The Role Of Art In The 19th Century

With the invention of cameras and photography in the 19th century, one of the main functions of painting as a way of documentation is changed and lost with such availability in technology. Is it in my opinion, that the purposes of art and it 's capabilities were reconsidered and experimented by many artist from all over the world. The status of art had to be redefined in order to remain itself a prominent role in the development of artistic and social cultures. Realistic representation of subjects was no longer deemed important and necessary by many artists, and art needs to capture what photography is incapable of. In my essay, I will attempt to discuss two paintings: Pual Cezanne’s “bathers” and Adrien-Jean le Mayeur de Merpres’s ‘Temple festival in Bali’ and their relationship to the change and transformation in the Art practice of the late 19th century to 20th century.

Human figures are the main subject in both Cezanne and Le Mayeur works, in which they share the similar compositional dominance in the bottom half of the paintings. Cezanne’s ‘bathers’, as what the title suggests, depicts a scene of a group women set against a lush environment of trees. They are evenly spread in horizontal manner across the canvas, appear to be at ease and relaxed. Le Mayeur’s work illustrates a joyous scene with the context of the native culture’s practice in temple festivals. Women and men in the painting appear engaged. The choice of human figures as subject was made with different