4.2 Purpose and Audience in Later European and American Art

A Philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery (Joseph Wright of Derby; c. 1763–1765; oil on canvas). An orrery is a mechanical model of the solar system. A lamp stands in for the sun, lighting rapt faces of all ages. Using the dramatic lighting once reserved for religious scenes, Wright made science awe-inspiring for an Enlightenment audience.

The Swing (Jean-Honoré Fragonard; 1767; oil on canvas). Rococo is a light, playful aristocratic style of pastel colors and flirtation. A young woman kicks off her shoe as a man hidden in the bushes looks up her skirt, while an older man pushes the swing. A private patron commissioned this lighthearted scene.

Self-Portrait (Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun; 1790; oil on canvas). Marie Antoinette's portrait painter fled the French Revolution and painted this in Rome. She shows herself at work, painting the queen, confident and elegant. She advertised her skill and her royal connections as one of very few women in the French Royal Academy.

Y no hai remedio, plate 15 of The Disasters of War (Francisco de Goya; 1810–1823, published 1863; etching, drypoint, burin and burnishing). During Napoleon's occupation of Spain, Goya etched brutal scenes. Here a blindfolded prisoner is tied to a post while rifles poke in from the edge, the soldiers faceless. The series was published only after his death.

Liberty Leading the People (Eugène Delacroix; 1830; oil on canvas). Romanticism valued emotion, drama and current events. Liberty, a woman with the French flag, leads Parisians of different classes over the dead in the July Revolution of 1830. The government bought it, then kept it out of sight as too inflammatory.

The Oxbow (Thomas Cole; 1836; oil on canvas). Stormy wilderness on the left, sunny farmland on the right, with Cole sketching in between. Shown to American audiences, it raises the question of whether settlement was progress or loss.

Slave Ship (Joseph Mallord William Turner; 1840; oil on canvas). Based on a real case in which enslaved Africans were thrown overboard so the owners could claim insurance. Shackled limbs sink among fish under a blazing sky. It was shown in London as an international antislavery meeting took place.

The Stone Breakers (Gustave Courbet; 1849, destroyed 1945; oil on canvas). Realism showed ordinary people as they were. Two laborers, one old, one young, break stones at life size, a scale usually kept for history painting. Shown after the 1848 revolutions, it struck viewers as political.

Olympia (Édouard Manet; 1863; oil on canvas). Manet reworked Titian's Venus of Urbino as a modern prostitute who stares at you, with a Black maid bringing flowers. Flat lighting and harsh contours shocked Paris viewers in 1865. Recent scholars also focus on the maid, modeled by a woman named Laure.

The Burghers of Calais (Auguste Rodin; 1884–1895; bronze). Calais commissioned a monument to six citizens who, in 1347, offered their lives to the English king to save the city. Rodin showed them anguished and individual, not heroic, and wanted them at ground level, among viewers. The city first put it on a tall pedestal.

Memorial Sheet for Karl Liebknecht (Käthe Kollwitz; 1919–1920; woodcut). After the murder of Liebknecht, a German communist leader, Kollwitz showed workers mourning over his body. The stark woodcut speaks for working people's grief rather than for a political party.

Illustration from The Results of the First Five-Year Plan (Varvara Stepanova; 1932; photomontage). Photomontage combines cut photographs into one image. Stepanova, a Constructivist who believed art should serve society, set Lenin above crowds with red shapes and an electric tower. It celebrated Soviet industrialization as propaganda.

The Migration Series, Panel 49 (Jacob Lawrence; 1940–1941; casein tempera on hardboard). One of 60 panels on the Great Migration, when millions of Black Americans moved from the South to Northern cities. A line divides a restaurant into white and Black diners, showing that discrimination followed them north. Flat shapes and bold colors tell history clearly.

Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Park (Diego Rivera; 1947–1948; fresco). A mural for a Mexico City hotel crowds centuries of Mexican history into a park. At the center, Rivera paints himself as a boy holding the hand of La Catrina, an elegant skeleton, with Frida Kahlo behind him. An inscription denying God caused outrage, and Rivera changed it.

Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks (Claes Oldenburg; 1969–1974; steel, aluminum and cast resin, painted). Yale students commissioned it during the Vietnam War. A giant lipstick sits on tank treads, mixing consumer culture with war; it served as a stage for protest speeches. It was later rebuilt in sturdier materials.