Marnin Young | Yeshiva University (original) (raw)

Books by Marnin Young

Research paper thumbnail of Van Gogh's Realism

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,

Research paper thumbnail of Realism in the Age of Impressionism: Painting and the Politics of Time

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

Research paper thumbnail of Impressionism and Imperialism in Maurice Cullen's African River

Research paper thumbnail of The Nineteenth Century: Part Two

The Nineteenth Century: Part Two

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.”

Research paper thumbnail of The Nineteenth Century: Part One

The Nineteenth Century: Part One

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."

Research paper thumbnail of Responses to "Questionnaire on Impressionism and the Social History of Art"

Research paper thumbnail of Capital in the Nineteenth Century: Edgar Degas's Portraits at the Stock Exchange in 1879

Research paper thumbnail of The Motionless Look of a Painting: Jules Bastien-Lepage, Les Foins, and the End of Realism

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.

Research paper thumbnail of The Antinomies of Time (on Frederic Jameson's The Antinomies of Realism)

The Antinomies of Time (on Frederic Jameson's The Antinomies of Realism)

nonsite, Feb 2014

Research paper thumbnail of Napoleon Disfigured: Nation, Identity, and War in Antoine-Jean Gros's Battle of Eylau

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.

Research paper thumbnail of The Death of Georges Seurat: Neo-Impressionism and the Fate of the Avant-Garde in 1891

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.

Research paper thumbnail of The Problem of Leisure (special feature, "Do We Need Adorno?")

nonsite, Sep 2012

Yet we can tell the difference. Consider some additional data: We can remind ourselves how well the ideology works—we’ve already seen how easily this transmutation happens in our poetry examples—when we notice how inevitably the alternative title to Cronan’s essay comes to mind. When the distinctive feature of neoliberalism’s economic subject is that he has become, in Michel Foucault’s words, an “entrepreneur of himself” (226), we truly are in a world where everyman, including the poet, is a capitalist. But on this account—the neoliberal one—everyman is a capitalist precisely in virtue of his relation to his labor. After all, it’s by hitting upon the convergence of wage income and capital in neoliberal theory that Foucault is able to identify the new homo economicus: “human capital” in the Beckerian sense, he is “his own producer” as well as “the source of his earnings” (226). But it’s also hard to see the difference, in this respect, between Clune’s suggestion that the data really show we are all laborers and Gary Becker’s belief that we are all entrepreneurs. It’s just like the poets said: we are all capitalists and/but we are all proletarians. We can’t even call heads or tails with that coin.

Research paper thumbnail of Heroic Indolence: Realism and the Politics of Time in Raffaëlli’s Absinthe Drinkers

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

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Richard Thomson, Presence of the Past in French Art, 1870–1905: Modernity and Continuity

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.

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Hollis Clayson, Illuminated Paris: Essays on Art and Lighting in the Belle Époque

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Laura Anne Kalba, Color in the Age of Impressionism

The Art Bulletin, 2019

Chapter 2 pivots to the “novelty and color-driven world of horticulture and gardening” (p. 44). Interestingly enough, Chevreul returns as an advocate of what Kalba calls “ocularcentric” gardening (p. 50). ‘The new parks and flower shops of Baron Georges-Eugéne Haussmann’s Paris were designed to produce a “powerful chromatic visual effect” (p. 57). In tandem with the new gardens, artificial flowers bloomed. Color

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Linda Nochlin, Misère The Visual Representation of Misery in the 19th Century

caa.reviews, 2019

http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/3484#.XGR9c1xKiUl

Research paper thumbnail of Symbolism Reformed (Review of Allison Morehead, Nature's Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form)

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Charles Palermo, Modernism and Authority: Picasso and His Milieu around 1900

caa.reviews

http://caareviews.org/reviews/3059#.XGR98FxKiUk

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Michael Marrinan, Gustave Caillebotte: Painting the Paris of Naturalism, 1872-1887

Research paper thumbnail of Van Gogh's Realism

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,

Research paper thumbnail of Realism in the Age of Impressionism: Painting and the Politics of Time

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.

