When does the Modernist era start?
A conventional date is 1855 Paris Exposition when the artist Gustave Courbet built his own pavilion and displayed his work which had been rejected by the jury, The Painter’s Studio. (1) Then in 1863 the Emperor Napoleon III allowed a Salon des Refuses to take place, in response to appeals of artists working in ways unacceptable to the official Salon and yet desperate for exhibition since that led to recognition and sales. Among the 2,500 submissions that failed to measure up to academic standards set by the jury was Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass, (2) the focus of public notoriety, controversy and unbridled ridicule for the impropriety of showing a female nude so casually in a modern setting with two dressed men with her frank stare out of the canvas- the Refuses was transformed into a three-ring circus, attended on a Sunday by as many as 4000 curiosity seekers. (Hunter & Jacobus, p. 9)
What was the official Salon that these artists were rejected from and went on to rebel against? It was the official art exhibition of the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France from the year 1725 till 1890. From the middle of the 18th century until 1890 it was the greatest annual or biannual art event in the world. Paintings and sculptures were presented floor to ceiling and the public paid tickets to enter. (3) (Wikipedia on Salon) It needs to be remembered that in the 19th century Paris was the cultural capital of the western world.
The Napoleonic monarchy collapsed after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, but was replaced by a republican government scarcely less conservative. In 1874, rather than plead with officialdom for a Salon des Refuses, certain progressive painters of Paris mounted their own exhibition in a studio owned by a commercial photographer Felix Nadar. It was at this show that one of Monet’s paintings, which he had titled ‘Impression, Sunrise’, (4) led to the coining of the term “Impressionists” by a critic who was bemoaning the artists’ contemptible lack of finish: “Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.” (quoted Wikipedia on Monet’s Impression painting) At this occasion we see many of the characteristics that become the earmarks of modernist art: “Boldly independent art independently presented by a beleaguered band of self-confident innovators, scandalized press and public, and the coining of an “ism” to designate a certain radical kind of form.” (Hunter & Jacobus, p. 9)
Then again some writers date the beginning of the Modernist era from the end of the Impressionist period, with the succession of experiments that could be termed Post-Impressionism, arguing that Impressionism continues that strong link with the natural world that was part of 19th century Realism, and that Modernism essentially is an anti naturalist liberating process – a search for an autonomous art no longer dependent on the world outside – an “unprecedented nonrepresentational art” (Hunter & Jacobus, p. 9) If we see modernism starting from this more certain break from depicting the natural world, then we would be looking at the post impressionists, e.g., those who were focusing on using a system of broken colour to create a sense of light in the viewer’s perception – e.g., the neo-impressionists or pointillist painters. (5) We would be looking at the use of flatter areas of rampant complementary colours in the Fauvists’ rich palettes (6) or the symbolic use of colour and imagery in the Symbolists’ works.
Why does this fundamental shift in art take place?
All these movements can be related to social developments of the time; e.g., the pointillists were stimulated by the outpouring of new science-based theories on colour and human perception in the late 19th century, Cezanne’s breaking down and reconstituting of nature through some form of geometric construction seems in retrospect to relate more to the changing understanding of human perception and the fragmentation of a rapidly changing world than to his expressed concern with returning to more classical form. (7) In the early years of the 20th century new scientific and technological discoveries, e.g., in atomic physics and chemistry, changed assumptions about objects. When Kandinsky first read, with great astonishment, of the atom and particle physics, he felt his sense of reality slipping and declared: “All things become flimsy, with no strength of certainty”. (quoted Hunter & Jacobus, p. 10) Art as a vehicle for emotion, fantasy, dream (as with the Symbolists) could operate as a counter to the noisy and banal age of progress. (8) (Hunter & Jacobus, p. 36) – you can see this also in the late Victorian fascination with spiritualism and mysticism as a counter to the alienating industrial technological and urban age – a reiteration of the emotional, intuitive, magical, imaginative side of humanity. (9)
There was a new appetite for exotica created by the spread of colonialism and easier movement between Europe and colonies in Africa, Asia, Oceania. (10) This led to a fascination with non classical art forms, new exciting perceptions: non-western, oriental, primitive cultures, folk art, art of children and the insane, naïve art. (Hunter & Jacobus, p. 13) Such fascinations were not new - (See, e.g., Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ images of how he imagined the Turkish harem in Odalisque with Slave, 1842, (11) and Eugene Delacroix’s highly romanticised oriental subjects after his trip to Morocco such as Lion Hunt, 1861), (12) - just encouraged by the expansion of the colonial world.
