Chapter 29 The Rise of Modernism: Art of the Later 19th Century
Notes
The first Industrial Revolution centered on textiles, steam, and iron, spread throughout Europe
and the United States. These changes led to what some have called a second Industrial
Revolution that was associated with steel, electricity, chemicals, and oil. These discoveries
provided the foundations for developments in plastics, machinery, building construction, and
automobile manufacturing, which paved the way for the invention of the radio, electric light,
telephone, and electric streetcar.
One of the significant consequences of industrialization was urbanization. The number and size
of Western cities grew dramatically during the later part of the 19th century, largely due to
migration from rural areas. Small farms were squeezed out by larger operations, and the new
work opportunities in the cities, especially factories, were the major factors in the migration.
Advances in industrial technology reinforced the Enlightenment’s foundation of rationalism.
Increasingly people embraced empiricism (the search for knowledge based on observation and
direct experience). The wide spread faith in science grew the Western philosophy called
positivism, that promoted science as the mind’s highest achievement. Positivism was
developed by the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857), who advocated a purely
scientific, empirical approach to nature and society.
Charles Darwin (1809-1882), was the English naturalist whose theory of natural selection was
the foundation of the concept of evolution. Evolution is based on mechanistic laws rather than
other possibilities. By challenging Christian beliefs, Darwinism contributed to the growing
secular attitude and was gravitated to by those who wanted to explain away the possibility of
God.
The British philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) applied Darwin’s theories to the rapidly
changing socioeconomic realm. He asserted, as in the biological world, that there was a
survival of the most economically fit. This logic was used to justify rampant Western racism,
imperialism, nationalism, and militarism that marked the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Social Darwinism was a theory that perceived that such conflict and struggle as inevitable.
The Concept of conflict was central to the ideas of German Karl Marx (1818-1883). Along
with fellow German Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), wrote The Communist Manifesto in
1848. It called for the working class to overthrow the capitalist system. Economic forces based
on class struggle induced historical change. Those who controlled the means of production
conflicted with those whose labor was exploited to benefit the wealthy and powerful. This
dynamic was called dialectical materialism. Marx’s goal was the seizure of power by the
working class and the destruction of capitalism. Marxism, which held great appeal for the
oppressed as well as may intellectuals, emphasized class conflict and was instrumental in the
rise of trade unions and socialist groups.
Industrialism required a wide variety of natural resources and social Darwinists easily translated
their intrinsic concept of social hierarchy into racial and national hierarchies. This provided
Western leaders with justification for the colonization of peoples and cultures that they deemed
less advanced. By 1900 the French had colonized most of North Africa and Indochina, while
the British occupied India, Australia, and large areas of Africa, including Nigeria, Egypt, Sudan,
Rhodesia, and the Union of South Africa. The Dutch were a major presence in the Pacific, and
the Germans, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italians all established themselves in various areas of
Africa.
The Development of Modernism
The rapid changes of modern life led to an acute awareness of the lack of permanence in the
world. This prompted a greater sense and interest in being modern. What is considered modern
permeated the Western art world resulting in the development of modernism. Modernist art’s
critical function differentiates it from Modern Art. Modern art, as discussed in Chapter 28,
refers to art of the past few centuries. Modernism developed in the second half of the 19th
century and is “modern” in that modern artist, then and now, often seeks to capture
images and sensibilities of their age. However, modernism goes beyond simply dealing
with the present and involves the artist’s critical examination of or reflection on the
premise of art itself. Modernism implies certain concerns about art and aesthetics that
are internal to art production.
Clement Greenberg, the 20th century American art critic, explained that “Realistic, illusionistic
art had disassembled the medium, using art to conceal art. Modernism used art to call attention
to art... The construction of painting was viewed as a negative by the Old Masters, something to
be concealed (Renaissance illusionism). Modernist painting has regarded these negatives as
positives to be acknowledged openly.”
The aggressiveness of modernism led to the development of the avant-garde or cutting edge.
These were artists whose work rejected the past and transgressed the boundaries of
artistic practice. The subversive dimension of the avant-garde was in sync with the
anarchic, revolutionary sociopolitical tendencies in Europe at the time.
Realism: The Painting of Modern Life
Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) was the leading figure of the Realist movement that began in
France around the mid 19th century. Realism provided viewers with a reevaluation of reality.
Realist artists argued that only thing’s of one’s own time, what people can see for themselves,
are “real.” Realists focused on contemporary life and not things of the past or fictional subjects.
Thus, Realists portrayed the things that had been previously deemed unworthy; the mundane
and trivial, working class laborers and peasants. They portrayed their subjects on the scale
previously reserved for grand history painting.
The Stone Breakers, 1848, by Courbet, captures on canvas in a straightforward manner two
men in the act of breaking stones, traditionally the lot of the lowest in French society. Their
labor is neither romanticized nor idealized, but is shown with directness and accuracy. His
palette’s dirty browns and grays convey the dreary and dismal nature of the task. The angular
positioning of the older stone breaker on the right suggests a mechanical monotony.
This interest in the laboring poor as subject matter had special meaning for the mid 19th century
French audience. In 1848, workers rebelled against the bourgeois leaders of the newly formed
Second Republic and against the rest of the nation, demanding better working conditions and a
redistribution of property. The army quelled the revolution in three days but not without much
loss of life and long lasting trauma. The issue of labor as a national concern was placed in the
forefront both literally and symbolically.
Burial at Ornans, 1849, depicts a funeral in a bleak provincial landscape, attended by
“common” people. Although the painting has the monumental scale of traditional history
painting, the subject’s ordinariness and antiheroic composition horrified the critics. The heroic,
the sublime, and the dramatic, are not shown here - only the mundane realities of daily life and
death. Unlike the theatricality of Romanticism, Realism captured the ordinary rhythms of
contemporaneous life.
Realism was viewed as the first modernist movement by many scholars and critics.
Accordingly, Realists called attention to painting as a pictorial construction by their pigment
application and by or composition manipulation. Courbet’s intentionally simple and direct
methods of expression in composition and technique seemed unbearably crude to many of his
more traditional contemporaries, and he was called a primitive. Courbet often used his palette
knife for quickly placing and unifying large daubs of paint, producing roughly wrought
surfaces. His example inspired the young artists who worked for him, and later Impressionists
such as Monet and Renoir. But the public accused him of carelessness and the critics wrote of
his “brutalities.”
The style and content of Courbet’s paintings were not well received. The jury selecting work
for the 1855 Salon, rejected two of his paintings on the grounds that his subjects and figures
were too coarsely depicted (so much as to be plainly “socialistic”) and too large. In response
Courbet set up his own exhibition outside the grounds, calling it the Pavilion of Realism. The
pavilion displayed statements that amounted to the new movement’s manifestos.
Like Courbet, Jean François Millet (1814-1878) found his subjects in the people and
occupations of the everyday world. Millet was one of a group of French painters of country
life, who, to be close to their rural subjects, settled near the village of Barbizon in the forest of
Fontainebleau. The Barbizon school, as they were called, specialized in detailed pictures of
forest and countryside. Millet, perhaps their most prominent member, was of peasant stock and
identified with the hard lot of the country poor. In The Gleaners, 1857, he depicted three
peasant women performing the backbreaking task of gleaning the last wheat scraps. These
women were the lowest level of peasant society. Such impoverished people were allowed to
pick up the gleaning after the harvest. This practice was described in the Old Testament book
of Ruth. Millet characteristically placed his monumental figures in the foreground against a
broad sky.
Although Millet’s works have sentimentality absent from those of Courbet, the French public
reacted to his paintings with disdain and suspicion, after the Revolution of 1848. Investing the
poor with solemn grandeur did not meet with the approval of the prosperous classes. In
particular the middle class landowners resisted granting the traditional gleaning rights. The
relatively dignified depictions of gleaning did not sit well with them. Further, the middle class
linked the poor with the dangerous, newly defined working class, which was finding outspoken
champions in men, such as, Marx, Engels, Emile Zola, and Charles Dickens. Socialism's
growing popularity scared the bourgeoisie. Millet’s sympathetic depiction of the poor seemed
to many like a political manifesto.
