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 Modern Art 1851-1929

Oxford History of Art

Dr Richard Brettell has taught at the painting, photography, architecture, and

University of Texas, Northwestern Uni¬ museology. His books include Pissarro
versity, and Harvard University and is and Pontoise: The Painter and the Landscape
currently Professor of Aesthetic Studies (Yale, 1990) which won the Charles Rufus
at the University of Texas at Dallas. Formerly Morey Award, and, with Caroline B.
Searle Curator of European Painting at the Brettell, Painters and Peasants in the igth
Art Institute of Chicago and McDermott Century (Geneva, 1983). He was also curator
Director of the Dallas Museum of Art, he and co-author of A Day in the Country:
has been involved with museum scholarship Impressionism and the French Landscape (New
for more than twenty years, publishing arti¬ York, 1984) and The Art of Paul Gauguin
cles and catalogues in the history of modern (New York, 1988).
f

-' > -
Oxford History of Art

Modern Art
1851-1929
Capitalism and Representation

Richard R. Brettell

'ary
TRENT UN L <Sil Y
Ap/O

OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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 Contents

Introduction The Great Exhibition of 1851, London i

Paris: the capital of modern art 3
New technology 3
The beginnings of modern art 3

PARTI REALISM TO SURREALISM 9

Realism 13
Impressionism 13
Symbolism 19
Post-Impressionism 21

Neo-Impressionism 24

Synthetism 26

TheNabis 27

The Fauves 29

Expressionism 30

Cubism 32

Futurism 33

Orphism 36

Vorticism 38

Suprematism/Constructivism 39

Neo-Plasticism 40

Dada 42

Purism 43

Surrealism 44

The ‘-ism’ problem 46

vii
PART II THE CONDITIONS FOR MODERN ART 49

Chapter 1 Urban Capitalism 51

Paris and the birth of the modern city 52

Capitalist society 56

The commodification of art 58

The modern condition 60

Chapter 2 Modernity, Representation, and the Accessible Image 65

The art museum 67

Temporary exhibitions 70

Lithography 72

Photography 74

Conclusion 78

PART III THE ARTIST’S RESPONSE 81

Chapter 3 Representation, Vision, and ‘Reality’: The Art of Seeing 83

The human eye 86

Transparency and unmediated modernism 87

Surface fetishism and unmediated modernism 89

Photography and unmediated modernism 92

Beyond the oil sketch 95
Cubism
97
Chapter 4 Image/Modernism and the Graphic Traffic io5
The Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood no
Puvis de Chavannes and Gustave Moreau: image/modernism
outside the avant-garde in
Image/modernism outside France 114
Exhibitions ol the avant-garde 116
Fragmentation, dislocation, and recombination 120

PART IV ICONOLOGY 125

Introduction 127
Chapter 5 Sexuality and the Body
Ffi
Manet’s bodies
!3I

viii CONTENTS
 Modern art and pornography 136

The nude and the modernist cycle of life 138

The bathing nude 141

The allegorical or non-sexual nude 146

Colonialism and the nude: the troubled case of Gauguin H7

The bride stripped bare Z5°
Body parts and fragments 151
Chapter 6 Social Class and Class Consciousness L5

Seurat and A Summer Sunday on the Island of the Grande Jatte (1884) i55
Class issues in modernist culture z59
Portraiture 163

Images of peasantry 170

The worker and modern art z74

Chapter 7 Anti-Iconography: Art Without ‘Subject’ 181

Landscape painting 181

Text and image 187

Abstraction 190

Chapter 8 Nationalism and Internationalism in Modern Art 197

National identity 197

Time and place 200

Abstract art, spiritualism, and internationalism 202

Nationalist landscape painting 206

Afterword The Private Institutionalization of Modern Art 211

Notes 218

List of Illustrations 226

Bibliographic Essay 232

Timeline (compiled by Julie Lawrence Cochran) 240

Index 250

CONTENTS IX
 Introduction: The
Great Exhibition
of 1851, London
The shelves of every general library in the world contain histories of
modern art. Since the early years of this century, scholars and critics of
virtually every nationality have attempted to explain the extraordinary
fluorescence in the art world that started in the mid-nineteenth cen¬
tury in Europe and became global by the turn of the century. The
words modern art are often contrasted with academic art or traditional
art to indicate the nature of this fluorescence. The notion that under¬
lies most of the books that define modern art is that this art arose in
response to the changing political, social, economic, and cultural char¬
acter of modern life.
This modern life was considered to be urban, industrially based,
socially fluid, and defined by the notion of capital or exchangeable
wealth. Historians of modern Europe usually begin their investiga¬
tions in the seventeenth century, a major turning point in the political,
social, and economic structure of society. The most recent generation
of art historians have included the eighteenth century in their dis¬
cussions of modern art, with Robert Rosenblum, Michael Fried,
Robert L. Herbert, and Thomas Crow all treating eighteenth-century
Europe (mostly France) as modern.
This history of modern art is dependent by its very nature on those
that preceded it. Julius Meier-Graefe’s Modern Art (published in Ger¬
man in 1904, and translated into English in 1908)1 was the first system¬
atic attempt to place the achievements of French painters in a larger
art-historical context that includes all of European art. When read in
conjunction with Paul Signac’s landmark book, From Delacroix to Neo-
Impressionism (1899), Meier-Graefe’s Modern Art lays the theoretical
and aesthetic groundwork on which most of the principal achieve¬
ments of modern artists and their commentators rest.2 As with virtu¬
ally all the earliest work on modern art, Meier-Graefe stops at 1900,
before the achievements of the first three incredibly inventive decades
of the twentieth century. Perhaps as a result of this, the nineteenth-
century history of modern art has most often been separated from its
Detail of Phillip Henry twentieth-century strands in both academic teaching and its literature.
Delamotte: Rebuilding the
This book attempts to correct that imbalance by commencing the
Crystal Palace at Sydenham,
1853. Exterior. history of modern art in the mid-nineteenth century and continuing it

I
through the first quarter of the twentieth century. Its parameters are,
by nature, at once arbitrary and symbolic. They do not correspond with
the completion of a major work of art or an invention, or an occurrence
directly related to the production of art. Rather, they admit that
modern art has been, and continues to be, part of an urban spectacle of
display, that its exhibition before urban audiences of various scales
is essential to its nature, and that a true study of modern art must
be grounded as much in its public presentation (which is not to say
consumption) as in its private production.
This study commences with the Great Exhibition of 1851, the first of
a series of truly international exhibitions of manufactured goods from
different countries, held in Joseph Paxton’s rapidly constructed and
architecturally unprecedented Crystal Palace near London, and
concludes with the opening exhibition of the then new Museum of
Modern Art in New York in 1929.3 The fact that both these events were
held outside France is not an unimportant factor in their selection as
the parentheses of this study. The knowledge that one of them con¬
tained works of plastic art as part of a larger exhibition of cultural
products (lamps, tractors, ceramics, furniture, machines, etc.) is also
essential to an understanding of this book’s aims. It must be stressed
that there was no art (or design, for that matter) that we would recog¬
nize today as modern in the Crystal Palace exhibition. Yet, the sheer
modernity of the exhibition itself justifies its position as the point of
origin for this book. Its royal co-founder, Prince Albert, spoke at the
opening of the exhibition about the ‘wonderful period of transition . . .
[when] thought is communicated with the rapidity and power of light¬
ning . . . and knowledge becomes the property of the community at
large’. This world-without-borders is also the leitmotif of our own
digital age, yet we should remember its origins in the middle of the
last century, when industrialism and colonialism made all Europeans
globally conscious.
This is among the first histories of modern art governed as much by
the currently fashionable word ‘representation’ as by the word art. Here
the discovery and subsequent widespread domination of the most
modern of media, photography, will be identified as an essential factor
in the definition of the primary role of painting in modern representa¬
tion. The extraordinary importance of photo-mechanical reproduc¬
tion foi the production of art will also be considered. There were few
modern intellectuals and artists who failed to argue the merits or
otherwise of photography and photo-mechanical reproduction. By
1870 all those living in a modern city anywhere in the world had been
affected by the newly developed image world made possible by the
industrialization of the reproductive media.

2 introduction: the great exhibition

Paris: the capital of modern art
The Euro-global aspect of this history is just as important a factor in
the selection of the 1851 exhibition as our starting point. Virtually every
history of modern art is dominated by the artistic production of the
French capital, Paris. Hence, modern art is in a sense modern French
art. This study can do little to reverse that idea, largely because Paris
was unequivocally the world art capital throughout the period 1852 to
1929. However, many artists who made critical contributions to modern
art were non-French, though based in Paris, and no true history of
modern art can exclude the contributions of the many different nation¬
alities such as British, Germans, Russians, Italians, Scandinavians,
Czechs, Spaniards, and Americans. Nor can it afford to exclude the
achievements of artists working in other major cities. It is largely
through the regular practice of the international exhibitions and their
artistic offshoots that the Euro-global world of modern art came to be
defined. Even nationalism in the arts has its international dimensions;
the radically and self-consciously Mexican art produced by Diego
Rivera (1886-1957) t^ie I92°s F inconceivable without his thorough
familiarity with French modernism and with the artistic theories of the
Frenchman Elie Faure (1873-1937).
With improved communications and new cultural ideas and images
from Paris, Vienna, or Berlin, avant-garde groups were disseminated
throughout Europe and much of the Americas by the early twentieth
century. This created a situation in which central works of art were
being made in peripheral places, as Prince Albert seemed to predict
in 1851.

New technology
Over half the illustrations for this text are representations made by
non-French artists, many of which have never before been included in
a general text on modern art. This decision was not made purely for the
sake of novelty, but was made possible by the recent availability of
information about modern art in the former Soviet bloc and because
of renewed enthusiasm for the ‘provincial’ modern art of Scandinavia,
the Americas, and other colonial areas. I begin this book with two
representations, both English. They contrast in virtually every way, yet
both can be classified as modern. The first, by the artist/photographer
Phillip Henry Delamotte (1820-89) is a calotype (a photographic print
created from a paper negative, a process developed in England in 1839
by William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-77)). Made during the recon¬
struction of Paxton’s famed Crystal Palace in Sydenham in the years
following the close of the 1851 exhibition, Upper Gallery (1855), is a pure
record of the effect of light on iron and glass [1]. There are no figures,
and the receding pictorial space defined by the architecture moves in
stately fashion up the left edge of the pictorial format. The asymmetry

NEW TECHNOLOGY 3
1 Phillip Henry Delamotte
Upper Gallery of the Crystal
Palace, 1855
The famous photographs by
the painter/photographer
Delamotte were, in fact, made
during the reconstruction of
the Crystal Palace at Syden¬
ham in 1853. They circulated
widely in photographic circles
and had as profound an effect
on exhibition architecture, as
did the building itself.

of the representation, its glorification of the mechanically made

elements ol modern architecture, its edge-consciousness, its omission
of the human figure, the virtual suspension of its viewer: all these
qualities make the representation as modern as its subject. This and
the other documentary photographs of the same building made by
Delamotte contrast sharply with his simultaneously created water¬
colours of the English picturesque tradition which would never even
be considered for inclusion in a museum of modern art. The message
here is familiar to postmodernists who recall the observation of their
earliest important theorist, Marshall McLuhan, that ‘the medium is
the message . When Delamotte saw and recorded the Crystal Palace
through a camera, he was unable to conform to the compositional
conventions of the painted representation and was forced to invent
new approaches to composition.
The second representation to introduce this text was made not by a
machine, but by hand. William Holman Hunt (1827-1910) painted
Valentme Rescuing Sylvia From Proteus in 1850-1 exactly at the moment

4 introduction: the great exhibition

2 William Holman Hunt
Valentine Rescuing Sylvia
from Proteus (The Two
Gentleman of Verona),
1850-1, oil on canvas
Fine art was intentionally
excluded from Prince Albert’s
1851 exhibition, and Hunt’s
painting could be seenafthe
Royal Academy. This decision
was reversed in all subsequent
international exhibitions, each
of which hosted major global
displays of art that raised
serious questions about the
relationships between art,
industry, science, nationalism,
and progress.

of the Great Exhibition [2]. Its subject, the last scene of the last act of
Shakespeare’s comedy of love Two Gentlemen of Verona, is at once his¬
torical and imaginative, inhabiting a cultural time consciously removed
from the radically timeless present of Delamotte’s photograph. It, too,
is modern, but modern in a very different way to the Delamotte image.
Hunt’s vividly coloured work plays a crucial role in John Gage’s recent
book, Colour and Culture, as an exemplar of mid-nineteenth-century
colour and light theory as used by painters.4 Its obsession with detail
and a kind of accumulated visual accuracy owes a profound debt to the
sort of hyper-realism that had entered the history of art with the intro¬
duction in 1839 of the photographic process called the daguerreotype.
Along with the French painter Paul Delaroche (1797-1856), who intro¬
duced photography to the French nation in a speech of 1839, Hunt
gloried in the almost enamelled details revealed to the human eye by
the daguerreotype, a unique photographic print on a silvered copper
surface. In Hunt’s painting, the last scene of the play is infused with a
colour, life, and sheer reality that it could never have had on stage. Its
imagery is anything but modern, but its representational vocabulary is
absolutely so, to the extent that when it made its first appearance in the
Royal Academy exhibition of 1851, it was decried for the garishness and
crudity of its colours just as Gauguin’s and Matisse’s paintings were
more than a generation later.5

The beginnings of modern art

Before rushing headlong into the body of the text, it is worth exploring
some of the other possible starting points for this book. One is surely
1846, when Charles Baudelaire published his landmark review of the

THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN ART 5

Salon with his call to artists to ‘be of their time’, to create an artistic
world that is continuously involved in an interaction with the present
rather than the past. Baudelaire’s call to arms was heard by very few
artists when he made it, and it was actually his later criticism, particu¬
larly his essay‘The Painter of Modern Life’, published in 1863, that had
the real impact on world art.6 Another starting date could have been
1848, a year of revolutions throughout much of Europe, and the date
used most often in conventional histories of Realism. Yet the 1848
revolution, though of widespread importance in European culture, had
too little effect on artistic developments in most nations, England
among them, for it to become a touchstone for an international history
of art. Another date, used often in histories of painting, is 1855, when
Gustave Courbet (1819-77) exhibited his immense painted manifesto,
The Studio of the Painter; A Real Allegory (see 3) in a special pavilion
constructed outside the second international exposition, held in Paris
in that year. Yet, for me, it was the impetus of the Crystal Palace
exhibition that caused the conditions for the creation, and exhibition,
of Courbet’s self-conscious masterpiece.
The fourth and perhaps most compelling alternative to 1851 is, of
course, 1863, when Napoleon III was forced to create the epoch-making
Salon des Refuses, in which Dejeuner sur I'herbe by the French artist
Edouard Manet (1833-83) was first exhibited. This exhibition had a
profound effect on the definition of modern art by making absolutely
clear and central its opposition to any forms of censorship and official
control. Yet any representative study of modern art gives ample proof
that its aims were not always rebellious or revolutionary. Indeed,
many of its greatest practitioners—one thinks immediately of the
Frenchmen Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), Odilon Redon (1840-1916),
Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940), or the Czech Alphonse Mucha (1860-
039) became social conservatives, and many of the most persuasive
theories of modern art rooted the achievement of those artists in the
greatest art of the past. Although there is a strong strand of social and,
consequently, aesthetic radicalism in modern art, it is not the sole
strand, and, for that reason, a book that begins with an official anti¬
official exhibition is methodologically hobbled by that decision.
There are troubling problems with 1851 as a starting-point, not the
least of which is the fact that many of the keynote characteristics of
modernism as defined in this book existed before 1851. Indeed, in ap¬
proaching the work of two great English painters who died before the
Crystal Palace exhibition, John Constable (1776-1837) and J. M. W.
Turner (1775-1851), it becomes clear that virtually anything that could
be said about the great unmediated French modernists, Courbet or
Cezanne or Claude Monet (1840-1926), could also be said about them.
And it is also true that virtually all the characteristics of what I will call
image/modernism existed in European art before modernism. It was

6 introduction: the great exhibition

in England with the Industrial Revolution that the physical, economic,
social, and technological conditions of modernism first flowered. For
that reason, unmediated modernism first flowered there, before being
interpreted visually in France and then translated into every artistic
language of the Euro-global world. Hence, our beginning.
But what of 1929? I had at first thought of 1926, the death of Claude
Monet, the longest-lived artist among the Impressionists. My rationale
was simple: that Monet had lived so far into the twentieth century that
he had witnessed the advent of scores of avant-garde movements,
many of which defined themselves in opposition to Impressionism.
The paradox of an Impressionist living through all the species of anti¬
impressionism appealed to me. Yet, in a book that recognizes the socio¬
political forces as paramount to modernity, the choice of the death of a
major artist as an ending point seems ill-advised. A better approach
seemed to be to tackle the entire issue of the official recognition of
modernism as the art of our time by the formation of public museums
devoted to modern art. The public opening of the Museum of Modern
Art in 1929 institutionalized modernism as the offical mode of repres¬
entation of the twentieth century. Its nature came increasingly to be
defined by museum and university academics. The fact that this
occurred only months before the collapse of the stock market and the
commencement of the largest depression in the history of capitalism is
fortuitous.
This book’s aim is to provide a critical introduction to the recent
debates and issues surrounding modern art.

THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN ART 7

Parti
Realism to
Surrealism
 Modern Art
Movements

The history of modern art has generally been written as a loosely

chronological sequence of movements, most of which were given their
current names as they developed. This history is thus objective because
it attempts to repeat the nomenclature and aesthetic language adopted
by the artists themselves or their close apologists. In the standard
histories, such as the exemplary Painting and Sculpture in Europe 1880-
1940 by George Heard Hamilton, the majority of these movements are
defined in the terms set by Parisian art, with nods to the development
of artistic groups elsewhere. These movements can be considered in
two groups as shown below.
The Italian literary historian Renato Poggioli has written persuas¬
ively (and accessibly) about the avant-garde in modern art and liter¬
ature.1 By his definition, avant-garde groups are small and have precise

Modern art movements

Firstly there were those that were per¬ exclusive membership: the Pre-
vasive, lasted for long periods, and had Raphaelite Brotherhood, Les XX,
loosely defined and shifting member¬ the Nabis, Suprematism, Futurism,
ships: Realism, Impressionism, Purism, the various Dadas, Vorticism,
Symbolism, Post-Impressionism, and Neo-Plasticism. To these must
Cubism, Expressionism, and Surreal¬ be added the numerous groups and
ism. This group tended to be defined societies of modern artists in central
and named by critics and art historians and eastern Europe which were fre¬
rather than by the artists themselves quently conceived on French, Austrian,
and to cut across national boundaries. or German models, often around
One finds Realism throughout Europe short-lived cultural journals. Certain
and the Americas, as one does of these, the Itinerants or Wanderers
Impressionism, Symbolism, Cubism, from Russia, for example, were of long
Expressionism, and Surrealism, and duration because they were devoted
these words have wide currency across to the principle of freely organized
linguistic boundaries. Yet most of the exhibitions rather than to a narrow or
definitions of these movements are self-selecting style or theory of repre¬
conceived in terms of a few canonical sentation. The tenets of these move¬
artists, making it difficult to use them ments or groups were defined by the
as broadly applicable, historically valid artists themselves, either in collective
descriptive categories. Secondly there terms or in those of a powerful leader,
were those that were small, of short giving them the character of small
duration, and with rigorous, often clubs or schools.
Detail of 20

11
3 Gustave Courbet and short-term objectives. Yet, before adopting this positivist and
The Studio of the Painter, militaristic reading of the avant-garde, it is important to remember
A Real Allegory Concerning
Seven Years of My Artistic Life, that certain modernist groups such as the working-class cafe societies
1854-5, oil on canvas in 1880s Paris, certain anarchist groups, and Dada, had an almost nihil¬
Perhaps thefirst self¬
istic, anti-authoritarian (anti-garde?) character, making it difficult to
consciously modern visual
manifesto, this painting
consider that they were in advance of anything. All the smaller groups,
appeared in the context of avant-garde and anti-garde, can be contrasted decidedly with the
an entire exhibition of works
movements whose theoretical positions imply a desire for long-term
by Courbet held outside the
official boundaries of the domination.
international exhibition of Despite attempts to write the history of modern art as an interplay
1855. Itisamongthetwoor
three best-studied works of
between the avant- or anti-garde groups and the movements that grew
nineteenth-century art, and its out of them, it has proved impossible to live without or replace the
visual argument for the cen¬
categories Realism, Cubism, or Expressionism, or the terms Nabis,
tra I ity of the painter to modern
discourse (Baudelaire is atthe Synthetism, or Orphism. Now, as we look back on modernism with a
very edge of the composition greater critical detachment, we have an opportunity to reassess the
centred on Courbet) is its most
utility of these terms and perhaps to consider abandoning them.2
remarkable quality.
Avant- or anti-garde groups or larger movements are so pervasive a
feature of modern scholarship that even their detractors use them,
often unconsciously, as easily understood categories. As these terms
are now common currency amongst students and the general public
this summary text will commence with a recounting of the history of
modern art defined by these -isms, against which I will build a case for
a simpler and more flexible binary system of aesthetic classification to
extend the conventional history.

12 REALISM TO SURREALISM
 Realism
The canonical artist of Realism is the great French painter, Gustave
Courbet, whose The Studio of the Painter, A Real Allegory Concerning
Seven Years of My Artistic Life has most often been considered the visual
manifesto of the movement [3], Exhibited with a large group of other
works by Courbet in a specially constructed building, Le Realisme,
outside the international exhibition of 1855, Courbet’s immense paint¬
ing combines the sombre tonalities of Rembrandt and Hals with the
sheer scale and epic confidence of Veronese. Its self-consciousness; its
acceptance of the urban condition of modern art; its relative roughness
and rapidity of execution; and its self-professed Realism, separate it
from any nineteenth-century painting made before it and set a stand¬
ard of ambition for most that succeed it. Yet, when we look at the actual
history of European and American Realist painting in the aesthetic
terms defined by Courbet’s art, the sheer diversity of the movement is
evident.'

4 Thomas Eakins
The Gross Clinic, 1875, oil on
canvas
This is the earliest master¬
piece of international Realism
in American art and it has
been justly published and
debated in recent literature.
This, like other major Eakins’s
paintings from the 1870s and
early 1880s, stems directly
from French practice,
following Eakins’s extensive
apprenticeship with the
French painter Jean-Leon
Gerome (1824-1904) and
his exposure to all the arts in
Paris duringthe late 1860s.

realism 13
 Realism represented a shift in the subject-matter of art from ancient
and medieval history, literature, and religion to what Courbet rightly
called ‘real allegories’: subjects ripe with pictorial, moral, religious, and
political significance. Realism can be defined as the first consciously
modern artistic movement which produced complex, compelling, and
mediated works of art [4]. There are two distinctly different interpreta¬
tions of Realism. The first, which I shall call Transparent Realism, re¬
tained the academic techniques of defining pictorial space and the
grouping of figures or forms, but instead of using traditional imagery
(from history, religion, or literature) their subject-matter came from
modern life. So, in paintings such as The Railway Station (1862) by the
English artist William Powell Frith (1819-1909), it was the overtly
modern subject that created a sense of modernity in their work [5].
With the alternative approach to Realism, Mediated (or self-conscious)
Realism, painters conveyed modernity and meaning in their work
through the unique use of paint. Courbet and his followers created
crusted and heavily-worked pictorial surfaces without a clear linear
substructure. Their surfaces often have the character of a stucco wall or
a rough fresco. In these works, and the most extreme are the palette-
knife paintings of Cezanne and Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) from the
late 1860s, the artist’s touch is rough and aggressive, and the power of
5 William Powell Frith
the artist over his subject-matter becomes the true subject of the work.
The Railway Station, 1862,
oil on canvas
Here the manipulation of the medium is at least as powerful as the
Frith’s painting is amongthe subject-matter depicted. This added value is important when we
earliest works of fine art to deal consider the relationship of the newly popularized medium of
explicitly with rail travel. It
glories in the glass and steel
photography to Realism.
architectural settingforthe Early photography too had two clearly contrasted techniques, one
vast machines, but does so
of which, the daguerreotype or its progeny, glass-plate photography,
in a style that is in noway
different than that used for produced (when perfectly executed) absolutely smooth and insistently
historical or genre paintings. linear representations (Transparent Realism, see 46), while the second,

14 REALISM TO SURREALISM
 the calotype or paper-negative process, produced rougher images
whose tonal masses defined their subjects in terms of value more than
outline (Mediated Realism, see 47).4

Impressionism
There is no doubt that Impressionism is the best-known and, paradox¬
ically, the least understood movement in the history of art.5 It can be
defined in two ways. The narrower (and more comfortingly precise) of
the two includes the artistic production of the men and women who
exhibited as part of the group of artists that first called itself the
Anonymous Society of Artists in 1874 and that, in various coalitions,
mounted eight group exhibitions in Paris between that year and 1886.6
The core members of this group were Monet [6], Pissarro, Pierre-
Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) [7], Alfred Sisley (1839-99), Edgar Degas
(1834-1917), Berthe Morisot (1841-95), and Gustave Caillebotte
(1848-94). Other artists, varying in fame and quality, from Viscomte
Ludovic-Napoleon Lepic (1839-90) and the Italian Giuseppe de Nittis
(1846-84) to Cezanne, Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), and Georges Seurat
(1859-91) were also included. While easy to accept as an historical
description, this definition has no aesthetic or stylistic character. The
movement itself was not clearly defined, aesthetically it embraced the
dexterous and finicky urban realism of de Nittis and the freely brushed
suburban Realism of Renoir.
The name itself is unsatisfactory and has always clung to the artists
like an unwanted relative. Coined by a critic in response to the title of a
painting by Monet (Impression: Sunrise, 1873), the name has come to

6 Claude Monet
The Luncheon: Monet's
Garden atArgentueil,
1873-6, oil on canvas
This large painting was
exhibited initially in the
Impressionist Exhibition of
1877, probably as an example
of a kind of private decorative
panel paintingforwhich
Monet hoped to obtain com¬
missions. This view ofthe
painter's own garden has roots
in eighteenth-century imagery
and excludes any hint ofthe
actual suburban setting of the
painter’s garden in Argentueil.

IMPRESSIONISM 15
7 Pierre-Auguste Renoir define Impressionism as an offshoot of Realism interested principally
Ball at the Moulin de la in the transcription of visual reality as it affects the retina of the painter
Galette, 1876, oil on canvas
within a discrete, and short, period of time. Hence, Monet’s paintings
The central masterpiece of
the Impressionist Exhibition are impressions that can, again, be closely linked to the contemporary
of 1877, this joy-filled
writing and thinking about photography. This idea is appealingly con¬
representation of daytime
leisure at a well-known
nected in French theory with the coincident literary movement called
Parisian beer garden received naturalism, which, through its principal spokesperson, Emile Zola,
extensive press notice. Its
defined itself as ‘a corner of creation viewed through the temperament
deftly brushed facture and
garden imagery suggest the of the artist’. The essential difference between Realism and Impres¬
eighteenth-century French sionism is that Impressionism recognized and, in a sense, fetishized
tradition of the fetegallante,
here rendered accessible
the subjectivity of the act of representational transcription. This
to workers and bourgeoisie. aesthetic decision was to revolutionize, and define, modern art.
Within the good cheer and
The latter idea is a much more compelling one to contemporary
genial sociability of Renoir's
image, a political message students of the movement, as it can be used to analyse the achieve¬
of universal access to leisure ments of diverse artists from Monet to the American artist George
can be located. Here, the
Bellows (1882-1925). Yet, in attempting to reconcile it with the more
working class has triumphed.
historically-motivated definition, the production of artists like
Cezanne, Degas [8], and Caillebotte, who did exhibit with the group,
can hardly be called Impressionist, and the elaborate late paintings
by Manet, who never exhibited with the Impressionists but worked
alongside them, do not conform to the tenets of subjectivity and tem¬
poral compression that are essential to its unity.

16 REALISM TO SURREALISM
8 Edgar Degas
The Race Track: Amateur
Jockeys near a Carriage,
1876-87, oil on canvas
As this racecourse scene
demonstrates clearly, Degas
was obsessed not only with
modern life, but with highly
complex compositional
strategies. His exaggerated
emphasis on the edges of the
pictorial format can be linked
to his fascination with the
pictorial representation of time
and motion. His pictorial world
was, like that of the other
Impressionists, associated
with leisure activity, and
hence with the sort of free
time brought by industrial
modernism.

As with Realism, Impressionism had two major divisions within its

ranks, and these can be related directly to the two types of Realism
already established. The first of these, Transparent Impressionism,
includes painters of mostly landscape or urban views, of whom Monet
is the canonical figure, who paint what appear to be impressions of
visual reality. An example of this might be Monet’s early masterpiece
On the Bank of the Seine at Bennecourt (1868) or, in figure painting,
Renoir’s The Promenade (1870) (see 87, 116). In this mode of painting,
the subject of the painting is the entire visual field in front of the
painter rather than clearly separate forms in illusionistic space. It must
be emphasized, however, that Transparent Impressionism differs
markedly from Transparent Realism in its insistence on the essential
subjectivity of art. The viewer of any landscape or figure painting by
Monet or Renoir is always aware of the artist as a character in the
drama of representation. For the Transparent Impressionist, trans¬
parency lies in the temporal compression of representation and in their
acceptance of the field of vision rather than a collection of three-
dimensional forms in space as the subject of the painter. The eye is
fetishized rather than the reality described.
The second type of Impressionism, Mediated Impressionism, is
confined mainly to figure painters who, following the lead of either
Degas or Renoir, constructed visual realms that stress the contingent
and elliptical aspects of realist subject matter in stylistic terms that are
mannered and self-consciously elaborate. Perhaps the best example of
this is Degas’s masterpiece of urban portraiture, Place de la Concorde
(1874-7) [9], but many works by Renoir, Caillebotte, Morisot, and the
American artist Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) (see 49) within the narrow
movement and countless European and American painters outside it,

IMPRESSIONISM 17
9 Edgar Degas
Place de la Concorde,
1874-7, oil on canvas
This famous painting, long
thought to have been lost in
the Second World War, has
recently emerged in Russia.
It represents a minor aristo¬
crat, the Viscount Lepic, with
his two daughters and pedi¬
gree dog, in a plaza built by
Louis XV, renamed after the
revolution of 1789, and
rebuiltduringthe Second
Empire. Thus, issues of class
and urban ownership are
subtly addressed by Degas,
whose family name had also
become falsely aristocratic
and spelled as de Gas before
the painter reclaimed it for
the bourgeoisie.

share its traits. For the Mediated Impressionist, visual reality is con¬
ceived not as a vibrant coloured field, but as a social world in which the
figure and its various ‘grounds’ must be analysed to be understood. Any
student ol the group’s exhibitions and its internal dissensions knows
that the Impressionists routinely divided into two groups, one around
Monet/Renoir and the other around Degas. For the first, drawing and
composition were less important than colour and surface unity. For the
second, the painter was predominantly a creator of elaborate com¬
positions with many elements, all ol which related both to each other
and to the edges and proportions of the pictorial format itself. The
contrasting aesthetic aims of these two groups led, in the end, to the
collapse of the group.
I must make several general points about Impressionism before
moving on to the various movements and schools that defined them¬
selves in opposition to it. The first is that Impressionist artists were
consciously independent of the state and its controls over artistic taste
and patronage, aligning themselves instead to private dealers and
collectors. In this sense, they were modern in their manner of display
and in the marketing of their art directly to clients on their own terms.
Secondly, the European and American reach of the movement was
immense, as large in many ways as that of the Realists who provided
many of the models to the Impressionists. Virtually every ambitious
artist in the Euro-global world knew of the movement by the mid-
1880s, and its effect on the practice of representation was virtually
global by 1900. Even today, the vast majority of popular or amateur
artists work in ways that have their roots in the practice of the
French Impressionists. Yet this reach has rarely been fully described or
understood by scholars, most of whom resist any serious study of the

18 REALISM TO SURREALISM
 assimilation of art practice within the population at large, preferring
to concentrate their attentions on the continuously self-selecting
avant-garde.
As a term, Impressionism is all but useless and should be gradually
dropped from the lexicon of the art and cultural historian. It has proven
an even more cumbersome term in the histories of music and literature,
most probably because a caricatural definition adapted from art history
has been used to describe phenomena in poetry, prose, and music that
bear only a coincidental resemblance to Impressionism in visual
representation.

Symbolism
The dialectical structure of modern art—indeed of modern civiliza¬
tion—requires a counterbalance to the art of Realism and its offshoot,
Impressionism. Since complexity is as much a characteristic oi modern¬
10 Oscar Gustave Rejlander ity as is simplicity, that counterbalance has several aspects. Of these,
The Two Ways of Life, 1857, the most pervasive and, superficially, the least apparently modern, is
printfrom 32 wet collodion
the movement called Symbolism. Like Realism and Impressionism/
negatives
Rejlander’s (1813-75) use
Naturalism, Symbolism was at once a literary and an artistic move¬
of composite negatives to ment, in which a theory of representation united artists of diverse
produce compositions with
media, sociopolitical origins, and education. An exploration of the
their roots in the history of
painting received widespread imagination as opposed to visual reality drove Symbolism [10]. For
publicity during his lifetime. Symbolists the visual was less compelling than the visionary, and their
Yet most later Symbolist
inspiration for image-making came from the powerful content of
photographers chose to create
costumed and posed tableaux words, including poetic and dramatic texts, folk tales, mythology, and
vivants as the subjects of their arcane forms of literature. Yet, in keeping with much literary theory,
photographs ratherthan to
create virtual collages of sep¬
the relationship between image and text in Symbolist art is often fas¬
arate negatives like Rejlander. cinatingly indirect, making it difficult to find in the text the meaning of

SYMBOLISM 19
 11 Edward Coley Burne-
Jones
The Wheel of Fortune, 1870,
oil on canvas
The Pre-Raphaelite move¬
ment’s greatest painter was
Burne-Jones (1833-98), an
artist of deep visual culture
and an obsessive pictorial
practice linked to that culture.
Only recently has his work and
that of his English colleagues
come to be recognized as part
of the Symbolist movement
in his native England. This
painting, together with others
by Burne-Jones in Germany
and the United States, shows
the extentto which the Pre-
Raphaelites had become
international.

the image. Symbolism assumes the advanced education of its makers

and viewers and was made for a self-selecting elite defined largely by
education and access to its paraphernalia: books, prints, works of art,
and other forms of cultural production.
Of all the major movements of the second half of the nineteenth
century in modern art, Symbolism was the most pervasively European
and least focused on France.7 It was also closely tied to regionalist and
nationalist cultural and political movements, in which artists attempted
through powerful images to create links between modern people and
their ancient, medieval, and, to a lesser extent, Renaissance pasts
Symbolism was prevalent in Europe and America, with the
Christian Church, however defined in various countries, being its
most powerful patron [11], This patronage and the effect of this art on
audiences of believers have not been fully studied, and specifically

20 REALISM TO SURREALISM
12 Jacek Malczewski religious art is the least studied arena in modern art production, mostly
Melancholia, 1894,
because the Church has been viewed by secular scholars as a traditional
oil on canvas
Malczewski has consistently
institution that failed to evolve in a secular or modern world. The
received international atten¬ fascination of Symbolist artists with religious cults of many sorts and
tion as the master of Polish
with spiritualism in general was so pervasive and such a major com¬
Symbolism. This, an early
work, shows evidence of his ponent of various modern movements or groups that the sacred must
fascination both with the be placed at the centre, rather than the periphery, of any study of
representation of emotional
modern representation.
states and with the complex
history of allegorical painting Symbolism was characterized by the same sort of binary structure as
in European art. The painting’s Realism and Impressionism. Certain Symbolists adopted the highly
most obvious art-historical
impersonal or academic style of Transparent Realists and of certain
precedents can be found in
the immense religious can¬ Mediated Impressionists: a linear style in which compositions are con¬
vases of late Renaissance structed as if in illusory space and imagery is valued more than style.
and Baroque painting.
Artists of this type include Fernand Khnopff (Belgian, 1858-1921),
Alphonse Mucha (Czech, 1860-1939), Janos Vaszary (Hungarian,
1867-1939), and others [12, 13], The second type, practised by artists
like Gauguin, Redon, Jan Toorop (Dutch, 1858—1928), Ferdinand
Hodler (Swiss, 1853-1918), and Edvard Munch (Norwegian, 1863—
1944), adopts the modernist attitude towards both surface and com¬
position, in which the artist’s presence is always felt by the viewer of the
work of art.