In 1895 The Society of French Orientalist Painters was founded in Paris with an annual salon for those French artists who travelled regularly to paint in French colonies such as N-W Africa, Ethiopia, Indochina, Oceania. This Society had a major input into the 1900 Exposition Universelle, which was a giant world fair from April to November in Paris attended by over 50 million people celebrating the achievements of the 19th century and looking forward to developments in the 20th. This Fair had a huge precinct given over to Andalusia in the Time of the Moors (13) to provide a spectacle of the unknown, the picturesque – it was a village covering 5000 sq metres on the right bank of the Seine with romanticised images from ancient and modern Spain, including a simplified rebuild of parts of the Alhambra in Granada, with gypsy type women standing around as though in a harem, at least the harem of the European imagination. (Hackforth-Jones & Roberts 2005, pp. 182-5) (14)
This fascination with the exotic spurred not only an orientalist obsession but also one with all things Japanese, known as Japonisme. Japan had been forced out of its self-imposed isolation by the combined powers of Britain and America and its ports forced to open in 1853. After this, paintings, prints, household objects flowed out of Japan to the West and there was a profound influence from the coloured woodcuts of artists like Utamaro, Hokusai and Hiroshige on western art. The planes of “brilliant solid colour set off and contained by the most radically simplified contour drawing, their steep and sharply angled views, their flat-pattern design, and their bold croppings, such supremely confident works of pictorial art could only reinforce the Europeans’ growing awareness” that “the surface on which the artist painted constituted a taut skin providing a world of pure art and no illusion.” (Hunter & Jacobus, p. 17) The influence of Japanese art reoccurs all throughout the different modernist art movements of the 20th century – it’s particularly obvious in Art Nouveau, Impressionism, Fauvism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism. Artists ranging from Monet to Mary Cassatt, Van Gogh (15) (16) and Gauguin, Toulouse Lautrec, the Australian Margaret Preston show the influence of fascination with Japanese arts. This also happened in music and you probably all know the musical The Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan, 1885, and Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly of 1904.
The artist Claude Monet never visited Japan but was so fascinated with Japanese art that his house was hanging in Japanese prints (he collected 231 of them from the 1860s on), (17) his beloved garden was styled on Japanese landscaping. He did a painting of his wife dressed in Japanese kimono, (18) he built Japanese bridges in his garden (19) and then did paintings of them. (20) Whilst Monet’s art was primarily influenced by plein-air painting, the practice of painting landscapes and figures in the open air, he was constantly challenged by the power and difference of Japanese art – he said of a Hokusai painting that there was “nothing useless” in it. (quoted Monet & Japan 2001, p. 3) Though Monet never imitated Japanese art, theorists see Japanese art’s influence in his rich colours, his joy in the beauty of nature, and Monet’s belief that intense observation reveals the deepest interconnections between all forms of being. (Monet & Japan, pp. 3-5)
Other Impressionist artists were more obviously directly influenced by Japanese prints. The American artist Mary Cassatt, friend of Degas, declared that she "hated conventional art," and found in Japanese woodcuts like those of Utamaro (21) a fresh approach to the depiction of common events in women's lives. After visiting a large exhibition of ukiyo-e prints at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris during the spring of 1890, she produced a set of ten colour etchings in open admiration of the Japanese artists’ subjects, compositions, and technical innovations. (22) (http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/jpon/hd_jpon.htm)
Art history focuses on the changes happening in the central powers of the world. But we are now seeing art histories being rewritten from other standpoints. So, instead of solely looking at the influence of the exotic ‘others’ of the world on central European art at the beginning of the 20th century, we can also look at how western art was influencing artists in say Egypt or Japan. It is fascinating to see the extent of ‘exotic’ influences on European artists. I read an article on how the French artist, Frederic Bartholdi, who created the famous Statue of Liberty (23) to celebrate the new American nation in 1885 based the statue on drawings he did of peasant women in 1855 in Egypt and the simplified grandeur of ancient Egyptian statuary. He vigorously denied any similarities between his earlier drawings and designs for a statue for the Suez Canal (24) and the Statue of Liberty.
On the other hand you also have an enormous influence from western culture back the other way. The centres of world power certainly affect the peripheries. So, after the opening of trade to Japan, you see the new fascination with Renaissance style perspective in Japanese art. (25) Hokusai also adopts with enthusiasm the new pigment that came from trade with the West, Prussian blue, in his series on Mount Fuji. (26) (Monet & Japan 2001) Whilst the Western romanticisation of the East sees the East or the Orient as timeless, fantastic, exotic, in contrast to the upheavals happening in the Western urban centres, similar social upheaval is happening in the East in the major centres of Algiers, Istanbul, Alexandria, and Cairo, which are undergoing rapid transforming changes. As cultures from opposite ends of the world collide, there are borrowings and adaptations, from both sides. (Hackforth-Jones & Roberts 2005)
Primitivism The more industrialism and urbanisation dominated the western world, the more there was a nostalgic glorification of tribal pastoral societies, seen as innocent, happy, more spiritual, more connected to nature. The apparent simplicity of ancient or tribal art forms seemed to enable greater emotive impact and more spiritual significance. Artists wanting to rebel against the strictures of the Academy and the social mores of bourgeois society often harked back to a golden past. So you get Gauguin travelling to Tahiti searching for paradise only to find that that vision of an innocence has been sullied by colonisation with prostitution, destruction of traditional culture, syphilis – which he got) (27) In the early modernist art movements there is a strong strand of this yearning for other forms in past cultures (28) (29), folk art (30), tribal art, the art of children, the insane (31), naïve art, (32) and this is seen in movements like Fauvism, Expressionism, Symbolism.
