Art criticism in the 20th century

Critical response to early avant-garde art

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many critics continued to grapple with the newness of the generation of artists inspired by Impressionism. The work of Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne made the avant-garde problem become even more explicit to critics, as the British critic Roger Fry’s eloquent analysis and defense, in Cézanne: A Study of His Development (1927), of his painting made clear. Fry, who gave Post-Impressionism its name, regarded Cézanne as the founder of a new Modernist aesthetic—a new formalism, in which, as he wrote in Vision and Design (1920), “plasticity has become all-important” and in which “all is reduced to the purest terms of structural design.” (It should be noted that Fry organized the first extensive exhibition of Post-Impressionist art in England, making it clear that curatorial courage can be critically decisive. Writing is clearly not the only means open to an art critic.) Another early advocate of Modernism, the German critic Julius Meier-Graefe, described Cézanne’s paintings, in Entwickelungsgeschichte der modernen kunst (1904; Modern Art: Being a Contribution to a New System of Aesthetics), as “mosaic-pictures…amazing in their vigorous contrasts of colour,” which “may be compared to a kind of kaleidoscope,” and noted that “the effects he produces are primitive.” Fry made the same point, noting in Vision and Design that Cézanne’s new kind of painting “reduced the artistic vision to a continuous patchwork or mosaic of coloured patches without architectural framework or structural coherence,” which nonetheless conveyed “the totality of appearance.” Both Fry and his fellow Bloomsbury figure Clive Bell came to the conclusion that it was abstract, formal elements that counted most—that alone were essential—so that a painting no longer had to represent an object or figure. Bell famously dismissed representational content as incidental anecdote, irrelevant to visual experience.

This increasing acceptance of abstraction set the stage for the critical shake-up caused by Pablo Picasso, who was the revolutionary, “critical” artist of the early 20th century. Gauguin had already made use of Polynesian figures and myths, but the ironic idea of the so-called primitive look as an advanced look—a radical new departure, which was in fact an extension of Western colonialism as well as a kind of nostalgia for a period before modernity, when humans were imagined to have lived more spiritually and in line with nature—took off with Picasso’s use of African masks in the proto-Cubist masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). In this work the Cubist reduction of human form to simple geometry was already apparent, as the flattening of the figures—inspired by the flat masks—indicates. The art of non-Western and nonindustrial cultures such as those of Africa was appreciated by Western critics for its seemingly pure plasticity; this seemed novel to European artists and critics eager to break with tradition and make a new art for a new century. In Five Primitive Masters (1949), the German critic Wilhelm Uhde valorized unschooled spontaneity as the true earmark of artistic genius.

In 1908, in his essay “The Three Plastic Virtues,” poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire argued that “the three plastic virtues, [of] purity, unity, and truth” had “triumphantly vanquished over nature” in Cubism. His assertion was the final stamp of approval on the new School of Paris led by Picasso. Pure plasticity—the aesthetic “truth,” as it were—was expressed, if in different formal terms from those of Cubism, in the abstract expressionism of Wassily Kandinsky, the leader of Der Blaue Reiter (“The Blue Rider”) artists in Munich, in Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematism, in Russian Constructivism, and in the geometric abstraction of Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg of the Dutch De Stijl group. After this, the concern with pure plasticity—color, surface (texture), line, rhythm, shape, and mass and the seemingly accidental yet unexpectedly harmonious relationship between these “formal facts” of the medium, as Clement Greenberg would one day call them—became the hallmark of Modernist, or formalist, criticism, which would dominate and guide the direction of much art in the 20th century.

The new conceptual orientation

Throughout the 20th century another school of thought developed alongside these critics’ interest in pure form. The early 20th-century manifestos—in effect, critical statements—of the Constructivist (1920) and De Stijl (1919) movements on the one hand and Dadaism (1919) and Surrealism (1924) on the other grounded art on conceptual rather than formal concerns. The Russian Constructivists were explicitly antiaesthetic and advocated the idea of the “artist-engineer.” The Dadaists and Surrealists were also ostensibly indifferent to formal stylistic concerns—the former advocated “antiart,” making the production of art an ironical matter (it could be “found” anywhere, depending on the artist’s “choice” of object), while the latter, heavily influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, regarded art as an expression of the unconscious and made deliberately absurd works that were like manufactured dreams.