Post-Impressionism
Roger Fry coined the term Post-Impressionism in 1906, in an exhibi¬
tion catalogue, as a consciously bland description of a wide variety
of works of art from the last two decades of the nineteenth century.8
The artists had mostly exhibited with Impressionists and were

POST-IMPRESSIONISM 21
13 Jozef Mehoffer
Strange Garden (Dziwny
Ogrod), 1903, oil on canvas
Mehoffer (1869-1946)
created the canonical image
of Polish Symbolist painting in
this work representing his wife
and child with a servant. The
painting reads little different
than does Rejlander's multi¬
negative Symbolist photo¬
graph —as a collage-like
juxtaposition of seemingly
unrelated images. As such,
itanticipates photographic
montage.

predominantly French: Gauguin, Cezanne [14], Seurat, and the

Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh (1853-90) [15]. In each case, the works
of art were read by Fry in terms set out by the artists themselves as a
form of self-conscious departure from the narrowly optical art of
Impressionism. Interestingly, two of these artists, Redon [16] and
Gauguin, are routinely classified as Symbolists due to their reliance on
literary texts. Yet, generally, Post-Impressionists are treated as heirs to
Impressionism, even as they depart from its tenets, and are contrasted
to Symbolist artists, who are generally viewed as non-modern or heirs
to the academy. Impressionism’s early embrace of the Post-
Impressiomsts has put them into a kind of genealogy of avant-garde
modernism that has been scathingly criticized by feminist historians of
art, most fervently by Griselda Pollock.9
The styllstlc characteristics of Post-Impressionism are strong: a
belief in colour as an emotional/aesthetic carrier of meaning, almost
independent of form and composition; an acceptance of the artificiality
of the picture; and a commitment to the portable easel picture, usually
known simply as painting, as the highest mode of artistic achievement,
n tact, hry s Post-Impressionism is an historical synthesis of several
discrete artist-defined movements or schools described below. His

22 REALISM TO SURREALISM
 14 Paul Cezanne
The Mill on the Couleuvre at
Pontoise, 1881, oil on canvas
By the early 1880s the rifts
within the Impressionist circle
were becoming evident, and
a general abandonment of the
Impressionist fascination with
the ephemeral was widely
recognized bythe late 1880s.
Around 1900 German and
British art historians
recognized that Cezanne’s
achievement ofa pictorial
timelessness, as in this
painting, differed markedly
from Impressionism. Here,
Cezanne represents an old
watermill near Pissarro’s
home in Pontoise in such
a way as to remove from the
image any signs of industrial
or modern time.

15 Vincent van Gogh

The Night Cafe, 1888, oil
on canvas
The expressive and emo¬
tionally charged atmosphere
of van Gogh's paintings are
exemplified in this canvas,
about which the painter
himself wrote that he was
expressing ‘the terrible pas¬
sions of humanity’. His use of
contrasting colour was rooted
notin optical theory, like that
of his colleague and friend
Seurat, but in older European
ideas of the symbolic and
associative meanings of
colour.

Post-Impressionist artists, particularly the Frenchmen Seurat, Cezanne,

and Gauguin, were widely exhibited throughout Europe and the
Americas in the years between 1890 and 1929 and came to be the
canonical formative figures of modern art for the earliest major theor¬
ists and writers like Julius Meier-Graefe, Roger Fry, Sheldon Cheney,
and Alfred Barr. For these critics, Post-Impressionism was the true
beginning of modern art.

POST-IMPRESSIONISM 23
16 Odilon Redon Neo-Impressionism
Decorative Panel, c. 1902, Two strands of Impressionist practice, light theory and artificial picto¬
tempera and oil on canvas
rial construction, were coupled to produce the first successfully inde¬
Redon's most characteristic
images are his famous ‘Noirs’, pendent art movement after Impressionism, called Neo-Impressionism
or ‘Blacks', several of which
or Scientific Impressionism by its practitioners. The master of the
were included in the final
Impressionist exhibition of movement, Georges Seurat, painted a small number of self-conscious
1886. He also achieved an masterpieces before his early death at the age of 32 in 1891. These
extraordinary form of colour
developed from a seemingly rigorous theory of light and human
harmony in his almost abstract
late decorations, such as perception of it, the origins of which can be found in the natural
this one commissioned by a sciences and which were applied imperfectly to visual representation.10
Dutch patron of Redon. The
aesthetic of the decorative,
Yet Seurat’s works were so original and so commanding that they
with its associations with themselves created a school of artists led by the Impressionist Camille
interior decoration and subtle
Pissarro, and by Seurat’s most theoretically sophisticated friend, Paul
colour harmonies, was
among the earliest modes
Signac.
of painting in which theories The crowning achievement of the movement is always identified as
of abstraction were explored.
Seurat’s A Summer Sunday on the Island of the Grande Jatte 1884 (1884-
6), exhibited at what was to be the final Impressionist exhibition of
1886 (see 96). The surface of this picture, constructed with discrete
touches of paint over which a layer of painted dots has been applied,
almost exhausts the viewer with its sheer mechanical orderliness.
Although based on a prolonged period of study on the suburban island

24 REALISM TO SURREALISM
 of the title, the work was constructed in a small Parisian studio from
many oil studies and drawings. Its clear association with the dynastic
art of ancient Egypt collides intentionally with the contemporaneity
and transitoriness ol its Realist subject, and both its large scale and its
sheer visual pretension made it difficult for other artists to work easily
in its wake. Seurat himself fretted with its successor pictures, each of
which was conceived as a carefully calculated move in an aesthetic
chess game that ended with his death.
Few could play it as well as Seurat, and Neo-Impressionism has
often been portrayed as a short-lived movement by historians of mod¬
ern art, more important for its theory, as propagated by Signac, than its
painting. The falsity of this is clear when we examine the later paint¬
ings of its two other great French practitioners, Paul Signac (1863-1935)

17 Paul Signac
Two Milliners (Les Modistes),
1885-6, oil on canvas
Although it is considerably
less famous than Seurat’s
Grande Jatte which it hung
nexttointhefinal Impression¬
ist Exhibition of 1886,
Signac’s painting is in some
ways a more successful
embodiment of both the
social and pictorial ideas
developed in the mid 1880s
by the Neo-Impressionists.

"“.■w

NEO-IMPRESSIONISM 25
and Henri-Edmond Cross (1856-1910), both of whom had a clear
influence on European colour painting of the first two decades of the
twentieth century [17]. In fact, it is possible to chart a direct lineage
from Impressionism (particularly the work of Monet and Pissarro) to
Neo-Impressionism to the Fauves. In addition to this French strand,
there were artists throughout Europe who were moved by Seurat’s
form of hieratic divisionism, the most important of whom were the
Italian-Swiss painter Giovanni Segantini (1858—99) and the Italian
Divisionists Angelo Morbelli (1853-1919) and Guiseppe Pellizza del
Volpeda (1868-1907). The movement had less impact in eastern and
northern Europe and comparatively little in the English-speaking
world.

Synthetism
Very few movements in the history of art were as grandly conceived, as
short-lived, poorly organized, and, paradoxically, as internationally
influential as Synthetism. Promoted chiefly by Gauguin, whose theor¬
ies of art developed from the Impressionism of his teacher Pissarro, the
movement was defined by a series of texts written by him and others.
The centre for this movement was Brittany, in France, principally the
town of Pont-Aven (they are often called the School of Pont-Aven),
and the village of Le Pouldu, where Gauguin and his followers worked
in the second half of the 1880s.11 They exhibited only once, in a cafe
inside the grounds of the International Exhibition of 1889.
The tenets of Synthetism are that pictorial art is the result of an
aesthetic synthesis among several elements, these being the natural
stimulus that prompts the work of art, the training and sensibility of
the artist, and the medium at their disposal. Clearly, all this stems
directly from Impressionist theory, but Gauguin’s practice stressed the
artificiality of picture-making and allowed greater freedoms tor the
artist to alter and exaggerate the formal aspects of representation, line,
colour, and value. To achieve an aesthetic synthesis between artist and
subject, the Synthetist artist must dominate rather than be submissive
to nature. The critical painting of this movement is probably Gauguin’s
Vision after the Sermon (1888), a work that has been considered to be a
revolutionary picture since it was rejected as an altarpiece by the small
church in Pont-Aven [18]. Its equal engagement with ‘vision’ and the
‘visionary’ separate it from most Impressionist or Realist painting (al¬
though it is tempting to interpret it as an ironical translation of the
Salon success oii%yc),Jean d’Arc ecoutant son vision by the French artist
Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-84)), and its reliance on fields of vibrant
colour bounded by artificially exaggerated contours startled young
artists, who immediately took it as a model for new works of art.
Oddly, Synthetism, as defined as an avant-garde subset of Symbol¬
ism, is among the most pervasive art theories of the late nineteenth

26 REALISM TO SURREALISM
18 Paul Gauguin
Vision after the Sermon:
Jacob Wrestling with the
Angel, 1888, oil on canvas
Gauguin’s split with
Impressionism became
absolute in 1888, when
he painted this religious
painting for the church in
the picturesque painter’s
town in Brittany, Pont-Aven.
The church rejected the
painting, but it was most
probably included in the
exhibition of'Symbolistand
Synthetist’ artists curated by
Gauguin fora cafe within the
grounds of the International
Exhibition of 1889.

century. This is due completely to the persuasive powers of its prime

exponent, Gauguin, and to the fact that the students in Pont-Aven in¬
cluded artists from Switzerland (Cuno Amiet, 1868-1961), Ireland
(Roderic O’Connor, 1860-1940), England (Robert Bevan, 1865-1925),
Belgium (Meyer de Haan, d. 1894), Hungary (Jozsef Rippl-Ronai,
1861-1927), Spain (Paco Durrio, 1868-1940), and Poland (Wladyslaw
Slewinski, 1856-1918), in addition to the better-known French mem¬
bers (Emile Bernard (1868-1941), Paul Serusier (1863-1927), and Paul
Ranson (1864-1909)). For this reason, Gauguin’s idea of Synthetist
painting took root in avant-garde circles throughout Europe. The
movement is often called Cloissonism, after the pervasive use of black
outlines and relatively undifferentiated colour. However, the use of this
term is on the same simplistic level of criticism as it is to call Neo-
Impressionism Pointillism.

The Nabis
Shortly before the exhibition of Synthetist Artists held in 1889, a small
group of young Parisian painters banded together to form a quasi¬
monastic society and called themselves the Nabis (the Hebrew word
for prophet). In a manner familiar to students of the various brother¬
hoods of Romantic and modern painting (the Nazarenes or the Pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood are the best-known examples), this was a
group of very young men, most of whom had known each other at
school, and all of whom needed the others in order to achieve a sense of
identity as a modern artist.12 The Nabis membership included the
Frenchmen Vuillard, Maurice Denis (1870-1943), Pierre Bonnard

THE NABIS 27
19 Edouard Vuillard
Misia and Vallotton in the
Dining Room, 1899, oil on
cardboard
This tiny painting represents
two of the painter’s friends
amongan international
bohemian circle in late
nineteenth-century Paris.
Misia Natanson was Polish
and herfriend Felix Vallotton
was Swiss, and both were
represented as belonging
utterly to a cluttered interior
represented by a French man.

(1867 1947), Kei Xavier Roussel (1877-1944), and others and soon ex¬
panded to include the Swiss-born artist Felix Vallotton (1865-1925) and
the French sculptor Aristide Maillol (1861-1944). Two other major
artists were closely associated with the Nabis, Redon, who had exhib¬
ited with the Impressionists, and the young French nobleman Henri
de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901). The aesthetic theory of these artists
was not in anyway different to that of Gauguin’s Synthetist group, but
the Parisian character of the movement, together with Denis’s eventual
embrace of Catholicism, gave it a distinct character, at once progressive
and traditional.

Far from being major inventors or, in their own terms, prophets, the
Nabis were artists who refined Gauguin’s Synthetist practice and ap¬
plied it to urban subject-matter retaining its roots in the art of Degas
I hey were chiefly important in the larger history of art for their close

28 REALISM TO SURREALISM
associations with the Nathanson family, a younger member of which
founded the important journal, La Revue blanche. These young artists
embraced an international Jewish clientele and were thus able to
spread certain of the most advanced aesthetic doctrines of Impression¬
ism and Synthetism throughout Europe. Their close association lasted
little more than a decade, during which time they exhibited as part of
other groups. They used their collective influence to further various
short-lived projects, both artistic and literary.
There is no canonical work associated with the Nabis, but surely the
greatest individual achievement associated with the movement is that
of Vuillard [19], Had Vuillard died in 1900 after just a decade of work,
rather than in 1938, he would have a greater reputation today than he
currently enjoys. Like the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
(1796-1875) earlier in the century, his most persuasive and internation¬
ally admired work was his earliest. Perhaps the best example of this is
the Large Interior with Six Figures (1897). Here a domestic interior of
extraordinary subtlety and complexity is arranged on a large horizontal
canvas, almost as if from puzzle pieces or as elements of a highly com¬
plex tapestry (see 120). There is nothing prophetic about this work;
rather, it acts as a brilliant summary of a generation of modern art and
its pictorial theories.

The Fauves
The French critic Louis Vauxcelles coined the expression, the Fauves
or ‘wild ones’, to describe the brilliantly, or savagely, coloured land¬
scapes, portraits, and genre scenes by a group of French painters centred
around Henri Matisse (1869-1954) in 1905 and 1906.13 This group in¬
cluded Andre Derain (1880-1954) and Raoul Dufy (1877-1953), and has
its roots in the late painting of the Neo-Impressionists, most notably
Cross and Signac. In many ways, the Fauves were a logical development
of the painting of two Post-Impressionists, Gauguin and van Gogh,
each of whom liberated colour from the restrictive and consciously
scientific role that it played in the art of the Neo-Impressionists. Yet,
like most observations, this is not strictly the case; after the death of
Seurat, Signac and Cross worked in ways that departed dramatically
from the purely optical theories exemplified by Seurat. Their colour
dots became patches and dabs of larger and larger scale, and their use
of colour theory began to stress the independent nature of pictorial
construction over the workings of the human eye. Hence, they made
room in their art for an idea of the picture as a pictorial surface that
communicated certain emotions through the interaction of colour
independent either of nature or of our visual perception of it.
Although Matisse was to become the dominating artist of Fauvism,
the work of another Frenchman, Maurice de Vlaminck (1876—
1958) and Derain in 1904-7 was equally powerful and impressive. An

THE FAUVES 29
20 Maurice de Vlaminck example of the pictorial force ol these comparatively minor artists is
Bougival, c.1905, oil on surely Vlaminck’s Bougival (r.1905) [20], Here a strictly Impressionist
canvas
subject, a site associated with Monet and Renoir in the early years of
This large, rhythmically com¬
posed landscape represents the movement, is injected with a pictorial energy that owes much more
precisely the same small town to the painting of van Gogh, featured in a retrospective in Paris in 1904,
near Paris where Monet and
Renoir painted in the summer
than it does to the colour constructions of the Impressionists. Yet the
of 1869. Here, Vlaminck was full impact of the French movement on the aesthetic autonomy of
inspired by the colour of
colour does not come until 1907—8, and one must wait until 1910-n to
Gauguin and the emotionally
charged brushwork of van find a completely mature and confident mastery over colour. In
Gogh to create a super¬ Matisse’s The Red Studio (1911), all thoughts of Gauguin and van Gogh
charged aesthetic at odds
vanish [21],
with the bucolic imagery he
chose to represent. Fauve painting had immense global impact, particularly through
exhibitions, in the years before the First World War. For that reason, it
is possible to identify works that stem directly from this Parisian avant-
garde in many different countries from Australia to Czechoslovakia.14

Expressionism
Although French art completely dominated both the invention and
the propagation of artistic movements and avant-garde groups,

30 REALISM TO SURREALISM
21 Henri Matisse
The Red Studio, Issy-les-
Moulineaux, 1911, oil on
canvas
The chromatic liberation of
Fauvism attained its highest
level in the painting of Henri
Matisse, whose workaround
1910 was intended to contrast
in every way to the non-
chromatic and analytical
painting of his friends Picasso
and Braque. Here, the colour
red so suffuses the com¬
position that it becomes,
in essence, the subject of
the painting.

German artists played an important role in the propagation of that his¬

tory. It took the publication of Julius Meier-Graefe’s Modern Art in
1904 to goad German artists into the action that produced the first au¬
thentic avant-garde in that country, known today as Expressionism
(and too often as German Expressionism). Because Germany lacked a
traditional capital city that could serve to centre, organize, and distrib¬
ute its cultural energies, its history of modern art has tended more
often to be regional and decentralized. It was not until German
painters, following the lead of the French, organized themselves around
the expressive painting of the elderly Realist, Max Liebermann (1847-
1935), and the richly painterly canvases of Lovis Corinth (1858-1925)
that they were able to produce an art whose emotional power and raw
pictorial surfaces make contemporary French work seem precise and
cool.
The art produced by two crucial avant-garde groups dominates the
German Expressionist avant-garde: Die Briicke, founded in 1905 in
Dresden and dominated by the painting of one of its founders, Ernst
Kirchner (1880-1938) [22]; and Der Blaue Reiter, founded in 1911 in
Munich as an exhibition society that provided a forum for the work of
three great painters, two Germans, Franz Marc (1880-1916) and
Gabriele Miinter (1877-1962), and one Russian, Wassily Kandinsky
(1866-1944), who had lived in Munich since 1896. All these artists pro¬
duced work that, like that of their French counterparts, the Fauves, was
dominated by high-intensity colour and stemmed from the work of
van Gogh and Gauguin. For the Expressionists, the emotional strength

EXPRESSIONISM 31
 22 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Nude Woman Combing her
Hair, 1913, oil on canvas
The brothel imagery of
Kirchner derived from a long
tradition in vanguard painting
stemming from Manet, Degas,
and Toulouse-Lautrec. In the
German work, the subject-
matter was given renewed
power through the use of
expressive formal devices that
intensify the picture’s tortuous
emotional atmosphere. How
different this is from the
timeless nudes of Cezanne
and Renoir.

of thetr subjects was as important as the colour. Though, like their

French colleagues, several of them rooted their imagery in Realist urban
culture, their works deal forthrightly with social class, commodified
sexuality, the world of animals (both in captivity and in the wild), and
nally, m the art of Kandinsky and others, with mythology and folk
tales. In many ways, the Expressionists fused Realism and Symbolism
with the conscious chromatic excesses of the Fauves. Largely because
of the persistence of anti-German ideology throughout the twentieth
century in France, Britain, and the United States, the art of the German
Expressionists is underplayed in the museums, survey texts, and uni¬
versity courses of those defining countries. However, the European
reach of Expressionist art was extraordinary, particularly in Russia and
central Europe, where the German language and Germanic or Austro-
Hungarian culture vied with that of France for cultural dominance.1*

Cubism
The firs' amstic movement to rival Impressionism in its global reach
and broad international significance was Cubism. Like Fauvism the
movement was named by Vauxcelles when in 1908 he referred to
Braque s contemporary paintings as ‘bizarreries cliques’. Cubism as a
movement has been recognized since shortly after its development as
the most original invention of twentieth-century pictorial art. Although

32 REALISM TO SURREALISM
rooted in the tightly organized paintings of Cezanne, which were seen
by young artists in the immense retrospective in Paris held in 1907, the
Cubist breakdown of the object and its relative disdain for expressive
colour have always been interpreted as a radically inventive strategy in
Western art and compared with such powerful artistic phenomena as
the development of one-point perspective in the Renaissance. Indeed,
the inventions of the Cubists have been powerfully exaggerated by
their apologists, many of whom wanted to see a complete rebirth in the
art of painting in the early twentieth century and to endow art with
mythic powers in an attempt to redefine the relationship between
seeing and representing.
The careers of the canonical Cubist practitioners, the Spaniard
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and the Frenchman Georges Braque (1882-
1963), were so intertwined in the years 1907-14 that many amateur
art lovers cannot easily tell their paintings apart.16 In the definitive
exhibition of their work at the Museum of Modern Art in 1989, the
competitive edge went to Picasso, whose work was extolled most
passionately in the intense and learned pronouncements of Leo
Steinberg. Yet, like many avant-garde practitioners, neither Picasso
nor Braque were persuasive theorists of art. For that, one must turn to a
group of minor artists, often referred to as the Puteaux Cubists after
the Parisian suburb in which they worked. Led by the Frenchmen
Albert Gleizes (1881-1953) and Jean Metzinger (1885-1941) they defined
in clear language the aesthetic tenets of Cubism. The fact that many
of their ideas relate imperfectly to the practice of Braque and Picasso
is not surprising, given the fact that, in this case, the theory post¬
dated the practice of the inventors and was not rooted in a close study
of their works.
Cubism has a small canon that has been defined by critics and his¬
torians to include the work of the Spaniard Juan Gris (1887-1927) and
the Frenchmen Fernand Leger (1881-1955) and Robert Delaunay (1885—
1941) as major followers of Picasso and Braque and then fans out to
include relatively minor French artists such as Henri le Fauconnier
(1881-1946), Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), Roger de la Fresnaye (1885—
1925), and others. Indeed, few major artists of the early twentieth
century were untouched by Cubism, and even those who wrestled with
it and rejected it such as Piet Mondrian (Dutch, 1872-1944), Gino
Severini (Italian, 1883-1966), or Kasimir Malevich (Russian, 1878—
1935), could not have developed as they did without dealing powerfully
with Cubist practice and theory. Cubism was also a good deal more
international in its scope than is often recognized in the predominantly
French-oriented bibliography and exhibition history. The art of the
Russian and early Soviet avant-garde is inconceivable without it, and
there were major Cubist practitioners by 1909-10 in New York, Milan,
Prague, Bucharest, and Moscow, to name only major centres.

CUBISM 33
 Cubist practice is divided into two major phases, called Analytic
and Synthetic respectively. Unlike the simultaneous and intertwined
development of the double strands of Realism, Impressionism, and
Symbolism, those in Cubist practice were successive. The Analytic
phase, here exemplified by Picasso’s great Portrait of Ambroise Vollard
(1909-10) [23], tended to be monochromatic and obsessed with the
creation of a shifting geometric pictorial image that fills the centre of
the composition and radiates out toward the edges of the pictorial
format [24], In theory, the artist arrives at the geometric structure by
studying the subject over time and analysing its pictorial character. The
pictorial vocabulary of short black lines and patches of paint applied in
sequences of clustered strokes is so simple that the challenge is to wrest
from the subject (a figure, a still-life, or an architectural landscape are
the most common) the basic characteristics of contour and value.
These, when assembled on the surface of the canvas, create an image
that embodies what theorists hoped to be the ‘essential’ qualities of the
pictured subject.
The second phase of Cubist practice, the so-called Synthetic phase
[24], applies to Cubist practice the same aesthetic shift that took
Impressionism from optical description to Synthetism. Yet, for the
Cubists, the Synthetic phase is rooted in a particular pictorial practice,
collage, in which the image is constructed not only with painted (or
drawn) lines and patches, but also with pasted elements from popular
23 Pablo Picasso
Portrait of Ambroise Vollard,
1909-10, oil on canvas
The great art dealer had been
painted by both Cezanne and
Renoir when hesatforthis,
the most famous of his many
portraits. His immense bald
head looms from a veritable
network of lines and painted
marks that give energy and
dynamism to a type of painting
that is traditionally associated
with stability. The Cubism of
Picasso and Braque was
achieved through intense
collaborative practice and
lacked the theoretical dimen¬
sion of the Cubists Albert
Gleizes (1881-1953) and
Jean Metzingerf 1883-1956)
who first wrote a bout the
movement in Du Cubisme,
published in August 1912.

34 REALISM TO SURREALISM
24 Pablo Picasso
The Bird Cage, 1923,
oil on canvas

visual culture: wall-paper, sheet music, posters, newspapers, theatre

tickets, and other flat urban refuse. The idea that the image is a syn¬
thesis of pictorial elements, some of which are hand-made and
others of which are borrowed, makes it clear that the representation is
not only artificial, but also essentially flat. The practice also relates the
artist to the urban image maker who works for commercial purposes
and to the world of the urban worker, forging powerful aesthetic and
political links between the Cubists and the art of the early Realists.

Futurism
Modern art in Italy is all too often downplayed in histories of modern
art, particularly the brilliant developments of the Macchiaiolli in the
1850s and 1860s and the real fluorescence of painting around the 1890s
with the Divisionist painters of Milan, Pelizza, Morbelli, and Giovanni
Segantini (1858-99). Yet the first powerful interaction between Italian
and French vanguard artists took place in the second decade of the
twentieth century and involved a group of artists who called them¬
selves Futurists. Led by the Italians Severini, Umberto Boccioni (1882-
1916), Giacomo Balia (1871-1958), Carlo Carra (1881-1966), and Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944), the group moved easily between
northern Italy and Paris, learning fully from the developments of the
Cubists.17 Yet, unlike the principal Cubists, the Futurists were ob¬
sessed primarily with words, and issued various manifestos, essays, and

FUTURISM 35
25 Umberto Boccioni even books about their aesthetic theories. Like the Impressionists
The City Rises, 1910, oil before them, the Futurists celebrated motion and the simultaneity of
on canvas
unrelated events [25]. They took the Impressionist preoccupation with
Here, Boccioni is primarily
concerned with the repres¬ the machine, the railroad, and the industrial transformation of the
entation of movement and urban/suburban environment, and combined it with the pictorial
flux. Rhythmically repeated
lines derived from the motion
inventions of the Cubists to invent a synthetic urban art that is highly
photography of Marey and rhythmic and infused with the energy of rapidly moving time. While
Muybridge are combined with
time in Cubist art is generally the time of an observer’s study of a static
brilliant coloursandan urban
subject to create an image of subject, Futurist time is dependent less upon an observer than on a
time that is both progressive sense of collective experience. The Cubists were visually unprepared
and utterly modern. Boccioni
chose to represent urban
for the First World War. For the Futurists, it was not only inevitable,
construction of a completely but representable.
pre-modern sort, using horses
and manual labour ratherthan
machines and machine-made
Orphism
forms. Orphism was, more or less, a one-person movement, which, with
the marriage of its instigator, Robert Delaunay, to Sonia Terk,
became a partnership. The name itself was coined by Guillaume
Apollinaire to describe the work of a group of artists who liberated
colour from any representational function.18 Delaunay’s colour paint¬
ing [261 developed together with a theory of painting that he himself
articulated, and both his theory and practice had a profound effect
on painting beyond France. In the United States, American painters
Stanton McDonald-Wright (1890-1973) and Morgan Russell (1886—
*953) developed Delaunay’s art to produce a body of work that is

36 REALISM TO SURREALISM
26 Robert Delaunay
Circular Forms: Sun, Moon,
Simultanel, 1912-13, oil on
canvas
Delaunay was the great
pictorial exponent of the
theory of simultaneous colour
contrast in French art after
Seurat. Yet, ratherthan apply
that theory to a fundamentally
representational art, Delaunay
created a brand of abstraction
in which colour itself carries
the meaning of the picture.
In this work, he makes strong
associations with a planetary
realm morefamiliarto
students of science than
to those of fine art.

27 Frantisek Kupka
Vertical Planes III, 1912-13,
oil on canvas
Kupka was the first eastern
European artist to have a
profound effect on the
development of French
painting. He lived mostly in
Paris before the First World
War and worked intensively
with Delaunay. However,
his particular brand of colour
modernism was distinctive
in eschewing both primary
colours and the theory of
simultaneous contrast
fetishized by his French
colleague.

orphism 37
 immensely sophisticated and internationally significant. Yet it was in
Paris and Prague that the Czech Frantisek Kupka (1871-1957) created
work that pushed Delaunay’s even further. Like most French artists of
the modern tradition, Delaunay was hobbled by that tradition, and he
seems to have been forced by history to base his colour painting on the
earlier theories of Chevreul and Rood, most of which had already been
applied to painting by the Neo-Impressionists. In this way, Delaunay
and his American followers conceived of colour in the fundamentally
optical terms of simultaneous contrast. Kupka’s work stems much
more fully from Symbolist synesthesia in which colour is related
to musical sound. Thus he produced works of startling chromatic
originality because his theory was more supple and suggestive [27],
The Orphic Cubists, as they were often called, have been seen as the
instigators of abstract painting in France and central Europe.

Vorticism
Since the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, English artists had made few
attempts to band together in avant-garde groups. This all changed in
the second decade of the twentieth century when the painter
Wyndham Lewis (1884-1957) developed a theory of art that he called
Vorticism, which concentrated the theories of synthetic Cubism and
the Italian Futurists to produce a new art movement. Like many van¬
guard movements, this one linked the visual arts and literature, with
the poet Ezra Pound being as important to Vorticism as Zola was to
Impressionism, Mallarme to Symbolism, and Apollinaire to Cubism.
These artists and writers developed a powerful body of work before,
during, and just after the First World War. The group unfortunately
dissolved in the 1920s, as London lost its vitality as a centre for the

28 David Bomberg
The Mud Bath, 1914, oil on
canvas
Although overshadowed by
the reputation of his colleague
Wyndham Lewis, Bomberg
was in some ways the more
accomplished painter. By
combiningthe theories of
Cubism and Futurism with
his own visual speculations,
Bomberg created a form of
pictorial dynamism more in
keeping with the individual
achievement of Leger than
with the theoretically inclined
work of the Puteaux Cubists
or the Futurists.

38 REALISM TO SURREALISM
 production of modern art. Yet, at their best, Lewis and his colleagues,
C. R. W. Nevinson (1889-1946), William Roberts (1895-1980), and
David Bomberg (1890-1957) created a body of experimental art as
interesting and vital as any in the world [28],19

Suprematism/Constructivism
If Vorticism is linked almost directly with the experience and repres¬
entation of war, the most powerful movement in the creation of a com¬
pletely abstract art in the early twentieth century is inextricably linked
with the Russian Revolution. Suprematism and its successor movement
Constructivism are inconceivable without the Russian Revolution.
Although Kashmir Malevich claimed to have developed a completely
abstract art by 1913 and is known to have exhibited non-objective
collages in that year, it was not until after the 1917 revolution that his
art became an exemplar not only of pure aesthetic research, but also
of a new social and economic world order [29], Together with a
well-formed and internationally significant group of vanguard artists,
Malevich constructed a theory of autonomous, non-representational
art that was linked by many early revolutionaries to the kind of

29 Kasimir Malevich
Suprematist Composition:
Black Trapezium and Red
Square, after 1915, oil on
canvas
This work bears the name
of the movementthat it
embodies in its title. Its sense
of com plete freedom from
representation and its
relatively impersonal facture
are hallmarks of Russian
vanguard painting in the
years immediately preceding
the Revolution.

suprematism/constructivism 39
cataclysmic social forces that were to transform Tsarist Russia. For the
first time in European art history, the most advanced art was directly
linked to equally advanced social and political theory, and artists
worked with architects, writers, musicians, dancers, and actors to
transform the visual world. There is no more important social/
aesthetic/political experiment in the history of modern art than
Malevich’s Suprematism and its general offshoot, Constructivism.20
Its crushing defeat at the hands of Stalin and its resulting inaccessibil¬
ity both to Soviets and to the capitalist West is one of the gravest acts of
censorship in modern history, an act only partially redeemed today.
For Malevich, human consciousness rather than the visual world
was the true, or supreme, subject of art, and he made the radical leap
into an art composed of elements with no relationship to the forms of
nature. His thinking was largely prompted by the Futurists, whose
name he adopted as early as 1913, and whose primary theorist,
Marinetti, visited him in St Petersburg in 1914. Yet, the strong tradi¬
tion of Symbolist art and theory in Russia looms large in Malevich’s
commitment to the expression of the artist’s emotions through abstract
elements. Like many avant-garde leaders, Malevich was a dedicated
polemicist and had learned from the close ties between Russia and
France of the importance of independent exhibitions in propagating
aesthetic doctrine to the intelligentsia. Europe’s first truly independent
artists’ group was not French but Russian (first with Artel in 1863 and
then with the Association of Travelling Art Exhibits, which trans¬
formed Russian artistic consciousness from 1870 until 1923).
Few European nations other than Russia could have produced a
population of artists who could create a revolutionary consciousness
through images (see 123). The list of the names of artists associated
with what some have called the Great Utopia would fill pages of this
book, and, unlike other avant-garde movements, this one became part
of the larger society it did so much to define. The failures of that society
led to its demise and to the odd marginalization of the only successful
vanguard movement in the history of art.

Neo-Plasticism
The Western world is much more familiar with the theories and
practice of absti action as developed by Mondrian and a small group
of Dutch artists and architects than they are with the production of
the Great Utopia [30]. Mondrian lived and worked in France,
England, and the United States as well as his native Holland, and he
was accessible to the defining intellectuals of modern art, both
French and American. Although he worked closely with followers
encouraged the formation of a group called De Stijl and wrote power¬
ful polemical prose, his art remained curiously hermetic, and he died
in virtual isolation in New York.

40 REALISM TO SURREALISM
 30 Theo van Doesburg
(1883-1931)
Pure Painting, 1920, oil on
canvas
Even the title of this painting
tells us of its abstract signific¬
ance. If Purism was to become
the name for a later Parisian
movement, it also served as a
kind of talisman for Dutch
painters of the late 1910s and
early 1920s, who strove to get
beyond painting as a form of
personal emotional expression
to another kind of art in which
the pure interplay between the
painting and the viewer was
more importantto pictorial
theory.

31 Piet Mondrian
Composition with Great Blue
Plane, 1921, oil on canvas
Mondrian was the most
consistent and important
painter/theorist connected
with geometric abstraction.
In a sense, each of his works
represents a step along a path
that he set for himself. Though
this path was fundamentally
linear, his questtook him away
from his native Holland to
Paris, London, and New York,
freeing him from the complex
politics of the Dutch de Stijl
movement, to which he
contributed so powerfully.