Changing social conditions for artists
In industrial republican democratic world of pluralities and greater individual liberties, art became no longer the patronised entertainment of an accepted cultural elite, but became more fragmented, revolutionary, subversive. The absence of realism in artworks scandalized critics and public alike. The rise of consumerism and mass media and popular culture alienated artists ever more onto the margins, the periphery of society, perhaps being forced to view themselves as some sort of avant-garde. This term was originally a military term for ‘advance guard’ or ‘vanguard’. The French critic and social philosopher Saint-Simon in the early 19th century used it more broadly to refer to efforts to link progressive social action, art, and science in an “effort to reform society and ameliorate the fortunes of the oppressed.” (Hunter & Jacobus, p. 18) Today it is used to talk about movements that are experimental or innovative, pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable as the ‘norm’ or the ‘status quo’. (Wikipedia on avant garde)
Impressionism and photography
When we think of Impressionism we usually think first of Claude Monet’s paintings – a shimmering fresh and joyful view of the world after the sombre and melancholic academic paintings of the official Salon. If you compare them to the prized academic art of the period you can see the replacement of blended colours and smooth chiaroscuro modelling and careful draftsmanship with instantaneity, almost hectic brushwork, placing strokes of colour next to each other so that they blend in the viewer’s eye to create light-illuminated form. (33) (34) They are rather like one of the early grainy photographs, which obliterated linear detail but captured flickering atmosphere. (35) It seems appropriate that the first Impressionist show was shown in the studio of photographer, journalist, caricaturist, novelist, balloonist Felix Nadar, (36) who was the first to take aerial photographs from his balloon trips (37) (38) and the first to use artificial lighting in his photos of the Paris catacombs. (39)
It is interesting to think how the use of photography in creating paintings is still considered not legitimate in more conservative art circles – e.g., in the Archibald Prize in Sydney there have been endless controversies about whether the artist should be allowed to use photography instead of doing the entire portrait from the model. (In 1975, John Bloomfield’s large photo-realist portrait of Tim Burstall, the film-maker, was disqualified as it was painted from a photograph and because Bloomfield had never met Burstall. (40) In this case the debated point was the justification of portraiture as revealing the inner self of the sitter rather than being simply a faithful rendering of facial features. Bloomfield struck back in 1981 when he threatened legal action over that year’s winning portrait by Eric Smith, Rudy Komon, which strongly resembled a 1974 photograph of Komon. Komon defended the award, saying he had been sitting for Smith for twenty-one years. These two cases highlight an ongoing debate about the relationship of photography to other art forms like painting.) (41) (http://archive.thearchibaldprize.com.au/history/controversy-debate/)
When photography was a new technology this debate was even more pronounced. When Monet was painting his Houses of Parliament series in 1900-1904 (42) he did some in London and then completed the series back in France and he sent to London for photographs to help him. By now he had abandoned his earlier working practice of always completing a painting on the spot in front of the motif. Monet’s use of photographs caused adverse reactions, but Monet's reply was that his means of creating a work was his own business, and it was up to the viewer to judge the final result. Monet continued his focus on light and colour and brushwork and with his later water lily series his work began to become primarily “an ever-fluctuating pattern of light and colour” (Hunter & Jacobus, p. 22) and became almost indistinguishable from abstract expressionism that would happen in America in the late 1940s. As with modern literature the mechanisms of making art – the brushwork, the colours, the composition - became increasingly the subject of modern art.
Photography was used as a tool by painters very early on, and we will follow this influence of photography as we discuss the other modernist art movements. Certainly amongst the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters photography was used as a basis for composition and likeness. (43-47)
The existence of photography and its growth as the primary medium by which to capture the world, dispossessed painting of this role, and in a way liberated painting to find new subject matters, and new styles, which over the course of the twentieth century shifted focus between political statement, social utopian aims, composition and materials, psychology and emotions of the artist, and satire.
In the following weeks we will explore more of the key modernist art movements of the twentieth century, always keeping in mind that these are just moments we are looking at, that so much is left out. We are focusing on painting often to the exclusion of other art forms, as has modern art history. We are looking at the dominant story of western art and ignoring by and large what other shifts were happening in art around the world. And we always have to keep aware of what was happening in the broader socio-political world that might help us understand why there seemed to be such amazingly restless reinvention in art throughout the twentieth century.
References:
Hackforth-Jones, J and Roberts, M 2005, Edges of Empire: Orientalism & Visual Culture, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford
Hunter, S and Jacobus, J 1992, Modern Art: Painting Sculpture Architecture, 3rd ed, Prentice Hall, New Jersey & Harry N. Abrams, New York
Monet & Japan 2001, NGA, Canberra
