The Rise of Modernism Art of the Later 19th Century Answers
Until recently , the give-and-take 'modern' was used to refer generically to the contemporaneous; all fine art is modern at the time it is made. In his Il Libro dell'Arte (translated every bit 'The Craftsman'due south Handbook') written in the early 15th century, the Italian writer and painter Cennino Cennini explains that Giotto made painting 'mod' [run across BIBLIOGRAPHY]. Giorgio Vasari writing in the 16th century, refers to the art of his ain period as 'modern.' [come across BIBLIOGRAPHY]
In the history of fine art, even so, the term 'modern' is used to refer to a period dating from roughly the 1860s through the 1970s and describes the style and ideology of art produced during that era. It is this more specific utilize of modern that is intended when people speak of mod art. The term 'modernism' is as well used to refer to the art of the modernistic menstruum. More specifically, 'modernism' tin can be thought of as referring to the philosophy of modern art.
In the championship of her 1984 volume [run into BIBLIOGRAPHY], Suzi Gablik asks 'Has Modernism Failed?' What does she hateful? Has modernism 'failed' but in the sense of coming to an terminate? Or does she mean that modernism failed to accomplish something? The presupposition of the latter is that modernism had goals, which it failed to attain. If so, what were these goals?
For reasons that will become clear later in this essay, discussions of modernism in art have been couched largely in formal and stylistic terms. Art historians tend to speak of modern painting, for example, as concerned primarily with qualities of colour, shape, and line practical systematically or expressively, and marked over fourth dimension past an increasing business concern with flatness and a declining involvement in subject thing. It is generally agreed that modernism in fine art originated in the 1860s and that the French painter Édouard Manet is the kickoff modernist painter. Paintings such as his Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe ('Dejeuner on the Grass') and Olympia are seen to take ushered in the era of modernism.
Only the question can be posed: Why did Manet pigment Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe and Olympia? The standard answer is: Considering he was interested in exploring new subject matter, new painterly values, and new spatial relationships.
But there is another more interesting question beyond this: Why was Manet exploring new subject matter, new painterly values and spatial relationships? He produced a modernist painting, yep, just why did he produce such a piece of work?
When Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe was exhibited at the Salon des Refusés in 1863, many people were scandalized not only by the subject matter, which shows two men dressed in contemporary clothes seated casually on the grass in the forest with a nude woman, but likewise by the unconventional way it was painted. Two years later the public were fifty-fifty more shocked by his painting of Olympia which showed a nude woman, plain a demi-mondaine, gazing out morally unperturbed at the viewer, and painted in a quick, broad way reverse to the accepted academic way. Why was Manet painting pictures that he knew would upset people?
It is in trying to answer questions similar these that forces usa to prefer a much broader perspective on the question of modernism. It is within this larger context that nosotros can discover the underpinnings of the philosophy of modernism and place its aims and goals. Information technology volition also reveal another dimension to the perception of art and the identity of the artist in the modern world.
The roots of modernism lie much deeper in history than the middle of the 19th century. For historians the modern period actually begins in the sixteenth century, initiating what is called the Early Modern Period, which extends up to the 18th century. The intellectual underpinnings of modernism sally during the Renaissance period when, through the report of the art, verse, philosophy, and science of aboriginal Greece and Rome, humanists revived the notion that human being, rather than God, is the measure of all things, and promoted through education ideas of citizenship and civic consciousness. The catamenia also gave rise to 'utopian' visions of a more perfect society, beginning with Sir Thomas More than'due south Utopia, written in 1516, in which is described a fictional island community with seemingly perfect social, political, legal customs.
In retrospect nosotros can recognize in Renaissance humanism an expression of that modernist confidence in the potential of humans to shape their own individual destinies and the hereafter of the world. Also present is the conventionalities that humans can acquire to sympathize nature and natural forces, and even grasp the nature of the universe.
The modernist thinking which emerged in the Renaissance began to take shape equally a larger pattern of thought in the 18th century. Mention may be fabricated first of the so-chosen 'Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns', a literary and artistic dispute that dominated European intellectual life at the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century. The crux was the issue of whether Moderns (i.eastward. contemporary writers and artists) were at present morally and artistically superior to the Ancients (i.e. writers and artists of aboriginal Greece and Rome). Introduced first in France in 1687 by Charles Perrault, who supported the Moderns, the discussion was taken upwardly in England where information technology was satirized as The Boxing of the Books by Jonathan Swift.