NEO-PLASTICISM 41
 Mondrian’s ideas of a new plastic consciousness in which art is
completely liberated from representation stem from Symbolist theory,
and it is no accident that his own early work is a form of late, rather
decorative Symbolism [31]. Yet while living in Paris, where he was
directly exposed to the various strands of avant-garde art, he practised
a kind of non-referential image making in which linear and geometric
elements play roles that have no apparent connection with the visual
world. It is not accidental that Mondrian’s pure plastic art arose simul¬
taneously with that of Malevich and his colleagues in Russia, but,
unlike their boldly dynamic work, Mondrian’s art is consciously con¬
strained and, in many senses, classical.21 Whereas Malevich’s construc¬
tions celebrate the world of the diagonal, and play visual games with
rhythmic forms, Mondrian’s work celebrates the restrictions of the
easel-picture’s rectilinear format, producing a form of modern plasti-
cism that has its roots in the Protestant world in which Mondrian, like
his countryman van Gogh, was born.

Dada
If there is an anti-movement in the history of modern art, it is Dada.
Its name is nonsensical; its membership was shifting and unpredict¬
able; and its aims had more to do with randomness, total freedom of
expression, absurdity, and abandon than with the construction of a new
aesthetic system for replication by others. Yet, like most of the other
groups already discussed, Dada had various urban centres of operation,
was highly theoretical and textually based, and had a cadre of leaders
and hangers-on, all giving it the quality of the organized avant-garde it
32 Francis Picabia
Universal Prostitution,
1916-19, ink, tempera, and
metallic paint on cardboard
Picabia (1879-1953) and
his friend Duchamp were the
primary French exponents of
Dada. Both in Paris and New
York, they produced images
like this that have their origins
in scientific and technical
illustration ratherthan in
art. Their delight in verbal
play and in trans-linguistic
punningarealso hallmarks
ofatypeofart-making
associated with the Dada
movement. This painting
was made in New York during
the First World War.

42 REALISM TO SURREALISM
sought to displace.2’ Its major precedents in cultural history were the
radical cafes of Paris in the 1880s and 1890s, where all forms of bizarre
anti-bourgeois behaviour were encouraged and where works of art
were made as part of performances or as instigators of conversation (or
contrived argument). The most extreme manifestation of avant-garde
cafe culture was the poet-playwright-philosopher-drunkard Alfred
Jarry (1873-1907) whose creation of an anti-order, an anti-doctrinaire
doctrine, and, in a sense, an anti-life defined an absurdist strategy that
came to be closely associated with Dada.
A list of individual works of art as embodiments of the essential
characteristics of Dada would be completely unfair to the tenets of this
anti-movement. In fact, a good many of the most characteristic works
associated with Dada were impermanent, made, that is, in conjunction
with the cabaret culture that was, in itself, the art form of Dada. The
Merz constructions of urban refuse created by the German Kurt
Schwitters (1887-1948) and the found objects selected and entitled by
Duchamp are evidence of the extreme divergence of artistic practice
that can be classified as Dada. Schwitters unearthed urban refuse like
a truffle sniffer, arranging it with the artificiality of an Escoffier.
Duchamp transformed the artist into an intellectual shopper who, in
browsing through the shops of a busy city, would suddenly pounce,
leaving to his viewers the task of interpreting his selection.
Dada’s origins are intertwined with those of the First World War,
and it was in the relative neutrality of Zurich and New York that artists
of various nationalities formed their cells of inanity in imitation of the
larger inanities of their world [32]. Dada had none of the intense ideal¬
ism of the various abstract movements—all of which saw room for
hope in the creation of a world beyond the War. Indeed, the nihilism
and individualism of the Dadaists can be contrasted utterly with the
idealism and conformism that characterized movements such as
Suprematism, Constructivism, and Neo-Plasticism.

Purism
The majority of important avant-garde groups of the second decade of
the twentieth century arose in the years around the First World War,
and few arose in the decade following it. In fact, the 1920s can be read
as a consolidating decade for the avant-garde, and its most important
advances were made in the systematic education of modern artists,
exemplified by the Bauhaus, and by the attempt on the part of a group
of French and Swiss artists to create a new industrial classicism or
machine aesthetic. Three French artists, Feger [35], Amedee Ozenfant
(1886-1966) [33], and Le Corbusier (1887-1965) banded together in the
early and mid 1920s to create a theory of art and architecture in which
the basic products of industry became the new standards of a modern
order.23 For these artists, a mass-produced glass, pitcher, plate, or pis-

PURISM 43
33 Amedee Ozenfant
The Jug, 1926, oil on canvas
This enormous painting
is perhaps the pictorial
manifesto of Purism. In it
both architectural elements
and ordinary utilitarian objects
are distilled to their essential
characteristics and arranged
in such a way as to demon¬
strate the theoretically uni¬
versal qualities of form.
The interlinked profiles of a
pitcher and a moulding are
intended to demonstrate
thatall beautiful forms share
fundamental qualities.

ton was as pure a form as a Greek kouros or a Renaissance bronze, and

the analysis of these objects, created for use by new technology, would
provide the standards against which all forms should be judged.
Nothing was outside the realm of art, and the role ol the modern artist
was to produce a new visual world, in keeping with industrial techno-
logy, in which beauty was to be found in the world of mass production.
In many ways, their thinking went way beyond the art of painting. Yet
each used painting as a way ol communicating these ideals to a soph¬
isticated intelligentsia. Their most profound moment came in 1925 at
the Exhibition ol Decorative Arts in Paris, in which they collaborated
to create new domestic spaces in which painting, sculpture, furniture,
decorative arts, and architecture were all equal in their conscious emu¬
lation ol mass-produced objects. Their utopian world was so pure that
it appealed to only a few wealthy clients rather than to the workers and
social organizers for whom it was intended.

44 REALISM TO SURREALISM
 Surrealism
As the Purists attempted to transcend easel painting and to create a
new world order through industrial classicism, another group of artists
and writers came to the lore in Paris.24 It was in 1924 that the writer
Andre Breton (1896-1966) issued the first Surrealist manifesto, not for
visual artists, but tor writers. He called for a poetics of the unconscious,
ol the mental world outside the control of reason and social organiza¬
tion. For Breton, the unconscious was as real and as susceptible to
representation as the visual world, and he formed a cadre of friends
and associates who valued literary and visual representations based on
hallucinations, dreams, nightmares, and other manifestations of the
unconscious. These men and women developed new strategies for art
making that ‘revealed’ the unconscious, visualizing, in so doing, the
secrets of the imagination. That their thinking stems logically from

34 Salvador Dali
Little Cinders, 1927,
oil on panel
Dali following the suggestive
pictorial lead of the Spaniard
Miro and the Italian Giorgio
de Chirico as well as the
theoretical direction of the
French theorist Andre Breton
broke free from both Realism
and Cubism to lead a group
of artists who used dreams,
memories, and fantasies as
their pictorial sources. This
early Surrealist painting adds
a disturbing dream realism
to Miro’s fields of colour and
a reas of a utomatic or u ncon-
sciously motivated drawing.

SURREALISM 45
Freud is worth noting, as is the pre-eminence in Surrealist practice
given to the word and literature. The effect of Breton’s suggestive and
ambiguous prose was to inject a new energy and experimentalism into
the practice of picture making.
There are two main types of Surrealist practice. The first of these,
exemplified by the painting of the Italian Giorgio de Chirico (1888—
1978) (who in fact preceded Breton by more than a decade), the Belgians
Rene Magritte (1898-1967) and Paul Delvaux (1897-1994), and the
Spaniard Salvador Dali (1904-1989) [34], accepts as true all the con¬
ventional representational strategies of western painting—perspective,
shading, shadows, atmospheric perspective, local colour, and a trans¬
parent surface. However, these conventions were subverted in the
minds of the Surrealists because they were used to give the illusion of
reality to the surreal or unconscious. The origins of Surrealist imagery
of this sort lie in dreams, in the encounter between the truth of visual
conventions and their sheer artificiality, and in the tensions between
transparent technique and opaque subject-matter.
The second type of Surrealist practice has no clear representational
function but is, rather, the use of materials by artists either during a
trance or without a clear representational plan. In this way the work of
art is automatic, the direct communication of the unconscious mind.
This technique has a long history in spirit photography and other
Symbolist attempts to give form to the unconscious imagination. But
at no time in the history of art before the Frenchman Andre Masson
(1896-1987) and the Spaniard Joan Miro (1893-1983) were the results of
this type of experimentation considered to be art. Automatic drawing’
became one of the central tropes of Surrealist practice, and its revival m
the United States during the late 1930s and early 1940s had a tremend¬
ously liberating effect on the history of post-war American abstrac¬
tion. It is interesting, in this context, to speculate on the connections
between the automatic qualities of Transparent Impressionism, with
its belief in rapid and largely unconscious visual transcription, and
those of the Surrealists, who eschewed any visual armature for the
image. Again, the seeds for a branch of the last modern movement
covered in this book can be found in an earlier one.
Surrealism was, like Realism, Impressionism, Symbolism, and
Cubism, a widespread movement that had a profound, and prolonged,
effect on world art. Its global reach was insured by the chaos that
resulted from the global depression and increasing warmongering of
the 1930s, and cells of Surrealist, along with other, artists and writers
settled in the United States, Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil, invigor¬
ating the artistic traditions of those provincial centres with doses of
modernist theory.

46 REALISM TO SURREALISM
The ‘-ism’ problem
This necessarily brief summary of the conventional movement-based
history of modern art makes clear the inherent limitations and even the
contradictions of the approach. These problems of definitional clarity
are not in themselves insurmountable. Indeed, the idea that the
representational arts of a long period in the history of modern culture
can be reduced to a few simple formulae would terrify most of us whose
aim is to explain that art.
In thinking about the meaning of the visual, the real, and the rep¬
resentation, no one can deny the absolute relevance of photographic
theory and the closely intertwined practice. The mechanization of
visual reproduction transformed both the distribution and the idea
of art in the industrial world, and the almost hermetic development of
painting that is the history of modern representation must be read as a
reaction against the proliferation of mass-produced representations. It
must also be remembered that photography played a very important
role in the working process of artists as diverse as Gauguin and the
American Man Ray (1890-1976) and that, by the turn of the century,
photography was seen as an important modern art form, whose practi¬
tioners were major forces in modernism.2S Indeed, the history of
modernism in America is inconceivable without the photographer-
theorist-dealer-collector Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), and the practice
of photography was an essential part of the Bauhaus.26
The recent opening-up of Russia and central Europe has coincided
with a massive attempt to redescribe modernism in western Europe,
the Americas, and Australia. This has resulted in a data-glut of pro¬
portions fiT which all of us are unprepared. Few historians of modern
art, trained in the West during the last generation, even know the
names of the major figures in eastern European or Latin American
modernism, in either the nineteenth or the twentieth century. And the
national histories of art kept so faithfully by historians and museum
curators in Russia and eastern Europe have not been linked to the truly
international and cosmopolitan art history to which they belong.
Artists working in Bucharest or Warsaw in the years before and after
the First World War were supremely well connected to a network of
cultural capitals defined by the media and the railway. No one in
modernist Vienna was uninformed about the latest developments in
Paris or Berlin, and for us to write the history of modernist art as if it
happened only in Paris is as fundamentally wrong as it would be to
write the history of the high Renaissance as if it occurred only
in Rome, or Greek architecture as it occurred only in Athens. The
modern Metropolis, as we will learn, was part of an interlinked and
cosmopolitan system of other urban centres. So too modern art.

THE‘-ISM’PROBLEM 47
Part II
The Conditions
for Modern Art
 Urban Capitalism

In 1919, just as the First World War ended, Fernand Leger painted his
largest canvas. Simply by entitling it The City (La Ville), Leger tells us
that his immense painting represents the very condition of modern
urban life, not a city with a particular name and history [35], In it, we
see no historical monuments, no streets or trees, no sky or space.
Rather, the city is defined as a coloured construction of flat visual ele¬
ments, and Leger gives form to the subject that is, in a certain sense,
the most pervasive in the history of modern art—the modern city, its
suburbs, and their inhabitants.
There is little doubt that the fantastic growth of cities was the most
important single achievement of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Most of the great historical cities in Europe were essentially
rebuilt and reconfigured in that century, and such is the extent of newly
constructed cities that one can scarcely imagine the Euro-global world
as it was before the nineteenth century [36], Even the quintessential
city of modern art, Paris, would be almost unrecognizable to a
twentieth-century viewer if that person were suddenly taken back in
time to the Paris of 1800. Many of the most important historical build¬
ings (the Louvre and Notre Dame, to name only the most prominent)
were then in fragmentary condition, and not a single one of its defining
boulevards had yet been built.1 When we look at new cities like
Glasgow, Manchester, Chicago, New York, Frankfurt, Buenos Aires,
or Melbourne the urban growth of the Euro-American world has no
precedent in human history.
In the late eighteenth century, France led the world in the shift from
high to low birth-rate that social historians have defined as a prime
characteristic of modernity, and virtually every Euro-global nation fol¬
lowed suit during the nineteenth century.2 With that shift and the con¬
comitant movement of peoples from rural to urban areas, the human
geography of Europe and America changed more dramatically in the
nineteenth and early twentieth century than ever before. The pre¬
industrial world in which the vast majority of workers were agricultural
labourers who lived in the country or in small villages and hamlets gave
way with almost alarming rapidity to a world of urban, and eventually
Detail of 40 suburban, workers, who congregated to secure employment and who

Si
35 Fernand Leger formed an immense new class, which Karl Marx called the proletariat.
The City, 1919, oil on canvas Another shift came with the enormous rise in the nineteenth century
This vast painting by Leger
of the previously small class of urban shopkeepers, professionals,
was madeattheendofthe
First World War in anticipation small-business owners, and other non-aristocratic property owners
of a new urban world un¬ called the bourgeoisie who by the twentieth century came to be the
fettered by divisions among
nations and social classes.
dominant class—both economically and socially—throughout Europe
Leger’s creation of an and much of the United States of America.
impersonal collective environ¬
ment was strongly associated
with the politics of the left to Paris and the birth of the modern city
which important French The paradigmatic city of modern art throughout the period covered by
artists had given visual
this book was Paris. Although somewhat smaller in population than its
expression since Courbet.
Leger remained a communist rival London, Paris was without question the artistic capital of Europe
throughout his long working and America. Its museums, galleries, art academies, art schools, art
life, but was open equally
to the United States and the
shops, and art studios were unparalleled anywhere in the world, and
Soviet Union. artists from every nation flocked there to develop their work.
Many twentieth-century visitors to Paris think of it as an historical
city, filled with monuments dedicated to the glory of its historic kings,
its powerful bishops, and its wealthy aristocrats. From the Baths of the
Romans and the monastic church of St-Germain-des-Pres to the
palaces of the Louvre, the Pantheon, and the Arc de Triomphe of

52 URBAN CAPITALISM
36 James Wallace Black
Boston from the Air, 1860,
albumen print
Black's view of the eighteenth-
and early nineteenth-century
city of Boston is one of many
views of Euro-global cities
made from the air. In these
images, cities seem to spread
laterally forever and to com¬
mand the whole of our visual
experience. Black’s photo¬
graph shows how the trad¬
itional urban rhythms of
Boston harbour could be
made modern by the medium
and mode of representation.

Foreign artists in Paris

Americans: Whistler, Eakins, Inness, Hungarians: Rippl-Ronai
Hassam, Davis, Sargent, Cassatt, Italians: Boldini, de Nittis, Boccioni,
Hopper, Bruce Segantini, Severini
Austrians: Klimt Lithuanians: Soutine
Belgians: van Rysselberghe Mexicans: Rivera
Canadians: Carr, Morrise, New Zealanders: Goldie
A. Y. Jackson Norwegians: Thaulow, Munch
Czechs: Mucha, Kupka Russians: Repin, Benois, Bakst,
Danes: Pissarro Chagall, Kandinsky
Dutch: van Gogh, Mondrian Spaniards: Picasso, Gris, Miro, Dali
Germans: Menzel, Liebermann, Swiss: Hodler, Amiet, Vallotton,
Pechstein Giacommetti

PARIS AND THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN CITY 53

 Napoleon, Paris is so thoroughly associated with its past that one
almost forgets that it is, as a city, as thoroughly modern as Manchester
or Chicago. Walter Benjamin, the great German social critic, con¬
sidered Paris as the capital of the nineteenth century. Benjamin saw the
roots of Parisian modernization in the 1820s and 1830s with the
construction of a web of commercial arcades in the city, private streets,
glazed against inclement weather and lit at night, that serve as models-
in-miniature both for the boulevards of Napoleon III and Haussmann
and for the extraordinary development of centralized covered markets
and department stores.3 The best portrait of modern Paris is probably
the earliest, the multi-volume study of the city Paris, its Organs and its
Functions, written at the end of the Second Empire by Flaubert’s
friend, the writer Maxime du Camp.4 Like the novels of Balzac and
Zola, it transformed the actual Paris into a conceptual paradox; a
bounded place without boundaries, a human realm unknowable by
individual men, or, in certain poetic and fictional terms, a seductive
and mysterious woman [37, 38].
Paris, to its apologists, had pulled away from the yoke of French
aristocratic history and was galloping headlong into the future which it
would define for much of the world. Paris was a construction zone for
most of its modern history, with its population moving house during
the period creating an unstable environment. The sheer instability of
the social, economic, and physical reality of nineteenth-century Paris
had a profound effect on artists’ representations of it.
Paris was scarcely alone. The demolition of slums and traditional
quarters in the old cities of Europe continued apace throughout the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Photographers in every
37 Gustave Caillebotte
Paris Street; Rainy Day,
1876-7, oil on canvas
Caillebotte was a wealthy
amateur painter brought
into the Impressionist fold for
financial reasons by Degas.
The smooth surfaces and
academically controlled
spaces of his compositions
were at the service of a new
urban imagery, and the
section of Paris chosen by
Caillebotte was almost new
when he painted it. The
principles of dynamic yet
regular urban planning
embodied in this flat image
were used throughout the
Euro-global world. The
painting first appeared in
the Impressionist Exhibition
of 1877.

54 URBAN CAPITALISM
38 Pierre Bonnard
Morning in Paris, 1911, oil
on canvas
This painting, togetherwith its
‘pair’ representing a Parisian
evening, were conceived as
immense decorative panels to
adorn the walls of a luxurious
private house. Each brings the
streets of Paris into an interior
(both found their ways to the
Morosovcollection in Russia
several years before the
Revolution), and each revels
in the human population of the
modern city rather than its
architecture. In the evening
painting, Bonnard arranged
the canvas into horizontal
bands of pavement and street
as if playing a visual game with
the horizontal panellingand
large-scale decorative mould¬
ings of traditional interiors.
The flower seller, whose cart
enters the painting, is ready¬
ing herself forthe evening
market of Parisians buying
flowers as tokens of various
affections.

39 Charles Marville
Tearing Down the Avenue
del'Opera, Paris, c. 1877,
albumen print from a
collodion glass negative
This is one of hundreds of
photographs made of Paris
by Marville. He recorded
(with grim determination) the
destruction of the traditional
city as it was being systematic¬
ally crushed to make wayfor city rushed to record the old buildings before their complete destruc¬
modern Paris. This image
tion, and many of the greatest urban photographs of the nineteenth
records a section of the city
that was almost completely century must be considered to be a form of preservation through rep¬
destroyed in the 1870s in resentation. These are the work of Charles Marville in Paris [39],
orderto build the quarter
Thomas Annan in Glasgow, the Bools and the Dixons in London, and
associated most fervently
with Impressionism. the photographers who recorded the Jewish quarter in Prague, the old
quarters near the walls of Vienna, the crooked streets of old Pest, and
the wooden buildings of Moscow. Even the modernist master, Eugene
Atget, as we have learned from Molly Nesbitt and others, made photo¬
graphs of old Paris for historians and antique dealers anxious to find in
the endless anonymity of modern Paris some forgotten corner in which
time stood still.5
It is scarcely possible today to imagine the sheer magnitude of
transformation in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe

PARIS AND THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN CITY 55

and the Americas: human, physical, social, architectural, and techno¬
logical. No life, not even that of the wealthiest aristocratic, was left
untouched, and, when one considers the enormous growth of capital
(or expendable wealth) during this period, the effect of all this on the
visual arts becomes clear. Works of art remained, as they had been,
either relatively (and variously) expensive commodities lor individuals
with disposable income, or embodiments of state or church patron-
driven values. But the nature of individual, governmental, and institu¬
tional wealth was so changed in the nineteenth century that the world
of art changed with it.

Capitalist society
Studies of the urban transformations ol traditional cities like Paris and
Vienna have made it possible to interpret the representations of these
cities in sophisticated and specific ways.6 ‘Haussmannization’ and the
‘Ringstrasse mentality’ are now standard ideas in courses on modern
art, and the phenomenal growth of American cities like Chicago and
New York has been well studied. The Haussmannization of cities like
Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Cairo, and Philadelphia is well charted, as
is the Viennification of Budapest and Bucharest, and the London- or
Edinburgh-based urbanism of Calcutta, Montreal, and Melbourne.
Yet there is a failure in all this literature to deal with the interlinked,
simultaneous, and global nature of urban capitalism in modern civil¬
ization. It is true, of course, that certain of these cities served as models
for others and that greater concentrations of wealth and governmental
power produced more—and less-—fully developed urban systems.
However, we should recognize first, that almost every city in the world
grew vastly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and second
that the simultaneous development of mechanized transport and mail
services linked them in a communications system of increasing com¬
plexity. Children in Japan knew more and more about the West, and
the reverse is true for children in Europe and the Americas. And the
sheer volume of global knowledge, of products, and of travel created a
world that was different in fundamental ways from the nationally and
regionally bound worlds of previous eras. No empire of the past—not
even the vast stretches of ancient Rome, or of imperial China—could
compare with the leaderless capitalist empire of modernism. And at no
time in previous human history did economic forces have a larger scope
than those of religion and government in the shaping of civilization.
Capital and its expansion was the story of modernism, and govern¬
ment survived only in so far as it could mould itself to the interests of
capital.
This system was most brilliantly analysed by Karl Marx and his fol¬
lowers, who became obsessed not only with their study of capital and

56 URBAN CAPITALISM
its ownership or control, but also with the socio-economic classes of
people defined in terms of their access to that capital. The sheer
simplicity of Marxist analysis, with its ironclad categories of bourgeois,
proletarian, and peasant classes, proved so compelling that Marxist
notions affected public policy throughout the Euro-American world
for nearly a century, providing the basis for a veritable industry of gov¬
ernmental bureaucracies and university scholarship. The arts were
similarly affected, both in practice and in theory, by Marxist systems
stressing the fundamentally economic forces that underlie all modern
civilization, producing numerous images that present or analyse class
relations, family structures, and individual anxieties in the midst of
social struggles.
The locus of these forces is the city, where workers and owners co¬
exist in uneasy harmony; where goods and services flow in seemingly
effortless or invisible systems; and where ideas and representations
congregate. In these cities, fortunes are made by energetic men and
women, and the expenditure of capital on luxury goods and representa¬
tional images is concentrated. Representational art, both mechanical
and hand-made, played a central role in this capitalist system and has
always been attached to urban centres. Yet, as the nature of these centres
changed in the nineteenth century, so representational art changed
with them. Art shops, commercial galleries, exhibition collectives, pri¬
vate homes, and private museums replaced the church and state insti¬
tutions as the loci of display and exchange. Modern collectors were as
often opera singers, factory owners, petty bureaucrats, publishers,
restaurateurs, and department store magnates, as aristocrats and
powerful government officials. A post office worker, Joachim Gasquet,
was as important as a collector for Impressionism as the Marquis de
Marigny had been for incipient neo-classicism in the aristocratic age.
The study of these changes has increased during the last two gen¬
erations, and particular strides have been made in the social history of
modern art. Following the lead of Marxist historians of the early and
mid-twentieth century, a veritable industry of scholarship has defined
significant art as a structured critique of capitalist civilization, while
other less ideologically motivated scholars have seen modern repres¬
entation as embedded in a discourse tied irrevocably to capitalist
ideology. Other scholars have been almost aggressively neutral in
their charting of the history of modern art as a system tied to the art
market, the art exhibition, and the system of criticism that gave verbal
definition to these modes of display and exchange. However, few
studies of modern art have applied to the description of repres¬
entational art history the same methods used to study the history of
clothing, decorative arts, or other luxury commodities.

CAPITALIST SOCIETY 57
The commodification of art
What can be said about art as commodity? First, it is clear that art is,
and was, marketed in remarkably similar ways to other luxury goods.
The markets in fine jewellery, antiques, vintage wines, carpets, or
couture fashion are equally arcane, secretive, and dominated by a small
number of houses, whose reputations are carefully moulded so as to en¬
hance the value of the desirable commodities in which they trade. The
definition of desire on the part of these market manipulators stresses
rarity, distinctiveness, and social allure, the importance of the product
being very closely tied to the economic and social clout of the client or
consumer. The markets for avant-garde art deliberately stress its
difficulty and lack of public appeal to give it an air of exclusivity. If one
actually liked Monet in the 1870s, Gauguin in the 1890s, Matisse in
1910, or Duchamp in the years after the First World War, one was part
of a very small, seemingly self-selecting club similar in structure to that
of collectors of other rare commodities. Indeed, avant-garde art was
among the very most exclusive of commodities throughout its history,
and to be part of the club of artists, dealers, critics, collectors, and
hangers-on was to have arrived at a very high cultural plateau.
To be successful as commodity, art must transform itself regularly
without losing its value, and in this way modern art has a close relation¬
ship to the history of other luxury products. Many historians sceptical
of the art world have routinely compared it to the world of women’s
fashion. Yet few art historians have accepted their ideas as truths be¬
cause of their view of high fashion’s frivolous nature. However, the
changes in subjects, surfaces, imagery, texture, compositions, and
colour that fill the history of modern art are not so different from those
of hems, colours, contours, and length in the fashion industry.
That said, we cannot claim that art dealers created the history of art,
as no economic system based on desire can be determined by set rules;
an element of unpredictability is important. Another more complex
reason why market fomulae have not determined art history involves
two factors: first the intrinsically critical (or privileged) nature of art
making in modern society; and second the idea central to artistic
theory that works of art can transcend time and can assume increasing
critical and financial value with time. For art, there is no planned
obsolescence.

The art market and contemporary criticism

One of the principal characteristics of modern urban capitalism is the
continuous creation of capital and its accumulation in new configura¬
tions. The value of capital is determined by the speed of its exchange,
so that if exchanges can be maximized, value increases in proportionate
ways. The art market is absolutely determined by these rules, although
the study of this system is still in its infancy and there has been no

58 URBAN CAPITALISM
attempt to define the economic system for modern art in a global
way The most systematic work on art markets is Pierre Bourdieu’s
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, one of the few
books that considers art within a context identical to that of other
cultural products.7
The most sophisticated, and persistent, study of the relationship
between representational art and capitalist society has to do with the
reception of works of art by the critics and writers at the moment of
their entrance into the discourse about art. This form of art history
privileges exhibitions over sales, largely because exhibitions produced
the conditions for criticism in the form of published reviews, whereas
sales usually produce only bills of sale, shipping documents, and other
forms of receipt. The bias of this type of history is partly due to the easy
access that modern scholars have to published reviews through large
research libraries, as opposed to the largely inaccessible archives of art
dealers or collectors.
Early art historical analysis (such as John Rewald’s) of critical writ¬
ing about modern art focused on the struggle of artists to overcome the
influential negative opinions of critics. This type of analysis, in which a
negative review is a sort of paper tiger, has been largely replaced by a
closer and more clearly contextual study of reception in which modern
critics read and reread the critical discourse that grew up around paint¬
ing in modern art.8 The most serious work has been done in the field of
modern French painting, largely because the critical discourse in Paris
was so much greater in quantity than that of any other Euro-global
city. We learn from students of artists such as Seurat, Picasso, and
Matisse just how a certain critic with a measurable socio-political posi¬
tion interpreted a particular work of art at a particular moment, pro¬
viding critical evidence for modern interpretation. As such, the art
historian searching for the significance of a modernist object is much
like an archaeologist, for whom the physical (and, thus, temporal)
position of an artefact is as important as is the artefact itself.1'
The problem with these analyses of the initial reception of works of
art is that they give critical privilege to contemporary interpreters, who
are seen as giving us better access to original meanings, and possibly
even artistic intentions, than do later ones. The logical flaws of this
theory are obvious, not only because we know well how blind we often
are to the systems in which we operate, but also because the published
readings of works of art are often written by those with indirect and
partial access to the actual socio-economic context of the object. In a
way, the theoretical division between atemporal (or modernist, anti¬
con textualist) criticism and contextual, historically specific criticism
has simmered throughout the past two centuries, not only in studies of
art, but also in literary theory.

THE COMMODIFICATION OF ART 59

 The modern condition
Fascinating connections have been drawn between the physical,
psychological, and social conditions of modern urban society and the
works of art that seem to represent modern reality in a transparent
manner. These links have been made following the lead of Arnold
Hauser, whose Social History oj Art is among the most important
Marxist texts in the history of art and whose essays on modern repres¬
entational art, both on Impressionism and on cinema, have proven
durable in the nearly two generations since they were published in
1951.10 Following Hauser, the consumption of nature by modern urban
dwellers of all social classes has been a persistent theme of modern
40 Joseph Stella iconography in both the United States and Europe.
New York Interpreted (The
This text stresses two major aspects of capitalist modernism that are
Voice of the City), 1920-2,
oil and tempera on canvas, seen as essential to modern representation: speed and dislocation. The
five panels modernist ideas of alienation, dislocation, rapid transformation, and
The five panels—more than
anonymity are essential to these views of artistic representation in cap¬
eight feet tall and twenty-two
feet long—thatformed this italist society. The canonical works discussed by art historians of this
immense public mural were persuasion abound in iconological and formal difficulties that express
painted overtwoyears by
the Italian-American artist,
these states of consciousness. This view of modern art as a structured
Joseph Stella. Although they critique of capitalism has worked so well for certain objects of art that
stem from the wartime
it has created a whole idea of modern art as essentially critical of
paintings of New York by
the French Cubist-in-exile,
capitalism.
Albert Gleizes, they were given We must remember, however, that modernism had its admirers as
a formal rigour, a precision
well, both in the academy and among artists and their critics. Indeed,
draughtsmanship, and a scale
unknown to the Frenchman. the sheer energy of artistic modernism, with its ability to embody the
They constituted the most excitement of the modern city, is a major feature of the art of this
important post-war embodi¬
ment of modern urbanism
period. The shopping genre scenes of Franz Marc and Kirchner; the
in America, and Stella had urban photographs of Stieglitz and the Hungarian Laszlo Moholy-
hoped that they would be
Nagy (1895-1946); the crescendos of construction among the Futurists;
purchased for a prominent
public building, but they the black-and-white punctuation of Vallotton’s urban prints; the gritty
remained unsold until 1937. representations of New York by John Sloan (1871-1951), Joseph Stella

60 URBAN CAPITALISM
41 Edward J. Steichen
The Flatiron, 1905, gum-
bichromate over gelatin-silver
Steichen recorded the most
exciting tall building ofthe turn
of the century in New York.
Designed by Chicago archi¬
tect, Daniel Burnham, its
shape derived from an
irregular intersection in New
York. Steichen recorded it in a
small, deliberately unfocused
image into which the great
building bursts with an
exaggerated sense of scale.
Architecture transcends both
the human body and nature,
which is reduced to the decor¬
ative lines of tree branches.

(1877-1946) [40], and Edward Steichen (1879-1973) [41]; Degas’s

brothels, and Toulouse-Lautrec’s cafes. The fact that these images
use new or anti-traditional representational strategies and that they
eschew notions of balance, order, harmony, and internal unity can
be viewed as an expression of the essential conditions of modern
urban life.
In discussing the modern city as both the locus and the subject of a
certain type of representational modernism, we must remember that
modern cities varied considerably in the period covered by this volume.
The endless grid ot Chicago, with its Loop of inter-urban trains
defining a skyscape of large privately owned buildings, could not be
more different to the sociable boulevard modernism of Paris, with
underground inter-urban trains and state-owned symbolic historical
monuments as the defining focal points of collective urban experience.
Nor can one discount the loosely organized, neighbourhood-centred
and fundamentally suburban sprawl of urban London, with its irregu¬
lar street pattern, tidy places, asymmetrically shaped parks, and seem¬
ingly chaotic but user-friendly urban train system. Each of these three
cities presents us with a different model of the modern city, and still
other models could be discussed. There is the Vienna model, with the
late-medieval city surrounded by a modern one with its wall becoming
a circular boulevard. And there is the juxtaposition of old city and new
city in Budapest, Edinburgh, and, to a lesser extent, Prague, each of
which concentrated its traditional urbanism on one side of the river (or,

THE MODERN CONDITION 6l

42 Aristarkh Lentulof in the case of Edinburgh, railway) and built a modern reflection on the
Moscow, 1913 oil and metal other [42, 43],
foil on canvas
Each of these cities represented itself for its citizens, visitors, and
Herethe domes of St Basil, the
towers and crenellations of the rivals in countless works of visual art, and additionally created exhib¬
Kremlin, and the architecture ition spaces for art to define its particular civilization in conjunction
ofthe'new’ Moscow combine
in one dizzying image of the
with another system of buildings for the performing arts. Indeed, art
city. Lentulof struggled suc¬ museums were central monuments to civilization in practically every
cessfully to create an image
modern city, no matter how its street system or public rail system
that brings traditional Moscow
into line with the modernist worked. The very link between the city and the museum is exemplified
imagery developed in Paris by the Metropolitan Museum in New York and its many less obviously
and Milan, an imagery that
named copies throughout the world. For New Yorkers, the sheer fact of
ricocheted throughout Europe
and America in the years their global metropolitanism is most perfectly embodied in their art
before the First World War.
museum. Conceived as an institution as global and complete as pos¬
sible, it combines old and new art, fine art and applied art, Western and

62 URBAN CAPITALISM
43 Charles Sheeler
(1883-1965)

non-Western art, art and archaeology, in a way that defines the city as a
global capital.
Thus the urban discourse of modernism was fluid and transformat¬
ive under a veneer of monumental permanence. One of the great
features of the cosmopolitan modern world was greater speed of com¬
munications and the fluid movement of multi-lingual populations,
creating new professional social interactions that had their only
precedent in the small-scale aristocratic world of the ancien regime.
The proofs of this are so numerous that one scarcely has to strain
to find an example. In October 1913 the Russian textile merchant/
collector Shchukin wrote to his friend Henri Matisse that, within the
previous two weeks, he had received visits in his home in Moscow
from numerous individuals including Karl Osthaus from Hagen
Germany (twice), Dr Peter Tessen from Berlin, other gentlemen
from Nuremberg, Strasbourg, Flensburg, Hamburg, Darmstadt,
and Halle, as well as from Jens Thiis of Christiania (Oslo). One
wonders what languages they spoke! All these men saw major works
by Gauguin, Picasso, Matisse, and others in Moscow.11 Such was the
cosmopolitanism of the modern.

THE MODERN CONDITION 63

 *

....

