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In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Paris was the world's art capital. The city's art schools, museums, salons, and streets attracted painters and sculptors from everywhere.
Explore Paris as the 19th-20th century art capital through Delacroix, Valadon, and Brancusi's lives, studios, and artistic legacies.
Key Takeaways
- Paris was the birthplace of multiple influential art movements and a hub for artists worldwide.
- Delacroix's innovations in color and composition deeply influenced later artists like Van Gogh and Cézanne.
- Artistic studios and museums in Paris preserve the legacy and working environments of major artists.
- Suzanne Valadon exemplifies breaking social barriers and the role of women in art history.
- Brancusi's abstract sculpture marked a pivotal shift in modern art, bridging European and American art scenes.
What the video covers
- Paris was the world's art capital in the 19th and early 20th centuries, fostering major movements like Impressionism, Romanticism, and Cubism.
- Eugène Delacroix, a leading Romantic painter, influenced modern art with works like 'Liberty Leading the People' and innovative color techniques.
- Delacroix's studio is now a museum housing over 1,000 of his works, offering insight into his life and artistic process.
- Delacroix was influenced by Théodore Géricault and John Constable, adopting techniques such as 'flossing' and color theory.
- Romanticism emerged as a reaction to social upheaval, emphasizing individualism, imagination, and emotion over neoclassicism.
- Suzanne Valadon, a former artist model turned painter, challenged social norms and influenced many artists including Picasso and Utrillo.
- Valadon's studio is now the Musée de Montmartre, a hub for late 19th and early 20th-century artists.
- Constantin Brancusi revolutionized sculpture with abstract forms, influenced by Romanian folk art and rejecting Rodin's traditional methods.
- Brancusi gained recognition in New York, championed by Peggy Guggenheim, and is credited with reinventing modern sculpture.
- The video highlights the interconnected lives of artists in Paris and how their work shaped future art movements.
Chapters
- 00:00Paris as the 19th Century Art Capital
- 01:35Eugène Delacroix's Life and Studio Museum
- 02:58Delacroix's Influences and Early Works
- 04:11Romanticism and Social Context in France
- 05:22Delacroix's Studies and 'Liberty Leading the People'
- 06:38Techniques Inspired by John Constable
- 07:28Delacroix's Impact on Color Theory and Later Artists
- 08:23New Generation of Artists After Delacroix
- 09:42Suzanne Valadon's Life and Artistic Circle
- 10:52Valadon's Artistic Style and Legacy
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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Major art movements like Impressionism, Symbolism, Art Nouveau, Fauvism, Cubism, Art Deco, and Abstract Art all began in Paris. It was in Paris that modern art was born.
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Art is, of course, not created in a vacuum: Artists are influenced by other artists, who in turn are influenced by other artists, in a long chain of connections. In this episode, we look at those interconnected lives through three major artists and visit their studios in Paris.
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Studios still open to the public, which give us an insight into how they lived and worked.
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The apartment and studio of the French romantic painter Eugène Delacroix is now a museum. It has over one thousand artworks by Delacroix: paintings, drawings, prints, writings, and objects that belonged to him. Delacroix grew up during the age of Napoleon. His father was the minister of foreign
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affairs, but most historians agree that Delacroix's real father was the diplomat and notorious womanizer Charles Maurice de Talleyrand. At the age of 17, Delacroix apprenticed at the studio of the conservative painter Pierre Narcisse Guérin, whose work of 1816 almost certainly influenced
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Delacroix's later masterpiece. At the same time, he began to study in the Louvre, copying the paintings of Veronese, Titian, and Rubens with other young painters. This was not copying merely to imitate; this is how artists learned technique. In Guérin's studio, Delacroix met Théodore Géricault, who would
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become a close friend and his major influence. As I show in my Géricault video, he began to work on The Raft of the Medusa in 1818. Delacroix watched Géricault work on the massive canvas,
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and the dramatic brushwork, daring composition, and choice of subject matter made a deep impression on Delacroix. He even served as a model for one of the figures in the foreground. In Delacroix's first
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major canvas of 1822, the structure is strikingly similar to Géricault's raft, down to the figures which anchor the pyramid shape. The same figures remind us not just of Géricault,
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but of the twisted bodies and drama of Michelangelo. And it marked the artist as part of the new modern style that would soon be called "Romanticism." This was a movement away from neo-classicism, with its emphasis
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on classical antiquity, and instead focused on the individual, imagination, and emotions.
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France was facing turbulent times. Mechanisation and urbanisation, plus revolutions, counter-revolutions, and civil unrest dominated the first part of the 19th century.