Information technology was also satirized by William Hogarth in a print called The Battle of the Pictures, which shows paintings generally past Renaissance and Baroque masters attacking Hogarth'south own works of equivalent but more contemporary discipline affair: an Old Master painting of a Penitent Mary Magdalen, for instance, attacks scene three from Hogarth'southward series The Harlot's Progress, while an aboriginal Feast of the Gods attacks scene three from Hogarth's The Rake'due south Progress. In i instance, the ancient Roman painting from the 1st century BCE known today as the Aldobrandini Wedding is shown slicing into the canvas of the 2nd scene from the Hogarth'due south Marriage à-la-Style serial. 
William Hogarth, The Battle of the Pictures, engraving and carving, 1743
Though treated humorously by Swift and Hogarth, the 'Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns' was driven by deeper concerns that pitted institutionalized Potency, whose claim to power was supported by established tradition, custom, law, and lineage, against more progressive individuals who chafed nether the restrictions that Authority imposed on their lives and the performance of society. The conflict introduces an important dichotomy that was to remain fundamental to the modernist question: the segmentation between bourgeois forces, who tended to back up the argument for the Ancients, and the more progressive forces who sided with the Moderns.
In the 18th century, the Enlightenment saw the intellectual maturation of the humanist belief in reason as the primary guiding principle in the diplomacy of humans. Through reason the mind achieved enlightenment, and for the enlightened mind, a whole new and exciting earth opened upwardly.
The Enlightenment was an intellectual motility for which the most immediate stimulus was the so-chosen Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th-centuries when men like Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton, through the application of reason to the study of the natural world and the heavens had made spectacular scientific discoveries in which were revealed various scientific truths.
More than oft than not, these new-found truths flew in the face of conventional beliefs, especially those held by the Church. For instance, contrary to what the Church had maintained for centuries, the 'truth' was that the World revolved around the sun. The idea that 'truth' could be discovered through the awarding of reason based on study was tremendously exciting.
The open-minded 18th-century thinker believed that virtually everything could exist submitted to reason: tradition, customs, morals, fifty-fifty art. But, more than this, information technology was felt that the 'truth' revealed thereby could exist applied in the political and social spheres to 'correct' bug and 'meliorate' the political and social status of humankind. This kind of thinking quickly gave rise to the heady possibility of creating a new and ameliorate society.
The 'truth' discovered through reason would costless people from the shackles of decadent institutions such equally the Church building and the monarchy whose misguided traditional thinking and one-time ideas had kept people subjugated in ignorance and superstition. The concept of freedom became key to the vision of a new society. Through truth and freedom, the world would be made into a better place.
Progressive 18th-century thinkers believed that the lot of humankind would be greatly improved through the process of enlightenment, from being shown the truth. With reason and truth in mitt, the individual would no longer be at the mercy of religious and secular authorities, which had synthetic their ain truths and manipulated them to their own cocky-serving ends. At the root of this thinking is the belief in the perfectibility of humankind.
Enlightenment thinking pictured the human race as striving towards universal moral and intellectual self-realization. Information technology was believed that reason immune access to truth, and knowledge of the truth would meliorate humankind. The vision that began to have shape in the 18th century was of a new world, a ameliorate globe. In 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his Inquiry into the Nature of the Social Contract, proposed that a new social organization should rest on 'an equality that is moral and legitimate, and that men, who may be unequal in strength or intelligence, become every one equal by convention and legal right.' By joining together into civil social club through the social contract, individuals could both preserve themselves and attain freedom. These tenets were cardinal to the notion of modernism.
Such declarations in support of liberty and equality were not only found in books. In the 18th century, two major attempts were made to put these ideas into exercise. Such ideas, of course, were not popular with conservative and traditional elements, and their resistance had to exist overcome in both cases through bloody revolution.
The first great experiment in creating a new and amend society was undertaken in what was literally the new world and the new ideals were first expressed in the Annunciation of Independence of the newly founded United states in 1776. It is Enlightenment thinking that informs such phrases as 'nosotros hold these truths to be self-evident' and which underpins the notion 'that all men are created equal.' The certificate'south worldly character is reflected in its stated concern for man'south right to pursue happiness in his lifetime, which signals a shift away from a God-centered, Christian concentration on the afterlife to i focused on the individual and the quality of a person's life. Fundamental, too, is the notion of freedom; liberty was alleged one of homo'south inalienable rights.
In 1789, some other encarmine revolution undertaken in France also attempted to create a new society. Its aim was to supplant an oppressive governmental construction centered around an accented monarchy, an elite with feudal privileges, and a powerful Catholic clergy, with new Enlightenment principles of citizenship, nationalism, and inalienable rights; the revolutionaries rallied to the cry of equality, fraternity, and liberty.
