|
|
Art of the 20th Century
A Revolution in the Arts
INTRODUCTION
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
Modern
The term modern art has come to denote the innovating and even revolutionary developments in Western painting and the other visual arts since the second half of the 19th century. It embraces a wide variety of movements, styles, theories, and attitudes, the modernity of which resides in a common tendency to repudiate past conventions and precedents in subject matter, mode of depiction, and painting technique alike. Not all the painting of this period has made such a departure; representational work, for example, has continued to appear, particularly in connection with official exhibiting societies. Nevertheless, the idea that some current types of painting are more properly of their time than are others, and for that reason are more interesting or important, applies with particular force to the painting of the last 150 years.
By the mid-19th century, painting was no longer basically in service to either the church or the court but rather was patronized by the upper and middle classes of an increasingly materialistic and secularized Western society. This society was undergoing rapid change because of the growth of science and technology, industrialization, urbanization, and the fundamental questioning of received religious dogmas. Painters were thus confronted with the need to reject traditional, historical, or academic forms and conventions in an effort to create an art that would better reflect the changed social, material, and intellectual conditions of emerging modern life. Another important, if indirect, stimulus to change was the development from the early 19th century on of photography and other photomechanical techniques, which freed (or deprived) painting and drawing of their hitherto cardinal roles as the only available means of accurately depicting the visual world. These manually executed arts were thus no longer obliged to serve as the means of recording and disseminating information as they once had been and were eventually freed to explore aesthetically the basic visual elements of line, colour, tone, and composition in a nonrepresentational context. Indeed, an important trend in modern painting has been that of abstraction—i.e., painting in which little or no attempt is made to accurately depict the appearance or form of objects in the realm of nature or the existing physical world. The door of the objective world was thus closed, but the inner world of the imagination offered seemingly infinite possibilities for exploration, as did the manipulation of pigments on a flat surface for their purely intrinsic visual or aesthetic appeal.
The beginnings of modern painting cannot be clearly demarcated, but it is generally agreed that it started in mid-19th-century France. The paintings of Gustav Courbet, Edouard Manet, and the Impressionists represent a deepening rejection of the prevailing academic traditions of Neoclassicism and Romanticism and a quest for a more truthful naturalistic representation of the visual world. The sepainters' Postimpressionist successors—notably Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Edgar Degas, and Paul Gauguin—can be viewed as more clearly modern in their repudiation of traditional subject matter and techniques and in their assumption of a more subjective and personal vision.From about the 1890s a succession of varied styles and movements arose that are the core of modern painting and are also one of the high points of the history of the Western visual arts in general.
These modern movements include Neo-Impressionism, Symbolism, the Nabis, Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, the Ashcan School, Suprematism, Constructivism, Orphism, Metaphysical painting, de Stijl, Purism, Dada, Surrealism, Social Realism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Op Art, Minimalism, and Neo-Expressionism.
Francis William Wentworth-Sheilds
__________
Origins in the 19th century
As long ago as 1846 the qualities proper to a specifically modern art were discussed by the French writer Charles Baudelaire in an essay on the French Salon. He argued that colour would be foremost among these modern qualities (a prediction that subsequent events confirmed), but he still saw the new art in the context of the Romantic movement. Subsequent modernity came to be seen as necessitating not only a new style but also contemporary subject matter, and in 1863 Baudelaire praised the draftsman Constantin Guys as “le peintre de la vie moderne” (“the painter of modern life”). In 1862, with Baudelaire's support, the French painter Édouard Manet brought together a subject from contemporary social life and an unconventional style in “Concert in the Tuileries Gardens” (National Gallery, London). This painting, though rather isolated in his work of the time, was influential in establishing a new outlook. Another literary figure whose critical writings were influential was the French novelist Émile Zola, though Zola had limited sympathy for what he called the “new manner in painting” of Manet; nevertheless he contributed from 1866 onward to the emergence of the Impressionist group. The first appearance of the phrase “modern art” in the relatively permanent form of a book title was in 1883, when it was used by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, a friend of Zola's, to describe the theme of various reviews of painters' work he had collected. Other books on the subject followed, such as the Anglo-Irish novelist George Moore's Modern Painting (1893). It was about this time that the term avant-garde was introduced by the critic Théodore Duret, who used it of certain young painters. From then on, modernity was to be a recurrent concern of artists and critics. Public acceptance of the new standpoint was slow, however. The first museums dedicated specifically to modern art grew out of the fervour of individual collectors—for example, the Folkwang Museum at Essen, Ger., and the Kröller-Müller State Museum at Otterlo, Neth., both largely consisting of collections built up before 1914. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the outstanding public collection in the field, was founded in 1929, and the Western capital that lacks a museum explicitly devoted to modern art is rare.
The conflict between the new forces and the established academic tradition in France came into the open in 1863. The jury of the official Salon, which had long exercised great despotism in matters to do with painting, rejected more than 4,000 canvases—an unusually high figure. The resulting outcry prompted the emperor Napoleon III to order that the rejected works, if the painters agreed, be shown in a special exhibition known as the Salon des Refusés. The exhibition included works by Manet; Johan Barthold Jongkind, an older Dutch painter who was working in a tonal and summary style from nature; Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne, who had met two years before at the Académie Suisse; Armand Guillaumin; James McNeill Whistler; and others. One of the greatest scandals was caused by Manet's painting “The Luncheon on the Grass” (Louvre, Paris), which was considered an affront to decency as well as taste. The younger painters became aware of their common aims. Claude Monet, whose landscape style had been influenced from the outset by the atmospheric sketches of the Channel coast of Eugène Boudin, as well as by Jongkind (whom he described to Boudin as “quite mad”), had met Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Jean-Frédéric Bazille studying in the studio of Charles Gleyre. Abandoning academic study, they worked together outdoors in the forest of Fontainebleau, where contacts with the Barbizon painters Narcisse-Virgile Diaz de La Peña and Charles-François Daubigny strengthened their direction.
The implicit acceptance of the visual scene on which the new style was based owed something to the example of Courbet, who influenced Renoir in particular in the next few years. The plein air (“open-air”) paintings of the Barbizon painters also had an effect, but the suggestion of an art based on the notation of pure colour was suggested by several sources. The example of Eugène Delacroix had a deep significance for the 19th century in France, and the reliance on separate, undisguised touches of the brush in the form that became characteristic of Impressionism is perhaps first apparent in sketches of the sea at Dieppe painted by Delacroix in 1852. The economy of Manet's touch in the 1860s was affected by Spanish and Dutch examples as well as by Delacroix, but his seascapes and racecourse pictures of 1864 are also important. The full Impressionistic style did not develop until the end of the 1860s.
