Modernism: Originality and the Presence of the Artist

James Clegg

Paul Gaugin (1889) Self Portrait

Self-portrait “les miserables”, dedicated to Van Gogh (1888)

Self portrait (1885)

Self Portrait (1894 – 1895), Photograph of Paul Gauguin (1988)

Tahiti

“All the aspects of [Gauguin’s] work that appeared bizarre and worrisome to the public in his own day now strike one as unproblematic and indeed self evident” Michel Gibson, Paul Gauguin (1991)

Emile Bernhard, Buckwheat Harvesters at Pont-Aven (1888)

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret (1886) Le Pardon en Bretagne

Paul Gaugin (1889) La Lutte de Jacob avec l’ange (The Vision after the Sermon)

“What splendid thoughts can be invoked through shape and colour! And how pedestrian they are all those Pompiers [academic painters] with their trompe l’oeil [illusionistic] imitation of nature! We alone sail forth on our phantom ship with the full cargo of our imaginative imperfection. And how much more infinity can appear tangible when we are in the presence of something undefined.”Paul Gauguin in Pont Aven, 1888

“[The] metropolitan type [of personality] – which naturally takes on a thousand modifications – creates a protective organ for itself against the profound disruption with which the fluctuations and discontinuities of the external milieu threaten it. Instead of reacting emotionally, the metropolitan type reacts primarily in a rational manner... Thus the reaction of the metropolitan person to those events is moved to a sphere of mental activity which is least sensitive and which is furthest removed from the depths of the personality.” (Simmel 1903, p.12)

Camille Pissaro (1897) Boulevard des Italiens Morning, Sunlight

Pablo Picasso (1907) Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

Kandinsky (1923) Unbroken Line

Adolf Loos (1930) Muler House, Prague

Above: Walter Gropius (1925-6) Bauhaus, DessauRight: Oskar Schlemmer (1922) Triadic Ballet costume

“By the turn of the [20th Century] the belief that the vision of the savage was somehow pre-rational or childlike had passed into popular thought”

(Rhodes 1994, p. 14)

Originality

Modernity and Modernism

• Modernity refers to the conditions brought about by the industrial revolution and the resultant social and political change.

• Modernism refers to a specific artistic response to modernity and is characterised by rejection of traditional artistic values and a search for new universal ‘truths’ often outside the constraints of bourgeois culture.

Modernist or Genius?• Modernists stove to develop original artistic languages

distinct from the past (often hard to grasp and anti-popular culture).

• ‘Modernist’ shares with the concept of the Romantic Genius: the sense of individuality, the desire to surpass limitations and make contact with ‘otherness’ and the appeal to irrational or emotional impulses (some writers see Romanticism as being the start of the Modern period)

• Modernists often rejected many of the grand visual realisations of the Romantics, and even to some degree a reliance on ‘skill’. Some Modernists rejected natural forms and many rejected figuration.

Modernist or Genius?• Kandinsky equated modernist artists with

prophets, seeing the way to the future. This shares much in common with the notion the ‘avant-garde’.

• In many ways ‘Modernist’ is close to the meaning of Genius, particularly in the context of art. There is even the hint of madness that has run concurrently with many conceptions of genius, as in Gauguin’s “inner monster”.

Presence

Jackson Pollock in the studio, drip painting

Barbara Kruger (1987) We don’t need another hero

Mel Brimfield (2012) Vincent After Kirk Douglas

Mel Brimfield (2012) Between Genius and Desire (after Hans Namuth)

Anton Henning (2007) Oasis

Keith Tyson, Studio Wall Drawings

Large Field Array