Art & Visual Culture

On modernism and the avant-garde

11th March 2017

Dr Ben Greenman

b.greenman@open.ac.uk

Thinking ahead to the exam Revision tutorial scheduled for the 20th May 2017. Focus has been on TMA questions but keep in mind exam question can address various subjects and themes in the course books. Be aware of the big themes, as these are the likely source of the questions – the book introductions are very good reminder of these. Sample exam questions are available. We will look at various examples in the revision session.

TMA05

Exercise: In what way might we describe these pictures as modern? Are they modern in the same way?

1. 2. 3.

Left: Pierre Bonnard, The Open Window, 1921.

Right: William Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience, 1853-4.

1.

Left: Edouard Manet, Asparagus, 1880. Right: Paul Gauguin, Still Life with a Horse’s Head, c. 1886

2.

Left: Maurice Denis, Spots of Sunlight on the Terrace, 1890. Right: Paul Cézanne, The Courtesans, c. 1871

3.

Spencer Gore, Gauguins and Connoisseurs at the Stafford Gallery, 1911/12.

Modernism – formalism – aesthetic qualities

Clement Greenberg, American art critic. From the essay ‘Modernist Painting’ (1960/5): ‘The Impressionists … abjured underpainting and glazing to leave the eye under no doubt as to the fact that the colours used were made of real paint that came from pots or tubes. ‘ ‘It was stressing … of the ineluctable flatness of the support that remained the most fundamental in the processes by which pictorial art criticised and defined itself under Modernism. ‘ (cited in Wood, 2012, p . 19) Clive Bell, English art critic, late 19th/early 20th century. Bell ‘distinguishes between works that suggested (debased) emotions and those that ‘provoke’ real emotional responses; the former turn on the way the subject is arranged, the latter on ‘significant form’ (his term for the formal characteristics, which regardless of subject, give rise to an aesthetic response …). For Bell, genuine artworks provoked self-sufficient aesthetic feeling; in contrast, he thought descriptive pictures provoked traduced emotions, in ways that were manipulative or ‘false’.’ (Edwards, 2012, p . 57)

Left: Maurice Denis, Spots of Sunlight on the Terrace, 1890. Right: William Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience, 1853-4.

Autonomy of art: rather than ‘being the servant of traditional morality or modern politicsm the claim is that art has to be self-running, self-regulating, consecrated first and foremost to aesthetics values’ (Wood, 2012, p. 23). Rejection of the role of story-telling. Rejection of the role of depiction/representation (i.e. abstract art). Emphasis on the formal features of the artwork. Autonomous work of art: A self-contained entity that provokes aesthetic emotion or experience.

Modern art – modern techniques

The ‘new art history’ or ‘social history of art’ (beginning in the 1970s) overturned this view of modernism as formalist and autonomous and considered the ‘social milieu’ and ‘social forces’ from which avant-garde emerged (Wood, 2012, p. 23).

Edouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, 1862-3

What is it to be modern? ‘Modern subjects and modern techniques’ (Wood, 2012, p. 26)

Top: Edouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, 1862-3 Bottom: Constantin Guys, On the Champs-Elysées, 1850

Charles Baudelaire

‘For Baudelaire …, all beauty contained ‘an element of the eternal and an element of the

transitory’; it was this latter that characterised the modern condition, that was overlooked in the

continuing adherence to academic classicism, and that artists should recognise. … it was to be found

… in the ‘pageant of fashionable life and the thousands of floating existences’ to be found in the modern city …. These kinds of things added

up to a new form of life, and it was up to painting to fix this unrecognised modern beauty.’ (Wood,

2012, p. 24).

The modern is the present day, the now, the temporary, and is tension or opposition with the

authority of the past.

Modern techniques, formal innovation was required to represent the experience of

modernity, as experienced specifically in the new, modern city.

Eugène Thibault, The Revolution of 1848: Before the Attack, 1848

Why an ‘avant-garde’ in Paris but not London?

The emergence of an artistic avant-garde (a dissident subculture) is explained, by Paul Wood, as follows: ‘… the more volatile situation in France created the conditions for the emergence of a genuinely dissident subculture in the arts. Revolution and coup d’etat in 1848 and 1851, and the subsequent proclamation of an empire which had nothing like the industrial base of the British empire to sustain it, invested Parisian high culture with an edginess that London lacked ….’

Haussmannisation of Paris, a response to 1848

‘One of the main things that made Paris new in the Second Empire was its physical modernisation under the programme of the mayor Baron Georges Eugene Haussmann. … It was this constellation of features, especially the new forms of commodified leisure in music halls, cafes and bars, that stimulated the new art. [These were] [t]raversed by all kinds of fissures of class and gender, freedom and power …. Fashion, the crowd, the dandy, the prostitute, carriages, cosmetics, and, of course, cafes and shops, were the visible features of the new life: the extraordinary cocktail of modernity that was Haussmann’s Paris’ (Wood, 2012, p. 26).

Baudelaire exhorted artists to embrace the full extent of the modern city: ‘all the way from the margins of ‘criminals and kept women’ to the sartorial detail of bourgeois life itself, ‘the dress-coat and the frock-coat’, ‘a black coat, a white cravat’, ‘slight nuances in design in cut’, ‘creases’ (Wood, 2012, p. 24).