Though the figurative aims of Impressionism can be regarded as the conclusion of 19th-century Realism, the method, which made no attempt to hide even the most basic means of preparing a finished painting, was an original one. Brushstrokes did not pretend to be anything but dashes of paint, thus conveying their coloured message without any disguise or effect at individual illusion. It was in this respect and in the all-embracing unity of colour and handling that resulted, rather than its realism, that Impressionism founded modern painting. Other developments in the 1860s had no immediate sequels in Impressionism. The presentation of some of Manet's figures, such as “The Fifer” (Louvre) of 1866, as vignettes or decorative designs shading into virtually blank backgrounds was a radical departure from the coherent pictorial construction of Western tradition since the Renaissance; it is the first sign of the form built outward from a central nucleus without reference to the classic frame that has appeared repeatedly in modern art. Honoré Daumier is supposed to have said that “The Fifer” reduced painting “to faces on playing cards,” and in 1865 Courbet compared Manet's “Olympia” (1863; Louvre) to “the Queen of Spades after a bath.” The possibility of making an image out of the bare, almost heraldic juxtaposition of flat colours was neglected while the complex notation of Impressionism held sway, but it came to be regarded with interest as Impressionism receded. Other unconventional principles of design—suggested equally by Japanese prints, such as those that Manet placed in the background of his portrait of Zola (Louvre) in 1868, andby the chance arrangements of photography—appeared in the work of Edgar Degas, who sympathized with the aims of the new group, associating himself with them in seven of their eight exhibitions, which he largely helped to organize.
Other qualities that Baudelaire in 1846 had specified as the qualities of modern art—spirituality and aspiration toward the infinite—evolved quite apart from Impressionism. The visionary implications of Romantic painting were explored by Gustave Moreau, whose elaborate biblical and mythological scenes, weighed down with sumptuous detail, gave colour an imaginative and symbolic richness. His example had a special value to the next generation. The imagination of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was of the opposite order, preserving the large-scale clarity of mural painting, a policy that made him appreciated when a reaction against Impressionism set in.
Another possibility of Romanticism was pursued in isolation by the Marseille painter Adolphe Monticelli. The richness of his colour is thought to have contributed something crucial to Cézanne's development. The counterpart of Moreau in Britain was Sir Edward Burne-Jones. The intricate and perverse linear formulations that he developed from the Pre-Raphaelites greatly influenced the international Symbolist style of the last decades of the century.
The influence of the trend in the direction of the modern in France, together with its controversial element, was introduced to Britain by Whistler, whose concern was narrowly aesthetic rather than analytic. The harmonies he developed were close to being monochromatic; his use of Spanish and Japanese elements had little of the radical originality of Manet and Degas. His influence dominated and also limited the development of avant-garde painting in Britain for many years. John Singer Sargent, like Whistler an American who came to live in Britain, popularized a less-discriminating version of the Impressionistic style.
In Germany a Romantic strain coexisted with a Realistic style that remained unaffected by the most advanced French painting. Anselm Feuerbach, one of the Romantics, was influenced by Delacroix. In 1855 he went to Italy where the effect of the 16th century came to predominate in his work. The landscapes of Hans von Marées were also essentially Romantic. He had visited France but spent most of his working life in Italy; the frescoes he executed in Naples echo Puvis de Chavannes in their style. Realism found exponents in Wilhelm Leibl and Hans Thoma. In Italy the reaction against the academies was centred in Florence, where a group known as the Macchiaioli (from macchia, “patch”) worked from 1855, producing landscapes, genre paintings, and Romantic costume pieces executed in the highly visible brushstrokes that gave the group its name.
In the United States, Thomas Eakins developed a broadly handled, powerful Realist style that became almost Expressionistic in his later years. He had visited Paris in 1866, and the influence of Manet can be detected in his paintings. His interest in anatomy and perspective gave him a role analogous to that of Degas. The early development of Winslow Homer, who was in France a year later, ran parallel to Monet's style in the 1860s. The work of Albert Pinkham Ryder was, by contrast, introverted and visionary. He was among the artists who adapted the Romantic vocabulary to the symbolic purposes of modern art.
In France in the mid-1860s Monet produced a series of large-scale open-air conversation pieces in which elements derived from Courbet and Manet were fused with a wholly original expression of dappled light in solid paint. The approach of Pissarro, who had arrived in Paris from the West Indies in 1855, was more delicate; influenced by Camille Corot as well as Courbet, he recorded pure landscape motives in a limited range of tones, though with a natural lyricism of feeling. The starting pointof Cézanne was, by contrast, vigorous to the point of violence. In 1866 he evolved a style in which paint was applied in thick dabs with a palette knife; this combined a handling (a technical term in painting meaning the individual's manipulation of materials in the execution of a work; it has been likened to a person's signature in handwriting) derived from Courbet with the gray tonality of Manet; its rough-hewn crudity has a consistency that was essentially new. His alternative style in the 1860s, with curling brushstrokes related to Daumier, is equally virile and was often applied tosubjects of violent eroticism. The unbridled force of Cézanne's early work gave the first sign of qualities that were to become characteristic of modern painting. Though exceptional, it was not unique; in Italy during the 1860s the Russian painter of historical and scriptural themes, Nikolay Nikolayevich Ge, produced sketches with loose, expressive brushwork sometimes resembling Cézanne's.
Impressionism
The first steps toward a systematic Impressionist style were taken in France in Monet's coast scenes from 1866 onward, notably the “Terrace” (1866; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), in which he chose a subject that allowed use of a full palette of primary colour. The decisive development took place in 1869, when Monet and Renoir painted together at the resort of La Grenouillère on the Seine River. The resulting pictures suggest that Monet contributed the pattern of separate brushstrokes, the light tonality, and the brilliance of colour; Renoir the overall iridescence, feathery lightness of touch, and delight in the recreation of ordinary people. Working at Louveciennes from 1869, Pissarro evolved the drier and more flexible handling of crumbly paint that was also to be a common feature of Impressionist painting.
It was in the environs of Paris after the Franco-Prussian War that there developed the fully formed landscape style that remains the most popular achievement of modern painting. An exhibition held in the studio of the photographer Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) in 1874 included Monet's picture “Impression: Sunrise” (Marmottan Museum, Paris), and it was this work that, by being disparaged as mere “impressionism,” gave a name to an entire movement. The exhibition itself revealed three main trends. The Parisian circle around Monet and Renoir had developed the evanescent and sketchlike style the furthest. The vision of those working near Pissarro in Pontoise and Auvers was in general more solid, being firmly rooted in country scenes. A relatively urbane, genrelike trend was detectable in Degas's pictureof Paul Valpinçon and his family at the races called “Carriage at the Races” (1870–73; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and Berthe Morisot's “The Cradle” (1873; Louvre [see ]). Manet himself was absent, hoping for academic success; his “Gare Saint-Lazare” (1873; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), influenced by the Impressionist palette, was accepted at the Salon. Modeling himself on Pissarro, Cézanne sublimatedthe turbulent emotions of his earlier work in pictures that were studied directly and closely from nature; he followed the method for the rest of his life.