Because of the power of art, France and the rest of Europe in the later 18th and early 19th
centuries prompted the French people to suspect artists as subversive. A person could be jailed
for too bold of a statement in the press, literature, art, music, or drama. Realist, Honore
Daumier (1808-1879), was a defender of the urban working classes, and in his art, he boldly
confronted authority with social criticism and political protest. In response, the authorities
imprisoned the artist. His lithographic prints enabled him to reach a broad audience. His in
depth knowledge of the unrest in the Paris Revolutions of 1830 and 1848, endowed his work
with truthfulness, which had great impact. Rue Transonain is a lithograph, whose title refers
to a street in Lyon where an unknown sniper killed a civil guard, part of a government force
trying to repress a worker demonstration. Because the fatal shot had come from a worker’s
housing block, the remaining guards stormed the building and massacred all of its inhabitants.
Daumier depicted not the execution but the terrible quiet of the aftermath. This print
significance is in it factualness. It is an example of the period’s increasing artistic bias toward
using facts as subject, and not always illusionistically.
The relative speed of the print medium, compared to a traditional painting, allowed Daumier to
comment on current events in a timely manner. The lithograph, Nadar Raising Photography
to the Height of Art, 1862, is an amusing witty commentary about the ongoing struggle of
Photography to be recognized as a fine art. This print was prompted by an 1862 court decision
that acknowledged that photography was indeed an art, and therefore entitled to legal
protection. The suit that was brought, involved copyright infringement, which only applied to
recognized art forms at the time.
Daumier brought the same convictions he displayed in his graphic arts, to his painting. His
unfinished painting Third Class Carriage depicts the cramped and dirty space that the poor
were forced to travel in on railway carriages. First and third class were closed compartments,
while third class was cramped and on hard benches. The disinherited masses of the 19th
century were repeatedly Daumier’s subjects. He tried to achieve the real by isolating a random
collection of the unrehearsed details of human existence from the continuum of ordinary life.
Daumier’s vision anticipated the spontaneity and candor of scenes captured with the modern
snapshot camera by the end of the century.
Edouard Manet (1832-1883) was committed to Realist ideas and was instrumental in affecting
the course of Modernist painting. Manet was a pivotal figure in the 19th century. Not only was
his work critical for the articulation of Realist principles, but his art played an important role in
the development of Impressionism in the 1870’s. When attempting to explain the critique of the
discipline central to modernism, art historians have looked to Manet’s paintings as prime
examples. Manet’s interest in modernist principles is clear in his Dejeuner sur l’Herbe, or
Luncheon on the Grass.
Manet depicts two nude women and two clothed men enjoying a picnic. The foreground figures
were all based on living identifiable people. The seated nude is Victorine Meurend (Manet’s
favorite model at the time) and the gentleman with the cane is his brother Eugene, and the other
is the sculptor Ferdinand Leenhof. The two men are dressed in fashionable Parisian attire of the
1860’s. The foreground nude is not only a distressingly unidealized figure type, but also seems
disturbingly unabashed and at ease, looking directly to the viewer without shame.
This outraged the public - rather than a traditional pastoral scene, Luncheon seemed merely to
represent the promiscuous in a Parisian park. Shock value was not the aim of Manet even
though he anticipated the criticism. Manet’s goal was a reassessment of the entire range of art.
Luncheon contains many references to painting genres - history painting, portraiture, pastoral
scenes, nudes, and even religious scenes. It represents a synthesis of the history of painting.
The negative response to Manet’s painting extended beyond the subject. Manet depicted the
figures in a soft focus and broadly painted the landscape including the pool in which the second
woman bathes. The loose manner of the painting contrasts with the clear forms of the harshly
lit foreground trio and the pile of discarded attire and picnic foods. In the main figures, the
many values that create form are simplified into one or two, lights or darks. The effect is to
flatten the forms and create hardness about them. Form is the function of light and not line.
Manet was using art to call attention to art. He was moving from illusionism toward open
acknowledgment of the flatness of the painting surface. The public, however, saw only a crude
sketch without the customary finish. The style of painting and the subject matter made this
work exceptionally controversial.
Even more scandalous was Manet’s 1863 painting Olympia. The work depicts a young
prostitute, reclining on a bed that fills the foreground. Stark naked, except a few accessories,
Olympia, which was the professional name for prostitutes in the 19th century, coolly looks into
the viewers eyes. The black maid in the foreground presents her flowers.
The public and critics were greatly outraged at Manet’s “in your face” and defiant portrayal of a
prostitute. The painting touches on racial issues, depravity and animalistic sexuality. The
rough painting style and abrupt tonality changes that contrasted with the public’s academic
tastes.
To better understand the public’s rejection of Manet and modernism we need to look at the the
work of a highly acclaimed French academic artist of the time Adolphe-William Bouguereau
(1825-1905), is instructive. Nymphs and Satyr depicts a classical mythological subject with a
polished illusionism. Although the scene appears very illusionistic, it is defiantly not Realist.
His choice of a fictional theme and adherence to established painting conventions could be only
seen as traditional. Bouguereau was immensely popular during the later 19th century, enjoying
state patronage throughout his career.
Marie Rosalie (Rosa) Bonheur (1822-1899) was awarded the Legion of Honor in 1865, and
was the most celebrated women artist of the 19th century. Although Bonheur’s work contains
Realist elements, she would more appropriately consider a “naturalist.” She was trained as an
artist by her father, who was a proponent of Saint-Simonianism, an early 19th century utopian
socialist movement that emphasized, among other things, the education and enfranchisement of
women. Bonheur launched her career believing that as a women and artist, she had a special
role to play in creating a new and perfect society. She was driven by a Realist passion for
accuracy, but resisted depicting problematic social and political situations that Courbet and
Manet embraced. Rather she turned to the animal world, combining a scientist’s knowledge of
equine anatomy with the love and admiration for the brute strength of wild and domestic
animals. The Horse Fair, is Bonheur’s most famous work. Panoramic and dynamic, the loose
painterly brushwork and rolling sky reveal her admiration for Gericault. Many engraved
reproductions of the work were eagerly bought, making it one of the most well known paintings
of the century.
Despite the public’s derision, the French Realists challenged the whole iconographic stock
of traditional art and called public attention to what Baudelaire termed the “heroism of
modern life.” In doing so they not only changed the course of Western art but also left
succeeding generations of viewers with a broader understanding of French life and culture
in the later 19th century.
American Realism
Depicting scenes of modern life was not exclusively French. The Realist foundation in
empiricism and positivism appealed to many artists in other countries. Winslow Homer (18361910) had first hand knowledge of the Civil War. When it broke out in 1860, he joined the
Union campaign as an artist reporter for Harper’s Weekly. At the end of the war, in 1865, he
painted The Veteran in a New Field. Although it is painted simple and direct, it provides
significant commentary on the effects and aftermath of the Civil War. A man is depicted with
his back to the viewer harvesting wheat. That he is a veteran is clear not only from the title of
the painting, but also from the uniform and canteen on the ground in the lower right. The
veteran’s involvement in meaningful and productive work implies a smooth transition from war
to peace. America’s ability to make a smooth transition from soldier to farmer, was a national
concern, but became strength. The poet Walt Whitman wrote, “The peaceful harmonious
disbanding of the armies in the summer of 1865 was one of the immortal proofs of democracy,
unequall’d in all the history of the past.” Homer’s painting thus reinforced the perception of the
country’s greatness.
Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) was a master Realist portrait and Genre painter living in
Philadelphia. He studied both painting and anatomy there before undertaking study under the
French artist Gerome. Eakins ambition was to paint things as he saw them rather than as the
public might wish them portrayed. This attitude was in line with the 19th century American
taste for accurate depictions with a hunger for truth.
The too brutal realism of The Gross Clinic, an early Eakins masterpiece, prompted a jury to
reject it for the Philadelphia exhibition commemorating the nation’s centennial. The work
presents the renowned surgeon Dr. Samuel Gross in the operating amphitheater of the Jefferson
Medical College in Philadelphia, where the painting now hangs. The subject testifies to the
publics increasing faith in science and medicine. The figures in the composition have been
identified, everything is up to date. The graphic scene was had to digest. Its unsparing
description of a contemporaneous event, was more than most could take. One critic wrote, “It is
a picture that even strong men find difficult to look at long, if they can look at all.”
Eakins believed that knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, was a prerequisite for his art.
This insistence on scientific fact corresponded to the dominance of empiricism during the latter
half of the 19th century. Eakins concerns for anatomical correctness led him to investigate the
human form in motion. Using regular cameras and a special one from France, Eakins
collaborated with Eadweard Muybridge in the photographic study of animal and human action.
These studies drew favorable attention from artists at home and abroad, and anticipated the
motion picture.
Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) was a Realistic photographer and scientist who came to
America from England in the 1850’s and settled in San Francisco. He established a prominent
international reputation for his photographs of the Western United States; winning the gold
medal at the Vienna Exposition in 1873 for his large plate landscape images of Yosemite. In
1872, the governor of California sought Muybridge's assistance in settling a bet about whether,
at any point in a stride, all four feet of a horse galloping at top speed are off the ground.
Through his sequential photography, as seen in Horse Galloping, Muybridge proved that they
were. Muybridge did other studies in motion that was too quick for the human eye to capture.
Muybridge received extensive publicity for his discoveries which he published in a book
Animal Locomotion. His studies influenced contemporaries such as Degas, and Frederick
Remington.
Muybridge presented his work to scientists and general audiences with a device called the
zoopraxiscope, which he invented to project his sequences of images, mounted on special
plates, onto a screen. The result was so life like that on viewer said it “threw upon the screen
apparently the living, moving animals. Nothing was wanting but the clatter of hoofs upon the
turf.” The illusion of motion was created by a physical fact of human insight called
“persistence of vision.” The brain holds what ever the eyes see a fraction of a second after the
eye stops seeing it. Thus, viewers saw a rapid succession of different images merging one into
the next, producing the illusion of continuous change. This illusion of continuous change lies at
the heart of the realism of all cinemas.
John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was an expatriate American artist and a younger
contemporary of Eakins and Muybridge. Sargent’s style was looser and more dashing than that
of Eakins. Sargent was in great demand as a portrait painter for the rich and elite of society. He
was renowned as a cultivated and cosmopolitan gentleman. He learned his fluid painting style
from study of Velazquez, whose masterpiece Las Meninas may have influenced Sargent’s
family portrait The Daughters of Edward Daily Boit. The four girls were the children of one
of Sargent’s close friends. Here, they are depicted in a hall and small drawing room in their
Paris home. The informal eclectic arrangements of their slight figures suggest that they are at
ease in a familiar space. He sensitively captured the naive, wondering openness of the little girl
in the foreground, the grave artlessness of the 10 year old child, and the self conscious poise of
the adolescents. This seems to be a spontaneous moment as if an adult had asked them to “look
this way.” Here is a most effective embodiment of the Realist belief that the artist’s business is
to record the modern being in a modern context.
Henry Ossawa Turner (1859-1937) was a black American artist who was a Realist painter
depicting the lives of ordinary people. Tanner studied art with Eakins before moving to Paris.
There he combined Eakins belief in careful study from nature with a desire to portray with
dignity the life of the ordinary people he had been raised among as the son of an African
American minister in Pennsylvania. The mood in The Thankful Poor is one of quiet devotion
similar to that of Millet. The grandfather, grandson, and main objects in the room are painted in
the greatest detail, while everything else dissolves into loose strokes of color and light.
Expressive lighting reinforces the painting’s reverent spirit. The deep shadows intensify the
man’s devout concentration, with golden rays illuminating the thanksgiving on the younger
face. Religious sanctity expressed in terms of everyday experience became increasingly
important for Tanner. A few years after our painting was completed, he began painting Biblical
subjects grounded in direct study from nature and in the love of Rembrandt.
Over time, Realist artists throughout Europe and America expanded and diversified their
subjects to embrace all classes, levels of society, all types of peoples and environments.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
In England, John Everett Millais (1829-1896) was a founder of a group of artists, the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, who refused to be limited to the contemporary scenes strict
Realists portrayed; these artists chose instead to represent fictional, historical, and fanciful
subjects with a significant degree of convincing illusion. Millais was so obsessed with details
that Baudelaire called him “the poet of meticulous detail.” The Brotherhood wished to create a
fresh and sincere art, free from what its members considered the tired and artificial manner
propagated in the academies by the successors of Raphael. Influenced by the well known critic
John Ruskin (1819-1900), the Pre-Raphaelites agreed with his distaste for the materialism and
ugliness of the contemporary industrializing world. The Pre-Raphaelites also expressed
appreciation for the spirituality, idealism art, and artisanship of past times, especially the
Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance.
Ophelia was exhibited in the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1855, where Courbet set up his
Pavilion of Realism. The subject, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is the drowning of Ophelia,
who in her madness, is unaware of her plight. Although the scene is fictitious, Millais worked
diligently to present it with unswerving fidelity to visual fact. He painted the background on
sight at a spot along the Hogsmill River in Surrey. For the figure, Millais had a friend lie in a
heated bathtub full of waters for hours at a stretch. As a result of this meticulous detail,
Ophelia was a huge success when it was exhibited.
Daniel Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) was well known as a painter and poet and was another
founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He also focused on literary and Biblical themes,
producing many portraits of women that projected an image of ethereal beauty and melded
apparent opposites - a Victorian prettiness with sensual allure. Beata Beatrix is a portrait of
Beatrice from Dante’s Vita Nuova - as she overlooks Florence in a trance after being
transported mystically from earth to heaven. The portrait had personal resonance for Rossetti; it
served as a memorial to his wife, Elizabeth Siddal (who was the model for Millais’s Ophelia).
Siddal had died shortly before Rossetti began this painting in 1862. In the image, the female
(Siddal-Beatrice) sits in a trancelike state, while a red dove (a messenger of both love and
death), deposits a poppy ( a symbol of sleep and death) in her hands. Because Siddal died of an
opium overdose, the presence of the poppy assumes greater significance.
Pictorial Photography
Photography was a medium created to serve the taste for visual fact, and was it self the creator
of a new Realism. But it could also be manipulated by talented photographers to produce quite
Romantic effects. After the first great breakthroughs, which bluntly showed what was before
the eye, photographers imitated Romantic arrangements of nature, filtering natural appearance
through sentiment - by using a soft focus. In the later 19th century, with much public approval,
photography had a Romantic-Realist school of its own, known as the “pictorial” method.
Gertrude Kasebier (1852-1934) was one of the leading practitioners of the pictorial style in
photography. After raising a family and working as a portrait painter, she took up photography
in 1897. She became famous for photographs with symbolic themes.
Blessed Art Thou Among Women depicts the famous annunciation theme. Kasebier’s title
suggests a parallel between the Mary and the modern mother in the image, who both protects
and sends forth her daughter. This photograph is an example of Kasebier's ability to invest
scenes from everyday life with a sense of spiritual and divine.
Impressionism
Impressionism, both in content and style, was an art of industrialized, urbanized Paris. As,
such, it furthered some of the Realist’s concerns and was resolutely an art of its time. Whereas,
Realism focused on the present, Impressionism focused even more acutely on a single moment.