‘
 Modernity,
Representation,
and the
Accessible Image
Three potent inventions—the art museum, lithography, and photo¬
graphy, all made before 1851—produced results that profoundly altered
the course of the history of art. These created another set of conditions,
related to, but different from, those of urban capitalism that deter¬
mined many of the characteristics of representational modernism.
Although the art museum and lithography are associated with the late
eighteenth century, their roots lie deeper in western civilization. The
thoroughly modern medium of photography harnessed image produc¬
tion to the machine and so could have been invented only in the nine¬
teenth century. Its invention, announced by the painter Paul Delaroche
to the French Chamber of Deputies in 1839 and deeply contested
throughout the nineteenth century, is among the handful of such
inventions in the human history whose results have proven so far-
reaching that they have yet to be fully understood. All three of these
innovations had profound effects on the history of Western ideas of
art and, thus, on the limits within which artists worked. All were
perceived in two ways: both as powerfully positive, and as equally
powerfully repressive forces. There are no important modern artists
whose careers were not affected by them.
Early in 1868, Edouard Manet completed his greatest portrait to
date, a formal exhibition portrait of the newly successful young writer,
Emile Zola [44], By situating his friend and defender in a book-and-
art-filled corner of a dark room, Manet immersed this young naturalist
not in the real world but in a world of representations. Interestingly, he
included not a single European painting. Rather, Zola sits as a bour¬
geois in a comfortable chair placed in front of a fashionable Japanese
screen, which runs along the left edge of Manet’s canvas, and a
delightful image bank consisting of a Japanese wood-block print, an
eighteenth-century French engraving by Nanteuil after a painting by
Velazquez (the original of which had been seen by Manet in Madrid
the year before), and finally either a photograph or reproductive print
Detail of 44 of Manet’s own painting, Olympia, completed in 1863 and included in

65
44 Edouard Manet
Portrait of Emile Zola, 1868,
oil on canvas
This formal portrait repres¬
ented the rising novelist and
critic Zola a yea r after the
publication of his first
successful novel, Therese
Raquin. It is visual proof of the
dominance of reproductions
and exotic works of art in the
capita list world. It was first
shown in the Salon of 1868,
after Manet's complete
rejection from the Salon
the previous year.

the Salon of 1865 [82], All these images are virtual rather than actual
wotks of art, only two of which, the Japanese screen and possibly the
Japanese print, were produced by (or under the supervision of) the
same artist who conceived of the image itself. In this way Manet
represents Zola as a completely modern man, able to evaluate and
interpret works of art in a polyvalent world of reproductions, photo¬
graphic and otherwise. If Andre Malraux had not yet begun to
conceive his imaginary museum of reproductions, Manet certainly
had. The remainder of Zola’s desk is filled with books and pamphlets
certain of which are illustrated, including the most popular and best-
se mg French art book of the mid-nineteenth century, Charles Blanc’s
"f0™ deS Pemtu™, and Zola’s own pamphlet promoting the work of
Manet to an urban public. For Manet, and for Zola, the world of the
visual and literary artist was altered and enriched by their access to
reproductions, pamphlets, magazines, and books. Their modernism

66 MODERNITY, REPRESENTATION AND THE ACCESSIBLE IMAGE

 was a highly mediated affair, enmeshed in both urban capitalism and
its cultural products.

The art museum

The art museum is so deeply rooted in modern urban culture that it
seems at once as ubiquitous and as eternal as the art it protects. Too few
museum visitors recognize the sheer modernity of the institutions in
which they see works of art preserved for all time. The apparent trans¬
parency of the museum, and its position outside ideology, has been
powerfully denied by postmodern scholars and critics of culture.
Although art museums existed during the Renaissance, and many
of the great treasure homes of Europe were open to visitors (of the right
social class) on a virtually regular basis before the late eighteenth cen¬
tury, we must look to the political revolutions of modern civilization
for the origins of public art museums, whose mission is to make art
from all eras and civilizations accessible to any citizen. The initial idea
of the revolutionary Louvre museum is quite simple: that the treasures
of art owned and housed in palaces by the King and French aristocrats

45 Eugene Delacroix
The Triumph of Apollo,
1850-1, oil on canvas
(mounted on the ceilingof
the Salle d'Apollon, Palais
du Louvre)
This immense canvas was
painted to fit into a ceiling flip
designed in the late seven¬
teenth century by the architect
Le Veauxforthe Louvre. It was
a modern work for an ancien
regime setting that had itself
been transformed from a
palace to a public art
museum. Delacroix's art
historical debts, particularly
to Veronese and Rubens, are
clear, and the museum visitor
could measure them by
walking to the large-scale
paintings by those hallowed
artists in the Louvre itself.

THE ART MUSEUM 67

were actually the property of the citizenry, who must preserve these
works for posterity as part of its own national heritage. Museums
became embodiments of public pride of ownership and are tied to
notions ol national power.
After the opening of the Louvre to great acclaim in 1793, the pres¬
sure effectively to nationalize royal collections was immense, leading to
the development of new public museums all over Europe during the
nineteenth century [45], England had its own quirky way of dealing
with this by creating a sort of private-public museum, the British
Museum, outside the Royal Collection. If Catherine the Great built
her Hermitage for ‘myself and the mice’ in the later eighteenth century,
her successors had no such delusions of power. Her great-grandson,
Nicolas I, hired the important German museum architect Otto von
Klenze to design an immense public museum, constructed between
1842 and 1851 adjacent to the palace itself.2
Perhaps because the works of art that these museums celebrate were
not modern, we forget that the museums themselves were modern
creations, developed for political rather than aesthetic reasons, and
that they essentially determined the Euro-global idea of great art in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Men and women like Sergei
Shchukin, Albert Barnes, Leo and Gertrude Stein, Samuel Courtauld,
Ilya Arensberg, and others have as great a presence in the literature of
art as a result of their collecting. In the nineteenth century the capital¬
ist collector replaced the ruler, who had obtained his works of art by
economic and military force. The notion that whoever owns art
confers on it his importance just as art confers its importance on him,
is central to modern ideas of art.
A list of major art museum buildings opened in Europe and the
Americas during the period covered by this book would fill pages. It
would include virtually every great museum in the world, excepting
only the Louvre, the Prado, the National Gallery of Art in London, the
Altes Museum in Berlin, and most of the museums of Italy. In fact art
museums are, in many ways, as modern as department stores and
railway stations, and their history can easily be integrated into the
larger history of display and public culture that has been written so
interestingly by historians who have chronicled the rise of bourgeois
civilization.
It was visits to art museums by artists, and the rise of the museum
art school in many European and American cities, that moulded the
artistic values of generations of modern artists such as Manet, Picasso,
and Leger. Historians of modern art know well the effect of schools
like the Art Institute of Chicago on canonical modern artists like the
American Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) (the effect was, of course,
negative), and visits to museums were as major a part of the travels of
modern artists as they were of any modern tourists. To read the attend-

68 MODERNITY, REPRESENTATION AND THE ACCESSIBLE IMAGE

•ance figures for the major art exhibitions held in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries reminds us of a time when these institu¬
tions were the mass-culture venues, before the onset of public access to
sporting venues, films, television, and the world-wide web. Over
150,000 people paid to see an exhibition of the contemporary Spanish
painter Joaquin Sorollav Bastida (1863-1923) at the Hispanic Society in
New York in 1909, and more than 20,000 of them bought catalogues.
Similar statistics could be presented for museum exhibitions through¬
out the period covered by this book. Even the ever anti-traditional
painter/teacher Camille Pissarro, who reportedly wanted to burn
down the Louvre early in his career, painted this pre-eminent museum
building more than seventy times in the last five years of his life.
What did the art museum as an institution do for artists? Firstly and
most important, it placed works of art on the pedestal of civilization, as
the most significant and valuable of man’s creations. This showed
young artists with little or no hope of being collected by a museum dur¬
ing their own lives that the activity of art making had immense cultural
value in itself. Museums also encouraged artists with an idea fashion¬
able among Romantics, that artists, if they are truly important, must
wait until after death to be fully recognized. This sense of museums as
being the eternal repositories of the greatness of the past was encour¬
aged because very few museums actually purchased art for high prices
during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hence, they
were not intimately involved with the art market. Indeed, their inde¬
pendence from it was carefully sought by the museum administrators,
who encouraged collection growth through gift or, more frequently,
state seizure rather than museum purchase, thereby separating the
museum from the tainted world of money. This idea still persists today
in France, Italy, much of eastern Europe, and Russia.
Museums were among the few places of display in modern culture
apparently free from the pressures of commodity markets, and this very
status gave them immense power. One can measure, for example, the
incredible effect on contemporary French art of the gift in 1869 of the
La Caze bequest to the Louvre. The wonderful group of paintings by
Chardin assembled by La Caze literally caused the production of
major works by painters such as Manet, Cezanne, Degas, and Morisot.
Without the Louvre, this impetus from the eighteenth century might
never have occurred, and it was the Salle La Caze that Vuillard chose as
his quintessential painting gallery in 1921 when he devoted a series of
four large decorations to the reopening of the museum after the First
World War.
One of the most persistent myths about museums and modern art is
that artists learned from museums principally by copying works of art
in them at an early point in their careers. There is little doubt that most
modern artists did in fact copy in great museums. This type of activity

THE ART MUSEUM 69

probably represents a distinct minority of their total use of the art
museum. The cases of Cezanne or Pissarro will serve us here, but I am
sure that a careful study of artists from any European capital would
reveal similar patterns. We know that both Cezanne and Pissarro
visited the Louvre throughout their lives although Pissarro seems
never even to have taken a sketch-pad, and there are no surviving
copies or drawings after works in the Louvre in his considerable oeuvre.
Yet his letters make it clear that he would observe the compositional
decisions in Poussin’s work, study the palettes of Turner and Veronese,
or learn about paint handling from Rembrandt or Chardin. Indeed, a
quick visit to a well-haunted corner of the Louvre could have helped
him solve a particularly nagging problem by providing him with an
immediate and time-tested precedent. Cezanne used the Louvre with
the same persistence, but, perhaps because he spent most of his work¬
ing life away from Paris, he felt compelled to take a sketch-pad with
him so as to study the rippling muscles in Hellenistic sculpture, the
inter-play between volume and void in the paintings of Chardin, and
the relationship between facial features and curling hair in a portrait
by Rigaud.
The Louvre was emptied twice in the twentieth century, for each of
the two great wars. The first time led to the longest closure of the
museum in its history, a period of nearly five years in which its
collections were inaccessible to the public. When the Louvre reopened
in 1921 artists and the public flocked to it in extraordinary numbers.
Indeed, the absence of great art from the contemporary world had
proved as devastating in certain ways as the war itself, and artists
responded to the reopened Louvre bv creating works that responded
powerfully to the past it enshrined and protected for moderns.
The so-called rappel a I'ordre, the conservatisizing tendency of 1920s
representational modernism, may have had as much to with the new
availability of the past at the Louvre as it did with anti-modernist
ideology. One form of modernism replaced another.3
The sheer simultaneity of various historical times in virtually any
modern art museum made it decidedly modern in the sense that his¬
tory itself was pluralistic and simultaneously available to the modern
viewer. No great modern artist before Picasso lived to see their work
represented in a major encyclopaedic museum, and none expected to
do so.

Temporary exhibitions
Exhibitions had a key role to play in the creation of the modern idea of
art. Although there had been Salon exhibitions in Trance since the
later seventeenth century, and many other countries developed ver¬
sions of this practice, it can truly be said that the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries are the great age of public display.4 Whether the

70 MODERNITY, REPRESENTATION AND THE ACCESSIBLE IMAGE

increasingly common industrial exhibitions, which most often in¬
cluded representations or images produced by modern technologies;
world’s fairs as major commercial vehicles tor governments and the
private sector; or private exhibitions produced by individuals, dealers,
or co-operatives of artists, the opportunities to display original works
of art or printed reproductions increased dramatically in the second
half of the nineteenth century. Attitudes towards display changed just
as rapidly as did the contents of the displays. We all know about salon-
style hanging, with bilaterally symmetrical rows of paintings of in¬
creasing size as one’s gaze ascends the wall. We also know that many
dealers and artist-groups changed these norms by hanging works in
single rows, by allowing the wall itself to show around the pictures, by
introducing new forms of artificial lighting, by developing skylit tech¬
nology, by developing new colours for gallery walls, by changing fram¬
ing and matting customs, and by grouping works in various new
combinations. Thus the mode of display became as important in the
art world as it did in the commercial world, where major developments
in display technology were sweeping Europe and America.
It is no accident that the best early essay about commercial window
display as an art form was written by Fernand Leger, and that Marcel
Duchamp and many other important modern artists were involved in
commercial window design.s And we know that the modern idea of
picture display, with works hung at eye level separated by a good deal of
space, with minimal framing, and on neutral walls, developed out of
the Impressionist exhibitions in the late 1870s and early 1880s. There
are literally thousands of photographs that document not just works of
modern art, but also the exhibitions that housed them. In fact, these
became increasingly common as photography entered the amateur
realm and as the exhibitions themselves became more elaborate, arti¬
ficial, and bizarre. The exhibitions of the Russian Constructivists were
for many years better known than the paintings themselves, and those
of the Dada artists too came to have greater importance than anything
they contained. Any reader of the prolific correspondence of Monet
and Pissarro or of the journals and private communications of Gauguin
and Vuillard will learn that they were all but obsessed with issues in¬
volving the display of their representations, and this obsession can be
extended to modernist photographers as well.
The first generation of catalogues raisonnes of the works of canonical
modern artists lists numerous temporary exhibitions in which these
works appeared during the first generation of their lives. These lists
include cities as far flung as Melbourne and Johannesburg and as
culturally diverse as Moscow and Barcelona. In fact, it is astounding to
cautious modern conservators who safeguard these works of art today
that they were transported so far and so often, without greater damage;
a geographical map of early exhibitions by Monet or Gauguin would

TEMPORARY EXHIBITIONS 71
be extraordinary. The works of many modernists created such a stir in
provincial cities that artists immediately reacted to them in ways little
different than those of traditional artists who confronted a new work
of art for the first time. The wonderful painting of 1913 by Stanley
Cursiter The Sensation oj Crossing the Street West End, Edinburgh,
was painted just after the Scottish painter had seen Severini’s
Boulevard (1912) in an exhibition curated by Roger Fry, shown in the
city that was considered the bastion of aesthetic conservatism
in Scotland. The most thorough study of the particular effect of a
French artist on a far-away place is Alberty Kostenevitz’s recent work
on the reception (and transformation) of Cezanne in Moscow and
St Petersburg.

Lithography
If museums were immense libraries of visual representations that could
be easily used (or, as was often the case, plundered or even misused) by
modern artists, it was the countless reproductions of works of art in the
print media that transformed modern art history to an even greater
degree. Few modern artists, even those who lived in remote cities,
went through life without visiting at least one great museum. But even
fewer artists were untouched by the virtual barrage of reproductions
that forever changed the relationship between the work of art and the
individual viewer in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.6 Modern
intellectuals from Albert Barnes to Walter Benjamin have decried the
pernicious effect that easily available reproductions of works of art have
on our experience of the original art object. More numerous, however,
are the optimists, most of whom follow the ever-eloquent lead of
Andre Malraux. Using the phrase, muse'e imaginaire or, awkwardly in
English, ‘museum without walls’, Malraux spoke and wrote about a
peculiarly modern condition of art: that most modern people see more
reproductions in their lifetimes than they do original works of art. For
Malraux, the liberating potential of this condition was even more
important than its obvious limitations.
The importance of reproductions for the history of art has often
been considered, yet too few systematic attempts have been made to
measure the effect of reproductions on the history of art itself. The
photographic technology that has made the modern discipline of
the history of art viable across the globe has also brought works of art
into the household, the studio, and the larger visual experience of the
artist. Many of the greatest modern artists such as Degas, Picasso, and
Dali made active use of reproductions, photographic and otherwise, in
their working process, allowing them a kind of conceptual freedom or
apparent boundlessness that is distinctly modern.
It is tempting to think that this practice is simply an extension of

72 MODERNITY, REPRESENTATION AND THE ACCESSIBLE IMAGE

the standard artistic method codified in the academies, in which prints
of works of art were used as an active part of the process of artistic
training. The difference between the historical use of reproductions
and the modern practice is in both degree and kind. Whereas, for the
academically trained artist, reproductions played a principal role in the
training of the artist and in the dissemination of work to an urban elite,
modern artists have used reproductions throughout their working
lives, as inspiration as well as an aide-memoire. The visual field of the
modern artist is so much larger, more complex, and more easily avail¬
able than it had been in previous centuries that it provided visual
stimuli that threatened in many cases to overwhelm the actual visual
world of the artist. If the seventeenth- or eighteenth-century artist
was confined to expensive reproductions produced in relatively small
editions, the modern artist is literally inundated with mass-produced
reproductions in many media, including photographic.
One of the earliest processes of reproduction was developed in Ger¬
many in 1798. The technique of lithography was the first reproductive
technique in the history of art that had no limits on the number of re¬
productions that could be made from an original drawing. The method
of lithography involves a smoothly sanded surface of fine-grained
limestone, on which an image is placed with an oil-based crayon or a
grease-based solution with a brush or pen. The resulting image accepts
ink, while the stone itself does not, and after printing it can be re-inked
and printed virtually an infinite number of times without any percept¬
ible decline in the quality of the print. After the printing is completed,
the stone is ground down to remove the drawing and is prepared for
another. A single lithographic stone can receive as many as a thousand
drawings and produce literally millions of prints. Although this tech¬
nical discussion might appear to be irrelevant to the larger aims of this
book, it helps us to understand the fact that, for the first time in human
history, one could print thousands of identical prints from one original.
Whether it was drawn by a major artist like Goya or a professional
print-maker like Senefelder or Lemercier, the image itself could have
a mass audience. The industrialization of image-making and the
creation of a market for these mass-produced objects formed a set of
particular conditions for the modern artist.
Access to visual information was at its height in large cities and also
widely available in provincial areas. These virtual works of art so nu¬
merically overwhelmed actual works of art that in many important
senses they defined the art world for the majority of people who lived
in modern cities. Whether related to travel, religion, literature, science,
art, or any other subject-matter, images saturated Europe, her colonies,
and the parts of the world dependent on her for trade and prosperity.
The image trade involved literally thousands of artists, in both the
production and the consumption of images, and the history of

LITHOGRAPHY 73
modern art is intricately linked with that of popular imagery, of which
reproductions of works of art constituted an enormous part.'
Yet, it was not principally its role in the multiplication of images
that set lithography apart from earlier graphic media. Rather, it was the
directness with which an artist’s gesture could be recorded and replic¬
ated using the medium. With the oil-based crayon or the small pots of
greasy ink, artists made lithographic paintings and drawings that could
be infinitely repeated. This gestural aspect of the medium, the direct¬
ness of the relationship between the artist’s hand and its replication
created conditions that assured the connection between art as hand¬
made and art as industrially replicated. This conundrum created one
of the greatest traditions in modern mass-produced print-making.
Even the ever-reticent Cezanne, whose early experiments with
print-making were confined to small-edition etchings, was convinced
by his dealer Vollard to create lithographic drawings. There was a
major revival of fine art lithography in the 1890s through the simple
recognition that lithographs could be both directly related to the
artist’s working process and capable of sustaining much larger editions
than intaglio or relief techniques. The careers of modern artists such as
Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard, Mucha, and others are inconceivable
without lithography.8
The names of the industrial printers of Europe are little known
today. Lemercier, the first large-scale printer in France, and a host of
competitors in Europe and America produced hundreds of millions of
inexpensive printed images that one could buy world-wide.9 Hence
modern iconography must contend for the first time with mass visual
culture. Indeed, the recognition of the importance of so-called popular
or mass-produced visual culture for modernist imagery and technique
has been one of the principal trends in recent studies of modern art.

Photography
If lithography and other industrialized representational media trans¬
formed the history of modern art, photography had an even greater
effect. Its invention was announced in 1839 in both England and
France, with competing claims to priority being made by various indi¬
viduals and nations during the 1840s. By 1850, when albumen-coated
paper was introduced and glass-plate negatives began to replace waxed-
paper negatives, photography began to exert a powerful force on the
history of representation. It produced a distinguished body of criticism
in the 1850s and 1860s as its adherents and detractors struggled to
define its relationships with traditional media from painting to the
graphic arts. Its most passionate advocates came to recognize that the
separate media that make up photography possess their own character.10
All histories of photography tell about its simultaneous develop¬
ment in France and England. A wealthy landowner and amateur,

74 MODERNITY, REPRESENTATION AND THE ACCESSIBLE IMAGE

46 Charles Negre
Chimney-sweeps Walking,
1851, salted paper print from
a paper negative
The pulpy texture of the paper
on which the negative for this
photograph was made give
this calotype a virtual quality.
Negre, like most calotype
photographers, created a
positive aesthetic value with
what was viewed by others as
a technical limitation of the
first negative process.

William Henry Fox Talbot, perfected a technique of paper photo¬

graphy with help from many friends, a technique that he came to call
the calotype or beautiful print. His method involved fixing a value-
reversed image on sensitized paper, which was then waxed so as to
become the negative for the production of a paper positive produced by
placing the negative on top of another sensitized sheet and exposing
both to sunlight [46], As a result of this, Fox Talbot’s process was actu¬
ally the first photographic print medium, and, with his considerable
resources, he actually set up in Reading the first major photographic
printing establishment to produce images and small-edition books
illustrated with photographs for sale.
The French development, called the daguerreotype after its in¬
ventor or publicist Louis Jacques-Mande Daguerre, was announced in
Paris before Fox Talbot had made his process publicly known. Unlike
the English process, the daguerreotype was a unique and unreprodu-
cible photographic image made in the camera on a sensitized silvered
metal plate. Whereas the calotype possessed both indirectness and the
graininess of its paper negative, the shiny daguerreotype was like a mir¬
ror (the technique was called ‘the mirror of nature’). Daguerreotypes
were appreciated immediately for their almost surreal level of detail,
for their entrapment of more visual information than the eye could
perceive. Thus the medium took over the market for portrait images;
its modernity, its permanent metal medium, its uniqueness, and its
likeness to a mirror transforming forever the idea of the portrait.

Photography and modern art

Because of its newness and the fascinating rivalry between England
and France, photography took the modern art world by storm. Photo¬
graphs were exhibited at every major international exhibition.
Societies and publications were formed throughout the world. Most

PHOTOGRAPHY 75
major critics and intellectuals gave their opinions on the merits and
problems with the medium. And virtually every middle-class urbanite
in the world owned photographs by the middle of the 1870s. There
was inevitably much anxious commentary about the relationship be¬
tween painting and photography, and between mechanical and non¬
mechanical image production [47], Lady Eastlake, wife of the director
of the National Gallery of Art in London, declared in 1850 that ‘From
today painting is dead’, and writers from Baudelaire to Ruskin first
praised and, eventually, decried the new medium. Many of the most
important art galleries commissioned and sold photographs; others
scorned photography as a science rather than an art. Yet professional
artists were among the hundreds of men and women who turned to the
medium at mid-century, and artists used photographs with increasing
ease and familiarity.
The idea that photographs were completely accurate and faithful to
visual reality was part of the earliest promotional criticism associated
with the medium. All of the most intelligent early writers about the
medium recognized its artificiality, its conventions, and its limitations,
while they praised its advances. The contrivances ol the portrait photo¬
grapher to avoid blur-making movements in their sitters created an
almost comic stiffness in early photographic portraits, a stiffness aped
jokingly by painters and print-makers. The long exposure times neces¬
sary for a full range of tonal value in the print created conditions in
which any movement was recorded as a blur or even rendered the
mover invisible, and most skies bleached to an absolutely spaceless
white because so much light emanated from them. To combat these
problems, early landscape and architectural photographers contrived
to banish their skies to the corners, edges, and tops of their pictures,
and they used hundreds of devices to minimize movement within their
field of vision. Their attempts were consistent enough that photo¬
graphs began to take on certain formal characteristics, many of which
appeared to flatten the representation. Architectural photographers
tended to place themselves so that the buildings they recorded were
strictly parallel to the picture plane. Photographers of cities or land¬
scapes often adopted high vantage points, looking down on their
subjects, both to remove what would be a blurred foreground from
their compositions (due to limited depth of field in early lenses) and to
minimize the white expanse of the sky. It was the very limitations of
the medium of photography that created the conditions for the
photographic, and blurring, flattening, and planar arrangements of
form soon became so common in the visual repertory of photographic
repiesentation that they appeared—both consciously and not—in
other representational media.
Yet, of all the problems associated with photography, the most
interesting and aesthetically challenging was the problem of the edge.

76 MODERNITY, REPRESENTATION AND THE ACCESSIBLE IMAGE

47 Andrew J. Russell
Hanging Rock, Foot of Echo
Canyon, Utah, 1867-8,
albumen print from a
collodion glass negative
Like many travel photo¬
graphers of the period
1850-80, Russell made his
negatives on large, completely
transparent sheets of glass.
This condition encouraged
an aesthetic of sharp focus
and compressed detail that
contrasted with the calotype
aesthetic just as Courbet’s
painterly aesthetic contrasted
with the smooth and linear
style of Frith.

We all know that any representational artist who conceives of their

subject in a certain way can arrange that subject so that it absolutely
dominates the composition. For photographers working out of doors,
the edges of the picture presented real problems. In cities and land¬
scapes, unwanted forms that could simply be banished from the rep¬
resentation by a painter or draughtsman were stolidly present in the
photograph, sometimes creating subjects that were unphotographable.
Often the photographer struggled to omit them by moving so that they
occupied the periphery of the pictorial field. Indeed, the extraneous as¬
pects of visual reality paradoxically became the real concern of the
photographer, and their removal or the diminution of their presence
was of paramount importance in conceiving of a successful photo¬
graph. This very situation lead to the gradual development in which
the accidents of nature that deformed photographs came to become
aesthetic virtues. The limitations of the medium took on positive char¬
acteristics, particularly in photographs by painters who used the
medium as part of their practice.
Among the many other limitations of the medium of photography
was movement. It was felt that painters or draughtsmen had the free¬
dom to represent movement because they were not encumbered with
the long exposure time of a theoretically instantaneous medium. It was
actually photographers who were the first to represent the movement
of bodies in a complete way and these scientific photographs, some of
which were made by the modernist American artist Thomas Eakins
(1844-1916), had profound effects on non-mechanical representation
into the early twentieth century. The notion of these photographs is
that the machine can see more accurately than the human eye, making
possible the accurate representation of rapid motion that is invisible or

PHOTOGRAPHY 77
unanalysable to the human eye. Fascination with movement was so
pervasive in this period that artists of such varying aesthetic proclivities
as the Frenchmen Duchamp and Ernest Meissonier (1815—91) were
united by their absorption with its accurate representation.
The true conquest of the public consciousness by photography
came with the development by Kodak of the easily portable hand-held
camera. The word Kodak was among the first international brand
names to permeate industrial and colonial society. It became a word in
virtually every language (including the ever-resistant French), and by
the late 1890s few middle-class citizens of the capitalist world had not
themselves made a photograph or seen one made by a friend or family
member. This was a truly revolutionary and modern development.
With the Kodak, anyone could represent their own world and experi¬
ences, thus potentially further limiting the professional artist’s rep¬
resentational function. The most common needs for images, at births,
weddings, deaths, confirmations, and bar mitzvahs, came increasingly
to be the arena of the amateur. In response the professional artist came
more and more to develop a higher idea of representation.

Conclusion
One of the principal conditions of modernity in representation is uni¬
versal access to images, both in the original and in reproduction.
Although the ownership of works of art remained privileged, any
member of modern society who desired to study diverse representa¬
tions had both the right and ability to do so. In spite of widespread
press censorship in certain European cities, the ‘graphic traffic’, as it
has come to be known, was largely unregulated in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, allowing individuals to create their own
libraries of representations, both in the mind and in fact. The proli¬
feration of museums, fairs, temporary exhibitions, exhibition societies,
and commercial galleries made access to originals possible in most
Euro-global cities with populations over 250,000. Artists used this
access to reproductions and originals in immensely varied ways. Yet no
study of modernism would be complete without a sense that modern
artists from Symbolists to Surrealists created a kind of modernism we
shall call image/modernism.

78 MODERNITY, REPRESENTATION
ANDTHEACCESSIBLE IMAGE
Part III
The Artist’
Response
1*111
 Representation,
Vision, and 'Reality’:
the Art of Seeing
‘I get all my inspiration from the real world, so I’m much more
involved in just walking down the street... and finding out what’s going
on in the world, than to look at another person’s interpretation.’
Jeff Koons, Flash Art (Summer 1997), 105

In 1930 the Canadian painter Emily Carr gave a lecture in her native
Victoria entitled ‘Fresh Seeing’.1 She might have called it ‘French
Seeing’, because many of the ideas in her lecture had their roots in her
own powerful experiences of French art and theory in the first decade
of the twentieth century. Her message was that successful art is not so
much a mode of representation as it is a mode of seeing, and that in
making important representations artists present the viewer not simply
with an internally consistent and successful image, but with an entire
way of seeing the world. This idea is not, of course, unique to mod¬
ernism, but it is so powerful a part of modernist theory that it deserves
to be canonized as one of the two principal ways of thinking about art
that has prompted modernism.
The desire to see afresh was a crucial part of the modern artist’s
practice. Constable, we are told, wished that he had been born blind
and suddenly regained his sight. Cezanne wanted to make a painting as
if in the state of mind of someone who had never before seen a paint¬
ing. Vuillard and Bonnard saw through the eyes of their nephews and
nieces, as if somehow to recreate the visual world anew. Picasso re¬
ported that he could draw like Raphael when he was twelve, and needed
to unlearn that facile skill in order to draw like a child. Mondrian was
convinced that only through supreme effort could one erase the history
of art from one’s mind in order to make timeless or essential art.
Kandinsky and the Swiss artist Paul Klee (1879-1940) used the draw¬
ings of children to release themselves from the constraints of conven¬
tionalized ways of seeing.2 A list of neo-na'ive theories of art would
reveal a virtual obsession of modernism, an obsession that cannot be
found in anywhere near the same strength in earlier theories of art.
The French landscape painter Charles-Fran^ois Daubigny (1817-
79) coined perhaps the best expression for this idea—savoir-voir.' All of
Detail of 62 us, even in the English-speaking world, know its cognate, savoir-faire,

83
48 Edouard Manet to know how to make or to do. The elegant gentleman who knows how
The Balcony, 1868-9, oil to have the best table in an expensive restaurant ready when he arrives;
on canvas
who, seemingly instinctively, orders the right wine, who knows, in
Manet’s painting was perhaps
the first case in which the short, how to make the world work as if for him, this is savoir-faire.
conditions of the urban Savoir-voir is another matter. How, we ask, can one know how to see?
promeneur were literally
Yet the most powerful weapon of the artist, in a capitalist society that
imported into the Salon itself.
His choice to represent the act needs constantly to redefine its utility, is the artist’s command of the
of viewing itself was radical,
visual. If seeing is believing, then representing is to have ultimate
yet his art historical debt—this
time to Goya—was not missed control of the seen world.
by visually cultured Parisians. To illustrate this point we could look at Manet’s The Balcony
(1868-9) which is, just that, a full-scale representation of a balcony in
modern Paris [48], The bottom of the painting is the lower/forward
edge of the balcony; the top is that of the glazed aperture that permits
intercourse between inside and outside; the picture’s actual frame must
have served both to protect the picture and to stand in for the archi¬
tectural moulding of the window. We see three life-size figures (with a
fourth, a shadowy servant), all of whom are occupied in looking out of
the picture at something or someone. The dark-haired seated woman
(the model was the painter Berthe Morisot) looks laterally, presumably
at the world-in-the-streets. The woman with the flower-hat looks at
us, the viewer, and the sole gentleman looks at her. There is a hierarchy
of gazes, all of which deal with some sort of desire. Yet the ultimate
mystery of the painting is that, when we imagine it hung high on the
wall of the Salon exhibition in 1868, it almost becomes an actual bal¬
cony and we, as viewers of the Salon, are transformed into the human
traffic of the boulevard. One of them gazes abstractly, refusing to meet
the gaze of others. The second looks directly into the eyes of the
viewer, threading the needle of urban consciousness, connecting the
synapse of sentiment. How much more modern can one be?
Viewers have long been accustomed to portrait figures with their
eyes staring at us as we move around a room. And we learn from count¬
less gallery talks and country-house visits that virtually every periph¬
eral figure in the history of figure painting who makes eye contact with
the viewer is actually a self-portrait of an artist. We have also learned
from critics of eighteenth-century art of the two modes of representa¬
tion that Michael Fried has termed absorption and theatricality.4
Absorption literally blots out our consciousness as viewers, forcing us
to give ourselves to the person or persons portrayed because they are
absolutely unconscious of us as viewers. The other side of the equation,
theatricality, involves the heightened consciousness of viewing, in
which we have brokered an agreement with the figure(s) in the paint-
ing, and each of us seems to acknowledge the existence of the other.
Manet, not being an eighteenth-century painter, had it both ways.
In The Balcony, Manet painted an image about viewing: the sexual¬
ity, anonymity, and hierarchy of viewing. As such, the subject of his

84 REPRESENTATION, VISION, AND ‘REALITY’

THE ART OF SEEING 85
painting is contemporary urban visual culture. His painting also places
the viewer of the painting in the position of being viewed by the figures
in the painting, so that the traditional function of the painting, as a
world viewed and consciously represented, is reversed. It is precisely
Manet’s consciousness of the representational efficacy of viewing that
characterizes his particular modernism. The Balcony makes clear that,
in modern art, the viewer is as important as the viewed, that seeing or
perception is itself now the subject of art. The viewer is temporary, the
painting is permanent.

The human eye

The history of modern representation developed alongside new ideas
about seeing itself. The very way the eye sees or perceives was the sub¬
ject of intense research in the nineteenth and twentieth century, and
the implication of all this research is that perception itself is conven¬
tional rather than natural, bounded by the physiognomy of the human
eye and by the emotional and psychological state of the mind that
receives those sensations. It is no accident that the first important
scientist who addressed the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris was
Michel-Eugene Chevreul (in 1839) and that he taught the students
about mixtures of colour in terms of the developing knowledge of the
physiology of the human eye. The greatest theoreticians of this period
were convinced that the answers to questions about the nature of light
and reality could best be found by studying the eye. Alexandre-
Edmond Becquerel, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, published his
great study of light {La Lumiere, ses causes et ses effets) in 1867 andi868,
just as the young Impressionists were making their first truly confident
outdoor pictures and the year before two simultaneous (and pre¬
mature) announcements of the development of colour photography.
The eye was, for scientists and for artists, an organ to be analysed as the
most sophisticated instrument known to record visual sensation.5
We know from the writings of Jules Laforgue in 1883 about the
physiological origins of Impressionism, and that the Impressionists
were vitally concerned with these developing scientific notions of
perception, the nature of light, and colour theory.

Even if one remains only fifteen minutes before a landscape, [he tells us] one’s
work will never be the real equivalent of the fugitive reality, but rather the
record of the response of a certain unique sensibility to a moment which can
never be reproduced exactly for the individual, under the excitement of the
landscape at a certain moment of its luminous life that can never be duplicated
.... Subject and object are then irretrievably in motion, inapprehensible and
unapprehending. In the flashes of identity between subject and object lies the
nature of genius. And any attempt to codify such flashes is but an academic
exercise.6

86 REPRESENTATION, VISION, AND ‘REALITY’

In 1869 Pissarro inscribed a drawing with the tantalizing phrase ‘a land¬
scape seen through a completely transparent vapour, the colours mixed
one into the other and trembling’. Not a mention of Louveciennes, ol
modern subject-matter, of the suburbanization of nature, or any of
the other aspects of Impressionist subject-matter written about so
extensively by scholars of the last generation.' And, when thinking
about Impressionist practice in these terms, one can easily move to its
rigorous synthesis in the practice of Seurat and Neo-Impressionism
and to its fluorescence in the tantalizing later writing of Monet, who
considered the subject of his paintings to be an ‘envelope of light’
rather than specific forms.
The struggle to achieve what Laforgue called a flash of identity
between subject and object was almost universally accepted as the duty
of the modern artist. The pictorial or stylistic manifestations of this
general idea are so diverse that they resist easy classification. Even
within the realm of French landscape painting, if one were to place
well-chosen examples of Realist, Neo-Impressionist, Fauve, and
Cubist landscapes or cityscapes in one gallery, it would be difficult to
imagine that they were all painted, partially, if not completely, in front
of an actual landscape against which the painter measured the success
or failure of his representation. This very idea makes it clear that
who painted the landscape and when the landscape was painted is as
important as the landscape motif or view itself, and this condition
remains true throughout the history of modern painting. In this way,
many of the highly complex attempts at modern iconography that
confine themselves to an analysis of the artist’s representational subject
per se (a bridge, river, tree, or haystack) are doomed to failure.
If modern reality is in constant flux and if the materials, techniques,
and concepts that underlie that representational strategy are also
changing, there is a built-in instability in the system of modern repres¬
entation to which artists must respond. It is also clear that their ways of
doing this varied widely.

