Modern

Origins in the 19th century

As long ago as 1846, the qualities proper to a specifically modern art were discussed by the French writer Charles Baudelaire in an essay on the French Salon. He argued that colour would be foremost among these modern qualities (a prediction that subsequent events confirmed), but he still saw the new art in the context of the Romantic movement. Subsequent modernity came to be seen as necessitating not only a new style but also contemporary subject matter, and in 1863 Baudelaire praised the draftsman Constantin Guys as “le peintre de la vie moderne” (“the painter of modern life”). In 1862, with Baudelaire’s support, the French painter Édouard Manet brought together a subject from contemporary social life and an unconventional style in Concert in the Tuileries Gardens. This painting, though rather isolated in his work of the time, was influential in establishing a new outlook. Another literary figure whose critical writings were influential was the French novelist Émile Zola, though Zola had limited sympathy for what he called the “new manner in painting” of Manet; nevertheless, he contributed from 1866 onward to the emergence of the Impressionist group. The first appearance of the phrase “modern art” in the relatively permanent form of a book title was in 1883, when it was used by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, a friend of Zola’s, to describe the theme of various reviews of painters’ work he had collected. Other books on the subject followed, such as the Anglo-Irish novelist George Moore’s Modern Painting (1893). It was about this time that the term avant-garde was introduced by the critic Théodore Duret, who used it of certain young painters. From then on, modernity was to be a recurrent concern of artists and critics. Public acceptance of the new standpoint was slow, however. The first museums dedicated specifically to modern art grew out of the fervour of individual collectors—for example, the Folkwang Museum at Essen, Germany, and the Kröller-Müller State Museum at Otterlo, the Netherlands, both largely consisting of collections built up before 1914. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, the outstanding public collection in the field, was founded in 1929, and the Western capital that lacks a museum explicitly devoted to modern art is rare.

The conflict between the new forces and the established academic tradition in France came into the open in 1863. The jury of the official Salon, which had long exercised great despotism in matters to do with painting, rejected more than 4,000 canvases—an unusually high figure. The resulting outcry prompted the emperor Napoleon III to order that the rejected works, if the painters agreed, be shown in a special exhibition known as the Salon des Refusés. The exhibition included works by Manet; Johan Barthold Jongkind, an older Dutch painter who was working in a tonal and summary style from nature; Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne, who had met two years before at the Académie Suisse; Armand Guillaumin; James McNeill Whistler; and others. One of the greatest scandals was caused by Manet’s painting The Luncheon on the Grass, which was considered an affront to decency as well as taste. The younger painters became aware of their common aims. Claude Monet—whose landscape style had been influenced from the outset by the atmospheric sketches of the Channel coast of Eugène Boudin, as well as by Jongkind (whom he described to Boudin as “quite mad”)—had met Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Jean-Frédéric Bazille while studying in the studio of Charles Gleyre. Abandoning academic study, they worked together outdoors in the forest of Fontainebleau, where contacts with the Barbizon painters Narcisse-Virgile Diaz de la Peña and Charles-François Daubigny strengthened their direction.

The implicit acceptance of the visual scene on which the new style was based owed something to the example of Courbet, who influenced Renoir in particular in the next few years. The plein air (“open-air”) paintings of the Barbizon painters also had an effect, but the suggestion of an art based on the notation of pure colour was suggested by several sources. The example of Eugène Delacroix had a deep significance for the 19th century in France, and the reliance on separate, undisguised touches of the brush in the form that became characteristic of Impressionism is perhaps first apparent in sketches of the sea at Dieppe painted by Delacroix in 1852. The economy of Manet’s touch in the 1860s was affected by Spanish and Dutch examples as well as by Delacroix, but his seascapes and racecourse pictures of 1864 are also important. The full Impressionistic style did not develop until the end of the 1860s.

Though the figurative aims of Impressionism can be regarded as the conclusion of 19th-century Realism, the method, which made no attempt to hide even the most-basic means of preparing a finished painting, was an original one. Brushstrokes did not pretend to be anything but dashes of paint, thus conveying their coloured message without any disguise or effect at individual illusion. It was in this respect and in the all-embracing unity of colour and handling that resulted, rather than in its realism, that Impressionism founded modern painting. Other developments in the 1860s had no immediate sequels in Impressionism. The presentation of some of Manet’s figures, such as The Fifer of 1866, as vignettes or decorative designs shading into virtually blank backgrounds was a radical departure from the coherent pictorial construction of Western tradition since the Renaissance; it was the first sign of the form built outward from a central nucleus without reference to the classic frame that appeared repeatedly in modern art. Honoré Daumier is supposed to have said that The Fifer reduced painting “to faces on playing cards,” and in 1865 Courbet compared Manet’s Olympia (1863) to “the Queen of Spades after a bath.” The possibility of making an image out of the bare, almost heraldic juxtaposition of flat colours was neglected while the complex notation of Impressionism held sway, but it came to be regarded with interest as Impressionism receded. Other unconventional principles of design—suggested equally by Japanese prints, such as those that Manet placed in the background of his portrait of Zola in 1868, and by the chance arrangements of photography—appeared in the work of Degas, who sympathized with the aims of the new group, associating himself with them in seven of their eight exhibitions, which he largely helped to organize.