The experiment of an independent exhibition was repeated in 1876, though with fewer participants. Monet now began to make studies of the Gare Saint-Lazare. Renoirused effects of dappled light and shadow to explore genre subjects such as “Le Moulinde la galette” (1876; Louvre [see ]). In 1877 only 18 artists exhibited. The major painters began to go their separate ways, particularly as there were disputes about whether to continue with the independent exhibitions. Cézanne, who did not exhibit with the Impressionists again, was perhaps the first to realize that a critical stage had been reached. For the first time, a style had been based on the openly individual character of a technique rather than on the form of a particular subject or the way it was formulated. A style that admits to painting as being only a matter of paint raises in a peculiarly acute form the question of how far the qualities of art are intrinsic. Impressionism in the 1870s was inseparable from heightened visual experience of a sensuously satisfying world. But the blocklike shapes in Cézanne's pictures, such as the portrait of his patron Victor Chocquet (c. 1877; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio), suggest that for him the relationship between the colour patches on his canvas was equally important. In the years that followed, he systematized his technique into patterns of parallel brushstrokes that gave a new significance to the pictorial surface (see ). An unassuming series of still lifes and self-portraits by Cézanne were painted in 1879–80, and these, when they became known, profoundly impressed the younger generation, who reckoned them to be as monumental as the great art of the past, yet in a subtly different way that was inherent in the actual manner of painting.
The style of the 1870s was formless from a traditional standpoint, and at the beginning of the next decade Renoir decided that he had gone to the limit with Impressionism and “did not know either how to paint or draw.” Following a trip to Italy, he set about acquiring a wiry, linear style that was the direct opposite of his relaxed, freely brushed manner of earlier years.
The appearance of a new generation posed a fresh challenge. Georges Seurat was moving away from the empirical standpoint of Impressionism toward a technique (Pointillism) and a form that were increasingly deliberately designed. Paul Gauguin, taking his starting point from Cézanne's style of about 1880, passed from a capriciouspersonal type of Impressionism to a greater use of symbols. He exhibited with the Impressionists from 1880 onward, but it was soon evident that group shows could no longer accommodate the growing diversity. In 1884, after the Salon jury had been particularly harsh, the Société des Artistes Indépendants was formed. The last Impressionist group show was held in 1886. Only Monet and Armand Guillaumin, to whose efforts the group owed much of its eventual recognition, were now in the strict sense Impressionists. Monet, who had exhibited only once since 1879, continued to build on the original foundation of the style, the rendering of visual impression through colour in paintings that studied a single motif in varying lights. For him the formlessness and the homogeneity of Impressionism were its ultimate virtues. In his last series of “Water Lilies,” painted between 1906 and 1926, the shimmering of light eventually lost its last descriptive content, and only the colour and curling movement of his brush carried a general all-pervading reference to the visual world. Renoir's later work was equally expansive; his sympathetic vision of humanity revealed its own inherent breadth and grandeur.
Impressionism, in one aspect, continued the main direction of 19th-century painting, and after 1880 the movement was an international one, taking on independent national characteristics. Russia produced an exponent in Isaak Ilich Levitan, and Scotland one in William MacTaggart. In Italy Telemarco Signorini and in the United States such painters as Childe Hassam developed modified forms of the style. In France, and to some extent in Germany with Max Liebermann, Impressionism provided a basis for the styles that followed.
Symbolism
During the decades before 1900, the Symbolists were the avant-garde, and one of quite a new kind, influencing not only the arts but also the thought and spirit of the epoch. Maurice Denis, their theoretician, enunciated in 1890 the most famous of their artistic principles: Remember that a picture—before being a war-horse, a nude or an anecdote of some sort—is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.
Such ideas inspired a group of young painters, among whom was Denis himself, to callthemselves Nabis (from the Hebrew word for “prophet”). They were in revolt against the faithfulness to nature of Impressionism; in addition, largely because they were in close touch with Symbolist writers, they regarded choice of subject as important. Theyincluded Paul Ranson, who gave the style a decorative and linear inflection; Pierre Bonnard; and Édouard Vuillard.
Other than the Nabis, one of the chief Symbolists was Odilon Redon, who moved from the same starting point as the Impressionists—the landscape style of the Barbizon school—but in precisely the opposite direction. Redon's visionary charcoal drawings (which he called his black pictures) led to successive series of lithographs that explored the evocative, irrational, and fantastic orders of creation that Impressionismexcluded. Redon later wrote:
Nothing in art can be done by will alone. Everything is done by docile submissionto the coming of the unconscious . . . for every act of creation, the unconscious sets us a different problem.
Redon established one of the characteristic standpoints of modern art, and his influence on the younger Symbolists was profound. In 1888 Gauguin, already affectedby a trip to Martinique, settled at Pont-Aven in Brittany. The influential style he developed there was based on the juxtaposition of flat areas of colours enclosed by black contours, the total effect suggesting cloisonné enamel (a technique in which metal strips differentiate the colour areas of the design, thereby creating an outline effect), hence the name Cloisonnisme used to describe this style. The spirit in which Gauguin rendered Breton scenes was mystical. He wrote:
Do not copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction; derive this abstraction from nature while dreaming before it, but think more of creating than of the actual result.
At Pont-Aven, Gauguin was joined by Émile Bernard and Louis Anquetin, who had lately begun to work in a similar way. Paul Sérusier painted under Gauguin's direction a little sketch entitled “Bois d'amour” that appeared more independent of appearances and bolder in its synthesis of pattern than anything that had been seen before; it became known in Paris as “The Talisman.” The liberation of Synthetism, as the new style was called, indeed worked like a charm, and after the Café Volpini exhibition of 1889 it spread rapidly. The movement was linked with literature and, in particular, with drama; it inspired its own periodical, La Revue Blanche, and Le Théâtre de l'Oeuvre (both founded in Paris in 1891); there were exhibitions twice a year at a Paris gallery, Le Barc de Boutteville, from 1891 to 1897.
The decorative style known as Art Nouveau, or Jugendstil, spread across Europe and the Americas in the 1890s. The pursuit of natural and organic sources for form still further alienated art from the descriptive purpose that had been the basis of figurative style, and an artistic movement without taint of historicism that molded thefine arts, architecture, and craftsmanship in a single, consistent taste recovered the creative unity that had been lost since the early 18th century. In The Netherlands the fin de siècle (“end of the century”; specifically the end of the 19th century, and a phrase that has overtones of a rather precious sophistication and world-weariness) style and sense of purpose appeared in the paintings of Johan Thorn Prikker and Jan Toorop. The Viennese Gustav Klimt made bolder and more arbitrary use of pattern. In Russia the demonic genius of Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel had points of contact with the Art Nouveau style. It even affected Seurat and his circle, who were known as the Neo-Impressionists; the popular imagery of Seurat's later works, such as “The Circus” (1890–91; Louvre), was expressed in sinuous rhythms not far from Art Nouveau, and the Belgian Henry van de Velde passed from Neo-Impressionism by way of fin de siècle decorations that were near abstraction to a place among the founders of 20th-century architecture. A strange and beautiful blend of Symbolism with an alpine clarity of colour close to Neo-Impressionism appeared in compositions such as “The Unnatural Mothers” by the Italian Giovanni Segantini.
