Jean-Antoine Watteaus Foursome Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Jean-Antoine Watteaus Foursome - testify ExampleThe image f cadavers being carried by an angry and frustrated crowd, with which I began this essay, is not remote from the one that I have just finished analyzing. Both Barbier and Watteau be symbolically recreating felt, palpable well-disposed change in the first two decades f the eighteenth century. They are also, on a hour level f symbolization, trying to understand the metaphorization f power and influence. The riots over paper money that had all at once become worthless and the commodification f art itself, f placing a monetary value on the around aesthetic f mans activities, are signifi give the axet issues, important to describe. The palpable weakening f a up to now seemingly invincible central government, objectified in these two scenes by the closed doors f the Palais-Royal and the disappearing delineation f Louis XIV, had been underlined by the relative openness that Philippe dOrleans had brought to his Court but, his candor was too little and too late. causality had hemorrhaged into the streets. Classes were being redefined, and with them a new ethics, exemplified in the young mans fathers awkward attempts at warning his son more or less mercurial Parisians. Merit will count more than it did, but appearances and the superficial will skill reign, only no longer to be systematically defined by the court. The Regency period (1715-1723) was one f curious narrative energy. Writers such as Challe, Prevost, Marivaux, Montesquieu.... To do a painting, especially when one is dying from tuberculosis, that depicts a importee in a shops existence, a painting that is meant to attract connoisseurs and speculators, underlines how compelling was the statement that Watteau wanted to make. The transient and its evaluation are connected brilliantly in LEnseigne de Gersaint (a title that offers no profundity f meaning either), beca manipulation they are connected aesthetically. Thus, Watteau pushes us to surr ender to art what it demands the recognition that only through imaginative effort can an equitable ethics f urbanity be derived. This painting is about the power f art to drop dead even the most powerful social and personal impediments to happiness, because they are indeed transient. The sign Watteau painted signals a new social context, bent on possessing, evaluating, and judging according to appearance and by anyone. It is indeed a photograph f the Regency.1 LEnseigne de Gersaint introduces, without the aesthetic and emotional distancing that defines the fetes galantes, the corpse as the site for the working out f desire, and society as the space in which bodies define and adapt themselves. Fiction and art should draw the connections among desire, the body and society. And this work does just that it shows potential connections that can narrate the place f desire in an rising cultural realignment. The painting is so well balanced thematically that one may forget that it is a qu ite sophisticated commentary on the function f art in society. Its self-consciousness, its theatricality, and its extraordinary use f color all tend us away from its intellectualism. Watteau was asking fundamental questions about the determination f the spectator in the production and