Transparency and unmediated modernism

The most obvious way to represent modern reality is to choose as one’s
subjects those aspects of the visual world unavailable or not invented in
the past. In this way, the modern painter could paint a railway station
like Francis Frith [5]; the Eiffel Tower like countless artists; a fashion¬
able sea-crossing like the French artist James Tissot (1836-1902);
an absolutely new cafe like Manet; or a zoo like Marc. This subject-
oriented representational strategy cannot be undervalued simply
because it is so obvious. Yet, in many cases, artists who chose this
strategy were less interested in the means of representation, in the
subjective aspect of the modernist flash evoked by Faforgue, than they
were in the sheer modernity of the represented subject. Works of this

TRANSPARENCY AND UNMEDIATED MODERNISM 87

49 Mary Cassatt
Little Girl in a Blue Armchair,
1878, oil on canvas
The young American painter,
Mary Cassatt, was brought into
the Impressionist circle in the
late 1870s by Degas, who had
relatives in the United States
and had visited the country in
1872. This canvas, painted for
inclusion in the art exhibition
of the 1878 International
Exhibition in Paris, has often
been called a collaborative
effort between Degas and
Cassatt. The American
remained in France through¬
out her working life, joining
Whistler and Sargent as
American expatriates abroad.

sort could be painted in a wide variety of modernist styles or in careful

replications of academic practice, but their chief value to their artists
and clients was in the skilful, and clearly recognizable, representation
of a modern subject [49],
Another strategy in the aesthetic of modern representation in¬
volved the artist in the technological advances in seeing that came
about due to microscopes, X-rays, motion-photography, and various
filtered-light modes of photography. The vast popularity of micro¬
scopic images, and the fascination with the recording of planets and
the solar system with telescopes, had a real impact on the makers of
painted representations, particularly in the first three decades of the
twentieth century. Linda Henderson has described the use made by
artists of mechanical representations of the world that describe visual
realms inaccessible to the human eye except through magnification or
mechanical modes of representation.8 Although different in certain
crucial ways from other forms of modern visual analysis, both their
visuality and their modernity must be stressed. The cellular and pris¬
matic abstractions of Czech vanguard painters like Kupka, the light
representations of Delaunay, and other types of abstraction are based
quite concretely in the realm of the visual, not just the visual of the
unaided human eye.
One of the most persistent aesthetic notions associated with this
strand of modernism concerns the technique of the artist. Unlike
Transparent Realist and Impressionist painters who call little attention
to their mode(s) of representation, most artists who described the
modern visual world were obsessed with how they represented as with
what they represented [50], A good deal of the forced banality of much
modern iconography, portraits, still lifes, simple genre scenes, and

88 REPRESENTATION, VISION, AND ‘REALITY’

50 Henri de Toulouse-
Lautrec
At the Moulin Rouge: The
Dance, 1890, oil on canvas
Toulouse-Lautrec was a
member of one of the oldest
and most important aristo¬
cratic families in France,
and, despite his adoption of a
bohemian lifestyle, remained
attached to that family until
his death. In many ways,
Toulouse-Lautrec was a
connoisseur of low-life, and
this representation of the
famous Parisian dance-hall
and beer garden can be seen
as a work made in direct
aesthetic descent from the
earlier paintings of Degas and
prints of Daumier.

landscapes, is intended to force the viewer away from the subject itself
as the locus of artistic interpretation. Instead, the manner of the repre¬
sentation becomes in this sense the subject, and no serious study of
modern art can deny the truth of this thoroughly traditional modernist
notion. From Impressionist views of perfectly ordinary scenes to the
generally uninspired subject-matter of Cubist and Fauvist painters,
modern artists have been deeply committed to the tact that modern
seeing or, to return to Emily Carr, fresh seeing can be applied to any¬
thing from a tree to a brothel. In this way of thinking, the more ordin¬
ary the subject, the more the viewer can appreciate the ‘fresh seeing’ of
the artist.

Surface fetishism and unmediated modernism

Among the many concerns of the painter at mid-century was the in¬
creasing popularity of photography. Both daguerreotypes and albumen
prints from glass negatives are completely focused, possessing a high
degree of surface detail, similar to the neo-classical academic finish of
artists such as the Frenchman Louis-Leopold Boilly (1761-1845) and
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867), throughout the visual
field. Perhaps as a result of the perceived competition from photo¬
graphy, painters from Courbet to Picasso developed a painting style as
a coloured relief in which the spatial and material nature of paint itself
was vital to the meaning of the painting. The painter strove to involve
the viewer in the process of artistic creation by fetishizing their major
material, paint.
This overt representational materialism makes clear to the paint¬
ing’s viewer that the painted representation at which they are gazing is

SURFACE FETISHISM AND UNMEDIATED MODERNISM 89

51 Paul Cezanne
The Artist's Father, 1866,
oil on canvas
This paintingand a small
group of other canvases by
Cezanne and Pissarro took
Courbet’s palette-knife realism
to new heights, making overt
stylistic links between easel
paintingand plastering,
trowelling, and other types of
physical labour. The complete
crudity of this work’s facture
contrasts strongly with the
ha ut-bourgeois imagery
of the portrait.

handmade, that its making is part of its meaning, and that a good deal
of the signature qualities of a painting stem directly from the painter’s
personal manner of manipulating paint and surface texture. As we have
seen, the most extreme cases of this are the palette-knife paintings of
Cezanne made in the late 1860s [51], but this painting is different in
degree rather than in kind from the modernist paintings of the
Macchiolli or even of the painterly society portraitists like those by the
American Sargent, the Swede Zorn [52], the Italian Boldini, or the
Russian Arkhipov. When we consider within this materialist strategy
the paintings of artists such as van Gogh, the Fauves, the Ashcan
School in New York, and the heavily worked surfaces of Patrick Henry
Bruce, Delaunay (1881-1936) and Leger, we can see the sheer range of
apparent styles within a single aesthetic system.9
For all these artists, the sheer physical reality of paint, its viscosity,
translucency, and colour, when brought together with a variety of tools,
brushes, knives, and spatulas, presented the painter with the oppor¬
tunity to be a virtuoso very much like a great pianist or singer. Thus
crudity of execution became a virtue, and modern artists worked hard

90 REPRESENTATION, VISION, AND ‘REALITY’

52 Anders Zorn
Self-Portrait, 1896, oil
on canvas
With Boldini, Sargent, Sorolla,
and Mancini, Zorn (1860-
1920) was amongthe inter¬
national exponents of a freely
brushed modernism that
stressed the sheer painterly
bravura of the genius painter.
Although disparaged by many
contemporary critics and
theorists, this type of painting
was immensely successful.
Zorn exhibited internationally
and briefly taught at the
School of the Art Institute of
Chicago, where he promoted
this form of modernism to
eager Midwesterners and
painted an important portrait
of the most important collector
of French vanguard art in
Chicago, Bertha Potter
Palmer.

not to disguise their working methods by refusing to bring their works

to a conventionally acceptable level of finish.
Indeed, the processes of conceiving and making a representation
were so interlinked in modernist theory that a true modernist painter
could not finish a picture because, if he did, the conception of the
painting must have existed at the onset of the process, making the pro¬
cess itself irrelevant. Thus, when we see the multiple scrapings of the
Frenchmen Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) and the
clusters of barelv visible and rejected lines in Picasso we see direct evid¬
ence of the artist’s work, making it impossible for us to interpret the
representation as purely an image, but as a process of unique creative
interaction among artist, subject, and material.
A particularly succinct embodiment of this notion can be found in
Edgar Degas’s painting, The Millinery Shop from the mid-i88os. His
young milliner makes her hat as Degas makes his painting, and her
unfinished hat is also the least conventionally finished portion of the
painting. Indeed, the section of the painting containing that hat was
scraped and reworked by Degas, who refused to disguise his process
both because it is central to the aesthetic of modernism and because it
was part of a complex representational strategy in which subject and
process were directly linked. An analogous claim can be made for
Cezanne’s canonical, and persistently puzzling, Still-Life with Plaster
Cupid (c.1895). In this curious painting on paper (unique in his oeuvre)
Cezanne allowed his paper support to show through in the interstices
between his painted marks, building up a self-consciously worked
surface that linked all the conceptual realms of his painting: actual

SURFACE FETISHISM AND UNMEDIATED MODERNISM 91

53 Unknown photographer
A London Slum, 1889, gelatin-
silver print _
Many photographers were
involved in the pictorial docu¬
mentation of urban life, and
this anonymous work from the
1880s serves as visual proof
of the horrible conditions of
urban life in the British capital.
Certain of these works were
used by advocates of social
justice to make visible parts
of the actual urban world
experienced by few people
of wealth and power. This vast
documentary project con¬
tinues to th is day, has no co¬
herent plan, and is backed by
no institution or government.

54 JacobA.Riis
Flashlight Photograph of
One of Four Peddlers who
Slept in a Cellar, c.1890,
gelatin-silver print
In the generation of Henry
James, Edith Wharton, and
John Singer Sargent, Riis
represented the seething
slums in which the new
immigrants to America lived
in New York. The directness
of his photographs, and the
fact that they are f u nda-
mentally a collaboration
between photographer and
subject, makes them partic¬
ularly important. Unlike most
representations of urban
slums made on the streets or
in public places, Riis actually
entered apartments and other
makeshift dwellings to show
a side of urban life unseen
by prosperous New Yorkers.
sculpture and painted sculpture; actual still-life and painted still-life;
child and adult; painting and drawing. Both Degas and Cezanne are
involved in painting visual manifestos about the very nature of paint¬
ing, but, in both cases, they raise rather than answer questions about
the new form of representation.

Photography and unmediated modernism

Histories of modern art have always found it difficult to find links
between the nineteenth-century preoccupation with the relationship

92 REPRESENTATION, VISION, AND ‘REALITY’

55 Evelyn George Carey
View of the Internal Viaduct
Near One of the Cantilever
Towers, Forth Bridge,
Scotland, c.1888, gelatin-
silver print from a collodion
negative
This vast steel structure was
documented as often as the
Brooklyn Bridge or the Eiffel
Tower. This photograph forces
us into the vertiginous inter¬
play of girders and steel
elements, resulting in an
image that almost defies
gravity. This, and many other
photographs of steel struc¬
tures made in the second
half of the nineteenth century,
have few art-historical pre¬
cedents save the late etchings
of Piranesi.

between reality and representation (or subject and object), and

twentieth-century notions of the autonomy of the picture that lead
inevitably to abstraction.
The fascinatingly intertwined history of painting and photography
in the nineteenth and twentieth century has not been explored fully in
the history of either medium. Indeed, one of the basic tenets of mod¬
ernism, that every medium has its unique properties and is involved in
a ceaseless conversation with itself, has prevented historians from deal¬
ing seriously with basic issues common to all modern representational
media.
Whether of historic buildings, sections of the landscape, or studies
of the criminally insane, photographs were meant to be analysed in
groups and studied for particular purposes, only some of which could
be known to the photographers themselves [53, 54], In this sense,
photography and print-making participated in a process of visual cata¬
loguing with its roots in the Enlightenment, but with considerably
wider audiences and distribution thanks to the image explosion of the
modern capitalist world [55, 56]. Yet this idea of a document and of the
representation as part of a process of research and analysis was never far
from painting. Indeed, painters of this period tended to restrict their
imagery and to make multiple representations of the same or similar
subjects, such as the study of prostitution by Toulouse-Lautrec, so
that their work came to have a sense of collective order and rigour
of conception analogous to photographic documentation. This aspect
of modern art also affected the practice of serial painters like the
late Impressionists, specifically Monet [57], who so standardized his

PHOTOGRAPHY AND UNMEDIATED MODERNISM 93

56 Margaret Bourke-White
High-Level Bridge, Cleveland,
1929, gelatin-silver print
This is one of literally
thousands of modernist
photographs to represent
industrial technology in the
new city. Cast-iron and steel
construction, a novelty in the
mid-nineteenth century came
to be increasingly common in
the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Photo¬
graphers vied to compose
images that lent a vertiginous
vitality to these structures and
thus to create emblems of
modernity. Bourke-White's
photograph is late in the
tradition, but manages to
sustain its power.

working procedures that he painted in a regular manner similar to the

way a photographer created and printed photographs.
What is particularly fascinating about the documentary and artistic
development of photography in the nineteenth century is that it can be
compared directly with that of modern painting. From the early uses of
multiple negatives by Gustav le Gray to the complex pictorial con¬
structions of Robinson and Rejlander in England during the 1870s and
1880s, an entire strand of art photography borrowed notions of com¬
positional order and finish, treating photographic prints as it they were
highly mediated and self-consciousless constructed works of art. Their
very acceptance of photography as a conventional medium capable of
modification must be seen as a part of a fascination with experimental
process that is also a part of modern painting [58],
Even at its onset, photographic practice was divided into two com¬
pletely different techniques, daguerrotype and calotype, the results of
which were aesthetically opposed despite their equal reliance on the
camera. A careful study of modern photography shows an obsession
with technical invention that goes hand in hand with an ever-widening
imagery and an ever-changing visual character. Photographers and
their viewers learned very quickly that photographs were only partially
true to the visual character of their subjects. And it was the conven¬
tionality of the medium of photography with which photographers
struggled. Perhaps the most important of these struggles in modern
photography was that of P. H. Emerson, the brilliant English photo-

94 REPRESENTATION, VISION, AND ‘REALITY’

57 Claude Monet grapher who, after creating a distinguished body of work that he called
Weeping Willow, 1919, oil ‘naturalistic photography’, actually renounced the medium, declaring
on canvas
with a dramatic finality that photography was not an art.10
Recent studies of the painting
technique of Monet have The very struggle of photographers to define themselves and to be
stressed the layered, highly
defined by the critical world as artists can be read as a reversal of the
complex surfaces on which
he laboured for weeks, even
strategy of modern painters, who defined themselves in opposition to
months, before completing conventional notions of art. For photographers, notions of focus were
the painting. The thick, crusty
as important as notions of finish were to painters, and each struggled
surface of this late master¬
piece, completed atthe end with compositional strategies, forever balancing their motifs or
of the First World War, makes subjects with the field of vision that contained them. And in all this
the tree trunk, the foliage,
there was intense questioning of the very idea, and function, of art in a
and the light itself equally
palpable. Monet is reputed capitalist or consumer-oriented society.
to have signed and dated this
picture on Armistice Day,
when War officially ended.
Beyond the oil sketch
We are accustomed to thinking of the oil sketch as being the purvey of
the Impressionist, for whom the act of representation was theoretically
linked to the direct experience of the motif by the painting throughout
the act of representation [59], While Monet often completed his works

BEYOND THE OIL SKETCH 95

 58 John Dudley Johnston
Liverpool an Impression,
1908, gum-bichromate print
If ever a photograph was a
translation of painterly pic¬
torial values, it is this superb
pictorialist photograph of
industrial Liverpool. Taking
his cues from paintings (and
prints) by Whistler, Johnston
conveyed a misty, indefinite
image of an almost deserted
urban realm, intentionally
poetic and socially un¬
problematic. The photo¬
graphic obsession with mist,
steam, fog, and other spatially
positive atmospheric effects
was a result, in part, of their
desire to remove unnecessary
visual incidence from their
images, givingthem the status
of fine art.

59 SandorGalimberti
View of a Street in Nagybanya,
1907, oil on canvas
Nagybanya, an attractive
village in present-day
Romania, was the Barbizon
of the Hungarian avant-garde
in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries.
Here, artists who worked
everywhere from Paris to
Bucharest would gatherfor
the summer season to paint
modern pictures of traditional
village life. Galimberti’s
(1883-1915) vertiginous view
of a street imposes an urban
aesthetic onto a village.

in the studio, tar away from the motif itself, this process allowed him to
adjust colours and surfaces to the conditions of exhibition lighting and
to create harmonies among pictures so that they hang well together 11
us practice was surely also maintained by Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro,
idegas, and others. 7

96 representation, vision, and ‘reality’

60 Konrad Krzyzanowski
The Landscape From Finland,
1908, oil on canvas
The plein-air landscape
movement in which artists
sought out potent motifs
and transcribed them directly
was practised throughout
the Euro-global world. This
wonderfully lively painting was
made by the Polish painter
Krzyzanowski (1872-1922),
on a trip north to Finland in
the summer of 1908.

Many ot the most artificial ol canvases were, in fact, painted in front

of the motif; virtually all the oil sketches of Seurat, Signac, and others
represent direct responses to their subjects, and we know that the most
famous of the artificial landscapes of the 1880s, the Talisman by the
French artist Paul Serusier (1863-1927), was painted out of doors dur¬
ing a short period of time, just as Monet painted his Impressionist
landscapes.12 Gauguin instructed Serusier to exaggerate all his colours
in creating the Talisman so that the resulting representation, small as it
was, attained the same force as the motif through compression and
chromatic intensification.
More often than not, artists who accepted the theory of unmedi¬
ated modernism practised their beliefs as simply as possible. After a
period of subject selection and preparation, they stood in front of their
motif and worked to transcribe it as they saw it, hoping that their
representations would capture that magical synaptic link between the
consciousness of the artist and his inspiration from nature [60]. For
them, other works of art, whether in the original or reproduction, were
a hindrance, polluting the purity of their quest for authentic individual
experience as it could be represented.

Cubism
The biggest break from this strand of painting seems to have occurred
in Paris at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1909

CUBISM 97
61 PerKrohg
Female Nude, 1919, oil
on canvas _
Although scarcely known
outside his native Norway,
Krohg (1852-1925) was an
artist who was familiar with
Parisian Cubism in both theory
and practice. This 1919
painting was madefrom a
model in ways no different
procedurally than those used
by Manet, Renoir, and Degas
in the 1860s and 1870s. One
can relate his work more easily
to the practice ofthe Puteaux
Cubists Gleizes and Metzinger
than to the canonical Cubism
of Braque and Picasso.

and 1910 Picasso and Braque began, under the distinct influence ofthe
late work of Cezanne, to construct pictures by building up forms and
figures from hundreds of short strokes ol paint, many of which were
linear. These paintings, dubbed Cubist, have often been considered to
be the decisive moment in early twentieth-century art, after which the
creation of an utterly non-objective painting was possible. Yet in look¬
ing at analytic Cubist paintings and in reading the early sources one is
struck over and over again that Cubist painters worked en face dn
motif just like Impressionist and many Post-Impressionist artists. They
also give us manifold clues in the picture that enable us to decipher the
subject of the painting. Indeed, Cubists attempted to see anew by rep¬
resenting anew, and the claims made for their syncopated canvases
were often rooted in actual sight. One of the most persistent of these
has the Cubist painter moving around a static subject, compressing
the many silhouettes and contours they observe into a single canvas. In
this way, the portraits of Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler or Vollard become
a view of either man through time; in a simplistic sense, a four¬
dimensional representation.
In spite of all the early criticism that situates Cubism as the anti¬
thesis of the then fashionable Impressionism, a good deal of the theory
of Cubism flows easily from that of the earlier artists. The Impression¬
ists, several of whom (Monet, Degas, and Renoir) were alive when
Picasso and Braque carried out their revolutionary experiments, were
equally fascinated both with time and with a motion-filled idea of

98 REPRESENTATION, VISION, AND ‘REALITY’

 the world. The sense of Impressionism as being a representation of
momentary time or short durations is transformed by the Cubists into
an idea of painting as a compressed series of observations made over a
comparatively long duration. In each theory, the particular character of
the representer is integral to the representation, the artist’s receptivity
to the motif as well as the preparation that equips them to represent.
Yet, where Impressionists immersed themselves in the larger world
out of doors, eschewing, at least in theory, the studios of academic
artists, the Cubists followed studio artists to a certain extent, in
their patient observations of static forms in interiors, where seated
subjects sat immobile and still-life elements were arranged for patient
observation [61].
When we read the favourable criticism written about the Cubists
during their breakthrough years, particularly the writing of Roger
62 Moriz Melzer
Bridge-City, 1921-3, oil
on canvas
The sheerformal exuberance
of this urban representation
suggests the progressive
urban politics of advanced
painters after the First World
Warand before the final
financial and cultural debacle
of Weimar culture.

CUBISM 99
63 Nils von Dardel Allard, we are thrust into a critical system that thought ol Cubism
The Trans-Siberian Express, as being anti-impressionist, just as the Synthetists and the Neo-
1918, oil on canvas
Impressionists had before them.1' Perhaps, Allard was unable to see
In this witty provincial Cubo-
Futurist painting, the train the extraordinary links between Cubist theory and that ol the artists he
itselfand itsabilitytodefine repudiated because so much of the most persuasive criticism about
and control the landscape is
the subject of the painting.
Impressionism was long out of print and because, by 1910, the staunch
How far we are from the defenders of Impressionism were the grand old men of French letters.
capital, and how near.
Impressionism was now to Cubism what academic painting had been
to Impressionism.
The works of Cubists and Futurists created a visual vocabulary that
had a more revolutionary effect on conventional modes of painting
than had those of the Realists, Impressionists, or the various Post-
Impressionists that preceded them. Indeed, their fascination with a
rapidly shifting urban environment as being the subject of an equally
rapidly shifting modern painting proves that there is more that con¬
nects them as moderns than divides them as representers [62].
Tolerance of diversity of style among the Impressionists was so great
that virtually every nineteenth-century movement that followed had
its roots in their membership.

Representation, time, and the city in Futurism and Cubism

The artists who, in a certain sense, gave new impetus to the modern
fascination with light and urban reality were the Orphists and the
Futurists. In the paintings of Delaunay, Severini, and others, the mod¬
ern city takes on a transformative energy that is only barely hinted at in

IOO REPRESENTATION, VISION, AND ‘REALITY’

64 Wyndham Lewis
The Crowd, 1914-15, oil and
pencil on canvas
Lewis conveys a sense of
urgency, scalelessness, and
impersonality in this urban
abstraction completed just on
the eve of the First World War,
Here, the city has no mould¬
ings, no columns, no comfort¬
ing figural allegories. It is
defined by geometric open¬
ings and grids amidst which
automatons move in contorted
rhythms.

irrrrr
rrrrr
rrrrr
rrrrr
rrrrr
nrrrr woe

rrrrr
rrrrr
rrrrr
rrrrr
rrrrr
rrrrr
the urban paintings of Impressionist and Realist artists [63], For the
later artists, the city is subsumed into a pictorial energy field in which
aspects of its visual character are seized, summarized, and scattered
across the pictorial surface. Hence the surface is no longer a field of
vision, but a field of action or compressed observation [64, 65], In a
sense, though, Baudelaire’s flaneur, the lonely urban connoisseur who
walks through the city, observing it from a detached perspective, re¬
mains the persona of these twentieth-century urban artists.
The metaphor of the window, through which Manet’s figures move
to enter the upper spaces of the boulevard in The Balcony, remains for
many modern painters the distancing device that it had been for
Realists and Impressionists (see 48). The fluttering figures at the edge
of Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines (1873) define the viewer’s vantage
point as a windowed balcony, just as the insistent grill in View through

CUBISM IOI
65 George Grosz
The Street, 1915, oil on
canvas
The cataclysm of a nameless
German street Is the subject
of Grosz’s powerfully
Expressionist exercise in
urban modernism. The
crescent moon presides over
a city where crime and despair
seem dominant, proving that
modernism was not always
optimistic and progressive.

a Balcony Grill by the French painter Gustave Caillebotte (1848-94)

locates us in the modern city. Yet for Delaunay, whose window series
is among the highest achievements of modern urban painting, the
window is fetishized, becoming itself the subject of the picture, its
pulled-back curtains becoming the contours of the Eiffel Tower,
its mullions dividing the picture field into geometric zones. And
Delaunay’s absolute fascination with prismatic colour too has its roots
in the theories of perception and light that are central to the Impres¬
sionist achievement. The convergence of the outside and the inside in
many post-Cubist urban views is remarkable.
There were few young modern artists anywhere in the world who
had not read, seen, or heard about Paul Signac’s great book of 1899,
From Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism. Signac and his highly articulate
colleague and friend Maurice Denis were among a group of artist-
writers who defined modern art for artists and whose texts created a

102 REPRESENTATION, VISION, AND ‘REALITY’

66 Gosta Adrian-Nilsson
The City by the Sea, 1919,
oil on canvas
This elegant small painting
proves that the Cubo-
Futurists' theories of urban
representation reached the
farthest edges of Europe and
the Americas by 1920.
Indeed, forall its horrors,
the First World War brought
to many Europeans and
Americans a greater sense
of international awareness.
In looking at a provincial city
by the sea, Adrian-Nilsson
created a cosmopolitan
image.

sense of the artist’s contribution to a very young and vital history. The
fact that, in most of these texts, Impressionism was viewed as a sort of
tiny step in the evolution of modern art cannot in any sense undercut
its prescriptive importance. This has been recognized most clearly by
Richard Shiff, who located in Impressionism not only the seeds of its
own death, but also the possibilities that were to be systematically ex¬
plored by painters for several generations following them [66],14
Indeed by 1900 the historicity of modernism, the sense of its tradition,
had become as strong within modern representation as the rebellious
anti-traditional discourse of the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s.

CUBISM 103
k-.j-
%"• ? , I
 Image/Modernism
and the
Graphic Traffic
‘The Pop artists did images that people walking down Broadway could
recognize in a split second—comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers,
celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles—all the great
modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to
notice at all.’
Andy Warhol, POPism (New York, 1980), 3.

When Paul Gauguin finally gave up on Paris, turning to a cheaper life

and a search lor a possible paradise on the remote island of Tahiti in
1891, he took a large collection of photographs with him. Today, unfor¬
tunately, these are lost, as are many artists’ collections of useful photo¬
graphs that are crucial to an understanding of modern art. However,
we know from a good many of his borrowings and from a few bits of
concrete evidence what some of them were. He had purchased porno¬
graphic photographs on the way in Port Said; photographs of paintings
like Manet’s Olympia, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’s L’Esperance, Women
of Algiers by the French painter Ferdinand-Victor-Eugene Delacroix
(1798-1863); photographs of the great Buddhist temple at Borabadour
in Java; and a large group of reproductions. He also had a collection of
Japanese prints and printed papers.1
His cannibalizing of this collection was once decried as a form of
plagiarism. He borrowed Cranach (a reclining Diana) and Manet in
making what one critic called his Black Olympia in 1896, and his well-
thumbed copy of the sale catalogue for the collection of his guardian
Gustav Arosa gave him access to paintings by Delacroix and Courbet
among others. Perhaps the academics among us despise this unaccred¬
ited borrowing, preferring the tidier world of footnoted quotations.
But Gauguin would have laughed at such pedantry, declaring his
absolute freedom to plunder the past just as the Impressionists
plundered the visual world of the present.2
Pissarro wrote scathing letters to his sons about Gauguin’s religious
paintings and about the younger artist’s search for art within art
(and spirituality).3 When we step back from the smoke emanating
from this artistic feud, we see that artists who spent their lives borrow¬
Detail of 71 ing from other sources, cobbling together pictures from fragments of

i°5
other pictures, were as embedded in the capitalist world as were their
moralistic counterparts who linked art and vision so insistently.
With accessible museums throughout Europe, easily available re¬
productions, and the new obsession with temporary exhibitions in large
urban centres, the image bank of the artist increased so greatly that one
could be modern simply by taking a new look at traditional imagery. It
was, indeed, the sheer multiplicity and non-hierarchical variety of
sources for works of art that constituted a major strand in capitalist
modernism. There have been few detailed studies of this phenomenon.
We have learned about the sources of Manet, Gauguin, Cezanne,
Seurat, and many other canonical artists of modernism, but these stud¬
ies have not been systematized. Indeed, the reliance of such analysis on
the traditional strategies of the iconographer has meant that, in many
cases, sources are identified as part of a type of analysis that locates the
meaning of a work of art in these sources. It would be more profitable
to study the graphic traffic as a system, in the ways that Estelle Jussim
and Beatrice Farwell have begun, following the model of William
Ivins, whose Prints and Visual Communications made such an impact
on the study of popular culture.4 We know that many of the most im¬
portant artistic plunderers in the history of modern art were not highly
principled about their sources. Manet used major masterpieces of
Western easel painting, anonymous photographs, and mass-produced
prints with equal ease, borrowing compositions and figures with little
apparent regard for the artistic status of the source. And just think of
Cezanne in the Louvre: his surviving sketchbooks make it clear that he
was absolutely catholic in his taste in painting and sculpture, borrow-
ing figures from sublime paintings by artists such as Rubens and
Boucher and more straightforward works by Claude LeFevre (1632-
75), Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714-89), and others.5 There were many
senses of hierarchy of images that operated simultaneously in culture,
creating a relationship between images and people that had no preced¬
ent in human history.
The system controlling the production, dissemination, and con¬
sumption of images is the modern visual condition. In fact, modern
men and women operate in a world of images, many of which impinge
constantly on their relationship with the real world. Although a prin¬
cipal strand of modernism eschewed, even battled, this system, the
second strand either embraced or subverted it, engaging actively in the
world of virtual images with indirect relationships to visual reality.
This was a type of modernism that persisted throughout the period
studied in this book, from Symbolist easel-painting, prints, and photo¬
graphs and a good deal of Neo-Impressionism to Surrealism. Image/
modernism is a tradition of art in which the encounter between
artist and motif, or between artist and canvas, which is important as a
diiect relationship for the unmediated modernist, is subjugated to that

106 image/modernism and the graphic traffic

 between the artist and the world of images they cannibalize. This
image/ modernist makes representations not from the world, but from
other representations, creating works in an endless flow of art
production that has its own internal mechanisms. The art of Gauguin,
Toroop, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (English, 1828-82), Aubrey Beardsley
(English, 1872-98), Gustav Klimt (Austrian, 1862-1918), Max Ernst
(German, 1891-1976), and countless others can be placed in this
tradition. Many of the artists whose work has been discussed in the
chapter on unmediated modernism made major forays into image/
modernism. Courbet and Renoir, great sensualists, made canvases that
vie in every way with earlier museum masterpieces by Rubens and
Rembrandt and many others; artists often had to feign rather than to
practise naivete.
Again, the styles used by these artists range from the old-master
precision and the closely related dream photography of Magritte to the

67 Stanislaw Wyspiariski
Gtowka Helenki, 1900,
pastel on cardboard
Wyspiariski was the most
varied and accomplished
artist of the young Polish
modernists. Trained in Paris,
he returned to Cracow to com¬
mence a lifelong represen¬
tational project that included
architecture, set decoration,
painting, illustration, stained
glass window design,
furniture, and writing. The
most important Realist writer
forthetheatre in Polish,
Wyspiariski also turned his
talents towards portraiture,
representing his friends and
family in paintings and pastels
of an astounding variety. This
is one of the many represen¬
tations of his daughter, whom
he studied throughout her
childhood.

image/modernism and the graphic traffic 107

smeared and gesturally defined images of Moreau. There were the
thinned, watery surfaces of Munch, where the texture of the canvas
unifies the image like paper unifies a watercolour or becomes light in a
lithograph, and the crusty pastels of Redon and the Polish artist
Stanislaw Wyspiariski (1869-1907), whose surfaces are as visually as¬
sertive as is the imagery they embody [67], Perhaps because of this styl¬
istic range, studies of image/modernism have been obsessed with
iconography or the explanation of the meaning of the image repres¬
ented. This has produced fascinating studies of such themes as:
chimera, homoerotic idealization of the male nude, and occult Chris¬
tian themes. Few scholars have confronted the possibility that the
meaninglessness or deliberate iconological imprecision of these images
may be more important than their attachment to particular meanings.
This issue becomes more problematic when one confronts the fact that
a good deal of collage and, particularly montage, can be considered a
form of image/modernism.
When an artist was at play in a world of images, the possibilities
were so great by the middle and later nineteenth century that one could
easily claim that there was more ‘territory’ for the artist in the image
world than in the actual world. Artists confined to the confrontational
strategy of unmediated modernism were hampered to a considerably
greater degree than artists who combed guidebooks, illustrated his¬
tories of art, exhibitions, scientific illustrations, X-rays, posters,
popular prints, and the like for inspiration. In fact, a good many artists
who contributed to image/modernism felt that the imagination was
the single most liberating arena available to modern man.
The logical flaws in this position, though obvious, did little to
undercut the fervour with which image/modernism was practised. In
fact, the real world was expanding at a comparable rate to that of the
image world. Trains, rapid mail, improved shipping, lighting techno-
logy, and so forth conquered larger and larger domains of the physical
world. Night became as visually accessible as day, and scientists and
writers like Jules Verne and H. G. Wells took modern people on voy¬
ages greater than any colonial imagination could grasp. Education
became a cheaper and cheaper commodity as the nineteenth and
twentieth century continued. The education of middle-class artists
like Rossetti, Vuillard, Duchamp, and others was their liberation from
class-bound professions and their introduction to the image world.
It is tempting, of course, to consider image/modernism as simply an
extension of the traditional Western art world, in which artists made
art from a system of images and techniques that were learned through
apprenticeship and the academy. In this system, innovation was en¬
couraged within the boundaries of that image production system,
and the openness of the systems to innovation varied from the extreme
strictures of the production of icons for the Eastern church to the

108 image/modernism and the graphic traffic

68 Ferdinand Hodler relatively loose world controlled equally by the academy and the art
The Night, 1890, oil on
market in eighteenth-century France. If one contrasts the territories of
canvas
The Night, or Sleep, was the
Ferdinand Flodler and the Frenchman Jacques-Louis David (1748—
‘succes de scandale' of 1825), examples of allegorical figure painters who both worked in the
the career of Switzerland's
interstices between two succeeding centuries, that of Flodler is far
greatest modern painter.
When hesentittothe
greater in range [68]. David, though a painter of greater power and art
municipal exhibition in his historical importance, worked within a considerably narrower idea of
native Geneva it was banned,
the picture, narrower because the state remained, for him, the greatest
and like many shocking
masterpieces, made a sen¬ patron and the salon the most important exhibition venue. To put mat¬
sational debut later in the year ters in a sharper perspective, the availability of visual source material
in the Champ-de-Mars Salon
for David was so much less than it was for Hodler that one can safely
in Paris. The nightmarish
figure of the hooded figure, say that the two artists operated in different systems. Even though
who might either arouse or David lived and worked in Paris with access to the greatest collection
castrate the terrified nude
male, together with the eerie
of works of art and images then accessible to the artist (or, at least, the
realism of Hodler's allegorical powerful artist), his visual library was tiny compared to that available to
figures centres the focus of the
the multi-lingual Hodler, who travelled outside southern Switzerland
shocked or amazed viewers
and makes their reactions
to Italy, France, Germany, and Austria, and who had access to an
more immediate. image resource—in books, reproductions, museums, art galleries—
that would have amazed David. It is clear from this contrast that many
modern artists were intimidated rather than liberated by the capitalist
image world. When one contrasts Puvis de Chavannes and Moreau
(Parisian artists who embraced it), with Pissarro and Monet (who
fled its clutches), the moralism of the latters’ consciously unmediated
modernism becomes clear.
The possibilities for the image/modernist were virtually limitless,
and the variety of styles, of source mechanisms, and of recombinant
imagery in image/modernism is extraordinary. The aim of the re¬
mainder of this chapter will be to present and analyse the practice of
successive generations of artists from the Pre-Raphaelites through to
the Surrealists as they manipulated existing images in an almost frantic
attempt to produce new ones of authority and originality.

image/modernism and the graphic traffic 109

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
When we think of the Pre-Raphaelites, with historicity built into their
very name, it is impossible to conceive of their existence before the art
museum, the concept of the history of art, easy travel, reproductions,
and art criticism. Indeed, their very consciousness of history, of con¬
necting to a time in art before the High Renaissance, is a modern
notion. Although there have been various revivals in the history of art
(the Hellenic revival in ancient Roman art, the Renaissance itself,
and, of course, Neo-classicism), the main difference here was that the
artists were aiming for a kind of corrective revivalism [69]. Pre-
Raphaelite theory grew out of the Gothic revival led by Augustus
Pugin, which was such an important part of British taste in the first
half of the nineteenth century, culminating in the historical criticism of
John Ruskin. Whereas the moralism of the Gothic revival had overt
political dimensions, the Pre-Raphaelites attempted a less burdened
revival, and one that, following the lead of Ruskin, accepts Italian art of
the trecento and quattrocento as a touchstone.
At the start of the Pre-Raphaelite movement around the mid¬
century, the spread of lithographic and photographic reproductions
was great, and their project of‘revival’ was precisely in sync with that
of the independent Arundel Society, a group who promoted Italian
religious art of the early and high Renaissance by commissioning
elaborate chromolithographic reproductions of works for schools,
churches, and suitably pious members of the public. Charles Eastlake,
director of the National Gallery in London, directed his purchasing
powers towards the same period in the history of painting, and by the
1870s the British national collections of Italian Renaissance painting
were superior to those of any European country except Italy itself,
many works being accessible to artists in the original. At the same
time, London supplanted Paris as the centre for the old master market,
with dealers and auction houses increasingly selling major works of
Italian art, many of which were thus accessible to the artists, albeit
temporarily. In 1857, less than a decade after the creation of the
Brotherhood, the largest and most important temporary exhibition of
old master painting ever held in Europe was mounted in Manchester,
and British and European artists flocked to see it.6
It is clear that the system of image exchange and transfer did little to
promote intimate relationships between modern artists and specific
works of past art. In fact, the partial, temporary, and fragmentary
nature of modern knowledge of the past is a large part of its nature.
Aitists suffered more from the effects of image glut than from power¬
ful encounters with a single work that left them feeling helpless. For
that reason, the modern scholar has a great deal of difficulty in
analysing the sources of Pre-Raphaelite art, not simply because the
artists disguised their sources, but because there were so many of them

no image/modernism and the graphic traffic

69 Stanley Spencer
Christ's Entry into Jerusalem,
c.1920, oil on canvas
Spencer (1891-1959) made
every effort to disavow
abstraction and to reconnect
modern painting to its Euro¬
pean traditions, as did the
painters of the new realism
in Germany, the muralists in
Mexico, and many members
of the School in Paris. Here, a
major Christian religious event
is reinvented by Spencer and
situated in an English village
from an indeterminate age.
Spencerforms partofa long
tradition of Christian art in
which the central drama of the
life of Christ is reinvented, re¬
costumed, and re-presented
in modern terms. Spencer's
Christ is a modern Englishman
just as van der Weyden’s
St Luke is a Flemish painter.

both visual and literary, and so few of these are clearly traceable. For
that reason, a good deal of writing about art-historical sources during
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century used the loose term
influence rather than the precise term source. Modern university-
trained art historians who want rigour and measurable standards in
their work often dismiss the concept of influence.