___________
The end of the 19th-century tradition
Until Seurat no painter had expressly founded a style on the intrinsic reactions of colour to colour and a codified vocabulary of expressive forms. The consistent granulation of colour in Seurat's work from 1885 onward was specific to the picture, not to the sensation or the subject. The coherent images of space and light that he made out of this granulation ended with him. Seurat's followers, grouped as Neo-Impressionists under the leadership of Paul Signac, developed his technique rather than his vision. Seurat's influence was nonetheless widespread and fertile; his system in itself supplied a clarity that painters needed. It was Neo-Impressionism that was in the ascendant when the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh arrived in Paris in 1886. The emotional travail evident in van Gogh's early work was marvelously lightened in the new aesthetic climate. But in his hands the dashes of pure colour turned and twisted, trading invisible and unstable lines of force. They werewoven into rhythmical and convulsive patterns reflecting themounting intensity of his own feelings. Such patterns converted the Neo-Impressionist style into something quite different—a forerunner of what was to be known as Expressionism. Other painters were less radical in their approach. Pissarro assimilated the Neo-Impressionist method to the vision of the older generation; Henri-Edmond Cross and Maximilien Luce gave it the characteristic economy of the age that followed. Henri Matisse's repeated experiments with it, culminating in his contact with Signac and Cross in 1904, finally converted the pure colour of Impressionism to the special purposes of 20th-century art.
In the meantime, the older Impressionists were producing the broadly conceived works that crowned their artistic achievement and formed, as it seems in retrospect, the great traditional masterpieces of modern art. Degas's lifelong absorption in the human body as a subject led him to produce a series of bathing scenes and drawings from the nude in which the form expanded to an amplitude that filled the picture. Fullness of form was an effect that Renoir also achieved. Cézanne announced a determination “to do Poussin over again from nature” and was reckoned to have fulfilled that aim with his “Great Bathers” and the series of landscapes of Mont Sainte-Victoire (see ). In the pictures of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the style and standpoint derived from Degas, but his graphic work reflected the aims of the Symbolist generation (see ). The most original contribution of Édouard Vuillard lay in the evocative patterning of the little pictures that he painted before 1900. The art of Pierre Bonnard, on the other hand, developed throughout his life. His subjects and his method remained, on the surface, those of the Impressionist tradition, but they were re-created from memory and imagination; Bonnard's pictures have the quality of a cherished private order of experience.
Developments outside France were not of comparable importance. In Britain in the 1880s, Philip Wilson Steer painted a small group of landscapes with figures that were among the earliest and loveliest examples of the fin de siècle style. The work of Walter Sickert revolved around an idiosyncratic fascination with the actual touch of a brush on canvas. His affinities remained essentially with the tonal Impressionism of the earliest stages of the modern movement rather than with the art of colour that developed from it, though he eventually made the transition in old age. In Germany the artists of the Postimpressionist generation, such as Lovis Corinth and Max Slevogt, working with the peculiar recklessness that is endemic to German painting, laid the technical foundations of Expressionism. Ferdinand Hodler in Switzerland developed a painterly Symbolist style in the 1890s. The Belgian painter James Ensor abandoned Impressionism at the end of the 1880s for a bitter and fantastic style that was a pioneer example of extreme expressive alienation.
The most remarkable painter of the fin de siècle outside France, however, was the Norwegian Edvard Munch. “The Cry” (Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo), the famous picture in which the rhythms of Art Nouveau were given a hysterical expressive force with hardly a vestige of the Impressionist description of nature, was painted in 1893. For many years before a breakdown interrupted his development in 1907, he worked abroad. He was particularly influential in Germany.
In the United States, Maurice Prendergast transformed Impressionism into pattern. In Russia the fin de siècle styles of Léon Bakst and the Mir Iskusstva (“World of Art”) group, aswell as a vivid revival of folk decoration, flourished, later becoming known internationally through their connection with the Russian ballet.
________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________
The 20th century
By 1903 the impetus of Symbolism was expended and a new and enigmatic mood was forming. The new attitude drew on a vein that was comic, poetic, and fantastic, exploring an irrational quality akin to humour inherent in the creative process itself, as well as on a reserve of ironic detachment. The new painters drew strength from unexpected sources. The work of Henri Rousseau, a former clerk in the Paris municipal customs service who was known as “Le Douanier” accordingly, and who had exhibited at the Indépendants since 1886, attracted attention. The apparent innocence of his pictures gave them a kind of imaginative grandeur that seemed beyond the reach of any art founded on sophistication.
The art of supposedly primitive peoples had a special appealin the early years of the 20th century. Gauguin, who had made direct contact with it in his last years, proved propheticnot only in the forms he adopted but in the spirit of his approach. Maurice de Vlaminck and André Derain, who met in1900, evolved a style together based on crude statements of strong colours. Matisse had been moving more circumspectly in the same direction. The apparent ferocity o fthe works that the three exhibited in 1905 earned them the nickname of the Fauves (“Wild Beasts”). It appears that Matisse was responsible for introducing Pablo Picasso to African sculpture. Picasso had already shown signs of dissatisfaction with existing canons; his use of fin de siècle styles in his earliest works has a quality close to irony. Primitive art, both African and Iberian, provided him with an austerity and detachment that led after 1906 to a radical metamorphosis of the image and style hitherto habitual in European art. In 1904 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, at Dresden, discovered the art of the Pacific Islands as well as African art. His first reflection of the primitive spirit was parallel to that of the Fauves and may have depended on them, if only partially.
The idea of art, first and last, as a matter of expression (in contrast to Impressionism) was common to Germany and France in the first decade of the 20th century; it appears in Matisse's Notes of a Painter, published in 1908. Matisse, in fact, hardly differentiated expression from decoration; his ideal of art as “something like a good armchair in which to rest” explicitly excluded the distortion and disquiet that earned the style of Kirchner and Die Brücke (“The Bridge”) group, which was founded in 1905, the label of Expressionism. The worldly subjects of Kirchner represented only one aspect of the group; the earthy Primitivism of Emil Nolde and the emphatic pictorial rhetoric of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff are more typical. Both Nolde and Max Pechstein (another member of the group) traveled to the Pacific. The development of the Austrian Oskar Kokoschka, who was influenced by members of Die Brücke, spanned the first two-thirds of the 20th century; the tempestuous emotion of his finest pictures places them among the masterpieces of painting of the German-speaking world in his time.