The French Revolution, notwithstanding, failed to bring about a radically new lodge in France. Several changes of regime chop-chop followed culminating in Napoleon's military dictatorship, the establishment of the Napoleonic Empire, and finally the restoration of the monarchy in 1814. Revolutionary action connected, though, in 1830 and again in 1848. Mention tin be made hither of a third major endeavor to create a new gild along fundamentally Enlightenment lines that took place at the beginning of the 20th century. The Russian Revolution, initiated in 1915, perhaps the nigh idealistic and utopian of all, too failed.
It is in the ethics of the Enlightenment that the roots of Modernism, and the new role of art and the creative person, are to exist plant. Simply put, the overarching goal of Modernism, of modern fine art, has been the cosmos of a better club.
What were the means by which this goal was to be reached? If the desire of the 18th century was to produce a better society, how was this to exist brought nigh? How does ane go about perfecting humankind and creating a better globe?
As we take seen, it was the 18th-century belief that only the enlightened mind tin notice truth; both enlightenment and truth were discovered through the awarding of reason to knowledge, a process that too created new knowledge. The individual acquired noesis and at the same time the means to discover truth in it through proper education and instruction.
Cleansed of the corruptions of religious and political ideology by open up-minded reason, pedagogy brings us the truth, or shows usa how to attain the truth. Didactics enlightens us and makes usa better people. Educated, aware people will form the foundations of the new society, a society which they will create through their own efforts.
Until recently, this concept of the role of education has remained central to western modernist thinking. Enlightened thinkers, and hither might be mentioned for example Thomas Jefferson, constantly pursued knowledge, sifting out the truth by subjecting all they learned to reasoned analysis. Jefferson, of course, not only consciously cultivated his ain enlightenment, but also actively promoted education for others, founding in Charlottesville an 'academical village' that later became the University of Virginia. He believed that the search for truth should be conducted without prejudice, and, mindful of the Enlightenment suspicion of the Church, deliberately did not include a campus chapel in his plans. The Church building and its bigoted influences, he felt, should be kept separate not only from the State, but too from education.
Jefferson, like many other Enlightenment thinkers, saw a clear role for art and architecture. Fine art and compages could serve in this process of enlightenment education past providing examples of those qualities and virtues that it was felt should guide the aware mind.
In the latter one-half of the 18th century, the model for the ideals of the new society was the world of ancient Rome and Greece. The Athens of Pericles and Rome of the Republican period offered fine examples of emerging democratic principles in authorities, and of heroism and virtuous action, cocky-cede and civic dedication in the behaviour of their citizens.
It was believed, in fact, certainly according to the 'ancients' in the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns mentioned before, that the ancient world had achieved a kind of perfection, an ideal that came close to the Enlightenment understanding of truth. The German art historian Johann Winckelmann, writing in the 18th century, was convinced that the art of aboriginal Greece was the nigh perfect and directed gimmicky artists to examples such equally the Apollo Dais. 
Apollo Belvedere
Roman marble copy after a bronze original of c. 330 BCE (Musei Vaticani, Rome)
Information technology is under these circumstances that Jacques-Louis David came to pigment the classicizing and didactic historical painting Oath of the Horatii exhibited at the Salon in 1785. David favored the classical and academic traditions both in terms of style and subject field matter. His painting depicts a stirring moment in the heroic story of courage and patriotic self-sacrifice in pre-Republican Rome. The firmly modeled statuesque male person figures on the left enact a virile drama through which are displayed their noble virtues. The energy and physical tension of their actions is contrasted to the curvilinear shapes and collapsing forms of the women on the right who are shown overcome by emotion and sorrow, showing the weakness of female nature. This was a yard and edifying work treating an honorable and moralizing subject. 
Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii
1785, oil on sail (Musée du Louvre, Paris)
David himself saw the role of fine art in edifice a new social club in no uncertain terms. An active supporter of the French Revolution, he was a fellow member of the Revolutionary Committee on Public Instruction where he explained that the Commission:
- considered the arts in all respects past which they should help spread the progress of the human spirit, to propagate and transmit to posterity the hit example of the sublime efforts of an immense people, guided by reason and philosophy, restoring to earth the reign of liberty, equality, and law.
He states categorically that 'the arts should contribute forcefully to public instruction.'
With respect to the quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, David can be associated with the supporters of the Ancients. He envisioned a new lodge based on bourgeois ideals. In dissimilarity, there were other artists, we can call them Moderns, whose vision of a new globe order was more progressive.
The Moderns envisioned a earth conceived anew, not one that merely imitated ancient models. The trouble for the Moderns, however, was that their new world was something of an unknown quantity. The nature of 'truth' was problematical from the beginning, and their dilemma over the nature of humans who possessed not only a rational mind open to reason but also an emotional life which had to be taken into business relationship.