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Romanticism's focus on individualism was a reaction against these major social changes. Delacroix led this artistic movement, and "Liberty Leading the People" is a prime example of Romanticism.
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The revolution in the painting is not the famous 1789 one of 40 years earlier, but the 1830 revolution that took place just days before he started the painting! Paris was a battleground, and the events unfolded on Delacroix's doorstep. The artist meticulously planned and researched
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the painting, and one of the museum's highlights is a stunning painted study for "Liberty Leading the People." It is owned privately and on loan to the museum temporarily.
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He used studies to recycle ideas, and this one made four years before "Liberty" includes an agitated figure leading a crowd behind her. He made numerous drawings exploring both of the main elements: the liberty figure and the pile of wounded and suffering bodies.
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Unlike classical representations of Liberty, which show the goddess as immortal and untouchable, Delacroix portrays her as both an allegorical goddess figure and a robust woman of the people, in the heat of the action. The mound of bodies acts as a kind of pedestal from which Liberty strides,
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barefoot and bare-breasted, out of the canvas and into the space of the viewer. "The Haywain" by John Constable is an image so nostalgic, so familiar, that we forget how radical and influential it was. Its use of colour and loose brush strokes were a sensation when it was
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shown at the Paris Salon in 1824, and we know both Géricault and Delacroix saw it. In a departure from the smooth paint surfaces of Neo-classical works, Delacroix used a Constable technique: "flossing."
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This process involves applying short delicate strokes of colour on top of the finished paint surface to create light and movement. Constable also revolutionized the painting of shadow by representing it as composed of strands of colour, another technique Delacroix would adopt.
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The French government bought Liberty in 1830, but officials deemed its glorification of revolution too "inflammatory" and removed it from public view. It was rarely seen again until 1874, when it was transferred to the Louvre. Inspired by other works, "Liberty Leading the People"
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would itself become influential. It was the inspiration for Victor Hugo's "Les Misérables" and the industry that would follow. Later, it also inspired the Statue of Liberty in New York.
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Delacroix's paintings would profoundly shape the work of artists who followed him. His experimentation with colour theory liberated art.
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He showed that no hue existed on its own; it would always be altered by complementary or contrasting colour. So it's no surprise that Delacroix was a major influence on Vincent van Gogh.
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Paul Cézanne also studied Delacroix's use of colour, and we can see the impact if we look at the two artists' work together. Both followed in the tradition of classical nudes.
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The poses of the bathers are similar, and in both images, the figures merge with the landscape.
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The visible brush strokes favored by Delacroix are even more dramatic in Cézanne's painting. At Delacroix's funeral in 1863, people said that his death marked the end of an era in French art.
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Yet even as Delacroix passed into history, a new generation of rebellious artists had begun to create work that engaged with the past but looked to the future.
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From a poverty-stricken childhood to a life as a circus acrobat, from a career as a popular artist model to becoming an artist herself, Suzanne Valadon lived a life so extraordinary, it reads like fiction. She was born to an unmarried washerwoman in a provincial village.
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Her education was on the streets, where unlike her upper-class contemporaries, Valadon defined her own identity—outside of prevailing social norms—and painted more challenging pictures.
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Her house and studio, now the Musée de Montmartre, witnessed a real who's who of artists passing through its doors. Valadon knew virtually every great painter of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Amedeo Modigliani would call her "the only woman in Paris who understands me."
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Her son was the painter Maurice Utrillo, who was so devoted to her that he signed most of his canvases "Maurice Utrillo - V"—for Valadon, and her friends Pablo Picasso, André Derain, and Georges Braque attended her funeral. She was the lover of the composer Erik Satie and the painters
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Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Renoir rented a studio in the same house as Valadon, where he painted this masterpiece, as well as "The Swing," which he executed in what are now the Musée de Montmartre gardens. At just five feet tall, Valadon was tiny, but her striking blue eyes, creamy skin,
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and golden hair made her a popular artist model. The most famous paintings featuring Valadon are by Renoir.
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In "Dance at Bougival," she was pregnant with her son—the future painter Maurice Utrillo, possibly fathered by Renoir. She posed for this painting, but rumours of an affair so incensed Renoir's fiancée, Aline Charigot, that she scraped Valadon's face off the canvas and made Renoir replace it with her own.
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It was said that Valadon learned to paint by observing the techniques of the leading artists she modelled for. You can see in Valadon's work the flat and solid colours of Paul Gauguin,
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depicted by Valadon's male contemporaries, it was unusual and even shocking for a female artist to paint nudes. Her images of women were generally truthful rather than idealised representations.
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Valodon's masterpiece shows a full-figured confident woman lounging on a daybed. She is a liberated modern woman who smokes, reads and most importantly isn't sexually available.