Although Impressionism is often discussed as a coherent movement, it was actually a nebulous
and shifting phenomenon. People have perceived the Impressionists as a group largely because
they exhibited together in the 1870s and 1880’s. However, participation in these shows was a
constant source of contention and debate among artists.
A hostile critic applied the label “impressionism” in response to the painting
Impression: Sunrise by Claude Monet (1840-1926) that was exhibited in the first
Impressionist show in 1874. Although the critic intended the term to be derogatory, by the third
Impressionist show in 1878 the artists themselves were using the label.
The term impressionism had been used in art before but in relation to sketches. Impressionist
paintings incorporate the qualities of sketches - abbreviation, speed, and spontaneity. This is
apparent in Impressionist: Sunrise. The brushstrokes are clearly evident. Monet made no
attempt to blend the pigment to create smooth tonal gradations and an optically accurate scene.
This concern with acknowledging the paint and the canvas surface continued the
modernist exploration that the Realists began. Impressionism operates at the intersection
of what artists saw and what they felt. The “impressions” that these artists recorded in
their paintings were neither purely objective descriptions of the exterior world nor sorely
subjective responses, but the interaction between the two. They were sensations - the
artists’ subjective and personal responses to nature. A
The lack of pristine clarity characteristic of most impressionist works is historically grounded.
The extensive industrialization and urbanization that occurred in France during the later half of
the 19th century can only be described as a brutal and chaotic transformation. The rapidity of
these changes made the world seem unstable and insubstantial. Baudelaire observed:
“Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, and the contingent.” Impressionist works represent an
attempt to capture a fleeting moment - not in the absolutely fixed, precise sense of a Realist
painting but by conveying the elusiveness and impermanence of images and conditions.
Most of the Impressionists depicted scenes in and around Paris, where industrialization and
urbanization had its greatest impact. Monet’s Saint-Lazare Train Station depicts a dominant
aspect of Parisian life. The expanding railway network had made travel more convenient,
bringing throngs of people into Paris. Saint-Lazare was centrally located in a busy part of Paris.
Monet’s strokes captured the areas energy and vitality. The agitated paint application captures
the atmosphere of urban life.
Gustave Caillebotte (1849-1877) depicted the spacious boulevards of Paris, that were the
result of the tearing down and rebuilding parts of Paris as part of the Emperor Napoleon III’s
plan to handle the close to 1.5 million population of the city and make an imperial statement.
This massive project was overseen by Baron Georges Hausmann, and involved tearing down of
many ancient buildings from medieval times, placing new water and sewer systems, street
lighting, and of course residential and commercial buildings. The greatly widened and opened
boulevards were a major component of the grand design. This whole process was known as
“Hausmannization.” The painting, Paris: A Rainy Day, depicts the city’s rapid urbanization.
Caillebotte did not dissolve his image into broken color and brushwork, as did the
Impressionists, but he did use their compositional sensibilities asymmetrical composition and
informal balance. The arbitrary cropping of the figures conveys a random and transitory nature
to this scene, a major characteristic of Modernism.
Many of the Impressionists were familiar with photography and there are notable parallels
between their paintings and photographs. The arbitrary cropping of figures, an often flattened
spatial effect, and the capturing of a fleeting moment are some of the parallels. The Point
Neuf, Paris, a photograph created by a twin lensed camera by Hippolyte Jouvin,
illustrates these points.
Another facet of industrialized Paris was increased leisure time and activities due to the
regimentation of schedules made possible by the advent of set working hours.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) captures this celebration of leisure in his painting,
La Moulin de la Galette. The casual, fleeting moment, clearly depicted here was a major
characteristic of Impressionism and modernity. Whereas classical art sought to express
universal and timeless qualities, Impressionism attempted to depict just the opposite--the
incidental, momentary, and passing aspects of reality.
A Bar at Folies-Bergere was painted in 1882 by Manet. The viewer is confronted by
disinterested, lost in thought, barmaid. Manet’s painterly brush strokes draw attention to the
surface of the painting (it is not an illusion of reality). Forcing further study, Manet gets the
viewer to see that all things in the mirror is not as it appears to be. Can you see what does not
align with reality?
Is the women on the right the barmaid’s reflection or some one else? If it is the barmaid, it is
impossible to reconcile the spatial relationship between the barmaid, the mirror, and the bars
frontal horizontality. These visual contradictions reveal Manet’s insistence on calling
attention to the pictorial structure of this painting, in keeping with Manet’s modernist
interest in examining the basic premises of the medium. This radical break with tradition
and redefinition of the function of the picture surface is why many scholars call Manet the
first modernist.
In Edgar Degas’ (1834-1917) painting Ballet Rehearsal, created in 1874, he portrays one of
his favorite subjects, classical ballet. Degas was one of the greatest compositional artists of all
time, by his incredible arrangement of space. In this work we see major characteristics of
modernism; Off-center, asymmetrical, arbitrary cropping of figures or objects, warming up for
rehearsal (not the big show itself), flatness of space, and painterly. Degas studied photography
and used it to make preliminary studies of the figures in interior spaces. Degas work also shows
the influence of the compositional sensibilities of Japanese prints. The Impressionists greatly
admired these prints for their spatial organization, familiar and intimate themes, and flat
unmodeled color areas.
The Impressionists were also interested in the outdoors. Monet’s interests began to sharply
focus on the roles light and color play in capturing an instantaneous representation of
atmosphere and climate. Monet carried the systematic investigation of light and color the
furthest.
Scientific studies of light and the invention of chemically synthesized pigments increased
artists’ sensitivity to the multiplicity of colors in nature and gave them new colors to work.
Impressionists concluded that local color is usually modified by the quality of light in which it
is seen, by reflections from other objects and by effects juxtaposed colors produce. Shadows do
not appear gray of black, as many earlier painters had thought, but seen to be composed of
colors modified by reflections or other conditions. The juxtaposition of colors on a canvas for
an eye to fuse at a distance produces a more intense hue than the same colors mixed on a
palette. The Impressionists achieved brilliant effects with their short choppy stokes that
accurately caught the vibrating quality of light. The fact that their canvas surfaces look
unintelligible at close range and their forms and objects appear only when the eye fuses the
strokes at a certain distance, is accounts for much of the early criticism leveled at their work.
These investigations into light and color are clearly seen in Monet’s series’ of Rouen Cathedral
and Hay Stacks.
Color and light were not the only formal elements being investigated. Degas was a master of
line. His works are very different from Monet and Renoir. Degas specialized in studies of
figures in rapid and informal action, recording the quick impression of arrested motion. He
often uses lines to convey this sense of movement. In The Tub, Degas outlined the major
objects in the painting and covered all surfaces with linear hatch marks. Degas achieved this
with pastel, (Degas’ favorite medium) dry sticks of powdered pigment. Pastels are applied
directly to paper accounting for the linear quality. They can be smudged but often retain their
density and brightness. In this work, what qualities tell us that this is drawing displays
modern sensibilities. (Intimate scene, acknowledged picture plane, observed difficulties
[lack of foreshortening on picture, shared edges of the pictures], flattened picture plane).
Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) was an American expatriate. In the Salon of 1874, Degas admiring
one of her paintings was said to have exclaimed “There is someone who feels as I do. Degas
befriended and influenced Cassatt. Being a woman, she was not allowed to frequent the cafes
and other haunts of her male artist friends. She also had to care for her aging parents who
moved to Paris. This limited her subject matter, which were mainly women and children. Her
significance is due to her being a woman, who she hung out with, and an intimate understanding
of her subject.
Henri-de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) was similar to the Impressionists in their depiction of
modern life, but his work was often edgier, darker, and satirical to the point of caricature.