It was too felt that reason stifled imagination, and without imagination no progress would exist fabricated. Reason alone was inhuman, only imagination without reason 'produces monsters' (see Francisco de Goya's The Slumber of Reason Produces Monsters). It was agreed, though, that freedom was central and was to exist pursued through the very exercise of freedom in the contemporary world.
Francisco de Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters
Etching and aquatint
(Caprichos no. 43: El sueño de la razón produce monstruos), 1796-1797
After the Revolution of 1789, the Ancients came to exist identified with the old lodge, the ancien régime. They were caste as politically conservative and associated with a blazon of academic fine art called Neoclassicism.
In contrast, the Moderns were seen as politically progressive in a left-wing, revolutionary sense and associated with the anti-bookish motility called Romanticism. The nature of this division is best seen in the rivalry of the classicizing creative person Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and the Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix.
In the Salon exhibition of 1824, Ingres exhibited his Vow of Louis XIII and Delacroix his Massacre of Scios. In his review of the exhibition in the Periodical des débats, the critic Étienne-Jean Delécluze described Ingres' work as 'le beau' (the beautiful) because in both fashion and field of study matter it followed classical academic theory and promoted the right-wing, conservative values of the ancien régime. In contrast, Delacroix'south painting was labeled 'le laid' (the ugly) considering of the manner it was painted, with loose brushwork and unidealized figures, and because its subject matter, the slaughter of thousands of Greek inhabitants on the island of Chios by Turkish troops in 1822, not only lacked examples of valour and virtue, simply also expressed a more liberal criticism of the event and moral outrage over its occurrence in the gimmicky earth.
For conservatives, Ingres represented order, traditional values, and the good onetime days of the ancien régime. Political progressives saw Delacroix equally the representative of contemporary or modernistic life. He was associated with political revolution and new progressive intellectual views; his supporters claimed he had established the idea of freedom in fine art.
Delacroix was the get-go major progressive modernist creative person in France. His paintings deliberately rejected the Academic platonic of the cute and instead, in the view of conservatives disquisitional of his work, he instituted the 'cult of ugliness'. Other artists were seen to adopt this same position, notably Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, each of whom deliberately rejected the Academic model of the beautiful. Their ideas and approach to art were regarded as so subversive that they were accused of attempting to undermine not simply the Academy but even the Land.
The threat of progressive modernism was such that the State, starting time with the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1855, embarked on a program the upshot of which was to neutralize and depoliticize works of art. The plan for the Universal Exposition was to include, in a retrospective exhibition, examples of various dissimilar styles of French art, including those of Ingres and Delacroix, in a way that highlighted eclecticism only which simultaneously too had the consequence of turning the paintings into non-threatening 'works of art'. With the back up of bourgeois forces and compliance of formalist critics and art historians, the political and social commentary essential to progressive modernist art was effectively stripped away leaving only the pigment on the sail, which was discussed simply in terms of its formal qualities.
In his guide to the Universal Exposition (Guide pratique et complet à l'Exposition universelle de 1855), Prince Napoléon-Joseph-Charles-Paul Bonaparte, who presided over the Universal Exposition, wrote that in Delacroix's painting Freedom Leading the People, 28 July 1830 :
- There are no longer whatever trigger-happy discussions, inflammatory opinions about art, and in Delacroix the colorist 1 no longer recognizes the flaming revolutionary whom an immature Schoolhouse set up in opposition to Ingres. Each artist today occupies his legitimate identify. The 1855 Exposition has done well to elevate Delacroix; his works, judged in so many different ways, have now been reviewed, studied, admired, similar all works marked by genius. [Translation from Patricia Mainardi: see BIBLIOGRAPHY]
Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 28 July 1830
1830, Oil on canvass (Musée du Louvre, Paris)
Thus, Delacroix the 'flaming revolutionary' was transformed into Delacroix the 'colorist.' Although some progressive artists, such every bit Gustave Courbet, perhaps sensing how inclusion in the exhibition might compromise their piece of work, refused to participate, the Universal Exposition effectively initiated a way to incorporate the impulses of progressive modernism and neutralize the threat it posed to the prevailing bourgeois ethos of society.
Until recently, this has remained a prevailing approach to modernism. The socialist statements so forcefully made by Gustave Courbet in his painting The Stonebreakers, for example, and the sharp political commentary of Édouard Manet in his The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian, 1867, for example, have been mostly suppressed and replaced by discussions of the formal qualities of each work.
But although these discussions may have deliberately repressed its revolutionary and confrontational graphic symbol, progressive modernism itself, equally an ideology and a political motility, remained vital and active.
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Source: http://arthistoryresources.net/modernism/roots.html
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