Chapter 21: Toward the Modern Era: 1870-1914 Flashcards
La Belle Époque
French for “beautiful era”; a term applied to a period in French history characterized by peace and flourishing of the arts, usually dated as beginning in 1890 and ending with World War I in 1914.
medical advances
reduced infant mortality, food shortages, housing shortages
The disparity in wealth between classes and between nations led to
he greatest period of European migration to the United States, where it was rumored—fancifully, to be sure—that the streets were paved with gold. In 1907, the peak year, more than 1.25 million European immigrants came to the United States, most of them from Southern and Eastern Europe. Between 1870 and 1914, millions upon millions of Europeans came to the United States
the world in which we live—with its great hopes and fears—began to take its present political shape in 1870
with Otto von Bismarck’s (1815–1898) creation of the German Empire—the incorporation of smaller German states into Prussia through a series of brief wars
he was conservative but started many liberal ideas such as old-age pensions, government sponsored medical care, unemployment insurance, and accident insurance
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Christianity was a slave religion, extolling feeble virtues such as compassion and self-sacrifice: the greatest curse of Western civilization. He viewed democracy as little better, calling it the rule of the mediocre masses.
Society can only improve if strong and bold individuals, who can survive the loss of illusions, by the free assertion of the will establish new values of nobility and goodness. Nietzsche called these superior individuals Übermenschen (literally “supermen”)
Unfortunately, his concepts were later taken up and distorted by many would-be world rulers of the 20th century, most notoriously the leaders of Nazi Germany.
women’s sufferage
British women could vote in local elections from 1868, and they could vote for local governments in Finland and Sweden in the 1870s. In the 1890s, some U.S. states granted women the vote, but only single women who owned property. By the eve of World War I, with the exception of Finland, no Western country (including the United States) allowed women to vote in national elections.
Women’s Social and Political Union, founded in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst.
Pankhurst and her daughters believed that only direct, violent action would secure women the vote. Her organization campaigned against political candidates who were opposed to women’s suffrage. When leading politicians, including British prime minister Herbert Asquith and his minister David Lloyd George, refused to back women’s right to vote, her supporters smashed the windows of London’s most exclusive shops, assaulted leading politicians, and chained themselves to the railings of official buildings. When sent to prison, they staged hunger strikes (only to be gruesomely force-fed). One of their activists, Emily Wilding Davison, threw herself in front of the king’s horse on Derby day, 1913, and was trampled to death. Only after World War I, in 1918, did the suffragettes in Britain win the right to vote. U.S. women voted in national elections for the first time in 1920.
Academic art
Artists educated in the academy painted traditional subjects (history, nudes, mythological subjects) rendered with precise drawing and highly polished surfaces.
William-Adolphe Bouguereau
One of the more popular and accomplished Academic painters
Gustave Courbet
laid the groundwork for Impressionism
impressionists
A late-19th-century artistic style characterized by the attempt to capture the fleeting effects of light through painting in short strokes of pure color.
They all reacted against the constraints of the Academic style and subject matter. They advocated painting out of doors and chose to render subjects found in nature. They studied the dramatic effects of atmosphere and light on people and objects and, through a varied palette, attempted to duplicate these effects on canvas.
Postimpressionists
A late-19th-century artistic style that relied on the gains made by Impressionists in terms of the use of color and spontaneous brushwork but employed these elements as expressive devices. The Postimpressionists rejected the essentially decorative aspects of Impressionist subject matter.
Postimpressionists fell into two groups that in some ways paralleled the stylistic polarities of the Baroque period as well as the Neoclassical–Romantic period. On the one hand, the work of Georges Seurat and Paul Cézanne had at its core a more systematic approach to compositional structure, brushwork, and color. On the other hand, the lavishly brushed canvases of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin coordinated line and color with symbolism and emotion.
pointillism
A systematic method of applying minute dots of discrete pigments to the canvas; the dots are intended to be “mixed” by the eye when viewed.
Synthetism
Paul Gauguin’s theory of art, which advocated the use of broad areas of unnatural color and “primitive” or symbolic subject matter.
Fauvism
From the French fauve for “wild beast”; an early-20th-century style of art characterized by the juxtaposition of areas of bright colors that are often unrelated to the objects they represent and by distorted linear perspective.
use of harsh, nondescriptive color, bold linear patterning, and a distorted form of perspective. They saw color as autonomous, a subject in and of itself, not merely an adjunct to nature. Their vigorous brushwork and emphatic lines grew out of their desire for a direct form of expression unencumbered by theory. Their skewed perspectives and distorted forms were also inspired by the discovery of ethnographic works of art from African, Polynesian, and other ancient cultures.