Lautrec’s work was an expression of his life. He was a small, ugly, dwarf of a man, who
inhabited the night world of Paris. The influence of Degas, Japanese prints, and photography
can be clearly seen in Lautrec’s works. Asymmetrical compositions, strong and noticeable
formal elements, such as, line and color, and dissonant use of color, characterize his work.
At the Moulin Rouge is exemplary of Lautrec's style. The expressive linear qualities,
distortion, and artificial color anticipated Expressionism, when the artists’ use of the formal
elements, increased their images impact on observers.
James Abbott McNeill Whistler ((1834-1903) was an American expatriate who worked in
Europe before settling in London. In Paris, Whistler knew the Impressionists and shared many
of their modern concerns. He also was interested in creating harmonies paralleling those in
music. To underscore his intentions, Whistler began naming his paintings “arrangements or
nocturnes.” Nocturne in Black and Gold (The Falling Rocket) is a daring painting with gold
flecks and splatters that represent exploding fireworks in the night sky. Whistler was more
interested in conveying atmospheric effects than he was providing details of the actual scene.
Creating harmonious arrangements of shapes and colors on a rectangular canvas was an
approach the interested many 20th century artists.
Works such as this angered many viewers and critics. One critic, the famous John Ruskin was
sued by Whistler for libel because he wrote that “Whistler was slinging a pot of paint in the
publics face.” Whistler won the case but was awarded one penny and ordered to pay court
costs, bankrupting him. He continued to produce work for the next 20 years.
Post-Impressionism
By 1886, the public and critics had accepted Impressionism. At this time, some of the
Impressionists and younger followers came to feel that the Impressionists were neglecting too
many of the traditional elements of picture making in their attempts to capture momentary
sensations of light and color on canvas. In 1883, Renoir commented that he had, “Wrung
Impressionism dry, and I finally came to the conclusion that I knew neither how to paint nor
how to draw. In a word Impressionism was a blind alley, as far as I was concerned.” By the
1880’s, four artists, in particular, began to systematically examine the properties and expressive
qualities of line, pattern, form, and color: Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat,
and Paul Cezanne. Van Gogh and Gauguin focused on the expressive capabilities of the formal
elements, while Seurat and Cezanne focused on more analytical concerns. Because these
artists’ mature works were so different from Impressionism, they have become known as the
Post-Impressionists.
Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) explored the capabilities of colors and distorted forms to
express his emotions as he confronted nature. Van Gogh’s father was a Protestant Dutch
preacher. Van Gogh became a missionary in the coal mining area of Belgium. He had many
professional and personal failures and was at the point of despair. He turned to painting as a
was to communicate his experiences. Van Gogh felt that the ability to create was more
important to him than God. Creation for Van Gogh involved the expressive use of color. In a
letter to his brother Theo, Vincent wrote, “Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have
before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily so as to express myself forcibly.” His use of color
was “not locally true from the point of view of the delusive realist, but color suggesting some
emotion of an ardent temperament.”
This desire for color expression led to Vincent’s expressive application of color. The thick,
broad, quick strokes seemed to enhance the intensity of his colors.
The Night Cafe is an interior scene that has been charged with energy. The apparently benign
atmosphere was meant to be oppressive. Van Gogh described it as “ a place where on can ruin
oneself, go mad or commit a crime.”
Starry Night was painted in 1889, one year before Van Gogh’s death. At the time of the
painting he was living in the asylum where he had committed himself. This work has been
shown to correspond to the view Van Gogh had from his asylum window. Here Van Gogh
seems to depict the vastness of the universe, filled with swirling, churning, and exploding stars
and galaxies, with the earth and humanity huddling beneath it. The dark deep blue that engulfs
the painting suggests a quiet but pervasive depression that inflicted Van Gogh.
Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) also rejected objective representation in favor of subjective
expression. He broke with the Impressionist studies of minutely contrasted hues because he
believed color should be expressive and that the artist’s power to determine the colors in a
painting was a seminal element of creativity. Gauguin's application of color and paint appears
much flatter, often visually dissolving into abstract patterns of patches, than does Van Gogh’s
heavy and thick brushstrokes.
The Vision after the Sermon or Jacob wrestling with an Angel is a work that decisively
rejects Realism and Impressionism. Gauguin claimed that he was attracted to Brittany’s
unspoiled or backwoods culture, with its cultural sensibilities of the past. These were the
“natural” people held up by Rousseau. Gauguin chose to ignore the many modern
developments that transformed the region into a profitable economy. The painting shows the
local Breton women, wearing their starched white Sunday caps and black dresses, similar to our
views of the Amish. They are visualizing the sermon that was preached at church regarding
Jacob’s encounter with the Holy Spirit (Gen 32:24-30).
Gauguin composed the picture to focus the viewer on the idea and intensity of the message.
Gauguin twisted the perspective and allotted the space to emphasize the innocent faith of the
unquestioning women, while shrinking Jacob and the angel. The painting is transformed
from traditional painting into abstract, expressive patterns of line, shape, and pure color.
Gauguin had a brief association with Van Gogh in Arles, but finally settled in Tahiti. He
thought it would be more “natural” than materialistic Europe but he found it to be more
developed than he expected. He moved to the Tahitian countryside to try and find his untamed
nature. It is here that he displayed his fascination with primitive life and brilliant color.
Gauguin often designed his canvas’ indirectly on native motifs and the color harmonies of the
tropical flora on the island.
Despite the lure of the South Pacific, Gauguin’s health suffered and his art was not well
received. In 1897, worn down by these obstacles, he tried to take his own life, but failed.
Before his death, he completed Where Do We Come From? Why are we? Where Are We
Going?” This painting can be viewed as a summary of Gauguin’s artistic methods and world
view.
Gauguin in a letter to a friend wrote that this painting was comparable to the Gospels. However
it displays a pessimistic message of life’s inevitability. He wrote:
Where are we going? Near to death an old woman... What are we? Day to day
existence... Where do we come from? Source. Child, life begins... Behind a tree
two sinister figures, cloaked in garments of somber colour, introduce near the
tree of knowledge, their note of anguish caused by that very knowledge in
contrast to some simple beings in a virgin nature, which might be paradise as
conceived by humanity, who give themselves up to the happiness of the living
In terms of style, this painting demonstrates his commitment to expressive color. Though the
landscape is recognizable, most of the scene, other than the figures, is composed of areas of flat,
unmodulated color, which conveys richness and intensity.
Gauguin died in 1903. Despite a brief career, his art and ideas greatly influenced subsequent
generations of artists.
Georges Seurat (1859-1891) painted works that were intellectual rather than expressionistic in
the use of color. He devised a disciplined and painstaking system of painting that focused on
color analysis. Seurat was less concerned with the recording of immediate color sensations than
he was with their careful systematic organization of a new kind of pictorial order. Seurat’s
system, known as pointillism or divisionism, involved careful observation of color and
separating it into its component parts. The artist then applied these pure component colors to
the canvas in tiny dots or daubs. Thus, the shapes, figures and faces in the image only become
comprehensible from a distance when the viewer’s eye blends the many pigment dots.
Pointillism was on view at the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition in 1886, when Seurat
showed his A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. Depicting the familiar recreational theme of the
Impressionists, Seurat’s painting seems strangely rigid and remote, unlike the spontaneous
representations of the Impressionists.
Seurat’s painting also recognized the shifting social and class relationships of the time. The
locale depicted is La Grande Jatte (The Big Bowl), an island in the Seine river, near one of
Paris’ rapidly growing industrial suburbs. The Scene captures a Sunday afternoon of people of
various classes, from the sleeveless worker lounging in the left program, to the middle class
man and women next to him. Most of the people where in their Sunday best, making class
distinction less obvious. Mass production of the Industrial Age also diminished the differences
that fashion historically signified.
Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) also turned from Impressionism to develop a more analytical style.