The transformation of painting after 1907 was particularly apparent in works executed in Germany. Wassily Kandinsky had come to Munich from Moscow at the age of 30 in 1896. His earliest mature works were painted in a jewellike, fairy-tale Cloisonniste style. He later told how one evening in his studio he came upon “an indescribably beautiful picture, drenched with an inner glowing . . . of which I saw nothing but forms and colours . . .” (from R.L. Herbert [ed.], Modern Artists on Art, 1965). It was one of his own works, standing on its side, so that its content was incomprehensible. Kandinsky's first nonfigurative watercolour was painted in 1910, and in the same year he wrote much of Concerning the Spiritual in Art , which converted the aesthetic doctrines of Goethe to the purposes of the new art. The series of “Improvisations” that followed preserved reminiscences of figuration, made illegible by the looseness of the pictorial structure; their diffuse and amorphous consistency had little connection with the main objectives of painting at the time. In the first decade of the 20th century, the idea of painting implied by Postimpressionism and that of a reasoned structure analogous to the structure of nature, if not to appearances, were far from exhausted. The influence of Kandinsky's “Improvisations” from 1911 onward, though delayed, was nonetheless great and pointed in a direction that abstract painting was to take 40 years later.
The Munich group Der Blaue Reiter (“The Blue Rider”), named after one of Kandinsky's earlier pictures, was formed in 1911 to represent the new tendencies when Kandinsky and Franz Marc withdrew from the heterogeneous Neue Künstlervereinigung (“New Artists' Association”). The group soon became, in its turn, a broadly based assembly of the international avant-garde artists of the day, although the stylizations of Marc himself now appear commonplace. Among the early members of the group, the Russian Alexey von Jawlensky evolved a structured form of Expressionism that culminated in the 1930s in a series of abstractions of a head, but the chief importance of the group was as a stage in the development of the Swiss painter Paul Klee.
Cubism and its consequences
Picasso's Primitivism, joined to the influence of Cézanne's “Great Bathers,” culminated in 1907 in the enigmatic and famous picture “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon” (Museum of Modern Art, New York City). Those who saw it were astonished and perplexed, not only by the arbitrary disruption in the right-hand part of the picture of the continuity that had always united an image but also by the defiant unloveliness, which made it plain that the traditional beauties of art, the appeal of the subject, and the credibility of its imitation were now, at any rate to Picasso, finally irrelevant. “What a loss to French art!” a Russian collector said, and Picasso himself was not sure what to think of the picture; it was not reproduced for 15 years or publicly exhibited for 30. Nevertheless, the effect on his associates was profound. Matisse and Georges Braque, who, unlike Picasso, had been experimenting with Fauvism, immediately started painting female nudes of similar stridency. Subsequently, however, Matisse turned back toward relatively traditional forms and the flooding colour that chiefly concerned him. Braque, on the other hand, became more and more closely associated with Picasso, and Cubism, as the new style was labeled by one of Braque's hostile critics in the following year, was the result of their collaboration. In the first phase, lasting into 1909, the focus of their work was the accentuation and disruption of planes. In the next two years Braque went to paint at Cézanne's old sites, and the inspiration of Cézanne's style at this stage is indubitable. In the second phase, from 1910 to 1912, the irrelevance of the subject, in any integral form, became evident. It was no longer necessary to travel in search of a motif; any still life would do as well. The essence of the picture was in the treatment. If Analytical Cubism, as this phase is generally labeled, analyzed anything, it was the nature of the treatment. The great Cubist pictures were meditations on the intrinsic character of the detached Cézannesque facets and contours, out of which the almost-illegible images were built. Indeed, the objects were not so much depicted as denoted by linear signs, a spiral for the scrolled head of a violin or the trademark from a label fora bottle, which were superimposed on the shifting, half-contradictory flux of shapes. The element of paradox is essential; even when it approaches monumental grandeur, Cubism has a quality that eludes solemn exposition. Subtle and elegant geometric puns build up into massive demonstrations of pictorial structure, demonstrations that its complex parallels and conjunctions build nothing so firmly and so memorably as the picture itself. This proof that figurative art creates an independent reality is the central proposition of modern art, and it has had a profound effect not only on painting and sculpture, as well as on the arts of design that depend on them, but also on the intellectual climate of the age.
The experimental investigation of what reality meant in artistic terms then took a daring turn that was unparalleled since pictorial illusion had been isolated five centuries earlier. The Cubists proceeded to embody real material from the actual world within the picture. They included first stenciled lettering, then pasted paper,and later solid objects; the reality of art asthey saw it absorbed them all. This assemblage of material, called collage, led in 1912 to the third phase of the movement, Synthetic Cubism (see photograph), which continued until 1914. The textured and patterned planes were composed into forms more like pictorial objects in themselves than recognizable figurations. In the later work of Picasso and Braque, it is again possible to construe their pictorial code as referring plainly to the objective world—in the case of Braque, to still life chosen with an appreciation of household things and, with Picasso, to emotive yet enigmatichuman subjects as well. The message of Cubism remained the same: meaning had been shown to reside in the structure of the style, the basic geometry implied in the Postimpressionist handling of life. The message spread rapidly.
The first theoretical work on the movement, On Cubism, by the French painters Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, was published in 1912. It was argued that geometric and mathematical principles of general validity could be deduced from the style. An exhibition in the same year represented all Cubism's adherents except the two creators. The exhibition was called the Section d'Or (“Golden Section”), after a mathematical division of a line into two sections with a certain proportion to each other. Among the exhibitors were the Spaniard Juan Gris and the Frenchman Fernand Léger, who in their subsequent work were both concerned with combining the basic scheme of Synthetic Cubism with the renewed sense of a coherent subject. Cubism stimulated parallel tendencies in The Netherlands, Italy, and Russia. In The Netherlands, Piet Mondrian, on the basis of Cézanne and the Dutch painters of the fin de siècle, had reached a very simple, symbolic style analogous to the Dutch landscape. He first saw Cubist paintings in 1910 and moved to Paris two years later. The subsequent resolution of his sense of natural conflict into increasingly bare rectangular designs balancing vertical against horizontal and white against areas of primary colour is one of the achievements of modern art. In 1917 the de Stijl movement formed in The Netherlands around him, with lasting consequences for the architecture, design, and typography of the century.
In Italy in 1909 a program for all the arts was issued by the poet Filippo Marinetti, who called his exercise the Futurist manifesto. He rejected the art of the past and exalted energy, strength, movement, and the power of the modern machine. In painting, his ideas were taken up by Carlo Carrà. Umberto Boccioni, the most talented of the group, pursued its ideas not only in painting but also in sculpture. The most memorable serial images of movement were those of Giacomo Balla; they reveal that, under its vivid fragmentation, the vision of Futurism was not far from the photographic. Its imperative mood and disruptive tactics nonetheless had their effect, finding an echo in Britain in the Vorticist circle around Wyndham Lewis. Lewis' analytical intelligence and the toughness of his artistic temper marked equally his near-abstract early works and the incisive classical portraits he painted later. Among his early associates, David Bomberg developed from the Cubist idiomin 1912–13 images of a striking clarity and force; and WilliamRoberts combined a Cubist formulation with social commentary analogous to that of the 18th-century painter William Hogarth.