Left: Passage Choiseul, Paris Right: Emilie Charmy, La Loge, 1902-3

Edouard Manet, Music in the Tuileries, 1862

Charles Baudelaire and the ‘Painting of Modern Life’ How is this painted? What does it depict? Whom is depicted? What does it tell us about Paris, the city?

Exercise: What do we understand about the life of the modern city from these

pictures? Think about where in the city they might depict? Who is depicted (e.g. gender, class)? What are the activities depicted (labour, leisure)?

1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

Gustave Caillebotte, Jour de pluie à Paris, 1877

Gustave Caillebotte, Le Pont de l’Europe, 1876

Mary Cassatt, The Boating Party, 1893–94, oil on canvas, 35½ × 46 in.

Mary Cassatt, At the Francais, a sketch, 1877-78

Vincent Van Gogh, Outskirts of Paris, 1886-8.

Emile Bernard, The Iron Bridges, 1887

Georges Seurat, Circus Sideshow (Parade de Cirque), 1887-88. Oil on canvas, 1 x 1.5m.

Claude Manet, Boulevard des Capucines, 1873

Left: William Powell Frith, The Railway Station (Paddington Square), 1862 Right: Passage Choiseul, Paris

Why an ‘avant-garde’ in Paris but not London? ‘A modernism in art’ or ‘an art that depicts modernity with traditions means and forms’ (Edwards, 2012, p. 60)

Why an ‘avant-garde’ in Paris but not London?

‘… something about English society prevented them from finding a way to make ambivalence and incoherence suggestive of modern experience; from making a dilemma from uncertainty. ‘ As George Eliot remarked: ‘That’s what Victorianism is: social relations cannot always be morally good – but they must be morally legible. No ambiguity.’ Steve Edwards proposes that ‘Britain was not conflict free …; the point is that capitalist modernity had been around for a long time and had come to seem natural.’ (Edwards, 2012, p. 60).

A. W. Pugin, ‘Contrasting towns’, from A.W.N. Pugin, Contrasts, London, 1841

Victorian, industrial Britain and medieval revivalism Medieval revivalism as ‘a reaction to industrial capitalism and the social conditions it generated in the large cities.’ The ‘Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a dissident ‘faction’ of the commercial bourgeoisie in which ‘an attachment to a certain romantic and decorative beauty’ became ‘a critique of the ugliness of nineteenth commercial and industrial civilization.’ (Edwards, 2012, p.72).

Branch of the Socialist League, designed by Walter Crane, c. 1885

‘In the essay ‘The lesser arts’ (1877), Morris argued that the arts, and the decorative arts in particular, were ‘sick’ as a consequence of the split between intellectual and mechanical works that occurred during the Renaissance.’ ‘ … Morris retained many of the values articulated by earlier proponents of medieval revivalism, increasingly he attributed the process of cultural decay to the rise of the capitalism and posited socialism as an alternative, rather than the dreamy idea of turning back the clock.’ (Edwards, 2012, p. 81).

‘Wandle’, printed fabric, manufactured by William Morris and Co, 1897

A ‘truth to materials’

Exercise What do you think of the interpretation of this work proposed on p. 81, which draws an analogy between form and social relations?

Leonard Wyburd, Arts and Crafts Drawing Room, c. 1900.

Why an ‘avant-garde’ in Paris but not London?

‘… Morris might not depict the scenes of and sites of modern life, but he successfully conveys a critical experience of that world centred on pleasure in labour. This is not modernism, or not what we usually mean by that practice in art, but an alternative way of putting modern life into artworks.’ (Edwards, 2012, p. 81).

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Glasgow School of Art, c. 1910

Left: Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907 Right: Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow, 1930.

Is the European avant-garde in the twentieth century merely autonomous, formal innovation?

Left: Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907 Right: Pablo Picasso, Guitar, Sheet Music and Glass, 1912

Both of these sculptures are representations of the human head. What are the differences and similarities between how they represent that head?

Left: Grebo mask, Ivory Coast.

Right: Pablo Picasso, Guitar, 1912

The ‘search for a new visual language appropriate to modernity involved a rejection of the conventions of academic modelling: gradations of light and shadow, smooth finishing, modulated light falling on different materials, rounded forms in space – all the technical devices for producing a coherent spatial illusion.’ (Loftus and Wood, 2008 (AA100), p. 62-3).

Left: Lyubov Popova, Composition with Figures, 1913 Middle: Vladimir Tatlin, Counter Corner Relief, 1915. Right: Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Worker’s Club at the ‘Exposition International des Arts Decoratifs,’ Paris, 1925

Is the European avant-garde in the twentieth century merely autonomous, formal innovation?

Exercise: Are these all examples of modern architecture? And, if so, in what way do

they reject architecture of the past and would have been regarded as distinctly modern?

1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

Bruno Taut, Glass Pavilion at the Cologne Werkbund exhibition, 1914.

Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Villa Savoye, Poissy, 1928-30.

Louis Sullivan, Merchant’s National Bank, Grinnell, Iowa, 1914.

Florence Henri, Structure, 1927.

Mies van der Rohe, German pavillion, Internal Exhibition, Bercelaon, 1929 (reconstructed).

Paul Rudolph, Bass Residence, Fort Worth, Texas, 1970-2