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.