In Russia, where Western developments were well known, the avant-garde, with its own roots in primitive art, had already evolved a simplified Expressionistic style. Kazimir Malevich produced formalized images of peasants at work that anticipated the later style of Léger. The striplike and often abstract formulations of Mikhail Larionov and Natalya Gontcharova, to which they gave the name of Rayonism, date from 1911. In 1912 Malevich exhibited his first “Cubo-Futurist” works, in which the figures were reduced to dynamic coloured blocks, and in 1913 he followed these witha black square on a white background. This increasing tendency to abstraction reached its culmination in 1915 withthe arrival of what he called Suprematism, in which simple geometric elements provided the whole dynamic force. The Russian movement, complicated by its own politics, was both accelerated and eventually broken by the Revolution, which gave it, for a time, a social function that the avant-garde has hardly achieved elsewhere. The Russian artists dispersed after 1922, however, and their legacy, the tradition of Constructivism, was transmitted to western Europe by El Lissitzky, Antoine Pevsner, and the latter's brother, Naum Gabo.
Prismatic colour, the element in Cézanne that the Cubists had neglected in dismantling his style, was taken up by Robert Delaunay. Delaunay's variety of Cubism was named Orphism, after Orpheus, the poet and musician of ancient Greek myth. The essential discovery of Orphism was proclaimed as a realization that “colour is both form and subject.” After an exquisite series of “Windows,” Delaunay freed himself from representation and based his designs on the effects of simultaneous colour contrast. These dictated the concentric patterns of his “Discs” and “Cosmic Circular Forms,” which occupied him and his wife, Sonia, thenceforward. The Czech František Kupka painted his first totally abstract work at about the same time. Even the simplest of his subsequent works never quite lost the rhythms of the fin de siècle style. Delaunay realized that a new order of painting was beginning, but his immediate influence was strongest abroad. Two American followers, Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell, exhibited as “Synchromists” in 1913. The Munich group Der Blaue Reiter was in touch with Delaunay, who exhibited with them, and the subsequent development of Klee was founded on his conversion to Delaunay's ideal of colour.
Fantasy and the irrational
The identity of a work of art as a thing in itself, independent of representation, was on the way to general recognition when the outbreak of war in 1914 interrupted artistic life throughout most of Europe. The activities of a group of painters, writers, and musicians who sought refuge in Zürich reflected the disorientation and disillusion of the time. Dada, as the movement was called, owed much to the iconoclasm of the Cubists and to the polemical tactics of the Futurists. Nonetheless its attack on art was fundamentally artistic; one wing of the avant-garde has owed allegiance to the Dadaist tradition ever since. As well as the need continually to attack the limits of the fine arts, it was felt important to “épater [“shock”] les bourgeois.” The Dadaists enlarged the field open to artists in three ways. They questioned the idea that some subjects were simply not relevant to painting, a question that had been hovering over art for some time, by the simple expedient of arguing that anything and everything was fair game. The repetitive and amorphous trends of Impressionism had in fact already given grounds for such a supposition. The next step was to make a reluctant public accept that any object was a work of art if an artist chose to proclaim it one. In 1914 Marcel Duchamp, the exhibitor of serial images of movement in the Section d'Or, produced a bottle rack bought in a Paris store. Better and more épatant still, he submitted a urinal to a New York exhibition under a pseudonym in 1917. Duchamp did not paint again, and this is perhaps the single Dadaist gesture that time has failed to reconcile with art. It was also the Dadaists who posed the question, if art (as Redon had realized) is not within the reach of will, how is it different from chance? Jean Arp made collages and then reliefs from random shapes obtained “according to the laws of chance.” Of all modern artists, he examined most closely the side of art akin to humour. Similarly, the Dadaists explored such elements as incongruity and dissociation, a process that led the way to Surrealism. Finally and almost incidentally, they asked, if the presentation of movement is proper to art, why not movement itself? Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter, with animated drawings and film, made the first works in a kinetic tradition that even by the late 1980s showed no sign of abating.
The painter who, more than any other, focused on incongruity—a feature that in painting involves the reinstatement of the subject, rather than its treatment, at the centre of art—was Giorgio De Chirico, an Italian born in Greece. De Chirico, rooted in the Mediterranean world, created from 1910 onward unforgettable images of its dereliction. In the immediate postwar years, he pioneered a style of emblematic, half-abstract still life called pittura metafisica (“metaphysical painting”), but by 1924, when the Surrealists began to work a similar vein of fantasy, De Chirico had changed; and in later life he disavowed his early achievement. Metaphysical painting had one unexpected sequel, the serene realism of Giorgio Morandi. Meanwhile, Kurt Schwitters in Germany developed the mediums of collage and assemblage in the new spirit. Francis Picabia, who was associated with Duchamp in the United States during the war, joined forces with the Swiss Dadaists in 1918; his contribution was an epigrammatic elegance of style. The German Max Ernst was the most resourceful pictorial technician of the movement and a continually fertile inventor.
It was in 1917 that the term Surrealism was coined, when the poet Guillaume Apollinaire described the style of the ballet Parade , for which Picasso had painted the sets, as:
a sort of sur-realism in which I see a point of departure for a series of manifestations of that New Spirit which . .. promises to transform arts and manners from top to bottom with universal joy.
The manifesto of the Surrealist movement, which was composed by the poet André Breton, did not appear until 1924, however. Surrealism meant different things in different people's hands, but a common feature was absorption in the fantastic and irrational. The questions posed by Dada also preoccupied Surrealists, but for them the problem of the involuntary, fortuitous element in art, for example, was clearly open to psychological solution. The Surrealists demanded “pure psychic automatism”; the automatic drawings that the French artist André Masson made from 1925 onward and, on a more mechanical level, the frottage (“rubbing”) devices of Ernst, which added to painting the evocative effect of fortuitously dappled textures, introduced an element that flourished even more fully 20 years later. Another discovery made in the wake of Dada was similarly delayed in its full impact: Parade had been the culmination of a series of musical compositions by Erik Satie that were based on ironic quotations of popular material. In the early 1920s the Americans Stuart Davis and Man Ray made paintings out of the designs on commercial packaging, foreshadowing the Pop Art of the 1950s.
The greatest achievement of Surrealist painting, however, was the invention of a new genre: fantastic realism—the prosaic, indeed quasi-photographic, rendering of the forms of fantasy and dream. The invention was the work, after De Chirico, of the Frenchman Yves Tanguy and the Spaniard Salvador Dalí. In the pictorial world of Dalí, everyday things undergo a transformation that can be almost disturbing; in that of Tanguy, forms are more suggestive than related to actual objects. A different aspect of this dream realism, one that is particularly disturbing, was shown by the Belgian René Magritte.