Puvis de Chavannes and Gustave Moreau: image/modernism

outside the avant-garde
Two of the greatest French painters of the second half of the nine¬
teenth century were image/modernists, and a familiarity with the work
of both is essential to an understanding of modern art. Pierre Puvis de
Chavannes (1824-98) and Gustave Moreau (1826-98) were thoroughly
and completely academic artists who worked within the terms of the
academy, the official Salon, and state patronage. Yet, unlike many
other artists who embraced official culture, the work of each man
played a vital role in the history of avant-garde art for two reasons: the
first hinges on their extraordinary stylistic achievements, respected by
and influential to younger artists; and the second on their free adapta¬
tions of old masters in ways similar to the transformations of such
sources by Cezanne, Seurat, and Gauguin.
Both Puvis de Chavannes and Moreau were born in the 1820s and
came to artistic maturity in the 1860s. Each was convinced that his art
was formed by a personal aesthetic quest that ended only with death,
and the very individuality of their missions appealed to avant-garde
artists. Unlike Manet, who liked to quote from earlier art so as to

PUVIS DE CHAVANNES AND GUSTAVE MOREAU III

70 Pierre Puvis de
Chavannes
The Shepherd's Song, 1891,
oil on canvas_
Puvis de Chavannes was a
hero of virtually every mod¬
ernist artist from Gauguin to
Picasso. His ceuvrederives
much of its formal rigour from
the fact that he was primarily
a wall-painter working in the
tradition of fresco painting.
The dry surface, relatively
unmodulated colours, and
planar compositions all derive
from wall-painting. Perhaps
because of this, modernist
artists were more captivated
by his forms than by the
relentlessly official imagery
of his work.

71 Gustave Moreau provoke specific comparison, Puvis strove to internalize and transform
The Chimeras, 1884, oil his sources and, hence, to make them modern. In his immense decor¬
on canvas
ative mural, The Shepherd's Song (1891), Puvis treats the water and its
This vast painting is like a
barely synthesized catalogue lawn-covered banks as undifferentiated planes of colour, on which
of Moreau's visual culture. individually posed figures, from disguised sources, are arranged almost
Figu res from a thousa nd
Baroque ceilings mingle with
as if they were cut out and pasted into place [70]. Occasionally, he
others lifted from other would ask a model to adopt a sourced pose and then draw the model.
sources—classical sculpture,
The possibilities for transformation here are great; a female model
Poussin, and Michelangelo—
and the whole seems to com¬ could be posed in a way that has its source in a male figure; the angle of
municate the dizzying representation could be slightly shifted; drapery in a source could be
freedom of the metropolitan
image/ modernist. The fact
removed or added; a small or peripheral figure in a source could be
thattheworkappearsto be transformed into a near-to-centre figure; and the converse of several of
unfinished is another part of these conditions is also possible.
its modernist agenda. Like
masters of modernist imagery The same can be said for the even more influential Moreau, who
like Degas and Cezanne, was, with the aesthetically opposed Pissarro, the greatest teacher in the
Moreau firmly believed that
modern French tradition. Moreau created a school for painters, the
the artistic process was as
important as the imagery of students from which included Matisse, Georges Rouault (1871-1958),
the artist and that artists could Henri Manquin (1874-1949), and Charles Camoin (1879-1965), in
only communicate clearly
if they represented and thus
addition to less-well-known late Symbolist masters like Georges
revealed theirtechniques. Desvallieres (1861-1950). According to Matisse, Moreau was virtually
unique among art teachers in late-nineteenth-century Paris for insist¬
ing that his students copy frequently in the Louvre: ‘It was almost
a revolutionary step for him to show us the way to the museum, at a

112 image/modernism and the graphic traffic

moment when [both] official. .. and living art. .. seemed to unite to
keep us away from it.’7 Yet, for Moreau, a copy was an attempt to trans¬
late the essence of a work of art rather than faithfully to transcribe its
details, and, as if in recognition of this, it is as difficult to find the
source for a figure or composition in Moreau’s work as it is for
Cezanne. One immense painted drawing of 1884, The Chimeras, is
almost an encyclopaedia of plundered figures, wrested from their
original contexts and recombined in a dizzying apotheosis to the
human figure [711.

PUVIS DE CHAVANNES AND GUSTAVE MOREAU 113

 Image/modernism outside France
This freely adaptive transformation of high-art sources was not con¬
fined to Paris, and virtually every European capital with a great museum
produced artists that mined these treasure troves like truffle-hunters,
attempting to baffle and delight their viewers with the obscurity of
their sources [72],
Several of the greatest ol these artists were central to the idea of
modernism promulgated by its earliest German exponent, Meier-
Graefe, but have been virtually excised from that history in the past
generation due to the anti-German sentiment so prevalent in post-war
art history. Perhaps the most interesting and enigmatic of these is Hans
von Marees (1837-87), for whom the bibliography in any language
other than German is paltry. Few visitors to the Neue Pinakothek in
Munich can forget the room devoted to the late allegorical composi¬
tions of this German master. Nude figures ol both sexes and various
ages populate von Marees’s hauntingly constructed forested land¬
scapes. They are simply present together, challenging the viewer to
accept them and to leave the world of the modern city and enter into
their mysterious world. In Golden Age II from the early 1880s the eight

72 Witold Wojtkiewicz
Bash Zimowa, 1908, oil on
canvas
Wojtkiewicz (1879-1909),
in his tragically short life,
produced the most bizarre
and enchanting Symbolist
paintings of Poland. Trained
almost exclusively in Warsaw
(he had made a short trip to
St Petersburg), he was widely
read and therefore a textually
orientated artist, whose series
of works on childhood
fantasies and stories must
be compared with the early
regressive work of Kandinsky.
Here, two frigid children stare
fixedly at the viewer of the
painting, while clowns
mounted on rearing rabbits
do battle in the snow. Anyone
wishingto see these paintings
must make a trip to Poland
where they are held.

114 imagf./modernism and the graphic traffic

73 Hans von Marees
Golden Age II, 1880-3, oil on
canvas
Here, von Marees assembles
a group of moody figures of
various ages and both genders
in a composition that is
redolent of European museum
painting of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries.
His own career was spent
shuttling back and forth from
his native Germany to Naples
and other cities of Italy.

figures present themselves to the viewer in a way at once contrived and

unselfconscious, as if begging for an interpretation [73], Only two, the
most distant male figure and possibly the child in front of him, seem to
meet our gaze, beckoning us into the languid yet oddly unsensual
realm of the picture. What were von Marees’s sources? The body types
suggest everything from classical sculpture to the High Renaissance,
but, again, it is clear that von Marees has himself drawn each figure
from a posed model, transforming or even obliterating the source by
making it actual.
We know that von Marees copied old master paintings and that his
sources have as broad and wide a character as did the great collections
of Munich and the Italian cities in which he lived. Titian, Rembrandt,
Velazquez, Perugino, Raphael, Rubens, and Palma Vecchio have been
identified by the careful students of his career. When the great majority
of von Marees’s mature works entered the public collections of Munich

IMAGE/MODERNISM OUTSIDE FRANCE 115

74 Edvard Munch
The Scream, 1893, tempera
and oil pastel on cardboard
This painting has become one
of the principal popular icons
of modernism. Certain writers
have suggested that the
screaming figure represents
the artist himself. Yet the
genderless and featureless
figure is surely generic,
encouraging us to identify
this moment of supreme
modernist angst as universal.

75 Paul Gauguin in 1891, four years after his death, they set a standard for young artists
Ancestors of Tehamana, for two generations. One cannot imagine the career of the young
1893, oil on canvas
Norwegian, Edvard Munch, without them [74],
This portrait-like represen¬
tation of Gauguin’s Polynesian Image/modernism combined a relentless search for inspiration in
common-law wife addresses past art with a rigorous studio practice, based both on figure drawing
fundamental questions of
colonialism and exploitation.
and on technical experimentation with the materials of the painter.
She is dressed in a modest Certain artists who followed the academic image/modernists (Puvis
missionary dress and placed
and von Marees) made room tor themselves as masters by playing
as if she were a European
woman sitting for a conven¬ down the museum- and reproduction-based aesthetic search and play¬
tional portrait. Yet she is ing up the experience of painting from life. Among the most important
juxtaposed against a back¬
of these are Munch, Hodler, and Poland’s Jacek Malczewski (1859-
ground of ancestral images—
linguistic and religious— 1929). Each of these artists was steeped in the image world, but
that were, and are, equally
each brought that world to bear directly on personal experience and
unintelligible to Gauguin,
to her, and to us. Gauguin’s natural transcription, creating a unique directness. It is worth pointing
adoption of a Tahitian- out that they were provincial painters, for whom the encyclopaedic
language title (roughly
museum was to be visited occasionally, but not daily, and for
translated here) lent further
unintelligibility to the image. whom reproductions and memories of works of art constituted their
image bank.

Exhibitions of the avant-garde

Most of the canonical modernist artists of the late nineteenth century
died either in that century (Manet, Seurat, and van Gogh) or in the
early years of the twentieth century (Gauguin and Cezanne). Their
deaths created the conditions for the posthumous display of their
work, and the paintings of most of these artists actually produced a

116 image/modernism and the graphic traffic

EXHIBITIONS OF THE AVANT-GARDE 117
76 Paul Cezanne
Old Woman with a Rosary,
1896, oil on canvas
This late painting by Cezanne
is one of a handful of works in
his career that deals with old
age. In this case Cezanne,
who had himself returned
to the traditional religious
beliefs of France, examines
the repetitive ritual of an old
woman, who fingers her rosary
while repeating endlessly the
words of penitent devotion.
Suggesting both late Rem-
brandtand Chardin, the
painting is a modern medi¬
tation on art, old age, and
religion.

77 Hans Christian Andersen

greater effect on European modernism of the first three decades of the
Wandschlrm, 1873-4,
collage on linen twentieth century than it did within their own lifetimes. Studies of
Throughout the Euro-global Cubism have made it clear that it was the study of precise paintings by
world, men and women of
Cezanne that compelled Braque and Picasso to create their studio
leisure made scrapbooks for
amusement and as recorders paintings of the years 1906-10, and precisely the same relationships can
of their lives. This collage by be made between the work of Fauve painters and large-scale Parisian
the famous scholar-writer is
one among thousands of
exhibitions of the works of Gauguin and van Gogh in the first decade
similar photographic collages of the century. One simply cannot imagine the paintings of Matisse,
made in the nineteenth
Vlaminck, or the French artist Andre Derain (1880-1954) without their
century, well before the idea of
collage was codified as a having studied particular paintings by van Gogh and Gauguin, deriv¬
prime medium of modernism. ing loaded impasto from one and chromatic exaggeration from them
Although it has long been
known, this project awaits
both, and these same works were seen by foreign artists as well [75],
serious study. Only two of the In this way, it was as much the experience of works of art as it was
eight panels from this series of
the studio or natural experience that caused the production of colour
photocollage are reproduced
here: Germany!left) and abstraction throughout the world. In a certain sense, this can be
France (right). classified as image/modernism only in a very guarded way. What

xi8 image/modernism and the graphic traffic

Derain and Matisse learned from van Gogh was not what to paint but
how to paint, and they derived little from the imagery of these artists.
They did learn compositional strategies, chromatic systems, ideas
about surface disruption, and the like, and they applied these lessons
both to similar and to different motifs. In this case, their lessons were
technical and could not have been learned clearly from contemporary
reproductions of the same works. This experience of original works of

EXHIBITIONS OF THE AVANT-GARDE 119

78 George Grosz and John
Heartfield
Life and Activity in Universal
City at 12:05 Midday, 1920,
photomontage_
Here is the archetypical sum¬
mation of image/modernism,
the photo-collage. The reality
conjured here is at once
cinematic (even before the
creation of Universal Studios!)
and static, and we, as viewers,
are expected to participate
with the artists in the formation
of a visual synthesis. The
discourse of abundance and
choice, central to capitalist
marketing, plays a powerful
role in this photomontage.

79 Paul Citroen art and the convoluted interconnectedness of works of art across gener¬
Metropolis, 1923, collage ations has yet to be clearly studied. The recent monographic exhibi¬
of photographs, prints, and
postcards
tions of van Gogh, Gauguin, and Seurat have clarified just which
If there is a single image of the paintings by those artists were exhibited during the decades following
Metropolis—or ultimate city their deaths, but the study of the reception of this work is at an early
of the imagination—it is this
collage. Here, the metropolis
stage. This is precisely because historians of modernist art have always
is everywhere and nowhere, believed in the fundamentally antithetical relationship of their artists
participating in the conscious¬
to tradition and have preferred to minimize their influences and
ness of travel, imaginative
and actual, that is such an sources. Conversely, monographers and students of sources have pre¬
important part of modern ferred to deal with non-art or reproductive sources rather than the
life. Citroen was a member
accurate charting of precise visual relationships among specific paint¬
of an active group of artists
who used photomontage ings, drawings, prints, and photographs. The same can be said for the
to describe the city. His
study of the Impressionists, who were treated to great exhibitions of
colleagues were Hausmann,
Hoch, and Heartfield. Corot, Courbet, Manet, and the French painter Jean-Franfois Millet
(1814- 75) in the years following the deaths of those precursive masters,
and these exhibitions produced results analogous to the posthumous
exhibitions of Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh, and Cezanne in the first
decade of the twentieth century [76],

Fragmentation, dislocation, and recombination

Perhaps the most fascinating forms of image/modermsm involve
collage and montage [77, 78], If the image world consists of billions
of representations of different sizes, types, relationships to visual
reality, and media, this very commonness allowed artists not only to
collect images, but also to alter them by cutting, arranging, pasting,

120 image/modernism and the graphic traffic

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FRAGMENTATION, DISLOCATION, AND RECOMBINATION 121

 ■and rearranging. Braque, Gris, Severini, the German artist Kurt
Schwitters (1887-1948), and many others used newspapers, advertise¬
ments, theatre tickets, handbills, labels, wallpaper, or other flat urban
ephemera as other artists used paint and brushes [79], Although mod¬
ern artists like Cezanne and Pissarro had long had a fascination with
forms of proletarian labour like wall-plastering, collagists took on the
equally proletarian alter-ego of a paper-hanger, either of wallpaper or
of printed advertisements and posters. And what fun they had! The
power of scissors and paste, long known to parents of small children,
was a kind of regressive liberation for artists. They literally controlled
images and printed ephemera in ways unknown to the copyist or
collectors of museum reproductions.
Most study of the collage has devoted itself to artists’ use of verbal
messages, whether newspaper articles by Picasso and Braque or word
fragments in what might be termed the visual poetry of Schwitters.
Less well studied is the longer tradition of photographic and image-
oriented collage and montage like that practised as early as the 1850s in

80 Stuart Davis
Lucky Strike, 1921, oil
on canvas
Davis (1894-1964) and
Gerald Murphy (1888-1968),
both American modernists of
the 1920s, were perhaps the
first importantartists who
took the world of advertising
as a source of imagery for
bourgeois easel painting.
Here, in a painting made
before his famous trip to
Paris, Davis applies the rules
of advertising—instant legi¬
bility, easy reproduction, and
brand recognition through
repetition—to painting. His
lead was followed in Paris
by Murphy and Leger.

122 image/modernism and the GRAPHIC TRAFFIC

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JAUVois Mu, sKPue lf ' CAR' uHAlUh «. ' • ; MOLECULE; . H»l' • TRIS t^LADEl : C

BRAUHER,

81 Victor Brauner the photographic alburns of amateurs and turned into a sort of high art
Composition, c. 1929, oil on by Max Ernst and the German artist Hannah Hoch (1889-1978) and
canvas
others in the 1920s [80]. This trend recombines dissociated fragment¬
As a leader in the Paris-
orientated avant-garde in his ary images, each with a separate spacio-temporal matrix, to form a new
native Bucharest, Brauner
whole. The improbability of these constructed images is part of their
had dabbled in the various
‘-isms’ associated with mod¬
essence, and viewers of the sophisticated twentieth-century versions
ernism. By the late 1920s are asked to be anonymous players in what must have been an amateur
he had firmly entered the
parlour game in the nineteenth century. What does ‘it’ mean?
Surrealist camp, and in this
picture ofa marauding dragon The sheer force of the image/modernist tradition cannot be under¬
he combines imagery from estimated, in spite of the varieties of its practice. Although rooted in
various sources to trap a
the traditional artistic education of academies, the force of the capital¬
nightmare with almost clinical
realism. Romanian art ist image expansion and its potential for adaptive reuse created pos¬
historians have been anxious sibilities for the conception and construction of new images that were
to see images like this as
dazzlingly realized by artists. From disguised borrowings to conscious
reactions to the world-wide
depression that descended plunderings of existing images, image/modernists vary from playful
upon the country in 1930, but to savage [81] and their work can be contrasted in virtually every way
it is actually more convincingly
linked to a pre-depression
with the products of their equally modern cousins, the unmediated
aesthetic trend in Paris. modernists.

FRAGMENTATION, DISLOCATION, AND RECOMBINATION 123

Part IV
Iconology
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 Introduction

Historians of modern art working during the past generation have

focused almost entirely on recovering the meanings of works of
modern art. These obsessions follow from, and seek to correct, the two
preoccupations of their teachers, the first generation of professional
historians of modern art: the first with recording the heroic conquest of
the art world by modernism, and the second with describing the his¬
tory of modern art in terms of the formal qualities of the easel picture.
Few current art historians and critics can forget the dramatic narrative
of formalism: a narrative that stressed the gradual acceptance by
canonical modernists of the essential flatness of the painting and of its
independent, and utterly non-verbal expressive domains, colour and
the painted mark. For most early historians and critics of formalist
modernism, the roots of these great pictorial achievements were to be
found in the art of Manet and the Impressionists, which was treated as
a prelude to the expansion of modernism in the seemingly contentless
abstract art developed by Kandinsky, the Suprematists, and the Neo-
Plasticists in the second and third decades of the twentieth century.
It is the sheer determinism of this history to which the second and
third generation of art historians and critics have reacted. ‘Wait,’ their
writing has told us, ‘these works of art are more complex than we have
allowed, more embedded in their own particular times and in the am¬
biguities of modernist culture.’ They are not empty vessels to be filled
simply with a pictorial meaning independent of language, as we were
taught by so many early historians and critics of modernism, but are
actually representations with highly mediated and complex interactive
relations to the worlds in which the artist worked. The art historians
who found everything from bodies to waterfalls in the abstract paint¬
ings of Kandinsky were flying in the face of an entire generation of
scholarship, emanating from Kandinsky himself, a scholarship that
effectively denied the importance—and occasionally the existence—
of these hidden forms.1 As Kandinsky’s pictorial world was being
recovered, students of collage began to study the sources of the texts in
the work of Picasso, Braque, Severini, and Schwitters, creating plays
between verbal and visual content in collages that had earlier been
explained in terms of flatness, conscious banality, and lack of content.2
Detail of 134 There has been, of course, a recent backlash against all this content

127
analysis, but the most sophisticated iconological writers about modern
art have contributed enormously to our understanding of pictorial
modernism. For the purposes of this survey, the four basic areas in
which content analysis has been foregrounded in the literature will be
treated individually. There will be a distinct bias in this discussion to¬
wards French art of the period 1860-1915, not only because it was so
much the dominant tradition, but also because its bibliography is both
international and infinitely richer than those describing the art of other
national traditions. We must wait at least another generation before
the abundant material (both artistic and documentary) that awaits
publication and analysis in Russia and eastern Europe, as well as the
vast and increasingly sophisticated literature on colonial art or on
American, Australian, and Canadian art, are integrated into the larger
history of modernism and before the various national schools that still
seem to obsess us can die a painless death.
The topics for these four iconological sections have been selected
not only because they have been richly explored by historians during
the last generation, but because so much more remains to be done in
each of them. Each section will contain a discussion of major works of
art that have been reinterpreted during the last generation, including
criticism of this work and speculation about new areas for research fol¬
lowing the suggestive leads of recent scholars.

128 ICONOLOGY
ifelK

W" - •- rMm
P; ljf| i |nk
 Sexuality and
the Body

That the most persistent and problematic subject in the history of

human art is the human body, is almost a truism. Our various gods,
whether Apollo, Christ, Buddha, Muhammad, or Vishnu, have had
their bodies represented in two- and three-dimensional human form
throughout the history of art. Yet the modern age has been profoundly
secular, with religion placed in a subsidiary position as a right to be
practised privately (or not) rather than as the organizing principle of
life. This, together with a diminution in the apparent power of the
hereditary aristocracy, removed immense areas of picturable subjects
and patrons for representation and forced modern painters to find
subjects that could command our attention in the relative absence of
religion and social hierarchy.
Now the central drama of civilization became the life cycle, and
specifically the role of sexuality and gender politics within it. The
world of visual representation has been mined as part of the new inter¬
pretive strategies created by Freudian, feminist, gender, and gay or
queer studies scholars. Indeed, the very meaning of the word body has
been significantly expanded during the last generation, and central to
this has been the fascinating development of body studies in the visual
arts.1

Manet’s bodies
One of the first ways in which modern artists entered the realm of pub¬
lic consciousness was to engage in a challenge to the conventions of
body representation. This was done most forcefully through an effort
to take the nude figure from the realm of allegory, religious or other¬
wise, and place that nude into actual or clearly contemporary visual
contexts. Courbet’s nude model, who stands as a viewer at the centre of
The Studio ofthe Painter (1855), is among the most decorous of the early
examples (see 3). Her position and demeanour signify modesty, and
she implicitly acknowledges by her gaze that it is the painter Courbet
(who is painting a landscape in this crowded human setting!), not her¬
self, who serves as the subject of the painting. We all know that Manet
raised the level of discourse about the contemporary nude with the
Detail of 90 most potency in 1863 and again in 1865. Dejeunersur Vherbe was rejected

131
 82 Edouard Manet
Olympia, 1863, oil on canvas
Manet completed Olympia
in 1863 and withheld the
paintingfrom the Salon until
1865. There it created a
second scandal only slightly
less virulent than the earlier
reception of the same
painter’s Dejeunersurl'herbe
in 1863. Manet’s manipu¬
lation of public expectations,
his courting of scandal, and
his fundamental belief in art
as part of social discourse all
derive from the practice of
Courbet.

from the official Salon in 1863, but its appearance in the hastily organ¬
ized Salon des Refuses ensured that its notoriety was even greater
because of this refusal. Studies of the significance of this move
on Manets part are legion.2 Virtually every line of contemporary
criticism has been uncovered and scrutinized for clues about early
interpretations of the painting, and we learn that more critics were
affected by the contemporaneity of the subject, particularly by the
nudity of the principal female figure against the clothed young men,
than they were by the flatness of Manet’s treatment of the main figure
The relative absence of modelling in Manet’s treatment of the nude
and his decision to suppress the space-suggesting illusionism of the
models left leg by draping it, and hence flattening the foot into the
p ane of the body, were noted in the reviews of certain critics. Yet, these
formal oddities were linked with the ‘dirty’ or improper subject: loose
women, probably prostitutes, out in the country (the Bois de
Boulogne?) with wealthy Parisian men.
Few of the early critics picked up on the source for the painting, and
it was too cleverly obscure and fragmentary to be easily recognized. In
act, the source was the river god and his attendants on the right side of
the reproductive engraving by Marc Antonio Raimondi after a fresco
representing the Judgement of Paris by Raphael. Clearly, Manet wanted
the composition to suggest a source in high art, but was less interested
m the recognition of that source. Had he been interested in public
recognition, he would have chosen a more readily available source and
would have transformed it a little less.
No, it was scarcely the source that made the picture shocking, it was
the fact of pictured nudity', to use Kerm.t Champa's useful phrase and
thltrifn M contemporary discourse.’ One must remember
that the Dejeuner was exhibited only six years after Flaubert's trial for

132 SEXUALITY AND THE BODY

 Madame Bovary and in an arena, the public art exhibition, much less
known for its assaults on public morals than the theatre or the novel,
both of which could be consumed in semi-public or totally private
settings.
In virtually every lecture course on Modernism, lecturers immedi¬
ately skip two years and introduce Manet’s next volley to the aston¬
ished students. Olympia was finished by Manet in 1863, but withheld by
him from the Salon of that year, and the next [82].4 The implication of
all this is that Manet actually was a gamester with his flat, and naked,
playing-cards. Yet, in all the years I have heard lectures and read art¬
icles or books about this delightfully deliberate act, I have never seen
Manet’s Olympia shown next to his other canvas painted for the 1865
Salon, The Mocking of Christ (or Jesus Insulted by the Soldiers, as Manet
himself called it) [83], Here, two nudes, one with a discreet loin-cloth,
one male, the other female; one vertical, the other horizontal; one
seated, the other reclining; one historic, the other contemporary; one
sacred, the other secular; one a real God and the other a false goddess.
Both Olympia and Christ raised questions of the consumable body, and,
for that reason, the body itself, as a site of communication and inter¬
pretation, was the subject of both paintings. In many ways, this juxta¬
position raises more questions about the body, tradition, modernity,
and sexuality than were raised at any earlier moment in the history of
Western art. This was not because a painter had never addressed these
issues before (think of Titian, Michelangelo, or Rembrandt), but

83 Edouard Manet
The Mocking of Christ, 1865,
oil on canvas
The second of Manet's two
secular representations of
Christian religious themes,
The Mocking of Christ repres¬
ents the moment of Christ’s
sham coronation before his
final trial. An image burdened
with both theological and
pictorial precedents, its
conscious confrontation
of modern anxieties about
religion has rarely been
understood in the
fundamentally secular
literature on modernism.

MANET S BODIES 133

because no painter had ever sent two such extreme (and convergent)
pictures to the same highly public exhibition.
In many ways, Manet’s gambit, to borrow that wonderfully useful
word from Griselda Pollock, was too strong to be comprehended, and
not a single study of his oeuvre has attempted a simultaneous under¬
standing of these two works. Interestingly, the female nude has always
been seen as the success, as the truly modern picture, while both
Manet’s immense religious paintings have been relegated to the side¬
lines of his enormous bibliography and to the equally enormous biblio¬
graphy of body studies.5 Writers such as Linda Nochlin, T. J. Clark,
Abigail Solomon-Godeau have looked long and, in a critical sense,
lovingly at Olympia and all but ignored the equally nude and equally
challenging body of Christ shown at the same Salon.6 It is the intention
of this chapter to assert that it was not merely the female body, not the
prostitute, that was the locus of concern in modernist art, but the
human body itself.
The female body has been for the past generation the site of femin¬
ist studies of modernist imagery. The subject of the canonical works of
the modernist tradition from Manet’s Dejeuner sur I'herbe to Duchamp’s
The Large Glass (see 94), is more often than not the female body, either
alone or more titillatingly in groups. This very observation forces us to
confront the essential sexism of artists, the art world, and modern soci¬
ety, reminding us of the exploitation of the female body and of its status
as the preferred site for what has come to be called the male gaze.
When we look at Olympia, or at most of the reclining nudes made dir¬
ectly in response to her, we have no choice but to assume a male ident¬
ity, and, further, we have no choice but to be customer-admirers. Thus
we are involved in a kind of complicitous moral secret simply by look¬
ing at the painting. If we, the viewers, had sent the gift of flowers being
presented to Olympia by the black servant, as we must infer from her
gaze, then there is someone we can’t tell about our assignation: our
wife, our fiancee, our mother, our aunt, our grandmother. Not only are
we a male viewer, but a clandestine one, and, to borrow the parlance of
gay activism, Manet has effectively outed our affair by having it take
place in a public gallery.
Again, Manet makes this rendezvous more shocking by quoting
Titian’s famous Venus ofUrbino (which, in turn, represents a Venetian
courtesan of Titian’s lifetime, but as Venus) and by entitling the picture
ironically, Olympia,; a feminized ‘mountain of the Gods’. No au courant
Parisian would have missed the sly allusion to the popular novel and
play, La Marriage d'Olympe, by Alexandre Dumas fils, in which a cour¬
tesan manages to entrap and actually marry a young aristocrat. With
Manet s Olympus, one feels that conventional morality, class hier¬
archy, and pictorial values have been eroded. Hence, the painting, like
the French novels of immorality so common in the eighteenth and

134 SEXUALITY AND THE BODY

nineteenth centuries, seems to be exposing the ills of society through
the act ol representation. What is chilling about Manet’s picture is the
sheer force ol Olympia’s gaze, her sell-possession, her complete lack of
illusion. She is, we suspect, ultimately the realist, utterly in command
of both her beauty and her body.
What were Manet’s female viewers to do? Did he paint the Mocking
of Christ for them? Or, as writers have suggested, is this great religious
painting related to contemporary anxieties about religion, anxieties
exacerbated by the appearance in 1864 of Ernest Renan’s book La Vie de
Jesus} The clarity of Renan’s book was remarkable, but its qualities
went unnoticed in the furore of public response to it. By omitting all
references to Christ’s resurrection, his reappearance on earth, and
other manifestations of his divinity, Renan’s book appeared to suggest
that Christ was not divine. Manet’s knowledge of the raging contro¬
versy around the book is assured by the sheer prominence it had in
Parisian discourse. The year before, he had sent to the Salon another
religious painting, The Dead Christ with Angels. In his 1865 canvas,
Jesus is alive, being falsely worshipped by his tormentors, and is
represented as he looks heavenward for solace. His body is anything
but beautiful, and his pallid complexion, gnarled knees, and enlarged
feet give him the air of a worker. Our gaze is met not by Christ himself,
but by a swarthy young man with well-muscled arms, a hairy chest, and
immense feet who wears a brilliant orange kerchief-turban, a wrap of
long fur, heavy trousers, and a sword. Why does he meet our gaze? Is he
drawing us into the circle of false worshippers of Christ? Are we to pick
up the rope and rod conveniently placed in the lower right corner of
Manet’s canvas so that we can join in this gruesome act? Again, as with
Olympia, Manet renders the viewer vulnerable, but, in this case, the
viewer is made to feel cruel rather than guilty, and the nude is an actual
God rather than a false goddess. Once more Manet cloaked his
representation in allusions to major works by other artists, about
which scholars have been arguing throughout the past generation.
Both these nudes are representations that link the history of High
Renaissance easel painting, both secular and sacred, with purely con¬
temporary concerns and that place the viewer in the unflattering and
morally problematic roles of both a customer and a mocking torturer.
In each picture, the nudity is essential to the meaning of the work:
Olympia’s brazen shamelessness, her acceptance of her body and its
use, is contrasted with Christ’s vulnerability just before he is to be cov¬
ered by the young man who meets our gaze. In both cases, we are asked
by Manet to recoil from the act of gazing. As viewers, we are ashamed.
What strikes most commentators about the sexual (and religious)
politics of Manet is that the artist banked not simply on the picture to
carry his messages, but on the picture in the specific context of a tem¬
porary public exhibition. Their size, their restricted palettes, their

MANET S BODIES 135

 strong and clearly readable compositions, the gazes of their figures,
and relationships with past art and contemporary literature, all this was
calculated by Manet for maximum shock value and effect. Their allu¬
sions are part of the cultural discourse of mid-i86os Paris, and would
simply not be understood by a provincial unaware of Parisian literature
and intellectual life. They are, in every sense, part of capital culture.
Before departing forever from the male nude in the context of reli¬
gion, one must turn to the first painting submitted to the Parisian
Salon by the American artist Thomas Eakins (1844-1916). The
Crucifixion was painted in Philadelphia during 1879 and accepted into
the Paris Salon of 1880.8 As a representation of the male nude, it is
among the strongest and most shocking in the history of art, but not
for reasons of sexuality. Eakins is reported to have posed his model,
John Laurie Wallace, in a skimpy loin-cloth outside on the roof of a
Philadelphia building so that he, Eakins, could paint the crucifixion
from life. The reality of Christ’s body, together with the fact that the
representation focuses on Christ’s hands as they seem to struggle to
free themselves from the nails, gave the representation a force essen¬
tially unknown in earlier art. The frequent comparisons in the liter¬
ature to the famous Crucifixion by the French artist Leon Bonnat
(i833_i922) from the Salon of 1874 (it should be pointed out that Eakins
never saw this painting) favour the Eakins crucifixion. Bonnat report¬
edly painted his Realist nude from a cadaver in a manner well known to
Romantic artists. Eakins, by contrast, emphasized the struggling life in
Christ as he writhes in the blinding light of the day shortly before the
temporary night that descended on the earth at the moment of Christ’s
death. How different it is from the slender, androgynous crucifixion,
The Yellow Christ, painted by Gauguin in 1889, and how easily we know
that Gauguin’s model was not life, but art.