Cezanne admired Delacroix, and allied himself with the Impressionists and their principles. Yet
after time and his studies of the Old Masters in the Louvre, he came to the belief that
Impressionism lacked form and structure. Cezanne declared that he wanted to “make of
Impressionism something solid and durable like the art in museums.”
In Mont Sainte-Victoire, we see Cezanne’s new aesthetic on display. His aim was not to
depict photographic truth, of the fleeting moment, rather, he depicts a lasting structure behind
the formless and fleeting visual information the eye absorbs. Cezanne attempted to
intellectually order the lines, planes, and colors that comprise nature. His had a goal of “doing
Poussin over entirely from nature,” meaning that Poussin’s effects of distance, depth, structure,
and solidity must be achieved by traditional perspective and chiaroscuro but in terms of the
color patterns an optical analysis of nature provides. Rather than seeing nature as rounded,
Cezanne depicted form in terms of small planes. He also used the intrinsic qualities of color,
and the power of colors to modify the direction and depth of lines and planes. He used the hue,
value, and saturation of color to advance and recede planes, (warm colors advance, cool colors
recede) it creates volume and spatial depth.
Treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything in proper
perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central
point. Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth that is a section of nature...
Lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth. But nature for us men is more
depth than surface, whence the need of introducing into our light vibrations,
represented by reds and yellows, a sufficient amount of blue to give the
impression of air.
In Cezanne’s Basket of Apples, the objects have lost something of their individual character as
bottles and fruit approach the conditions of cylinders and spheres. The still life was a good
vehicle for the artist’s experiments, as he could arrange a limited number of selected objects to
provide a well ordered point of departure. So analytical, meticulous, and time consuming was
Cezanne’s approach that he had to use artificial fruit because real fruit would often rot.
Basket full of Apples captures the solidity of each object by juxtaposing color patches.
Volume and solidity of the space appear disjointed in the depiction of the discontinuous table
edges and multiple points of view. In his study of space and volume, Cezanne articulated
different viewpoints in the same work. This, along with seeing form in terms of planes,
constituted a significant paradigm shift in how space was depicted the previous 500 years in
Western culture, and greatly influenced the next generation of artists. Picasso called Cezanne
the “Father of Cubism.”
The Rise of the Avant-Garde
Each successive modernist movement of the 19th century -- Realism, Impressionism, and PostImpressionism -- challenged artistic conventions of the time with greater intensity and
frequency. This relentless challenge gave rise to the avant-garde. Use of this term has
expanded over the years; it now serves as a synonym for any particularly new or cutting edge
cultural manifestation. The word avant-garde, which means “front guard,” derived from 19th
century French military usage. The avant-garde were soldiers sent ahead of the army’s main
body to reconnoiter and make occasional raids on the enemy. Politicians who deemed
themselves visionary and forward thinking subsequently adopted the term. It then migrated to
the art world in the 1880’s, where it referred to artists who were ahead of their time and who
transgressed the limits of established art forms. The avant-garde were modernists in that they
rejected the classical, academic, or traditional and they adopted a critical stance toward their
respective media. Yet they departed from modernism in their art’s extreme transgressiveness or
subversiveness, Further, the avant-garde increasingly disengaged themselves from a public
audience. In zealously exploring the premises and formal qualities of painting, sculpture, and
other media, avant-garde artists created an insular community whose members seemed to speak
only to one another in their work. The Post-Impressionists were the first to be labeled avant-
garde. Avant-garde principles appealed to greater number numbers of artists as the 20th century
dawned. In the art scene in many graduate schools and many undergraduate programs, one is
expected to be avant-garde.
Symbolism
By the end of the 19th century, the representation of nature had become completely
subjectivized, to the point that artists did not imitate nature but created free interpretations of it.
Artists rejected the optical world as observed in favor of a fantasy world, of forms they conjured
in their free imagination, with or without reference to things conventionally seen. Technique
and ideas were individual to each artist. Color, line, and shape, were used as symbols of
personal emotions in response to the world. These artists who rejected the visual world were
solely concerned with expressing reality in accord with their spirit and intuition. Deliberately
choosing to stand outside of convention and tradition, such artists spoke like prophets, in signs
and symbols.
Symbolism was a term that originally applied to a general European movement that was
applied to both art and literature. Symbolists disdained Realism as trivial, and asserted that fact
must be transformed into a symbol of inner experience of that fact. The task of the Symbolist
was not to see things, but to see through them to a significance and reality far deeper than what
superficial appearance gave. One group of Symbolist painters was called the Nabis (the
Hebrew word for prophet) and was influenced by the work of Gauguin. An influential
Symbolist poet, Rimbaud, said that to achieve the Seer’s insight, artists must become deranged.
In effect, they must systematically unhinge and confuse the everyday faculties of sense and
reason, which served only to blur artistic vision. The artist’s mystical vision must convert the
objects of the common sense world into symbols of a reality beyond that world and ultimately,
a reality from within the individual.
The extreme subjectivism of the Symbolists led them to cultivate all the resources of fantasy
and imagination, no matter how deeply buried or obscure. They urged artists to stand against
the vulgar materialism and conventional mores of industrial and middle class society. Through
their philosophy of aestheticism, the Symbolists wished to purge literature and art of anything
utilitarian, to cultivate an exquisite aesthetic sensitivity, and to make the slogan “art for arts
sake” into doctrine and a way of life.
The subjects of the Symbolists became increasingly esoteric and exotic, mysterious, visionary,
dreamlike, and fantastic. The Symbolists were contemporary with Sigmund Freud, the founder
of psychoanalysis, and introduced the world to the concept and the world of unconscious
experience. These artists inspired later artists of the 20th century that had great interest in
creating art that expressed psychological truth.
Pierre Puvis De Chavannes (1824-1898), although never formally identifying himself with the
Symbolists, became a prophet of those artists. He rejected Realism and Impressionism,
producing an ornamental and reflective art that did not depict the noisy everyday world. In The
Sacred Grove, Chavannes deployed statuesque figures in a tranquil landscape with a classical
shrine. The motion of the figures seems suspended in time and conveys a ritual significance.
The modeling is bas-relief and there is an mystical calm. The effect is an anti-realistic
statement and a rejection of the contemporary materialistic world. The Academy accepted him
for his classicism, and the avant-garde for his vindication of imagination and his artistic
independence from the contemporary.
Gustave Moreau (1826-1898) gravitated toward subjects inspired by dreaming solitude and as
remote as possible from the everyday world, in keeping with Symbolist doctrine. His subjects
were presented sumptuously and sensually through intricate line, gorgeous color, and richly
detailed shape. Jupiter and Semele, one of Moreau’s rare finished works, depicts the mortal
slave girl Semele, one of Jupiter’s loves, begged the God to appear to her in all his majesty, a
sight so powerful that she dies from it. The artist presented the subject in a setting fit for a
Wagner opera, whose music Moreau admired. The glowing color and towering opulent
architecture create a very dramatic effect. All the forms are richly detailed. The viewer is
transported into the world of imagination free from the confines of the present.
Odilon Redon (1840-1916) was also a visionary who used the Impressionist palette to
whimsically apply color to the mood radiated by the subject. This image born in the dreaming
world and the color analyzed and disassociated from the waking world come together here at
the artists will. Redon observed, “My originality consists in bringing to life, in a human
way, improbable beings and making them live according to the laws of probability, by
putting - as far as possible - the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible.
Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) was an artist who tried to paint “primitive” without leaving Paris.
He was an untrained artist who produced an art of dream and fantasy in a style that had its own
sophistication and uniqueness of the time. His lack of technical ability was compensated by a
natural talent for design and an imagination for the exotic.
The Sleeping Gypsy shows the title figure in a silent desert world, dreaming beneath a moonlit
night. Does the lion mean to menace the gypsy?
Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was a Norwegian painter who was linked in spirit to the
Symbolists. Munch had a very painful view of life and felt that man was powerless against the
forces and feelings of life. He wanted to describe “modern psychic life” His highly charged
paintings were of great influence to the German Expressionists in the early 20th century.