In the years after 1918, a mood of classical consolidation affected some painters. In Germany a “New Objectivity” (Die Neue Sachlichkeit) was imposed on Expressionism; the eventual synthesis appeared in the brutal paintings of Max Beckmann. In France the Italian-born Amedeo Modigliani, affected by the simplicity of the Romanian-born sculptor Constantin Brancusi, arrived at a delicate linear realism, the last of the great Postimpressionist styles.
The Expressionist tradition was developed to an extreme of agonized distortion by Chaim Soutine. Another Russian-born member of the school of Paris, Marc Chagall, who had been influenced both by Cubism and the Russian avant-garde, discovered in the 1920s an individual and inconsequent veinof pictorial fancy. The sombre and devotional art of the Frenchman Georges Rouault bore the marks of his training with Gustave Moreau and as a stained-glass maker. Its crude force had been developed in the context of Fauvism, but the vision was one of refined introspection. The vigour and freedom of Fauvism was developed in the opposite direction in the decorative, extrovert style of another French painter, Raoul Dufy. The classicizing trend of the 1920s had a remarkable sequel in the work of the mural painters of Mexico. One such, Diego Rivera, had learned the formal lessons of Cubism in Paris; José Clemente Orozco was more dependent on the folk art of his country. Their frescoes combined grandeur with a legibility and social awareness rare in modern art.
The greatest imaginative achievements between World Wars I and II were, however, again those of Picasso. In the years immediately following World War I he had painted a series of solidly modeled yet oddly ironic figure pictures. Then his mood changed, and in 1925 “The Three Dancers” (Tate Gallery, London) reintroduced an anarchic and convulsive quality. The ambiguities and transformations of his art, both in painting and sculpture, have an emotional character that is entirely his own, but the enlargement of the artistic language greatly influenced others. The metamorphosis of natural shape into abstracted forms that nevertheless curve and bulge with their own life, a metamorphosis initiated by Picasso, became the international style of the early 1930s. The Spaniard Joan Miró gave it his own clarity and gaiety. Biomorphic abstraction, in essence the method of Tanguy, extended the resources of Surrealism, and the Chilean Roberto Matta Echaurren, who began painting in 1938, used it with dramatic effect. A poetic version of the style, rooted in an emotional response to landscape, was evolved in Englandby Graham Sutherland. In the later 1930s, with “Guernica” (1937; Prado, Madrid) and other pictures, Picasso responded to specific events. Around 1940, two painters in the United States, Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, gave the biomorphic style a new character: relaxed, diffuse, and clear.
The development of abstract painting between the wars was comparatively slow. Klee (in 1921) and Kandinsky (in 1922) gravitated to the Bauhaus, the school in Germany whose work at Weimar and later at Dessau deeply influenced architecture and design as well as basic teaching. Oskar Schlemmer, whose simplified manner paralleled the Italian metaphysical painters, and Lyonel Feininger, an American-born painter working in a style developed from Cubism, were already teaching there. Kandinsky was concerned with refining the geometric ingredient of his work.Klee developed the poetic and fantastic elements of his art with an inconsequent fertility. The systematic purity of the Bauhaus approach survived longest in the work of Josef Albers, who moved to the United States in 1933. In 1940 Mondrian moved to New York City, and his last dynamic pictures reflect the new environment. Mondrian's work was appreciated by only a small circle, although a similar strength of purpose with a delicate responsiveness to a broader range of forms appeared in the work of the British painter Ben Nicholson. In the 1930s some paintings were executed by artists who formed themselves into groups, such as Abstraction-Création in Paris, Unit One in London, and the Association of American Abstract Artists in New York City. The work of these groups attained wider recognition only after World War II.
After 1945
The postwar work of Braque developed a few basic themes. The space and content of “The Studio” series of five paintings were formulated in vertical phases of varying sombreness; a mysterious bird that featured in this series was a symbol expressive of aspiration. Nicolas de Stael, a friend of Braque who was born in St. Petersburg, reached in 1950 a style in which lozenges of solid paint were built into structures of echo and correspondence. Colour in itself provided the substance, and de Stael's influence was considerable. The painterly and basically traditional vein of abstraction pursued in Paris by such painters as Alfred Manessier remained at root decorative. In Italy, traditional trends in sculpture are reflected in the brilliant accomplished modeling of Giacomo Manzù; Marino Marini, devoting himself almost entirely to the single theme of horse and rider, gave a bald realistic style an oddly apocalyptic force.
The Expressionist tradition was revived in the new spirit by the “Cobra” group of painters from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam who came together in Paris in 1948. In the work of Asger Jorn and Karel Appel, the image springs as if bychance from the free extempore play of brushstrokes. Surrealism proved remarkably durable. Among its adherents, the American Joseph Cornell had been evolving from the techniques of collage and assemblage a personal and evocative form of image; the Pole Hans Bellmer and the German Richard Lindner, working in Paris and New York, respectively, explored private and obsessive themes; they were recognized as among the most individual talents of their generation. In general, the most idiosyncratic and anarchic qualities of art were being developed as a new tradition, while geometric abstraction was seen to be the natural basis for the arts that are public and communal in purpose. Victor Pasmore in Britain, for instance, abandoned his earlier Postimpressionist standpoint to start afresh with constructional and graphic symbols deriving from Klee and Mondrian.
The presence of a number of the pioneer Surrealists in the United States during World War II affected later developments there. Surrealism's element of psychic automatism, particularly the spontaneous calligraphy of Masson, was particularly influential. The possibilities had, in fact, been implicit in modern painting for at least two decades; in Paris in the 1920s Jean Fautrier was already basing pictures on spontaneous and informal gestures with paint. In the United States in the 1940s, however, fresh impetus came from the impulsive play of colour in the work of the influential teacher Hans Hofmann. The movement that became known as Abstract Expressionism represented a decisive departure from its European sources, not only because the homogeneous consistency of a painted surface in itself took on a new meaning in the expansive U.S. conditions but at least equally because of the exceptional personality of Jackson Pollock. The style Pollock adopted in 1947 reflected an original involvement in the act of painting that transcended deliberation or control. The influential critic Harold Rosenberg wrote in 1952:
At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze or “express” an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.
(The Tradition of the New)
In contrast to Pollock's work, that executed at the time by Willem de Kooning, though equally sweeping and ungovernable, showed a recurrent figurative reference; his series of alarming variations on the theme “Woman” began in 1950. Another Abstract Expressionist, Franz Kline, claimed, in executing his shapes like huge black and white ideograms, to be in some sense depicting figurative images. Rosenberg dubbed the group “action painters.” In the course of the 1950s their influence was felt in almost every country.The climate of artistic opinion that spread outward from New York made possible flamboyant gesture paintings such as those of the French-born Georges Mathieu.