Modern art and pornography

The nude, and specifically the female nude, continued to dominate the
politics and practice of modernist painting throughout this period.
Typical subjects would include: bathers out of doors, bathers in the in¬
terior, prostitutes alone or in groups, or women of uncertain social
standing at their toilette. These works seem to constitute an internal
tradition within modernism, a formal and iconographical tradition of
the female nude, stronger in modernism than in any other period of the
history of painting with the possible exception of the Baroque.
Fascinatingly, this tradition was absolutely co-equal with the rise
and mass dissemination of photographic pornography, which played a
suppressed but strong role within that medium from the 1850s onward.
All the photographic media made contributions to pornography, in
particular stereophotography, the most titillating of mediums, with its
delightful 3-D effects. We know that artists collected pornographic

136 SEXUALITY AND THE BODY

84 Edvard Munch photographs, probably for two reasons: first as pornography and, in
Ashes, 1894, oil and tempera certain cases, as part of their critique of conventional sexual mores and,
on canvas
Munch's project to painta vast
secondly, as models or easily accessible sources of actual nude figures.
multi-canvas series called Gauguin purchased a group of pornographic photographs (probably of
The Frieze of Life’ is one of the the colonialist or multi-racial variety) in Port Said and we know that he
most ambitious in the history
of modernism. Virtually
kept them in his bedroom in the South Seas. We also suspect that the
Wagnerian in scope, although poses of many nudes in modernist painting have their origins in porno¬
the series was, in fact, never
graphy, which was, in turn, a kind of kitsch mimicking of high art.
completed, it was exhibited
in several forms in Germany, This contribution of an unofficial and unregulated type of popular
France, and Scandinavia. imagery to the visual discourse must be remembered when we look at
This life-cycle analysis, like
painted representations of the female nude. Some, like the nudes of
that of Freud, was centred on
male-female sexual relation¬ Manet and Gauguin, have fascinatingly direct relationships with the
ships and their rumblings photographs. Manet even seems to have been interested in the flatness
through the life of the indi¬
of the strongly lit photographed nude, which is such an important
vidual. Themes of guilt,
shame, wanton lust, betrayal, formal component of his painted nudes. Others, like Degas and
and impotence dominate Toulouse-Lautrec, invented naturalistic compositions and scenes that
the series.
have little precedent in the contrived and posed scenes in photographic
pornography. Indeed, their two great series of pornographic prints,

MODERN ART AND PORNOGRAPHY 137

 Degas’s untitled brothel monotypes of the late 1870s and early 1880s
and Toulouse-Lautrec’s lithographic series Elies, depart radically from
the stereophotographs and pornographic narratives being produced in
late nineteenth-century Europe.

The nude and the modernist cycle of life

If one were to write a history of modernist body imagery, one could
easily find representations of bodies throughout the life-cycle of the
individual [84], One can easily begin with images of childhood pre-
sexual nudity which, though rare, range from the quasi-pornographic
photographs of little girls by Lewis Carroll (1832-98) to the well-
nourished babies of Mary Cassatt.
In the case of Carroll, the visual availability of the girls contrasts
with their remoteness (for both compositional and moral reasons)
from actual touch, and this can be contrasted with the completely
transparent and guiltless sensuality of Cassatt’s investigation of the
tactility of infants and of inter-generational touching. In fact, no artist
in the history of Western art has treated this subject with such subtlety
and probity outside the confines of the holy relationship between the
Virgin Mary and her infant son Christ. That there are erotic aspects to
this relationship was surely not entirely absent from Cassatt’s con¬
scious mind, and Gauguin’s gently erotic representation of his own
sleeping child raises this type of voyeurism to a more disturbing, and
clearly conscious, level.

85 Magnus Enckell
The Awakening, 1894, oil
on canvas
There is no more powerful
representation of male
adolescent sexuality in the
history of modern art than
Enckell’s haunting painting.
Like many northern European
artists, the Finnish Enckell
was trained in Paris, where
this painting was conceived
and made in a tradition that
included Puvis de Chavannes,
Toulouse-Lautrec, and
Munch.

138 SEXUALITY AND THE BODY

86 Pablo Picasso
Family ofSattimbanques,
1905, oil on canvas
The nuclearfamily is rarely
the subject of modernism as
artists sought to deal with the
individual orwith social class
ratherthan with familial
relations. Here, Picasso
borrowed the imagery of
urban entertainers from
Honore Daumier who had
investigated similarsubjects
in prints and paintings during
the mid-nineteenth century.
Yet Picasso made his image
so monumental and mythic
that this working family
performs for us outside of
modern time in the wan light
of an endless day.

One of the most fascinating visual obsessions in modern art is with

adolescent sexuality. From the investigations of male pre-pubescent
preening and wrestling by Gauguin to the single most terrifying image
of male adolescent transition, The Awakening [85], by the great, and
little-known, Finnish artist Magnus Enckell (1870-1925) artists dealt
as frankly with the developing eroticism of the adolescent as did Freud
or his followers. And, lest we think Enckell’s painting peripheral to our
investigation because of its provincial origins, we must not forget that
it was painted in Paris during Enckell’s three-year stay there, and that
it was sent to the largest international exhibition of contemporary art
ever held, in Paris in 1900.
Picasso too had an extraordinary sensitivity to the adolescent and
young adult of both sexes. His work from the first decade of the
twentieth century seems all but obsessed with lost innocence and deso¬
lation, and, although many of his family subjects can be traced to the
images of popular entertainers by the French artist Honore Daumier
(1810-79) (whose work was undergoing a modest revival in the early
twentieth century), Picasso injected an air of psychological poignancy
into scenes that were, for Daumier, more political in significance [86],
As many scholars have pointed out, it was Picasso’s reaction to the early
suicide of his friend, the young Spanish painter Carlos Casagemas
(1881-1901), that produced some of his most powerful images of the
passage into manhood culminating in La Vie (1903). This was painted a

THE NUDE AND THE MODERNIST CYCLE OF LIFE 139

87 Pierre-Auguste Renoir
The Promenade, 1870,
oil on canvas
This painting by Renoir comes
closer than any other of his
longcareerto dealingwith the
potentially dangerous aspects
of desire. Despite its fluid
painterly draftsmanship, the
painting records a dalliance
that, like those in the novels
of Zola and the stories of de
Maupassant, will have
ramifications that lastthrough
the remainder of the lives of
these two beautiful young
people. Beauty, we are told,
has its price.

decade later than Enckell s masterpiece, and is presided over by a

brooding young man (Casagemas), nude but for a bit of drapery to hide
his genitalia, clinging to a young nude woman. They confront an older
woman, fully draped, who holds a sleeping child. Picasso’s young man,
dark, troubled, and doubtful, reaches out in Michelangelesque grandeur
towards the mother as if in recognition of the ultimate responsibilities
that must be taken in human life.
Picasso’s famous investigation of the passage from adolescence to
manhood has so many relationships to earlier and contemporary paint¬
ing that they can only be summarized here. One thinks of Eakins’s
adolescent and male Arcadia (1883), Cezanne’s great visual poem about
the introspection and vulnerability of adolescence, Le Grand Baigneur
(1885) and Hodler’s View into the Infinity (1902-3), and the list could be
considerably longer. Not since the Mannerists had artists dealt so
frankly and so ambiguously with adolescent sexuality. Again, there are
numerous parallels in photography, both the kitsch homoerotic

140 SEXUALITY AND THE BODY

pornography of the infamous Baron van Gloeden or the blurred male
bodies of John Holland Day. The concept that there is a paradoxically
powerful innocence in the young male nude figure runs throughout the
history of modern art, countering the avant-garde preoccupation with
prostitution and the reclining female nude that has been such a domin¬
ant part of modernist discourse and its feminist critique [87],
In fact, there is a counter-investigation of developing female sexual¬
ity through girlhood and adolescence in modernist paintings. Inter¬
estingly, the most fascinating of these are outside the French tradition,
in which the male gaze is so dominant. One thinks of the female equiv¬
alent of Enckell’s boy, Edvard Munch’s Puberty, a haunting image of a
female at the edge of womanhood conceived by a male artist, a work
made very close in time to Gauguin’s father-to-daughter book, Cahier
pour Aline. Hodler and Munch both painted multi-canvas life-cycles
of both males and females. Munch’s cycle was entitled The Frieze of
Life and exhibited in various forms and versions throughout his
mature life.9 In all of these, nudity is central to the enterprise. Hodler’s
Communion with Infinity (1892) and his Woman at a Mountain Stream
(1903) placed the female nude alone in a landscape in poses with no
connection to bathing, giving them an elemental force by denying any
specific genre narrative. Because we cannot explain them as actual
women doing something out of doors, they become ‘woman’, for whom
age and gender are more essential than class or social status. Also, the
sheer fact of their solitude gives them a viability as humans apart from
men, against whom they are at least partially defined in most images in
the modernist tradition.
The single work that sums up the life-cycle is Gauguin’s Where Do
We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897). In this work
the viewer is treated to a mythic frieze of life from infancy to death
which takes place in a temporally and physically remote paradise [88],
The androgynous male fruit-picker at the centre of the composition
alludes, of course, to the fall of man, but in an oddly ironic way. Why,
we ask, does a lone male pick fruit in Paradise? Why are there so many
women in Paradise? Why is there ageing and even death in Paradise?
What God presides over Paradise? The questions pile up as the viewer
comes slowly to terms with the visual and iconological issues in this
frieze of life, questions that one is forced to ask because the title of the
painting itself is a series of questions, and it is clear that those questions
have no precise answers.

The bathing nude

The vast majority of images of the nude exist in the context of bathing,
a subject rife with sexual and social associations that are currently being
analysed by Linda Nochlin and others.10 For most representational
artists, however, the subject of the bather renders nudity transparent by

THE BATHING NUDE 141

 0« AUims No.

88 Paul Gauguin making it seem guiltless and thus acceptable to the viewer. Bathers are
Where Do We Come From?
nude because they have to be; they are engaged in a cleansing ritual
What Are We? Where Are We
Going? 1897, oil on canvas which, even when collective, is most often unconnected to the sexual
This is the first of two summae act. In contrast to the internally voyeuristic tradition in bather imagery
theologicae produced in Tahiti
(Suzannah and the Elders), modern bathers, both male and female,
by Gauguin. In it he traces the
life-cycle of woman from birth place the viewer in the place of voyeur, but generally deny them access
through death, borrowing to the pictured realm via the gaze of one of its figures. Renoir’s and
poses and figures from diverse
sources, both western and
Cezanne’s bathers do not look back at us, and even the sexually active
non-western, to create a self¬ bathers of Degas (women bathing alone or, at most, with a servant, as if
consciously global image. All after or before sex) do not acknowledge the viewer’s presence.
the women are presided over
by an androgynous male fruit- This is also true for the fascinating tradition of male bathers that
picker, who signals that plays an important and little-recognized role in modern body imagery.
Gauguin, like all Europeans,
In France, we have the male bathers of Caillebotte, Cezanne, and the
was raised with the Christian
concepts of the fall of man and French artist Frederic Bazille (1841-70)—a tradition which all but dies
the consequent permanent in French art of the first three decades of the twentieth century, when
loss of paradise on earth.
the female nude completely dominates body discourse [89], Yet, there
are major contributions to this tradition by painters such as Eakins,
Max Fiebermann (1847-1935), and Munch [90, 91], Few of these
images engage in any overt way with sexuality, treating the body as

142 SEXUALITY AND THE BODY

innocent when it swims far from the prying eyes of others. By repre¬
senting this subject repeatedly, painters did bring into the realm of the
public gaze a private subject, again allowing a form of voyeurism into
art, but a form that does not in any direct sense assault what might be
called conventional bourgeois morality.
We all know, of course, that bathing does not always occur outside
and that many of the most important modern representations of
bathing deal with the new bourgeois obsession with bodily cleanliness
by focusing on the bather indoors. The male examples of this genre
are extremely rare, and only one important example hangs in a public
museum, Caillebotte’s Man at His Bath (1884) [92], This painting
defies easy explanation. Its subject is a completely nude middle-aged
bourgeois man, shown from the back while drying himself in a large
modern bathroom. What, may we ask, is picturable about this? The
man is too old to be an ideal or even a beautiful youth. He is shown in a
completely private act during which he is visually inaccessible to any¬
one else (except possibly an invisible male servant who has handed him
the towel). We are even permitted a discreet view ol his scrotum, just
visible between his legs in a way that shocks viewers to this day. His

THE BATHING NUDE 143

89 Jean Frederic Bazille
Summer Scene, 1869,
oil on canvas
This painting was accepted at
the Salon of 1870, just before
its young painter volunteered
for service in the French
military and was killed. It is the
first large-scale representation
of the modern male nude in
the Salon shown in the new
light-filled style achieved by
Monet, Bazille, and Renoir in
the late 1860s. Its homosocial
discourse has become
fashionable in current
literature.

90 Max Liebermann
In the Bathhouse, 1875-8,
oil on canvas
This early painting by the great
German—and Jewish—
Impressionist serves as proof
of the internationalism of
vanguard modernism bythe
1870s. Begun in Amsterdam,
where Liebermann is reputed
to have observed the repres¬
ented scene, the work was
largely painted in Paris, where
he visited Manet and was
exposed to Impressionism.
It was kept by the artist
throughout his life, and the
fluid landscape behind the
figure on the right (a clothed
version of the famous classical
sculpture of the Thom Picker)
was completed in Germany
shortly before the painter’s
death.

144 SEXUALITY AND THE BODY

91 Thomas Eakins
Swimming, 1885, oil on
canvas
This work was painted as part
of a private commission from
one of Eakins’s admirers. Its
frank representation of the
male nude and the fact that its
models included the painter
himself as well as several of his
students atthe Pennsylvania
Academy were so scandalous
that Eakins actually lost his
teaching position as a result
of the painting.

wet feet have made glistening marks on the wooden floor. In terms of
its represented subject, Caillebotte’s painting is absolutely without
precedent, and, when he sent it to the 1884 exhibition of the vanguard
group Les XX in Belgium, the outcry was such that it was moved to a
locked room.
When we contrast this bather with the group of women bathing in¬
doors represented by Degas in the 1880s and 1890s, its flagrant denial of
pictorial decorum becomes even clearer. Yet Degas’s representations
have been subjected to literally thousands of pages of criticism in the
past two decades, while Caillebotte’s picture has languished in critical
obscurity. There are two probable reasons for this. One concerns the
canonical status of Degas as a professional modernist, compared to the
critical view of Caillebotte as an occasionally inspired amateur who
also sailed, swam, and played cards. The other concerns the fact that
the vast majority of the most intelligent and passionate body/criticism
of the past decade is the product of feminists who have focused on the
problem of male artists representing (and hence dominating) the nude
female body. Whether these scholars focus on the discourses of bodily
cleanliness, prostitution, and sexual morality or simply on the act of
male fantasist voyeurism through representation, their writings have
relentlessly probed the male artist’s, dealer’s, and collector’s construc¬
tions and receptions of desire through representational domination.
The comparatively rare representations of the male nude by male
artists have not been relevant to this endeavour. Indeed, these latter
images seem now to be the territory of the growing subdiscipline of gay
or queer studies, with its focus on homoeroticism or, less stridently,
homosocial pictorial codes.

THE BATHING NUDE 145

 92 Gustave Caillebotte
Man at his Bath, 1884,
oil on canvas
This painting, perhaps the
most shocking representation
of the male nude in
nineteenth-century art, was
exhibited in a closetwhen
itwassentto the Belgian
vanguard exhibition of
LesXX in 1884. Although,
like Eakins’s Swimming, it
was conventionally painted,
its imagery was hardly
acceptable within the
idealizing context of easel
painting. Caillebotte keptthe
paintingthroughouthis life,
and it was notamongthose
selected after his death in
1894 as part of his monu¬
mental gift of Impressionism
to the French nation.

The allegorical or non-sexual nude

In thinking about body representation in its fullest sense, one cannot
omit the nude within the context of allegorical and historical painting.
Whether Degas’s Young Spartan Girls Provoking the Boys or the com¬
paratively chaste work of Gauguin or Matisse, works representing the
nude figure in a kind of timeless pictorial realm are common in the his-
tory of modern art. In few of these cases are the figures actually erotic.
Rather, nudity remains tied to an unspecified, and usually classical,
timelessness. Yet, in certain images, particularly those by Malczewski
and Hodler, the allegories take on the air of actuality; the figures
approach the pictorial surface and the intense colours give them a
directness and clarity at odds with the idea of a remote, ageless past.
eir works might even be called aggressive allegories, in that they
possess the viewer’s visual realm so completely that there is little room
for escape or passive contemplation such as that we might muster for
ruvis de Lhavannes or von Marees.
1 hese works set an odd but definite precedent for the urgently
powerful representations of rather placid bather themes that shook
tench art in the first decade of the twentieth century. It is not the im¬
agery or even the compositions of Cezanne’s large Bather compositions
of the late 1890s and early years of the twentieth century that make
tiem modern, it is the way in which these strong and virile female

146 SEXUALITY AND THE BODY

nudes were drawn as large and misshapened figures. They are not the
elegant androgynes that populate so much modernist art, nor are they
voluptuous pillows of flesh such as those favoured by Rubens and the
French artist Francois Boucher (1703—70) and reinvigorated by Renoir,
nor even are they the concoctions of curves that fill the history of
French art after Jean-Auguste-Domimque Ingres (1780-1867). None
ol this applies to Cezanne’s amazons, whose eroticism, should we find
it, is contained within the picture and has nothing to do with the world
of the viewer. They are essentially representations of power and move¬
ment rather than sensual beauty, and they exist not because of us, but in
spite of us.n
These great creations have no relationship to the discourse about
class and sexuality that seems to have preoccupied Manet and his nu¬
merous followers. They are also absolutely glacial in their lack of inter¬
est in the viewer. Cezanne’s large Bathers were not available to
members of the Parisian vanguard until the autumn of 1907, when at
least two of them were exhibited in the Salon d’Automne. By that time
Picasso had already painted, and repainted, Les Demoiselles d Avignon
and Matisse had completed his boldest bather yet, the so-called Blue
Nude. This demonstrates more strongly than any other example I could
use the inter-generational and collective nature of modernist art.
Indeed, the elderly Cezanne was responding to the same ideas of rep¬
resentation that were inflaming the young French artists Braque and
Matisse and the younger Picasso. It was not so much a question of
influence as of a collective sense of pictorial investigation that, in these
cases, flourished both in the comparative freedom that Cezanne had
created through his distance from Paris and in the hothouse of
anonymity and youth created by the others in Paris.

Colonialism and the nude: the troubled case of Gauguin

One of the other major subsets of body imagery has to do with the
immense cultural discourse around colonialism. From the gigantic
and controversial ruminations of Edward Said to the equally strident,
but more confined, protestations of Abigail Solomon-Godeau and
Stephen Eisenman, the current critical obsession with what might
be called the colonial body is among the strongest corrective veins in
postmodernist discourse. The principal victim of this writing is the
ur-colonialist painter, Paul Gauguin, whose lamentable inability to
speak any other language than French restricted his choice of paradise
to the French colonies. Initially he tried to live among francophones
working in Panama; then he visited Martinique, subsequently return¬
ing to France and considering Madagascar and the lie de la Reunion,
before receiving a government subvention to go to Tahiti. He died of
an overdose of morphine on another island, Hiva Oa, this too part of
the French colonial administration. Few artists tried harder to leave

COLONIALISM AND THE NUDE: THE TROUBLED CASE OF GAUGIN I47

93 Paul Gauguin
Manau tupapau (Spirit of the
Dead Watching), 1892, oil on
burlap mounted on canvas
Evidence suggests that this
painting was valued by
Gauguin above any other
from his first Tahitian trip
in 1891-3. Conceived as a
reversion of Manet’s famous
Olympia, bought for the nation
in 1891 and copied by
Gauguin just on the eve of
his departure for Tahiti, this
‘Black Olympia’ addresses
fundamental issues of cross-
cultural fear, superstition,
guilt, and death in ways that
make Manet’s earlier effort
appear almost charming.

Europe and modernist urban culture behind, and few tailed more
miserably in their attempts. His last collective work ot art, the
house which he decorated and called the Mahon du jouir or House
of Pleasure, had a modern sewing-machine, lots of good wine,
machine-made furniture (along with work of Gauguin’s own making),
machine-produced books, an entire collection of photographs and
prints, machine-printed textiles, and the like. The world ot the
native that he aped was really a sort of hand-made veneer over an
utterly European, and modern, substructure.
These facts are pointed out over and over in the diatribes against
Gauguin that fill the politically correct literature of the past decade.12
Yet, when we read Gauguin’s own texts and think through his highly
complex and polyvalent images, it becomes clear both that he was
utterly aware of his modernism and that he himself knew from the
onset that his search for a paradise on earth would not succeed in any
literal way.
What about his bodies? They are mostly brown, mostly Polynesian,
mostly female, young, and available. Every commentator who lashes
into Gauguin’s colonialist sexism in analysing Manau tupapau, the
most famous anti-Olympia of the fin de siecle, does so without regard
for Gauguins own sardonic irony. Indeed, any reader of his voluminous
late prose knows that he is often his own greatest victim and that his
attitude towards the world is that of a wizened ]okester who projects
such disdain for the world that even his delusions become comic.
Gauguin’s several versions of the story behind Manau tupapau (Spirit
of the Dead Watching) were all written after the painting had been

148 SEXUALITY AND THE BODY

completed [93]. They deal with two aspects of body imagery, the first
personal and the second mythic. What Gauguin learns when he sees
his frightened mistress gaze up at him in the middle of the night is that
her feelings of guilt or fear are not easily accessible to him and that,
although he can speculate on their causes, he cannot ultimately know
her mind because he is a European man. The entire construction of the
painting around the trope of Olympia tells us that Gauguin is dealing
with his incomprehension within his terms, not hers. Where Olympia
reveals herself to us because we have paid for her, Gauguin’s mistress,
Tehura, lies on her stomach as if recoiling in fear, presided over by a
fully clothed figure of indeterminate sex who seems as much to haunt
as to protect her. Is she frightened of the painter/viewer or, as the
painting suggests, are her fears rooted in her culture and its mysterious,
and inaccessible, belief systems? If Manet made his viewer feel like a
male customer out in public, Gauguin created a situation in which his
European male viewers (the painting was first sent for exhibition in
Copenhagen) feel as if they have frightened this beautiful young girl
and, furthermore, that they don’t understand quite why. This work is
anything but a simple act of male colonialist domination, because it
tries so very hard to force the viewer to confront that domination and
to question it. The easy sexuality of the native, so much part of the
myth of colonial culture, is here exploded in an image of the fear of‘the
other’ and our incomprehension at that fear.
It was, in fact, the sins of the European world related to the religious
and cultural history of Europe and the Middle East that were the
greatest subjects of Gauguin. Elis late nudes derive their poses from
Buddhist sculpture, but their meanings are rooted in the various
images of the fall of man or the expulsion from paradise that populate
the history of Western art. The system of colonialism allowed Gauguin
to search beyond Europe, but Europe was always with him. His bodies
are so various and complex that they cannot be reduced to the sexist
charge that his art was totally determined by the male gaze. The
muscular standing Eve, whose body derives from Buddhist sculpture at
Borabadur, in Nave Nave Fenua (The Delightful Land), is not a likely
candidate for visual rape, and several writers have remarked on the odd
androgyny of several other figures, particularly the fruit-picker (surely
a male) in Gauguin’s WhereDo We Come From? What Are We? Where Are
We Going? [88], The water-drinker in Pape Moe (Mysterious Waters) re¬
lates to a distinctly homoerotic scene in his novelistic text, Noa Noa,
that is often quoted in gay studies courses and flies in the face of his
equally often quoted comment, ‘I like my women ugly, fat, and vicious’
(surely an example of Gauguin’s extremely sardonic humour).
The shame of a raped woman is clearly the subject of The Night¬
mare, a transfer drawing from the penultimate year of Gauguin’s life,
and the nudes in what we might call Gauguin’s philosophical brothel,

COLONIALISM AND THE NUDE: THE TROUBLED CASE OF GAUGIN 149

the cover of his manuscript ‘L’Esprit Moderne et le Catholicisme , take
part in rites of display and denial the roots of which lie in Christian and
pre-Christian dogma. For Gauguin, as for many of the most powerful
body modernists, the represented body was the seat of desires that,
unless temporarily sated, prey upon the psyche. The body was also a
container of ageing and despair, the vessel of the failure as well as the
triumph of humans. At few periods in the history of Western art has
the body been more powerfully expressive than in the years covered in
this book, the years before modernism became hegemonic.

The bride stripped bare

The idea of the nude as a machine has deep roots in the sciences and
scientific illustration. From Feonardo’s anatomical drawings, through
to the obsessive recording of the human body in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, the interior of the body has been a subject of a
type of representation that lies outside art. In the twentieth century,
the workings of the body entered the exhibition hall and, eventually,
the museum. The artist most persistently associated with this is Marcel
Duchamp, who ‘tore to tatters’ his sisters in a painted representation of
1911 and then went on to construct a machined bride that was to popu¬
late his representations until the incompletion (it broke) of his The
Large Glass in 1923. The bride in question has no flesh or covering for
her mechanism. She also has no head or arms (no mind and no feel¬
ing). She is a series of tubes and organs, the functions of which are
reproductive, and she is juxtaposed in The Large Glass with a group of
bachelors (the nine malic moulds) that are precisely the opposite of her.
Where she, the machine revealed, has no covering, they have no inter¬
iors; they are moulds to receive melted liquids that will solidify and be
unmoulded before they are once again filled with warm liquid.
Duchamp’s witty and terrifying dialectic of woman/man, inside/
outside, machine/mould, parts/whole, etc. and his industrialization of
sexuality has many precedents in the history of Western art, but none
of them either predict or explain Duchamp’s nude, which is as many
have pointed out, his move in an artistic chess game of manoeuvres
that started in antiquity and gained in strategic intensity with modern
‘ttt. The philosophical brothel of Picassos Les Demoiselles d Avignon,
the most famous nude representation of the first decade of the twenti¬
eth century, demanded a counter nude, and Duchamp created her over
a period of years.
There are few works in the history of art that are more complex,
more essential to subsequent artistic developments, and more delib¬
erately enigmatic than Duchamp’s penultimate (but not ultimate)
move, The Large Glass or The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even
(his title) [94], Among its many achievements is its oddly modern
internationalism. The Large Glass was made by a Frenchman in New

150 SEXUALITY AND THE BODY

94 Marcel Duchamp
The Bride Stripped Bare
by her Bachelors, Even (also
The Large Glass), 1915-23,
oil and lead wire on glass
Duchamp had begun to
conceive of this visual
manifesto at least two years
before he began the arduous
process of its creation, and a
thorough knowledge of his
intellectual preparation is as
important toan understanding
of the work as is an examina¬
tion of The Large Glass itself.
Like many works of modern¬
ism, Duchampconfrontsthe
impossibility of sexual union
byseparatingthe realm of the
bride and the bachelors com¬
pletely and by insuring,
through formal and linguistic
means, thatthere will never be
physical contact. This is the
most complex representation
of sexuaI frustration in the
history of art.

York and has never crossed the Atlantic. It has resided since 1953 in the
Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it takes its place in a virtually
definitive collection of works by Duchamp, who, as its installation sug¬
gests, preferred his own company to that of others and who wanted
himself to be in charge of the reception and interpretation of his own
works. Because The Large Glass is so large and so intentionally break¬
able it cannot, and will not, be moved, forcing the modern connoisseur
(or voyeur) to make the journey to Philadelphia to look through the
glass.

Body parts and fragments

All the nudes discussed so far in this essay are complete. We assume in
looking at them that the entire human body of the model was known to
and represented by the artist. Yet there is an entire species of modern
body representations, including photographs, that divide the whole
body into parts and revel in discontinuities and the fragmentary. The
most obvious of these are what might be called Cubist bodies, in which
the wholeness of the body is undercut. In Braque’s Ma Jolie, we are un¬
able to imagine ourselves caressing the thighs or fondling the breasts of
this prostitute’s body. No, she is all parts, bundles of lines that intersect
and dissolve to create a palpitating image in flux. Braque’s ‘my pretty’

BODY PARTS AND FRAGMENTS 151

sits rather than reclines, receiving our gaze, but not as herself. Rather
she is a representation by Braque, who makes a work about seeing and
transcribing a seated nude. He, not she, is the subject. Yet to call her
fragmentary is wrong. She is not made of parts. Rather, the lines and
patches of paint from which her body is assembled represent them¬
selves, not portions or aspects of her body. We are not called upon to
imagine that she looked like Braque’s representation of her. Rather, we
are asked to interpret Braque’s session with her in the terms of the
painted marks made by him on the canvas. She was whole, but Braque
cannot represent her as whole because he is so concerned with fetishiz-
ing or analysing his process of representation. Hence, Braque’s nude is
less about the nude even than Duchamp’s mechanical bride, who is, by
contrast, a traditional representation, because it is the bride who is
being represented.
It is to Leger and to a larger group of artists who mechanized the
nude that we must turn in our search for body fragments. Leger’s nudes
are assembled from parts as if they were constructed in a factory. The
jointed fingers and arms are like prosthetic devices that literally repres¬
ent parts of the body, and for this reason they are considerably simpler
as body representations than what we might call Braque’s and Picasso’s
non-representational bodies of 1910-n. This notion of the machine
body is a persistent sub-theme in modernist body representations and,
given the increasing industrialization of Europe and America, this is
scarcely surprising. Indeed, mechanized body representations annex
the representational to the industrial in a surprisingly literal and
unimaginative way.
One must turn to Dada and Surrealism, with their wilful scalar and
chromatic distortions, their employment of montage, and their often
violent fragmentations, for the real revolution in body representation.
The so-called ‘exquisite corpse’ of the late 1920s is the ultimate violated
body, for, in these collaborative works, the whole body is made up of
three parts, each the product of the fantasy of one artist, each of whom
is, in turn, unaware of those of the other two when making his
contribution to the whole body. Hence, the body is whole only at the
end of production, and no one artist can claim the representation. This
division of the body is essentially unprecedented in Western art, unless
one counts the collaged body as a form of precedent. In this latter
tradition, practised by amateur and professional artists since the
mid-nineteenth century, the represented body is composed of several
separate elements that are combined to become a single body. These
collaged bodies often combine male/female, human/animal, young/
old, and other apparent oppositions to question the very inviolability of
the body itself. Certain of these images function as visual equivalents to
verbal puns or metaphors, making suggestive links among unlike
forms. Others are wittily subversive jokes, whose point is not clear. In

152 SEXUALITY AND THE BODY

95 Hannah Hoch
The Sweet One (Die Susse)
‘From an Ethnographic
Museum’, c.1926, photo¬
montage with watercolours
Hoch’s photomontages are
part of a vanguard project
rampant in the 1920s
involving the dismemberment
and recombination of the
human body. Whether using
surrogates like the dolls of
Hans Bellmer or pages taken
from scientific and socio¬
logical manuals like Hoch,
artists violated the integrity
of the body and created new
bodies through art. Here, the
body parts belong to others,
human bodies catalogued
for research by ethnographic
museums. Hoch seems to
question the entire enterprise
of body collecting by creating
this recombinant body.

all these cases, the wholeness ol the body is jettisoned, exploded, and
even denied in images that are among the most disturbing in the
history of art. Whether the terrifying dolls of the Polish artist
Hans Bellmer (1902-75), the witty combinative insect-human bodies
of Max Ernst, or the fabulous body contraptions of Hannah Hoch
[95], these plays on image/modernism were made to thumb their
noses at traditional representation and to declare arenas of represen¬
tational freedom that many early viewers took to be prescriptions for
socio-sexual freedoms. For this, the images can be interpreted as anti¬
bourgeois contrivances made for the delectation of the bourgeois
intelligentsia whose mores they satirize or subvert.

BODY PARTS AND FRAGMENTS 153

Social Glass
and Class
Consciousness
The social history of art has been the most active and confident branch
of the larger history of art for more than a generation, and no period in
the history of art has been more systematically rewritten using socio-
historical methods than the history of modern art. There is little to
surprise us in this, as modern culture saw the creation of an immense
new bourgeoisie and an urban working class, whose relationship with
the traditional peasants or rural workers of Europe was complex and
difficult. The Marxist class-structure defined at the beginning of mod¬
ernist Europe was very much part of the life of Europeans. Indeed, the
overlay of modern classes on traditional ones: the tiny aristocracy, the
slightly less tiny mercantile bourgeoisie, and the rural worker, created
strains in society that affected everyone. The proper or intrinsic attrib¬
utes of class were defined throughout the modern period, and the
psychic and social tensions of inter-class relations are recorded in
countless nineteenth- and twentieth-century memoirs, biographies,
and novels.
Whether we read of the fictional lives of Balzac’s heroes and hero¬
ines or the memoirs or letters of Disraeli, Zola, Toulouse-Lautrec, or
Kafka, the issue of class is of paramount importance. Americans, we
are often told, have a difficult time understanding this, because they
are taught from a young age that there are no rigid social classes in
America and that one can be what one wants. Yet, actual experience
has taught us differently, and American modernism, particular that of
its photographers, the painters of the Ashcan School, and other urban
Realists, has had highly developed interests in social class in most of its
representations.