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The composition references Eduard Manet's "Olympia", itself modeled after Titian's "Venus of Urbino". But unlike both men's nudes, Valadon's subject is not an idealised "pin-up" Suzanne Valadon forged a successful career in a man's world and raised important questions about ageing, beauty and female desire.
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By the time of her death, Valadon had made over 450 oil paintings, but although she had a very successful commercial career as an artist, she is still not as well known today as she should be.
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Constantin Brâncuși - or Brancusi was a Romanian peasant born in a small farming village, who through sheer talent and determination became THE pioneer of modern sculpture.
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Today Brancusi's Paris studio is a work of art in its own right - it is an exact reconstruction of Brancusi's original atelier. In 1956 Brancusi left his entire studio (including its contents) to the French state - on condition that the studio would remain precisely how he left it.
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This was important. For Brancusi the relationship between his sculptures and the space that contains them was "key". From his early studies in Bucharest he had placed sculptures in a tight spatial relationship, creating new works which he called "Mobile groups".
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The works bounce off each other and create a new dialogue and this is how we see them today.
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Brancusi changed the course of sculpture from what he called "Beefsteak and Muscle" to geometric abstraction, and would be a major influence on artists like Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Isamu Noguchi. The artist Ellsworth Kelly met Brancusi in Paris in 1953,
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and minimalism would evolve from the ideas first developed in Brancus's sculptural forms. As a child in Romania, he had a natural talent for carving wooden tools and we can see this skill in his later practice as a sculptor, who carved his own work directly from wood or stone. The plinths,
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pedestals and homemade furniture made by Brancusi that we see in his atelier, were part of the work , and as important an artistic product as his sculptures. After training in Bucharest where he won many awards, Brancusi set off on a legendary 18-month walk from Bucharest to Paris and arrived
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the same year Picasso, Modigliani and Chagall did - 1904. He worked as an assistant to Auguste Rodin, carving in marble from Rodin's clay models, but he left after only two months saying: "Nothing grows under the shadow of big trees". Brancusi rejected Rodin's practice of making
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clay models - but leaving the final product to be cast or completed by a team of skilled labourers.
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Instead Brancusi preferred to do the work himself, working directly on a piece of stone or wood.
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This practice was followed by artists like Henry Moore, and "direct carving" became seen as one of the fundamental ideas of modern sculpture.
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In his early art we can see traces of Rodin, but we also see a rarely discussed influence Medado Rosso, and Brancusi himself acknowledged that Romanian folk art - in particular its wood carvings - were important. Like many European artists experimenting with abstraction at the time,
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Brancusi was influenced by African art. In particular "Kota reliquary figures" of Gabon. Artists in the early 20th century were especially fascinated by the radical abstractions of the human body in African art. Picasso had a large African guardian figure in his own collection,
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and Giacometti also collected African art. These figures were a major influence on Cubism, the dominant art form at this time, but while Picasso and Braque were fracturing and fragmenting forms, Brancusi was "streamlining" them, emphasising clean lines, and pushing the medium of sculpture into new
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unique territories. In 1913, five of Brancusi's sculptures were chosen for the Armory Show in New York, and a year later he was given his first ever solo show in the world.
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The influential Peggy Guggenheim championed him (as she would later champion Jackson Pollock). Paris may have welcomed Brancusi, but it was New York that made his name.
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This is one of the masterpieces on display in Brancus's atelier in Paris. The model was his lover, the Hungarian artist Margit Pogany, who described sitting for Brancusi over several weeks.
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Each time he created a perfect likeness in clay she said he would destroy it and reuse the clay and start all over again. Despite many life sessions, it was only after Pogany left Paris that Brancusi carved this marble bust of her - from memory - then he cast four additional versions.
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The finished work captures not an exact likeness but the intrinsic nature of Pogany. It is a model in simplicity that reduces the basic features of a woman's face to what Brancusi called "The Essence of Things".
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Constantin Brancusi's sculptures looked like nothing else - then or now. In the same way that Picasso reinvented painting at the start of the 20th century, it's safe to say the Brancusi "reinvented sculpture".
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When we talk about modern art, we are really talking about Paris. It was a time when artists came from all over the world just to be in that magical city - to be transformed.
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It was an extraordinary time and place, that was worth walking all the way across Europe for.
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Delacroix, Valadon and Brancusi helped make Paris, "The City of Art", a reputation it would retain for over a century, seemingly invincible in its role as a visionary cultural leader.
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But like all things, that too was to change.
Topics:Paris art historyEugène DelacroixRomanticismSuzanne ValadonMaurice UtrilloConstantin Brancusimodern art19th century artart museums Parisartistic influence