The idea of painting as a homogeneous allover fabric led at the same time to other quite separate developments. Prompted by the primitive and psychotic imagery that he called l'art brut (“raw art”), Jean Dubuffet embarked on an extraordinarily resourceful series of experiments in translating the raw material of the world into pictures. The energy that fills the works of the American painter Mark Tobey is by comparison gentle and lyrical and much influenced by East Asian art. Dubuffet's example inspired the abstract “matter” painting that developed in several countries around 1950. At its best, as in the work of the Catalan Antonio Tapies, this style conveys a strong sense of natural substance.
New forms
In painting generally a new directness was strikingly combined with a new simplicity. Beginning at the age of 80, in the five years before his death in 1954, Henri Matisse made a series of large gouaches découpées in which the increasingly abstract images were created solely by the juxtaposition of sharply cut patches of brilliant colour. Their influence was widespread and by no means confined to painters, such as the American Ellsworth Kelly, who developed the vibrant interaction of hard-edge colour areas. Even from other starting points, painters were reaching similar conclusions. The very simple yet resonant colour combinations of the New York painter Mark Rothko or the grand severity of another American, Barnett Newman, furnish examples.
Abstract painting was revealing far wider potentialities than had been apparent between World Wars I and II, but figurative styles showed a new freedom as well. The Swiss Alberto Giacometti, who had worked as a Surrealist, evolved in both sculpture and painting his sensation of the visual impact of figures in space. Francis Bacon in Britain uncovered unexpected and startling connotations in the apparition of a human likeness on canvas.
Painting in the 1960s not only sought originality; it took up a deliberately extreme position that may have seemed almostto pass the bounds of art. Paintings might be extremely large. Alternatively, they might be extreme in some other respect, such as the canvases of the Frenchman Yves Klein, which showed only a plain, arresting blue colour, or the black pictures of the American Ad Reinhardt, with variations so slight as to be hardly perceptible. The element of apparent chance in action painting explained the way the stains of colour in the work of the American painter Morris Louis appeared to flow and soak across the canvas as if of their own accord.
The tradition of Dada and its skepticism regarding what had once been the received definition of art prompted continual experiment with the techniques of assemblage. Robert Rauschenberg in the United States sought to place his subtlycalculated “combine paintings” (collections of contrasting objects joined to make an ensemble) in the gap between reality and art, contrasting the significance of paint with the borrowed imagery and objects juxtaposed with it. Jasper Johns, an associate of Rauschenburg's, worked with preexisting designs such as targets and the U.S. flag, giving them an ironic look when subjected to incorporation in his works. In the borrowed imagery and popular quotations, on which much painting was based in the years that followed, the irony was intensified to the point of ceasing to be irony at all. Roy Lichtenstein took strip cartoons and other banal (even banally artistic) imagery as the motifs for pictures. Another American, Claes Oldenburg, began by reconstructing common things out of the random pictorial substance of Abstract Expressionism; his later reconstructions of the rigid furniture of everyday life are tailored out of limp plastic sheeting.
There is nothing random about the typical art of the 1960s. On the contrary, it was planned exactly and normally carried out by an efficient, almost mechanical-seeming system. Hard-edge painting developed into a wide range of planar styles having in common only their exploitation of optical reactions and the element of shock that is the visual concomitant of sharp contrast. The spread of this idiom was particularly influenced by the Hungarian-born Victor Vasarely, who worked in France; its most personal development was in the largely monochromatic work of Bridget Riley in Britain. Again, the initial tendency was to exclude such sensations from the aesthetic canon, but in theevent a whole region of visual meaning, void for uncertainty since abstraction began, was reclaimed for painting. Optical art, or Op Art, emphasizes movement, whether potential, actual, or relative, and such effects have been ingeniously investigated by the Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel (“Group for Visual Research”), founded in Paris in 1960, and the Zero group in Düsseldorf, Ger. In the reliefs of the Venezuelan Jesús Raphael Soto, shifting vision is given a delicate order.
Other developments have proved more fertile. In the hands of the American painters Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella, painting discovered new shapes, both within the rectangular canvas and beyond it. The new value given to the painted plane did not benefit painting only. The British painter Richard Smith deployed it in three dimensions in painted constructions that re-create impressions of commercial packaging in terms of the spatial imagination of the arts.
The extreme in this reduction of means and sophistication of aesthetics was perhaps reached when a group of sculptors in the United States and England turned to investigate the possibilities of minimal and primary forms, normally the simplest geometric solids, alone or arranged in baldly repetitive series. Here, it is the spectator (as perhaps in a sense it always is) who brings the interpretation and supplies the art. The proposition had the apparent preposterousness expected of avant-garde art, yet it seemed likely, in its turn, to shed light on problems that are very much older. It is characteristic of sculpture and painting in the 20th century to deal more and more consciously and directly with the ultimate definition of art. The perennial compulsion to reverse previously accepted definitions has threatened ever more directly the recognizable identity of art. At the end of the 1960s the tendency to emphasize the systems and attitudes of art rather than its product led to a move in several countries to deny the validity of the art object. Instead artists prepared written specifications for ideal, imaginary art, the fulfillment of which was superfluous, or self-sufficient programs for performances paradoxically analogous to some aspect of the more familiar artistic acts. Conceptual art has opened the way to activities notable in their defiance of conventional expectations. The designs of earth art or earthworks are fulfilled by moving large amounts of soil, preferably in inaccessible places, perhaps in token of the potency of traditional art to impose its shape on the world. Activities of this order may appear to belong as much to theory as to artistic creation itself; in the 1970s these distinctions, with other familiar cornerstones of artistic thought, were held to have lost their validity.
Sir Lawrence Gowing
___________________
In the 1970s, critical and public interest centred on the reductive constructions of Minimalism and the nihilistic questioning of conceptual art. The late 1970s and early 1980s, however, witnessed a resurgence of excitement in painting and a return to figurative representation. A new movement called Neo-Expressionism arose in New York City and in the art capitals of western Europe, especially in West Germany, combining the heavy paint surfaces and dynamic brushstrokes of Abstract Expressionism with the emotional tone of early 20th-century German Expressionism. The new movement's subject matter ranged from basically literal, though self-consciously primitive, treatments of the human figure to a range of imaginary subjects indicative of modern urban life, particularly its glamour, alienation, and menace. Anotable characteristic of Neo-Expressionism was the newly prominent role played in its commercial acceptance by gallery owners and art dealers who adroitly publicized the movement's artists. Indeed, Neo-Expressionism's sudden success was an indication of the growing commercialization of the avant-garde and its unhesitating acceptance by wealthy, influential collectors and progressive-minded museum curators. Some critics voiced doubts over what they saw as the reflexive pursuit of artistic novelty under the influence of commercial pressures, and some even asserted that critical and public acclaim had to some extent become divorced from the goals of finding and patronizing painters whose works had lasting artistic significance.