Although they professed conceptual aims, these movements in fact helped broaden expression. Constructivism and De Stijl developed and refined the rational, geometric style that became de rigueur in modern International Style architecture by such architects as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, while Dadaism’s and Surrealism’s use of automatist spontaneity, chance, and accident influenced the formal experiments of a generation of artists, particularly those of the Abstract Expressionists. Despite the conceptual nature of their critical statements, therefore, these movements resisted being easily categorized as purely formal or conceptual. The dual paths these movements embodied—art oriented toward formal innovation and expression versus art oriented toward conceptual aims—would remain central to the major approaches to critical practice and art making throughout the 20th century.

Avant-garde art comes to America

As the century progressed, art criticism grew in part because of the explosive growth of avant-garde art but also because the new art became newsworthy enough to be covered by the media, especially when big money invested in it. The New York Armory Show of 1913 made a big public splash—U.S. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt visited it and remarked that he preferred the Navajo rugs he collected to the abstract art on display. Reaction to the work was generally mixed. Peyton Boswell, writing in the New York Herald, described Marcel Duchamp’s controversial painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 as a “cyclone in a shingle factory.” Yet the millionaire Walter Arensberg supported Duchamp, a gesture that was a harbinger of the coziness that would develop between art and money, fueled in part by the possibilities of speculation in the unregulated art market. Major private collections of avant-garde art emerged—perhaps most noteworthily that of Albert C. Barnes—further legitimating it.

The founding of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1929 under the auspices of the Rockefeller family was the consummate sign of the social and economic success of avant-garde art. Under the leadership of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the museum mounted a series of now classic breakthrough exhibitions, although Cubism was singled out as the particularly seminal movement. The point was clearly made in Barr’s diagram of the development of avant-garde art through 1935: “Cubism,” in the largest letters, has pride of place. According to the diagram, Cubism derives from Cézanne, Neo-Impressionism, and Henri Rousseau and leads directly to Suprematism, Constructivism, and De Stijl, finally leading to abstract art. This became the orthodox formal high line. German Expressionism, Dadaism, and Surrealism are shunted to the side, falsifying their influence and significance. Today Barr’s diagram looks academic and prejudiced, showing the limitations of a one-dimensional reading of avant-garde art privileging the formal. Again, the power of an institution to dictate and legislate art history is clear: Barr was in effect a modern Le Brun, and the Museum of Modern Art became the avant-garde academy, seeming to have more authority than the art itself.

The formal abstraction initiated by Picasso and the Cubists reached its extreme in the emergence of the avant-garde American art, Abstract Expressionism, in the 1940s. The New York Times and Time magazine began to cover art events, often in controversial depth, as the critical reporting of Edward Alden Jewell and John Canaday in the Times indicated—the former was “befuddled” by Abstract Expressionism, the latter skeptical of it. Abstract artists themselves became critics in an attempt to clarify and justify their work. A decisive moment occurred in 1943, when Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko wrote a “Statement” in the Times in response to Jewell’s “nonplused” response to their “‘obscure’ paintings.” As they said, “The artist’s complaint that he is misunderstood, especially by the critic, has become a noisy commonplace,” so that the artist has to become his own critic. Another important event occurred in 1961, when Canaday’s “insulting” views on contemporary art—he regarded the Abstract Expressionists as fakes—were attacked in a letter signed by a number of artists and cognoscenti who defended it. The issue of this exchange is not whether Canaday was right or wrong but rather the seriousness with which his views were taken, indicating that criticism had become an indispensable part of the art scene and as controversial as the art with which it dealt.