Other qualities that Baudelaire in 1846 had specified as the qualities of modern art—spirituality and aspiration toward the infinite—evolved quite apart from Impressionism. The visionary implications of Romantic painting were explored by Gustave Moreau, whose elaborate biblical and mythological scenes, weighed down with sumptuous detail, gave colour an imaginative and symbolic richness. His example had a special value to the next generation. The imagination of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was of the opposite order, preserving the large-scale clarity of mural painting, a policy that made him appreciated when a reaction against Impressionism set in.

Another possibility of Romanticism was pursued in isolation by the Marseille painter Adolphe Monticelli. The richness of his colour is thought to have contributed something crucial to Cézanne’s development. The counterpart of Moreau in Britain was Edward Burne-Jones. The intricate and perverse linear formulations that he developed from the Pre-Raphaelites greatly influenced the international Symbolist style of the last decades of the century.

The influence of the trend in the direction of the modern in France, together with its controversial element, was introduced to Britain by Whistler, whose concern was narrowly aesthetic rather than analytic. The harmonies he developed were close to being monochromatic; his use of Spanish and Japanese elements had little of the radical originality of Manet and Degas. His influence dominated and also limited the development of avant-garde painting in Britain for many years. John Singer Sargent—like Whistler, an American who came to live in Britain—popularized a less-discriminating version of the Impressionist style.

In Germany a Romantic strain coexisted with a Realist style that remained unaffected by the most advanced French painting. Anselm Feuerbach, one of the Romantics, was influenced by Delacroix. In 1855 he went to Italy, where the effect of the 16th century came to predominate in his work. The landscapes of Hans von Marées were also essentially Romantic. He had visited France but spent most of his working life in Italy; the frescoes he executed in Naples echo Puvis de Chavannes in their style. Realism found exponents in Wilhelm Leibl and Hans Thoma. In Italy the reaction against the academies was centred in Florence, where a group known as the Macchiaioli (from macchia, “patch”) worked from 1855, producing landscapes, genre paintings, and Romantic costume pieces executed in the highly visible brushstrokes that gave the group its name.

In the United States, Thomas Eakins developed a broadly handled, powerful Realist style that became almost Expressionist in his later years. He had visited Paris in 1866, and the influence of Manet can be detected in his paintings. His interest in anatomy and perspective gave him a role analogous to that of Degas. The early development of Winslow Homer, who was in France a year later, ran parallel to Monet’s style in the 1860s. The work of Albert Pinkham Ryder was, by contrast, introverted and visionary. He was among the artists who adapted the Romantic vocabulary to the symbolic purposes of modern art.

In France in the mid-1860s Monet produced a series of large-scale open-air conversation pieces in which elements derived from Courbet and Manet were fused with a wholly original expression of dappled light in solid paint. The approach of Pissarro, who had arrived in Paris from the West Indies in 1855, was more delicate; influenced by Camille Corot as well as Courbet, he recorded pure landscape motives in a limited range of tones, though with a natural lyricism of feeling. The starting point of Cézanne was, by contrast, vigorous to the point of violence. In 1866 he evolved a style in which paint was applied in thick dabs with a palette knife; this combined a handling (a technical term in painting meaning the individual’s manipulation of materials in the execution of a work; it has been likened to a person’s signature in handwriting) derived from Courbet with the gray tonality of Manet; its rough-hewn crudity has a consistency that was essentially new. His alternative style in the 1860s, with curling brushstrokes related to Daumier, is equally virile and was often applied to subjects of violent eroticism. The unbridled force of Cézanne’s early work gave the first sign of qualities that were to become characteristic of modern painting. Though exceptional, it was not unique; in Italy during the 1860s Nikolay Nikolayevich Ge, a Russian painter of historical and scriptural themes, produced sketches with loose, expressive brushwork sometimes resembling Cézanne’s.