Research paper thumbnail of Impressionism and Imperialism in Maurice Cullen's African River

Research paper thumbnail of The Nineteenth Century: Part Two

The Nineteenth Century: Part Two

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.”

Research paper thumbnail of The Nineteenth Century: Part One

The Nineteenth Century: Part One

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."

Research paper thumbnail of Responses to "Questionnaire on Impressionism and the Social History of Art"

Research paper thumbnail of Capital in the Nineteenth Century: Edgar Degas's Portraits at the Stock Exchange in 1879

Research paper thumbnail of The Motionless Look of a Painting: Jules Bastien-Lepage, Les Foins, and the End of Realism

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.

Research paper thumbnail of The Antinomies of Time (on Frederic Jameson's The Antinomies of Realism)

The Antinomies of Time (on Frederic Jameson's The Antinomies of Realism)

nonsite, Feb 2014

Research paper thumbnail of Napoleon Disfigured: Nation, Identity, and War in Antoine-Jean Gros's Battle of Eylau

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.

Research paper thumbnail of The Death of Georges Seurat: Neo-Impressionism and the Fate of the Avant-Garde in 1891

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.

Research paper thumbnail of The Problem of Leisure (special feature, "Do We Need Adorno?")

nonsite, Sep 2012

Yet we can tell the difference. Consider some additional data: We can remind ourselves how well the ideology works—we’ve already seen how easily this transmutation happens in our poetry examples—when we notice how inevitably the alternative title to Cronan’s essay comes to mind. When the distinctive feature of neoliberalism’s economic subject is that he has become, in Michel Foucault’s words, an “entrepreneur of himself” (226), we truly are in a world where everyman, including the poet, is a capitalist. But on this account—the neoliberal one—everyman is a capitalist precisely in virtue of his relation to his labor. After all, it’s by hitting upon the convergence of wage income and capital in neoliberal theory that Foucault is able to identify the new homo economicus: “human capital” in the Beckerian sense, he is “his own producer” as well as “the source of his earnings” (226). But it’s also hard to see the difference, in this respect, between Clune’s suggestion that the data really show we are all laborers and Gary Becker’s belief that we are all entrepreneurs. It’s just like the poets said: we are all capitalists and/but we are all proletarians. We can’t even call heads or tails with that coin.

Research paper thumbnail of Heroic Indolence: Realism and the Politics of Time in Raffaëlli’s Absinthe Drinkers

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.

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Richard Thomson, Presence of the Past in French Art, 1870–1905: Modernity and Continuity

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.

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Hollis Clayson, Illuminated Paris: Essays on Art and Lighting in the Belle Époque

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Laura Anne Kalba, Color in the Age of Impressionism

The Art Bulletin, 2019

Chapter 2 pivots to the “novelty and color-driven world of horticulture and gardening” (p. 44). Interestingly enough, Chevreul returns as an advocate of what Kalba calls “ocularcentric” gardening (p. 50). ‘The new parks and flower shops of Baron Georges-Eugéne Haussmann’s Paris were designed to produce a “powerful chromatic visual effect” (p. 57). In tandem with the new gardens, artificial flowers bloomed. Color

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Linda Nochlin, Misère The Visual Representation of Misery in the 19th Century

caa.reviews, 2019

http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/3484#.XGR9c1xKiUl

Research paper thumbnail of Symbolism Reformed (Review of Allison Morehead, Nature's Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form)

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Charles Palermo, Modernism and Authority: Picasso and His Milieu around 1900

caa.reviews

http://caareviews.org/reviews/3059#.XGR98FxKiUk

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Michael Marrinan, Gustave Caillebotte: Painting the Paris of Naturalism, 1872-1887

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Dario Gamboni, Paul Gauguin: The Mysterious Centre of Thought

Research paper thumbnail of The Labyrinth of Interpretation: On Cathy Gere’s Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism

The Labyrinth of Interpretation: On Cathy Gere’s Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism

nonsite, Jun 2011

Research paper thumbnail of The Social History of Impressionism: A Conversation

The Social History of Impressionism: A Conversation