Art criticism in the 19th century

The growth of power and influence

Art criticism grew exponentially in the 19th century, when artists began to make works with an uncertain future. Rather than working for the church or state, whose commissions demanded ideological and often stylistic conformity, artists had become freelance and seemingly free-spirited producers for a market that was not always there. Of course, the state still sponsored exhibitions—the annual Salon of the French government was the model (inaugurated in 1667, when Louis XIV sponsored an exhibition of works by the members of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in the Salon d’Apollon in the Louvre Palace). Salon standards were bound by tradition until the mid-19th century, when they began to relax under the pressure of new theories of art, developed in response to new kinds of art, which rebelled against traditional models.

The new artistic liberty was undoubtedly influenced by the republican revolutions that broke out in 1848 against the monarchies of the Austrian Empire, France, Germany, Italy, and Sicily—that is, against the ancien régime. Every one of the revolts was repressed, but the liberal spirit that inspired them lived on in art, displaced from its original purpose. (This spirit no doubt was also encouraged by a general atmosphere of social and cultural change, evident in the Industrial Revolution and in the growth of museums and libraries that was correlative with the growth of literacy.) Before 1848 sketches could be submitted to the Salon jury, but only the finished work could be exhibited; afterward, paintings were exhibited that seemed closer to sketches than finished pictures. After 1850 the traditional standards in the category of heroic landscape were ignored—in effect suspended as obsolete—so that the naturalistic landscape paintings of Théodore Rousseau could finally be exhibited. Similarly, subjects from everyday life, composed and painted in a less-finished manner, were allowed in what had hitherto been the academically rigid category of “genre.”

Change was clearly in the air and with it liberalization—a new democratization of art, with a new abundance and diversity that had to be sorted out. Criticism began as a journalistic effort to do so, with reviews (often by literati) appearing in such belles lettres magazines as the Examiner, Athenaeum, Art Journal, Revue des deux mondes, L’Artiste, Gazette des beaux-arts, Grenzboten, Das Deutsche Kunstblatt, Die Dioskuren, and Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst. These magazines were consulted by both the bourgeois buying public and the art cognoscenti. Criticism in these journals often became a theoretical effort to justify critical choices—that is, to rationalize what was often an intuitive appreciation of certain artists. In other words, the determination of value, on whatever theoretical basis, entered into the reporting of information, often for those who had little or no chance to see the art in question, thereby legislating opinion into art history. As the French poet and art critic Paul Valéry wrote, “There is never a formless object, a colourist’s folly, a freak of distortion that cannot be imposed on public attention, even to the point of admiration, by means of description and analysis, and by taking advantage of the fact (20 times proved in the 19th century) that the reactions of opinion can raise to the rank of a masterpiece a work which on its first appearance was misunderstood or ridiculed, thus multiplying its original market value by a thousand.” As the French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire had earlier exclaimed in his essay “The Salon of 1846”: “How many artists today owe to the critics alone their sad little fame!”

Whatever the ironies of advocacy, some critics chose to take up the cause of individual artists who embodied certain artistic preferences or principles. The cause of painter J.M.W. Turner was taken up by John Ruskin, a brilliant, eccentric, often disturbed figure, who was himself an artist. Ruskin defended Turner’s landscapes—which had been ridiculed by critics who found them too technically daring—with youthful exuberance in Modern Painters (vol. 1, 1843), on the grounds of their empirical accuracy. He would use the same defense in his support of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The Pre-Raphaelites had received harsh criticism from critics such as the novelist Charles Dickens, who in 1850 wrote with disdain of their disregard for academic ideals in their highly realistic paintings. In 1851 Ruskin took on the role of public defender for the group, publishing a pamphlet and writing twice to The Times of London in the Pre-Raphaelites’ defense. The public was clearly aware of developments in art, as such newspaper letters indicate.

Other critics supported more a stance than a particular artist, continuing the Poussin-Rubens debate of the 17th century. The tension between the academics and the independents was epitomized in the dispute between those who supported the cool idealizing classicism of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, whom French critic Jules-Antoine Castagnary singled out as the one “great portraitist” of the 19th century, and those who supported Eugène Delacroix’s romanticism, color, robustness, and imagination, as Baudelaire called them in admiration. Ingres, a student of Jacques-Louis David, was a master of drawing who, like Poussin, turned to Raphael as a model of harmony and construction, while Delacroix extended the Baroque concern with color that was evident in Rubens and the Venetians. Ingres was “the last of the great French Classicist painters,” as the Austrian art historian Fritz Novotny wrote, while Delacroix inspired young innovative painters such as Paul Cézanne. At mid-century, apart from Baudelaire, who advocated the most romantic possibilities of painting, the most prominent critics tended to think in terms of stark oppositions and distinctions—often beauty and ugliness—and thus often failed to achieve an adequate dialectical criticism. Thus, for example, French critic Étienne-Jean Delécluze was a supporter of the “Homerists,” followers of Ingres’s style, and deplored the “école du laid” (“school of ugliness”) of the “Shakespeareans,” who emulated Delacroix. But this debate would become moot with the development of the avant-garde.