The Art of Revolution

The state and nature of a culture’s development can be seen by it’s modes of popular expression. Art, music, and literature all combine to reveal the over-all state of a society’s growth and attitudes towards such matters as sexuality, politics, and the family. The 19^th Century was a turbulent time for all three mediums, a mirror for the political, economic, and social upheavals Europe was experiencing at that time. In the following paragraphs I will introduce three of the most prominent revolutionaries on the cultural battlefield and the influences they had on their peers, society as a whole, and on posterity. Kate Chopin (1851-1904) is a good place to begin this journey as she is arguably the mother of modern feminist literature, a distinction earned by her persistence in challenging typical notions of women and their proper attitudes. Chopin used irony, imagery, and an economy of words to create intriguing situations and thought-provoking tales about love and relationships that did not get serious attention until half a century after her death, likely due to the author’s unwillingness to conform to the idealized notions of womanhood. In the short-short story “The Story of an Hour” Chopin takes us into the mind of a recent widow who is far from grieving as she contemplates a newfound liberty brought to her by the loss of her husband, and the darkly ironic ending to the tale. That work, however, pales in comparison to the author’s exploration of adultery in the short story “The Storm” in which the protagonist succumbs to temptation and strays from her husband without the slightest regret. Further, with the line “her firm, elastic flesh that was knowing for the first time its birthright…” Chopin was clearly suggesting that women actually enjoyed sex, a scandalous notion in her day and still a dangerous topic now.

In the field of music Chopin has a kindred soul in one of the most electrifying personalities in the history of art, the master composer Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827). Beethoven revolutionized music by adding five new instruments to the orchestra, doubling the number of wind instruments and adding new words to the musical vocabulary to deepen the understanding of the work. It was Beethoven who added the words dolente (sorrowful) and teneramente (tenderly) to the musical vocabulary, alongside adagio (slow) and allegro (fast). He further rewrote the rules of Symphony by expanding the number of movements, the length of the work, and by using sudden pauses and silences to capture the listener. The Maestro’s talent was undeniable, but his manner of expressing it was shocking to the reserved society of Napoleonic France, and his works, the Ninth Symphony in particular, was not well received in all quarters.

Still another artist who dared to challenge convention was the painter Edouard Manet, who like Beethoven, received both acclaim for his talent and vilification for his manner of expressing it. One classic example of this was his infamous Dejeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) where he depicted a nude woman calmly enjoying a picnic with two fully dressed men. This painting was considered so indecent that the jury of the Royal Academy rejected it from display at the Paris Salon, leading to it’s exhibition at the Salon des Refuses (Salon of the Rejected painters) where it caused a stir anyway. Not satisfied with violating one social taboo, Manet went on to paint Olympia wherein he attacked the “sacred” form of the reclining nude by painting a model in the “costume” of a prostitute. The idea of painting nude women was not a scandalous one provided it was done “appropriately.” That is to say that the model could portray a Goddess or an Idealized Persona such as Liberty, but to simply be a *gasp* nude woman….it was unthinkable!

For good or ill, these three artists, and their contemporaries forever changed the face of the world by stripping away “common sense” notions of what was “decent and proper” for art, society, and culture as a whole. It makes one wonder what will be said about the controversial artists of the now when our children are grown.