dynamics of rural wage labour in early Third Republic France. In doing so, Bastien-Lepage brought one line of realist painting to a close and in turn opened a new tradition of artistic naturalism.
Art historians have almost invariably focused on the seeming ideological contradictions in Antoin... more Art historians have almost invariably focused on the seeming ideological contradictions in Antoine-Jean Gros’s Battle of Eylau, pointing consistently to the “shocking” display of wounded and dead Russian soldiers in the foreground of the picture. All evidence suggests, however, that the canvas functioned quite effectively as propaganda for its historical audience at the Paris Salon of 1808. The resolution of this interpretative paradox is the central task of this article. Through an analysis of salon criticism and the application of recent theoretical approaches to the representation of war, it seeks to demonstrate how the painting’s focus on national identity in fact produced a compelling and ideologically coherent portrait of Napoleonic war.
Journal of the International Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art , Jul 2012
This essay examines the critical and artistic responses to the death of Georges Seurat in 1891. W... more This essay examines the critical and artistic responses to the death of Georges Seurat in 1891. While some at the time saw the avant-garde divided between scientifically-oriented Neo-Impressionism and mystical Symbolism, the posthumous understanding of Seurat’s work increasingly collapsed the two categories. In particular, the Neo-Impressionist embrace of the aesthetic of Charles Henry, in which compositional lines produced predictable effects on the viewer, made it possible to see Seurat’s paintings in purely formal, indeed idealist, terms. The Neo-Impressionist avant-garde consequently struggled to define its distinctive nature over the course of the year, with important consequences for later art.
The Art Bulletin, Jun 2008
First shown at the sixth Impressionist exhibition in 1881, Raffaëlli’s Absinthe Drinkers represen... more First shown at the sixth Impressionist exhibition in 1881, Raffaëlli’s Absinthe Drinkers represents a location, an activity, and a social type – the banlieue, drinking, and the déclassé – which, when mixed together, offered a volatile cocktail to its original audience. A detailed historical examination of the social signification of these subjects demonstrates that the core meaning of the work resides in its representation of time. Recuperating a durational pictorial temporality from mid-century Realism, the painting managed to suggest, for certain viewers, a critical alternative to Impressionism and to the intensifying restructuring of the cultural experience of time under modernity.
Book Reviews by Marnin Young
H-France Review, 2022
Once upon a time, political leaders evoked a “classical” style “to visually connect [the] contemp... more Once upon a time, political leaders evoked a “classical” style “to visually connect [the] contemporary Republic with the antecedents of democracy in classical antiquity, reminding citizens not only of their rights but also their responsibilities in maintaining and perpetuating its institutions.” This quote aptly summarizes the gist of Richard Thomson’s latest book on French art and visual culture during the first decades of the Third Republic. The words I cite here come not from Thomson, however. Quite the contrary: they appear in President Donald J. Trump’s 2020 “Executive Order on Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture.” As the source suggests, the evocation of the classical past as a model for the present is now overwhelmingly an affair of the right. And yet, this was not always the case. The strength and indeed the urgency of The Presence of the Past is its demonstration of the mutability of the political significance of past art. As Thomson shows, both left and right in Third Republic France--artists,
arts administrators, art historians, and politicians--sought to legitimize and enrich their art and ideology through dialogue with and emulation of Greco-Roman antiquity, the quattrocento, and even the painting of Peter Paul Rubens.
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Books by Marnin Young
Papers by Marnin Young
Book Reviews by Marnin Young
arts administrators, art historians, and politicians--sought to legitimize and enrich their art and ideology through dialogue with and emulation of Greco-Roman antiquity, the quattrocento, and even the painting of Peter Paul Rubens.
arts administrators, art historians, and politicians--sought to legitimize and enrich their art and ideology through dialogue with and emulation of Greco-Roman antiquity, the quattrocento, and even the painting of Peter Paul Rubens.