The Cry is a famous painting by Munch, of which he made many variations. The figure is
placed on a real world bridge, but departs from reality in a very visceral and emotional way.
The simplified figure and curvilinear setting seems to amplify the strong emotions. Munch
wrote, regarding this work, “I stopped and leaned against the balustrade, almost dead with
fatigue. Above the blue-black fjord hung the clouds, red as blood and tongues of fire. My
friends had left me, and alone, trembling with anguish, I became aware of a vast, infinite
cry of nature.” The work was originally was titled Despair.
Sculpture in the Later 19th Century
Sculpture was not readily adaptable to the optical sensations favored by the painters. Sculpture
served predominantly as an expression of supposedly timeless ideals, rather than the fleeting
moment. Yet, sculptors did try to purse many of the ideals important to Realism and
Impressionism.
Jean- Baptiste Carpeaux (1827-1875) combined his interest in Realism with a love of
Baroque and ancient sculpture and of Michelangelo. Ugolino and his Children is a group
based on a passage from Dante’s Inferno and shows Count Ugolino with his four sons shut up
in a tower to starve to death. In Hell, Ugolino relates to Dante how, in a moment of extreme
despair I bit both hands for grief. And they, thinking I did it for hunger, suddenly rose up
and said, “Father... [and offered him their own flesh as food. The twisting intertwined, and
concentrated figures suggest a self devouring torment of frustration and despair.
Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) was fascinated by the body in motion. Although color was not a
significant factor in Rodin’s work, Impressionist influence manifested itself in the artist’s
constant concern for the effect of light on a three-dimensional surface. Rodin said, “The
sculptor must learn to reproduce the surface, which means all the vibrates on the surface,
soul, love, passion, life... Sculpture is thus the art of hollows and mounds, not of
smoothness, or even polished planes.” Working in clay and wax, Rodin, fingers were
sensitive to the subtle variations surface and the play of constantly shifting light on the body.
Walking Man was a study for Saint John the Baptist Preaching of which there is a copy in
our St. Louis Art Museum. Rodin captured the sense of the body in motion, not only by the
stance, but by the careful manipulation on the surface to create a sense of vibrating light.
Careful attention to detail is compounded with a sketchy modeling.
The Burghers of Calais depicts a group of the city leaders of the medieval French town of
Calais that gave their lives so that the English, who had the town under siege, would spare the
lives of the town’s people. Rodin grossly distorted the figures to heighten the anguish and pain
of the leaders and the monumentality of their sacrifice. The figures seem to wander aimlessly,
stumbling to their fate. The roughly textured surface adds to the despair. The work was to be
placed at street level, rather than an elevated pedestal (meant to inspire by looking up), in hope
that the citizens would be inspired to be face to face with their sacrificial ancestors. The
government commissioners found the work so offensive in its “Realism,” they banished the
monument to a remote site and modified the work’s impact by placing it high on an isolating
pedestal.
Many of Rodin’s works were left unfinished or were deliberate fragments. Seeing the aesthetic
and expressive value of these works, modern viewers and sculptors have developed a taste for
how the sketch, half finished figure, the fragment, and the vignette lifted out of context all have
the power of suggestion and understatement. Rodin’s ability to capture the quality of the
transitory through his highly textured surfaces while revealing larger themes and deeper, lasting
sensibilities explains the impact he had on 20th century artists.
The Arts and Crafts Movement
While many artists embraced industrialization, mass production, and the modern life, others
decried the impact of rapid industrialization. One response came from the Arts and Crafts
Movement in England. It developed in the later 19th century and was shaped by the ideas of art
critic John Ruskin and artist William Morris (1834-1896). Both men believed that
industrialization alienated the worker from their own nature. The advocated an art “made by
the people for the people as a joy for the maker and the user.” This condemnation of
capitalism and support for manual laborers were compatible with socialism, and many artists
considered themselves socialists and participated in the labor movement.
Members of the Arts and Crafts Movement dedicated themselves to producing functional
objects with high aesthetic value for a wide public. The style they advocated was based on
natural, rather than artificial, forms and often consisted of repeated designs of floral or
geometric patterns.
Morris contributed to this populist art by forming a decorating firm that produced wall paper,
textiles, tiles, furniture, books, rugs, stained glass, and pottery. The firm’s services were in
great demand. In 1867, Morris decorated the Green Dining Room at London’s South
Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum), the center of public art education
and home of decorative art collections. Nothing is left to its own; every area is carefully
designed and imbued with intricate design.
In Scotland, Rennie Scott Mackintosh (1868-1929), popularized this ideal by designing a
number of tea rooms. The Ladies’ Tea Room, in the Ingram Street Tea Room in Glasgow is
consistent with Morris’ vision of a functional, exquisitely designed art. The chairs, stained
glass windows, large panels of colored gesso and twine, and other areas all combine in a
unifying, rhythmic, and geometric design.
Art Nouveau
Art Nouveau (New Art) was an architectural and design movement that developed out of the ideas
promoted by the Arts and Crafts Movement. Proponents of this movement tried to
synthesize all the arts in a determined attempt to create art based on natural forms that
could be mass produced for a large audience. The Art Nouveau style emerged at the end of
the 19th century and adapted the twining plant form to the needs of architecture, painting,
sculpture, and all the decorative arts. The mature Art Nouveau style was first seen in houses
designed in Brussels in the 1890’s by Victor Horta (1861-1947). The staircase in the Van
Eetvelde House is a good example. Every detail functions as part of a living whole. The
curvilinear structures and patterning combine with actual plant forms, to create a total
environment. Art Nouveau artists were inspired by Japanese print designs, Van Gogh,
Gauguin, and their Post-Impressionist, Symbolist contemporaries.
Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898) was one of a group of English artists whose work existed at the
intersection of Symbolism and Art Nouveau. Salome is an illustration for a book by Oscar
Wilde. The Peacock Skirt perfectly represents the Art Nouveau style. Banishing Realism,
Beardsley confined himself to lines and patterns of black and white, eliminating all shading.
The elastic line encloses sweeping curvilinear shapes that lie flat on the surface. Some of the
spaces are left blank, while others are filled with swirling complexes of mostly organic motifs.
Art Nouveau achieved its most personal expression in the architecture of Antonio Gaudi
(1852-1926). Gaudi was an ironworker who became an architect. He long to create a style that
was both modern and appropriate to his country. His designs took inspiration from MoorishSpanish architecture and from simple architecture of his native Catalonia. He conceived of a
building as a whole and molded it like a sculptor would model clay. His work proceeded
slowly under the guidance of his intuition and imagination. Gaudi, like Brunelleschi, had to
develop new structural techniques that would allow him to actually construct his vision. Casa
Mila is a apartment house that is a wonderful free form mass that wraps itself around a street
corner. Lacy iron railings enliven the swelling curves of the stone cut facade. Dormer windows
peep from the undulating roof capped by writhing chimneys. The cave-like portal allows
entrance into the building. This feature may reflect the excitement that swept Spain in 1879
following the discovery of Paleolithic cave paintings at Altamira. Gaudi felt that each of his
buildings was symbolically a living thing and the passionate naturalism of his designs is a
spiritual kin of early 20th century Expressionist painting and sculpture.
Fin de Siècle Culture
The momentous changes of the century that the Realists and Impressionists had responded to
were now familiar and ordinary at the end of the 19th century. Fin de Siècle “end of the
century,” describes not only a chronological time, but also refers to a certain sensibility. There
had been significant political upheaval and the growth of the middle class and their quest for
“the good life.” All these changes evolved into a culture of decadence and indulgence.
Characteristic of this period was an intense preoccupation with sexual drives, powers and
perversions: the femme fatale was a particularly resonant figure. People also immersed
themselves in the exploration of the unconsciousness, popularized by the work of Sigmund
Freud. This culture was unrestrained and freewheeling, but the determination to enjoy life
masked an anxiety prompted by the fluctuating political situation and uncertain future. The
country most closely associated with this culture was Austria.
One Viennese artist whose work captures the period’s flamboyance, but tempers it with
unsettling undertones was Gustauv Klimt (1863-1918). In The Kiss, Klimt depicted a couple
locked in sensual embrace. Rather than depiction the full figures, Klimt has dissolved the
figures clothing into shimmering extravagant flat patterning. The patterning shows clear ties to
Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts Movement and the flatness of modernism. Paintings such
as The Kiss were visual manifestations of the end of the century spirit because the captured a
decadence conveyed by opulent and sensuous images.
Other Architecture of the Later 19th Century
New technologies and the changing needs of urbanized, industrialized, society affected
architecture throughout the Western world. Since the 18th century, cast iron had significant
influence of the size, strength, and fire resistance of structures. Steel, available after 1860,
allowed architects to enclose even larger spaces, such as railway stations and exposition halls.
The Realist impulse encouraged an architecture that expressed a buildings purpose, rather than
hide its function. French engineer architect Alexander-Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923) responded
to this idea through his metal skeleton structures that made important contributions to the
development of the 20th century skyscraper. Eiffel trained in Paris and began designing
exhibition halls, bridges, and the interior armature for the Statue of Liberty. The Eiffel Tower
was designed for a great exhibition in Paris in 1889. It was seen at the time as a symbol of
modern Paris and a symbol of 19th century civilization. Its needle shaft rises to a height of 984
feet above the city, and was for many years the tallest building in the world.
The interpretation of the inner and the outer space became a hallmark of 20th century
architecture. Eiffel’s metal skeleton structures, as well as other innovative architecture, jolted
some to the realization that the new materials and new processes might germinate a completely
new style and a radically innovative approach to architectural design.
The desire for greater speed and economy in construction as well as reduction in fire hazards,
prompted greater use of cast and wrought iron in the construction of many buildings. A series
of disastrous fires in the 1870’s in New York, Boston and Chicago, demonstrated that cast iron
still did not hold up to the effects of fire. This led to the encasing of the cast iron in stone
masonry, combining cast iron’s strength with stone’s fire resistance.
In cities where land was at a premium, there was a need to build higher. Metal could support
such structures. With the invention off the elevator, first installed in the Equitable Building in
New York in 1868-1871), height was made more effective. The skyscraper was born.
Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-1886), created architectural designs that displayed a strong
Romanesque influence that Hobson greatly admired; rounded arches and masonry walls. The
Marshall Field Wholesale Store (now demolished) was a vast building occupying a city block
and designed for practical purposes. The building shows the tripartite levels of a Renaissance
palace, yet has no classical ornament. The massive stone courses and strong horizontality of the
windowsills define the levels and stress the long sweep of the building. The structural frame
lies behind the great masonry screen. The great arcades open up the walls of this large scale
building. This building design pointed the way to the modern total penetration of the walls
and the transformation of them into mere screens or curtains that serve both to echo the
underlying structural grid and to protect it from weather.
Henry Louis Sullivan (1856-1924) is widely considered America's first truly modern architect.
Instead of imitating historic styles, he created original forms and details. Older architectural
styles were designed for buildings that were wide, but Sullivan was able to create aesthetic
unity in buildings that were tall.
To achieve this, he utilized the latest technological developments to create light-filled, wellventilated, office buildings and adorned both interiors and exteriors with ornate embellishments.
Such decoration served to connect commerce and culture, and imbued these white-collar work
spaces with a sense of refinement and taste.
Louis Sullivan believed that the exterior of an office building should reflect its interior structure
and its interior functions. Ornament, where it was used, must be derived from Nature, rejecting
classical references and the ubiquitous arches
Sullivan's designs often used masonry walls with terra cotta designs. Intertwining vines and
leaves combined with crisp geometric shapes. This Sullivanesque style was imitated by other
architects, and his later work formed the foundation for the ideas of his student, Frank Lloyd
Wright.
Wainwright Building
Sullivan’s first successful expression of the tall office building was the Wainwright building,
built in 1890 in St. Louis. Sullivan's functional analysis equates the building to a column, base,
shaft and capital. First floor with large open spaces for merchandise establishments, banks, etc.
The top floor is for mechanical equipment. The shafts between floor offices are all essentially
the same size and shape.
In the Wainwright Building Sullivan developed the expression for the tall office building which
would be accepted by the Modern Movement as the model solution.
Sullivan's achievement is in the area of expression. His ornament, derived from nature and from
geometry was close to Art Nouveau in Europe. Its organic nature, basic continuity, influenced a
young man in Sullivan's office in his thinking toward "Organic Architecture"- Frank Lloyd
Wright.
The Guaranty (Prudential) Building in Buffalo, New York was built 1894-1896. The
structure is steel with a terra cotta sheath. The imposing scale of the building and the regularity
of the window placements served as an expression of the large-scale, refined, and orderly office
work that took place within. Sullivan tempered the severity of the structure with lively
ornamentation both on the piers and cornice on the exterior and the stairway balustrades (rails),
elevator cages, and ceilings in the interior. “Form follows function” was Sullivan’s famous
dictum, and was the slogan of early 20th century architects, is clearly seen here.
Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company Building
Another of Sullivan’s buildings, the Carson Pire Scott and Company Building, in Chicago,
carried his principles still further. One of the most important structures in early modern
architecture, this building required broad, open, well-illuminated, display spaces. The minimal
structural steel skeleton permitted the achievement of that goal. Its modular construction and
design was very influential. The lowest two levels of the building are covered in a rich
ornamental cast iron facade that frame the large display windows as a frame would a picture,
thus form follows function. It is an excellent example of Sullivan's genius for architectural
ornament.
Although the new architectural models and materials were important, not all accepted them.
Historical styles were still prominent especially in the homes designed for the wealthy
industrialists and railroad barons, who desired lavish abodes befitting medieval barons or
Renaissance princes.
Richard Morris Hunt (1827-1895) specialized in serving the building ambitions of America’s
new aristocracy. He brought Renaissance and Baroque forms to the ostentatious plans. The
Breakers was built as the Newport summer home of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, a member of the
wealthy United States Vanderbilt family. Designed by renowned architect Richard Morris Hunt
and with interior decoration by Jules Allard and Sons and Ogden Codman, Jr., the 75-room
mansion boasts approximately 138,000 sq. ft. of living space. The interior rooms are grand in
scale and sumptuously rich in decor, each having its own variations of classical columns,
painted ceilings, lavish fabrics, and sculptural trimmings. The home was constructed between
1893 and 1895 at the then-astronomical cost of more than seven million dollars
($151,481,222.91 in today's dollars adjusted for inflation). The Ochre Point Avenue entrance is
marked by sculpted iron gates and 30 foot high walkway gates are part of a 12 foot high
limestone and iron fence that borders the property on all but the ocean side. The 250' x 150'
dimensions of the five story mansion are aligned symmetrically around a central Great Hall,
rising some 45 feet above the majestic main stairway.
The period’s extravagance and ostentation in architecture extended to interior decor. Furniture,
lights, rugs, and wallpaper, with designs inspired by sensuous opulence of Art Nouveau were
popular. Louis Comfort Tiffany was among those famous for creating these objects. His
Lotus Table Lamp was constructed of a leaded glass that was patented by Tiffany and pieced
together in a mosaic design. The bronze lamp stand is based on the curvilinear floral forms of
the lotus. Tiffany's designs were intended for the wealthy and very expensive. Because of
expense and time, only one lamp was crafted at a time, insuring high quality craftsmanship that
was prized by the Arts and Crafts Movement. The lavish opulence of the period remained
popular with the ultra rich until World War I shattered the times.