Seurat and A Summer Sunday on the Island of the

Grande Jatte, 1884
Seurat split the Impressionists apart with the sheer force of his em¬
bodied pictorial theory in 1886. His large painting^ Summer Sunday on
the Island of the Grande Jatte, 1884 was the talk ofParis [96], Its surface,
covered with thousands of tiny strokes of paint, some in the shape
of dots, caused painters to split into camps of converts or enemies.
Its painter, a 27-year-old classically trained artist, had never before

15s
96 Georges-Pierre Seurat exhibited with this vanguard group, but the criticism and conver¬
A Summer Sunday on the sational discourse that surrounded this painting were as intense and
Island of the Grande Jatte,
1884,1884-6, oil on canvas prolonged as any aesthetic argument in the history of modern art. For
This painting, the second proponents of what Seurat himself called Neo-Impressionism, the
of the large genre scenes
work was nothing less than revolutionary, putting forward a set of
of modern life achieved by
Seurat, took nearly two years standards and rules against which representations could be measured.
to complete in the painter’s Curiously, a good deal of the most interesting recent literature
tiny Parisian studio. It was
about this painting has very little to do with this stylistic controversy or
completed by mid-1885 and
totally repainted with dots with the painting’s technique, but is concerned with its imagery.1
in the autumn and winter According to T. J. Clark, who writes passionately about its meanings,
of 1885-6, before being ex¬
hibited in 1886. Scholars have
the painting’s most revolutionary feature was not intimately tied to its
identified prostitutes among colour theory and dotted lacture (which are merely ciphers for modern¬
the seemingly bourgeois
ity), but rather its relationship to the class-based social discourse of
women, raising questions
of class permeability in Third Third Republic France. For Clark, the actual subject of the picture is its
Republic France. entitled subject: a specific weekend day, Sunday, at a specific place, the
island of La Grande Jatte, between Neuilly and Asnieres to the west of
Paris, in a definite year, 1884 (two years before the initial exhibition of
the painting). In his now famous passages about the painting, Clark is
fascinated by the positions, sizes, costumes, sex, age, and interactions
ol the painting’s many figures, all of which are, to him and many others
who work in his manner, part of a sustained meditation by Seurat on
the subject of social class. Hence, for Clark, the subject of the picture is
embodied in a particular style of representation, but it is not about that
style, as many students ol modern painting have long been taught.

156 SOCIAL CLASS AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS

97 Georges-Pierre Seurat
Bathers at Asnieres, 1883-4,
oil on canvas
This, the first self-conscious
masterpiece by Seurat, rep¬
resents male working-class
leisure in a hieratic way
derived from sources as
diverse as Egyptian sculpture,
Piero della Francesca, and
PuvisdeChavannes. Like the
later Grande Jatte, the image
is organized within a struc¬
tured series of planes in which
the figures are trapped almost
like insects in amber. Across
the Seine, we see the island
of the Grande Jatte and the
completion of a boat-race that
also enlivens the left side of
the Grande Jatte.

What makes this immense machine, as it would be called if it were a

Salon painting, about social class? The answer is complex and lies in its
relationship to another painting by Seurat, completed in 1884 (the year
of the illusionistic Grande Jatte), the Bathers at Asnieres [97], Before
Seurat’s later addition of the stippled, integral frame to the sides of the
Grande Jatte, the two works were of identical dimension. Each rep¬
resents figures out of doors in two distinct, but visually shared, land¬
scapes. In fact, the figures in the Bathers all look to the right (east)
across to the Grande Jatte, and all contemporary commentators on
Seurat’s paintings have noticed that there is a boat race in both paint¬
ings, thus suggesting an actual link. The earlier painting confronts
urban poverty and, perhaps, unemployment. All its figures are male;
none is wearing the well-cut clothing of the bourgeoisie, nor the
equally elaborate costumes used by that class for outdoor leisure. One
figure, an adolescent youth, seems to call out across the Seine to the
unseen inhabitants of the Grande Jatte. All the figures dominate a set¬
ting defined by industrial technology, with railway bridges and factory
chimneys structuring the landscape. The painting is composed as if it
were a great mythological tableau, and many writers have pointed out
its affinities with works by conventional painters like Puvis de
Chavannes (whose Salon painting of 1882, Pays Doux, has fascinating
affinities with it). Its component of radicalism has less to do with its
style or chromatic structure, than with its class-laden, and thus con¬
ventionally inappropriate subject. The classicizing rules of composi¬
tion and pictorial structure used by Seurat were considered perfectly
appropriate to elevated subjects from mythology and history, but not to
a banal and literally lower-class subject like Seurat’s working men and
boys on the Seine.
It seems clear that Seurat initially conceived of the Grande Jatte as a

SEURAT AND THE GRANDE JATTE (1884) 157

98 Lukian Popov
Mobilized, 1904, oil on canvas
One of the primary places of
systematic class mixing was—
and remains—the military,
and Popov confronted the
social gulf between officers
and soldiers in this powerful
painting about social control
and government-sanctioned
slavery. His contribution to
military painting was unusual
within that official sub-genre
of modern art because of its
overtly questioning—even
critical—stance.

99 Adolph Menzel pendant to the Bathers in order to present a world that is in every sense
Supper at the Ball, 1878, opposed to his earlier painting, in ways familiar to historians of nine¬
oil on canvas
teenth-century art.2 Yet, rather than pairing day and night or ancient
Menzel was amongthe
supreme masters of modern and modern, Seurat paired workers with bourgeoisie, creating a
painting in Europe. This work situation in which the modern artist focused his attention on utterly
plays a role in the international
avant-garde because it was
contemporary issues ol social class and its visual legibility. In reading
exhibited in Paris in 1878 and the current literature about the two paintings, we quickly confront
admired (and copied) there by
the slippery nature ol social class in modern society. In fact, most
Degas. It represents a huge
official ball like those that were commentators on the Grande Jatte, which is a considerably more com¬
the definers of social life in plex picture than Bathers, stress the inclusion within this seemingly
Euro-global capital cities. Its
respectable bourgeois world of workers masquerading as bourgeoisie.
co-minglingof government
officials, aristocrats, and It seems, from this commentary, that Seurat gave visual embodiment
members of the haute- to the relative impermeability of the working class (after all, nobody
bourgeoisie in a tapestry of
light, costumes, and move¬
wanted to be part of the working class) and the disturbing permeability
ment was so successfully ol the bourgeoisie.
achieved by Menzel that he
If, as many think, the placid Sunday afternoon on the Grande Jatte
seems almost to have been
a pictorial apologistforthe is polluted with prostitutes and noise-makers, most of whom appear as
official culture he represented. members ol the bourgeoisie in disguise, then the entire social order so
elegantly constructed by Seurat is more tenuous than his rigid com¬
position at first suggests. The fisherwoman and the woman with the
pet monkey have been identified as prostitutes by their attributes; and
the prim but unchaperoned woman reading a novel in the foreground,
sharing the shade with a rower and a dandy, might solicit or simply re¬
ceive the interest of one or the other of these men before the afternoon
is over.3 And the fact that all this covert activity takes place during a
holy day in the presence of respectable women and children makes it all
the more alarming (and potentially subversive). Seurat seems to chart a
course lor women in the Grande jatte, and we see that gender repres¬
ented throughout life. There is a baby (and perhaps another in a baby

158 SOCIAL CLASS AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS

carriage), a little girl walking with her mother, a young girl running to
another, two adolescents (in different states of readiness for the battle
of life), many young women, married or attached women, and one old
woman with her nurse. By contrast, the men are mere chess pieces (like
Duchamp’s malic moulds) whose costumes and poses give them
significance in terms of the women. Within the context of this seem¬
ingly respectable place, women have been and will be corrupted by men
(or will corrupt men), and innocence will be kept, or lost.

Class issues in modernist culture

It the intricacies of urban social interaction, both sexual and class-
based, were Seurat’s subject in his first two self-conscious master¬
pieces, he was not alone [98]. Indeed, the entire history of the most
modern literary form, the novel, is engaged with class stabilization and
class rise, the latter adversely affecting the former. Readers of Jane
Austen, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and
countless others can recite a series of plots in which aristocrats, profes¬
sionals, shopkeepers, and workers dance delicately through the trans¬
itions of life from birth to death, transitions in which the rules seem

CLASS ISSUES IN MODERNIST CULTURE 159

 made to be broken again and again, but most often to the detriment of
the rule-breakers. The death of the good courtesan, who gives herself
over to her true love after years of sin, is a regular feature of popular
fiction, theatre, and opera. Why should painters be any less interested
in this drama than were their friends, the writers?
The social geography of Europe plays across the surface of modern
painting [99]. We marvel at the levels of the social prison of Tsarist
Russia as it was represented by the greatest masterpieces of Russian
100 Ilya Repin Realism, Religious Procession in the Province of Kursk [100], painted by
Religious Procession in the
Ilya Repin (1844-1930) at precisely the same moment as Seurat’s social
Province of Kursk, 1880-3,
oil on canvas diptych. All the orders of Russian society swarm through Repin’s
Repin was the most famous denuded landscape, moving relentlessly, and collectively, towards an
modern artist of late Tsarist
unseen goal. In this immense canvas, Repin’s aims tend more towards
Russia, He painted larger-
scale canvases representing the totalizing ambitions of his countryman Tolstoy than towards the
important scenes from
subtler, and more carefully coded, social drama in Seurat’s seemingly
Russian history and was
also pressed into the service
mono-class realm. For Repin, the question of class as a defining, and
of the state when he was constraining, force in society was to be dealt with all at once, and in
commissioned to paint
this single mythic image he compressed thousands of years of class
government officials towards
the end of his life. Here, development. His painting places the future of each class in the hands
he created a sort of summa of each other class, creating in a single image a portrait of Russia
of Russian society, diverse
members of which move
known to no one individual, yet accessible to everyone.
uneasily but relentlessly One can see why historians who delve into the intricacies of class
together down a dusty path
ambivalence and disguise are more fascinated by Seurat than by Repin.
through a naked landscape
towards a future that cannot Seurat’s women strain at the edges of bourgeois respectability, some
be seen even by the painter. with more success than others. Reading his painting in ways that

160 SOCIAL CLASS AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS

101 Henri Matisse
The Conversation, 1909,
oil on canvas
Amongthe great modernist
masters of the twentieth
century, Matisse was the
ultimate bourgeois. His
commitment to family life and
to maintainingthe traditions of
the paterfamilias are notable,
and even the apparently
unabashed sensuality of his
paintings was proper. Here, in
an image of family discord rare
in his ceuvre, we see the artist
and his wife in what he wryly
calls a conversation. Freud
could scarcely have conceived
of a more layered encounter
between husband and wife,
father and mother.

Richard Thomson and T. J. Clark insist it must be read requires formid¬

able research skills and a delight in social nuance that is often elusive to
contemporary viewers. Whether their readings, and the subsequent
brilliant summary texts ol Michael Zimmermann, are those of Seurat
himself is difficult to know. Yet this arcane research demonstrates that
there were contemporaries of Seurat who could read the painting in
terms of subversive class-crossing. The danger in this type of activity is
apparent only to those of us who live in societies that value class stabil¬
ity, and, when all is said and done, few moderns actually do. More of us
applaud than decry the exceptional chambermaid who marries the
count and becomes a successful countess. More of us wince than cheer
when a merchant who has worked hard all his life is trounced by the
unprincipled speculator who ruins his carefully tended market. Makers
of representations were in all likelihood more interested in the perme¬
able than the fixed elements of class, as virtually all Impressionist
images suggest.
Certain social historians of art have dwelt on the bourgeois aspects
of modern iconography. We learn from various writers about the class-
bound, and anti-aristocratic, aspects of Impressionist imagery, and
students of the bourgeois family could find ample material for dis¬
cussion in those of artists like Cassatt, Picasso, and Mondrian.
Indeed, few important representations of the modern world now in
public collections in Europe or the Americas fail to represent social
class in some way [101]. Whether kitchen still lifes, river-bank sub¬
urban landscapes, tourist mountain scenes, or urban genre scenes,

CLASS ISSUES IN MODERNIST CULTURE l6l

virtually every representation carries class signifiers, either ol the
represented class or for its intended bourgeois audience.

Artists and class

There are also the dramatic stories of class rise through art, and various
examples include the lives of two contemporaries, the Impressionist
Renoir, whose family was solidly working class, and the French aca¬
demic painter Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-84), whose parents were
well-off peasants. Both these artists flirted with and finally entered the
highest levels of society in the terms of the haute-bourgeoisie.4 Renoir
retreated to a farmhouse in the south of France, while Bastien-Lepage
alternated restful periods at home in the country with urban escapades
with Sarah Bernhardt and the beau monde, only to die at a very young
age. Each of them dealt with various levels of society in their repres¬
entations, although neither adapted his style to the class of his subjects.
Bastien-Lepage made a career as a painter of peasants and the plucki¬
est members of the working class, while Renoir became a great painter
of (and for) the nouveaux riches, as his numerous society portraits
attest. Although neither of them belonged through birth to the urban
bourgeoisie, neither can be placed in any other class.
This little digression into the social origins and ambitions of two
French artists is intended to demonstrate that artists themselves were
in many fundamental senses socially ambiguous throughout the period
covered by this volume. Very few artists were produced by the aristoc¬
racy; one can think effortlessly only of Tolstoy and Toulouse-Lautrec,
among important artists. Most came from the educated middle classes,
some from the professional class (like Manet), and others from the
mercantile bourgeoisie (like Caillebotte and Cezanne). Interestingly,
there are very few good biographies of modern artists. The monograph
or exhibition catalogue with a biographical essay or chronology all give
us the impression that artists lives are of secondary importance to their
works, and with the exceptions of van Gogh, Gauguin, Toulouse-
Lautrec, Picasso, and Dali, very few lives of the artists are part of the
general cultural discourse. A recent biography of Manet and modern
biographies of Toulouse-Lautrec and Gauguin locate all these French
artists in families of real accomplishment.5 The artist, in each case, was
not the only interesting and important person in his family.
In this way, artists occupied an almost classless or class-avoiding
place in modern society, and most biographies of artists insist that,
when their artists families were from the respectable bourgeoisie, there
were difficulties in gaining parental approval for a profession that was
anything but secure. In spite of the widespread belief in the financial
and social insecurity of artists, most important modern artists were
successful in reaping financial awards from their production. As with
many members of the new bourgeoisie, there were the years of struggle,

162 SOCIAL CLASS AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS

102 Fernand Leger
Soldiers Playing at Cards,
1917, oil on canvas
Leger fought bravely in the
trenches of the First World War
and recorded his response to
that degraded form of modern
heroism in this representation
of three automatons playing
cards in a trench. Like modern
artists and intellectuals, Leger
embraced the war, believing
that it would clean out the
cobwebs of aristocratic control
and class warfare that had
marred the history of modern
Europe. This work seems to
imagine a world of male
camaraderie and relaxation
in which man and machine
are in a state of harmony.
As a work of art, it is no less
idealistic than Renoir’s Ball but, with real effort and with the help of dealers and other middlemen,
at the Moulin de la Galette. most artists whose work is reproduced in this book enjoyed comfort¬
able lives, at least by their late middle age.

Portraiture
Whom did modern artists portray and how did they portray them?
Until recently, the art of portraiture has assumed a tertiary role in the
vast bibliography of modern art. When portraits are central to the
career of an important modern artist (as they were for Cezanne, for ex¬
ample), they have often been treated as figure studies in which issues of
likeness, class, and age are less significant than they are for ordinary
portraits. When one comes to ordinary portraits, most historians of
modern art almost dislike them because they were made for money.
However, as many recent exhibitions and studies have made clear, por¬
traiture is among the principal strands of modern art. Indeed, social
historians, historians of the family, psychologists, and many others
have a wealth of material in the vast body of modern portraits, both
photographic and hand-made.
Certain artists conceived of their ceuvre as a vast collective portrait
of their societies. One cannot imagine arriving at a complete under¬
standing of the modern European family or of the individual in mod¬
ern society without the portraits of Manet, Eakins, and countless
others. When these are placed in the context of contemporary portrait
photography, they present the interpreter of the modern individual
with an almost overwhelming body of evidence about modern anxi¬
eties, triumphs, and social pressures [102J.
The analysis of the Philadelphia professional and business intelli¬
gentsia by Eakins uncovers tormented, deeply cultured, and melan¬
cholic men and women who inhabit a world of shadows. Degas, surely

PORTRAITURE 163
103 Kasimir Malevich
Portrait of the Artist Ivan
Vasilievich Klyun (1873-
1942) as a Builder, 1911,
oil on canvas_
Malevich’s portrait seems
to reconstruct the head of
his sitter from various geo¬
metric elements, many of
which are irrationally shaded
so as to suggest a three-
dimensionality elsewhere
denied in the image. The
result is more an assault on
what Malevich would have
viewed as ‘bourgeois' notions
of likeness and attempts to
construct a more or less
universal man. Withoutthe
title this image would never
be read as a portrait.

the greatest painter of portraits in the history of modern art, investig¬

ated the subtle tensions and dependencies in marriage, sibling rivalry,
loneliness, impotence, and same-sex friendship as well as the complex¬
ities of anonymous public encounters in the modern city. And how the
American John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) worked hard to make his
portraits of the wealthiest bourgeoisie and their aristocratic friends
look the same, further eroding a class boundary that had been the most
apparently secure in traditional society. His vast family portrait of the
ninth Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, painted to rival Reynolds’s
famous family portrait of the fourth Duke, recorded an alliance be¬
tween a distinguished English aristocratic family in decline and a
wealthy nouveau-riche American family, the Vanderbilts. The mar¬
riage didn’t last very long: enough to produce children and to spruce up
Blenheim Palace and its gardens, enough to give Consuela Vanderbilt
a title she didn’t really need; but the painting survives at Blenheim as
proof of the social compromises families make for the sake of class rise
or class maintenance. It speaks volumes about both Sargent and the
Marlborough family as one walks through Blenheim.
Yet, when thinking about modern portraiture as a phenomenon,
what becomes clear is that it was almost completely a bourgeois art
form. Modern portraiture represented the comforts and anxieties of

164 SOCIAL CLASS AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS

 the urban-based class, who used their minds, their charm, their lan¬
guages, and their money, but rarely their bodies (except through mar¬
riage), to secure and maintain their social positions. There are
numerous aristocratic portraits in the history of art, but they are, in the
main, virtually indistinguishable as representations from those of the
bourgeoisie [103, 104], The clothes, furniture, and poses were not in
any important way different in a portrait of a countess or of an actress.
In this way, class itself was not the ostensible subject of modern por¬
traiture. The class status of the individual portrayed was, more often
than not, assumed by the sheer fact that most such representations
were commissioned.6 For that reason, the painter’s role was to give

104 Raoul Hausmann

TatlinatHome, 1920, collage
of pasted papers and gouache
Hausmann (1886-1971) and
his wife, Hannah Hoch, were
the German masters of photo¬
montage. In this picture
Hausmann creates a portrait
of the great Soviet architect
Tatlin notfrom life, but from a
photograph to which he adds
disembodied images that link
the head of Tatlin to a 'home'
of machines, animal anatomy,
travel, industry, and poverty.
For Hausmann the portrait
represents his meditation
on Tatlin ratherthan Tatlin
himself.

PORTRAITURE 165
 representational substance to the individuality rather than the class
origin (or class aspiration) of the subject. It was the particular way in
which a woman sat, wore her clothes, or posed, as well as the particular
characteristics of her features, that made a society portrait successful
as a representation. We must understand, in recognizing this, that
portraits function to define collective class membership, as they also
reveal the individual’s unique traits of physiognomy, taste in dress, ges¬
ture, and physical setting. For a woman of substance in Paris or Boston
there were quite rigid class rules of dress, conduct, decorum, and ges¬
ture that, if not followed, would prompt expulsion or social stigma.
Portraits, more often than not, accepted and represented those rules,
treating the individual as an exemplar of their social group or class
[105, 106],
Modern portraits were very often exhibited in public settings like
the Salon or the various Secession exhibitions in Munich and Vienna,
but without identifying their sitters precisely. The most famous case
was, of course, Sargent’s portrait of Madame X, shown in the Salon of
1884 to great effect. In fact, the urban game of identifying the subject of
exhibited portraits reached a real peak in modern art, when an increas¬
ingly international high society began to compete for public attention
in the arena of the exhibition, using and being used by artists. The
complete scandal of Madame X’s black velvet evening dress, which re¬
vealed a scandalously large portion of powdered skin and which she
105 Arthur G. Dove
Grandmother, 1925, collage
The American abstract
modernist, Dove (1880-1946)
began making collage in 1924
and used this Dada technique
only during 1926. Here he
invokes a nameless American
grandmother, perhaps his
own, but with no hintastoher
appearance. Rather, her com¬
bination of modesty, piety,
hard work, and devotion to
her garden are evoked. We
suspect that she has died and
that this recreation of her was
produced from objects found
after her death rather than
during her lifetime or as
recalled by her child.

166 SOCIAL CLASS AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS

106 Katherine Dreier
Psychological A bstract
Portrait of Ted Shawn,
August 1929, oil on canvas
Dreier (1887-1952) was
among the most important
forces in post-First World
War American collecting and
marketing of European
modernism. Here, she
represents a friend in terms
not of his likeness, but of his
psychological essence,
probi ng the depths of the
intellectual bourgeoisie of
which she was a member.

wore in public at the Salon, gained instant notoriety both for the sub¬
ject (whom certain Parisians instantly knew as the creole wife of the
banker Pierre Gautreau) and for its young American painter. As a rep¬
resentation, Sargent’s portrait is as modern as any portrait by Manet or
Degas. Also like their portraits, it stands in a clear, and knowing, rela¬
tionship to the history of painted portraiture, particularly, in Sargent’s
case, to Flemish and English portraiture. As such, it is a work that is
modern because it seeks publicity amidst the spectacle of the modern
city. If the representation is traditional in that it succeeds within a limit
of painted marks, poses, and formats already set in the history of art,
its application of those principles to a modern person without social
justification for these connections is remarkable.
Many of the most famous modern portraits seem critical both of
their class and of the social strictures of class representation. Degas’s
only commissioned portrait outside the painter’s own extended family
was refused by its subject, Mme Dietz-Monin, a Parisian society host¬
ess, a relative of whom arranged the commission when the artist was
suffering financial reversals. It was, however, listed in the catalogue of
the Impressionist exhibition of 1879 as Portrait after a Costume Ball and
as part of a series of portraits dealing with the urban bourgeoisie by
Degas, Cassatt, and Caillebotte. The idea that the modern urban class,
the bourgeoisie, was the most important subject for the modern
painter was a common one in the discourse surrounding the creation of
Euro-global modernism. The ‘New Painting’, as Edmond Duranty
called it in 1876, was dedicated to the careful and discreet representa¬
tion of the modern urban citizen at home, at work, at play, in daytime

PORTRAITURE 167
107 Lucia Moholy
Florence Henri, 1926-7,
gelatin-silver print
This utterly direct portrait
allows the sitter’s face literally
to fill the pictorial format.
As such, the sitter is at once
unavoidable and oddly
inaccessible. Only her earring
and her make-up are indi¬
cators of gender and class,
and we learn nothing about
her surroundings, little about
her costume, and less about
her body.

and at night, and Caillebotte and Degas were his heroes. We know
now that they were far from alone, and that artists throughout the
world rushed to represent the new money of modern capitalism as well
as the men and women of accomplishment in the arts, politics, letters,
and professions.
The history of modern art is filled with painted portraits of people
from different areas of life, from doctors to bankers, cafe owners to art
dealers, and countless men and women of leisure with the time and the
means to be represented. All in all, this astoundingly rich painted por¬
trait of modern capitalist society has yet to be deeply mined by either
social historians or historians of art, all of whom have relinquished this
job to historians of photography.' The veritable mania for photo¬
graphic portraiture started in earnest in the late 1850s and produced
vast quasi-industrial shops with equally vast fortunes reaped by their
organizers. Throughout the world, there was a developing market for
portraits in which the purchaser was lured not only to commission por¬
traits of himself and his family, but to join a kind of photographic
pantheon of worthy men and women. In virtually every capital city,
portraits of High Society or great achievers in culture or business were
grouped and sold by subscription. This mania resulted in the propaga¬
tion of the English, Irish, Scottish, and American national portrait
galleries. No such institution existed before the nineteenth century,
and most have survived the twentieth century as relics of the lost
industrial world. These collections of portraits in all media are, in the

168 SOCIAL CLASS AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS

108 Margrethe Mather
Semi-Nude (Billy Justema
in Man's Summer Kimono),
c.1923, gelatin-silver print
The title of this beautifully
conceived photograph
informs us of both the gender
and the identity of the sitter,
suggesting that this decidedly
feminine image actually
represents a western man
wearing the garment of an
eastern man. Its evocation of
travel, leisure, and indolent
sensuality give it a distinctly
bourgeois and urban quality.

end, about as interesting to modern viewers as the photographic por¬

trait galleries of the capitalist city—ephemeral, of course, but catering
to a dated notion of celebrity.
Scholars of photographic portraiture have taught us the ways in
which photographers simply adapted representational strategies and
props from painted portraiture to make their images both credible and
legible. We can learn many of the same lessons from a study of modern
painted portraits. Swirling drapery, flower-filled urns, distant vistas
with cloud-filled skies, and poses deriving from Graeco-Roman sculp¬
ture—all these are equally common in painted and photographic por¬
traiture in the modern age [107, 108]. Yet, in both media, scholars have
identified the most significant modern portraits as subversive of these
elevating devices. Whether in the photographic portraits of Hill and
Adamson, Julia Margaret Cameron, or Nadar, or the painted portraits
of Degas, Eakins, or Vuillard, the subversive or transgressive character
of the image is a constant theme in recent scholarship about this work.
The artist is perceived as being critical or even contemptuous of tradi¬
tional portraiture, which is viewed as socially consistent, elevating,
and, in large measure, banal. This critique of the recipes of portraiture
is often interpreted as a critique of class-based society itself. Tradition
in portraiture is not at all monolithic, if one considers the work of
Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, Velazquez, Hals, and Goya, where the
expressive range within the genre is great enough to act as precedent
(or example) for virtually any modern portrait, avant-garde or other¬
wise.
The history of art in general has avoided precisely the kind of statist¬
ical and quantitative methods that have been so fruitful for social

PORTRAITURE 169
historians, historians of technology, and population historians. It is
now time to correct this imbalance and to train art historians in quanti¬
tative methods so as to recover from the immense body of artistic rep¬
resentations a good deal of their lost documentary significance. Social
historians have set an agenda, and certain art historians have followed
this up, especially in the area of children and the family, but art
historians’ excessive focus on reading and rereading the individual
works of a handful of great artists has prevented them from grappling
with larger questions and from using the visual evidence they are best
equipped to gather and interpret.

Images of peasantry
Although the bourgeoisie can claim numerical superiority in repres¬
entation, they are certainly not alone. Artists often address social
classes separately, preferring to construct visual realms that are closed
or class-specific. We have seen this in the case of Seurat, and it is also
true of Vanessa Bell in her picture of working people at the beach
[109], The oldest class on earth, the peasantry, deriving from the
earliest human agricultural societies, plays a very large role in modern
representation. There is, in fact, no style of modern art devoid of
peasant imagery.8 Even the most advanced and urban of art styles,
Cubism and related Futurism, allow the rural worker into their visual
fields, and even the almost exclusively bourgeois Impressionists
painted peasants. There is a small but vital literature devoted to
peasant images, most of which stresses the usefulness of these
representations to certain cultural myths fostered in industrial cities:
myths of origin or of the pastoral simplicity of rural society when
viewed from a corrupt urban perspective. We have learned from
many writers about the ways in which peasant images were designed
to function in an urban artistic context to which the peasant had
no admission, and hence about their evident artificiality. This is
particularly compelling in the analysis of the erotic function of many
peasant images, a function that was already recognized by urbanites in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the hands of certain
scholars, the truism of the bourgeois function of peasant images has
become a means of discrediting peasant images by making them part
of a complicitous and co-optive representational strategy, not so dif¬
ferent from colonialism. In this way the modern representation of the
peasantry is filled with hegemonic political meanings that enable
the modern scholar to claim moral superiority and, thus, to discredit
the representation and its maker.
In the face of the wide range of peasant images by male and female
artists, this categorical view is untenable. Following the lead of the in¬
ternationally famous Millet, whose origins among the peasantry itself
is well known, artists throughout Europe and the Americas painted

170 SOCIAL CLASS AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS

109 Vanessa Bell rural workers in fields, homes, and markets. Some of these peasants
Studland Beach, c.1912, work to produce food for themselves, but the market economy is not
oil on canvas
really so far from most nineteenth-century peasant images. While
This sophisticated and
haunting modernist painting many of the images stress the mind-numbing physicality of peasant life
borrows freely from Gauguin (in this, following the earlier tradition of the peasant as a human
and Matisse, applyingtheir
formal ideas to a scene
beast), others confront peasant leisure and even education among the
observed in Bell's native rural classes [109], The images have such a variety of styles that no at¬
England. The title places us
tempt to link the peasantry with a particular mode of representation is
firmly outside France, and
the imagery of huddled possible. What is clear is that, as part of the general artistic project to
figures, standingfigures with understand the world through the representation of it, the peasant oc¬
their backs to the viewer, and
cupied an important niche. In fact, the galleries of the Salon, the Royal
figures wearing hats confined
to the edges of the picture, Academy, or any of the major exhibitions in Germany, Austria, and
transforms this place into a Russia were better socially integrated in representation than they were
part of the international scene.
in audience. Peasants harvested grain, tended their animals, churned
butter, sewed by candlelight, ate frugally, and even posed for their rep¬
resenters in galleries full of royalty, dandies, and generals, all of whom
looked out from gilded frames. Peasant images were neither larger nor
smaller, more or less avant-garde, than those of the bourgeoisie. That
they were made for the bourgeoisie is undeniable; they were, after all,
modern commodities.
It has long been thought that the peasant image can be tied more or
less exclusively to the visual project of Realism, and the peasants of

IMAGES OF PEASANTRY 171

110 Rudolph Thygesen artists such as Courbet, Millet, and Paul Adolphe Dagnan-Bouveret
Barbarians, 1914, oil on
(1852-1929) are often grouped and studied. Yet a simple list of peasant
canvas
In this brilliant, if provincial, images in what has become mainstream avant-garde art would be very
painting one sees just how long, varying from the Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist peasants
quickly the linearity and colour
of Pissarro and the French artist Maximilian Luce (1858-1941) through
intensification of Matisse’s
brand of Fauvist modernism those of Gauguin, van Gogh, and Cezanne to the noble peasants of
permeated Europe and Gosol in the work of Picasso. While Pissarro and Luce created their
America. The decorative
images as part of a specifically anarchist political project and as part of a
arabesques of Thygesen's
composition unfold in leisurely representational embodiment of a modern ‘agro-industrial’ world,
rhythms that are given pic¬ those of Gauguin, van Gogh, Cezanne and Picasso can be interpreted
torial punch by his brilliant,
contrast-filled palette. His
as part of an elemental humanism, in which the class-bound fashion
‘barbarians’ are surely the trends of cities are removed from the viewer’s consideration so that the
‘fauves’ or ‘wild beasts' that
art functions on a generally human plane. To this predominantly
animated Parisian exhibitions
from 1905 to 1908.
French image, we must add the extraordinary fascination with the
peasant in Russian, Swiss, Italian, and Central European modernism
[110], And on the eve of the Russian Revolution the overtly politicized
representation of serfs as noble rural workers was common in Russian
modernism. In Russia and, subsequently, the Soviet Union, the rights
and individuality of rural workers were being expressed in artistic rep¬
resentations as modern and as urban as any in the history of art.
In 1886, Pissarro completed The Apple Pickers after a four- or even
five-year period of intermittent work on the canvas [111]. It hung next
to Seurat’s GrandeJatte at the final Impressionist exhibition of 1886. In
it, a group of three female rural workers (can we actually call them
peasants?) work in a carefully tended garden. One loosens ripe apples
from the tree with a stick; another picks them up from the ground; a
third tastes the sweet fruit, while putting the apples in a basket, most
probably for sale. There is, hence, a sort of visual diagram of the steps
involved in the harvesting and presentation of apples. None of the
young women makes any form of contact with the viewer, and
Pissarro’s adoption of a very high horizon line and a square format
makes it difficult for us to relate in any direct bodily way to the figures.
Rather we are asked to think about them in the context of a contrived
and decoratively complex representation. Oddly, given the usually
sexist urges in the representation of young peasant women in modern
painting, these figures were not intended to provoke thoughts of lust,
in spite of the obvious links between apple picking and Christian
sexual discourse. We do, it must be admitted, look down on them, but
Pissarro seems more anxious to deny our presence than to use the poses
and horizon line to embody a class superiority that we know he did not
feel. What, then, is the class significance of this work?
Surely we can say something about this issue by considering it as an
exhibition picture in the context of two other works, both of which
were shown in its presence in 1886: Seurat’s Grande Jatte and Signac’s
Two Milliners (1886). One room contained a collective class portrait of

IMAGES OF PEASANTRY 173

Ill Camille Pissarro
The Apple Pickers, 1884-6,
oil on canvas_
Pissarro was one of several
committed modernist painters
who represented traditional
rural life using the stylistic
advances created for urban
art. Like many members of
the left (Pissarro was an
anarchist), Pissarro valued
human work of all kinds. He
confined hisana lysis of work
to rural labour, leaving the
representation of industrial
labourto his younger
colleague, Maximillian Luce.
Here, we see a virtual dance
of rural labour in a work that
Pissarro painted and re¬
painted several times before
exhibiting it next to Seurat’s
Grande Jaffe at the final
Impressionist Exhibition of
1886.

three levels of French society, rural workers, urban workers, and urban
bourgeoisie, in three paintings of a similar style. Both Signac and
Pissarro were committed anarchists, for whom the class divisions in
modern society were like shackles that prevented individuals having
full and free self-expression. Yet, in this exhibition, three class-specific
representations were juxtaposed so as to raise profound questions
about class, questions without easy answers. The realm of representa¬
tion was, thus, socially varied without being socially mixed, or in the
case of the Seurat, apparently so. And the same can be said about the
official Salons.

The worker and modern art

Perhaps it was because the peasantry was associated with a distant rural
world that its image tended more towards elegy and pastoral than did
the images of the immense and modern proletariat or working class.
Concerns over the working conditions and spiritual life of the urban
working class were an important component of modern thinking
throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, as communica¬
tion and representation made the lives of the working class more acces¬
sible to the economically dominant bourgeoisie. In fact, images of the
working class were rare by comparison with the peasant image, most

174 SOCIAL CLASS AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS

112 Nikolai Yaroshenko
The Stoker, 1878, oil on
canvas
Yaroshenko’s contribution to
Russian art was defined by
the Association of Travelling
Exhibitions or The Wan¬
derers’, of which he was an
early member. This was the
first well-organized vanguard
movement in Europe, and
its aim, to take art directly
to the Russian people
through privately organized
exhibitions, was later adopted
by the Impressionists. Here,
Yaroshenko permits a terri¬
fying guideto take us into
the ‘hell’ of industry.

113 Abrham Arkhipov

Laundresses, 1901, oil on
canvas
This brilliant study of urban
work revels in the heat and
comparative darkness of a
crowded laundry. Arkhipov,
along with the portrait painter
Serov, should be considered
amongthe handful of Euro-
global masters of the loaded
brush. Like Zorn, Sorolla, and
Mancini, Arkhipovapplied the
same technique to workers
and peasants as Sargent and
Boldini did to aristocrats and
members of the haute-
bourgeoisie.

THE WORKER AND MODERN ART 175

 probably because of their predominantly negative and critical char¬
acter. Although most recent writing about working-class imagery
has been directed at the urban workers of Manet, Degas,9 and the Im¬
pressionists, I have chosen two Russian examples of proletariat
imagery: the famous The Stoker (1878) [112] by Nikolai Yaroshenko
(1846-98) and Abrham Arhkipov’s (1862-1930) later and more lyrical
Laundresses (1901) [113]. Both works were exhibited in the privately
financed exhibitions of ‘The Itinerants’, a group of advanced artists
who sought to bring art directly to urban audiences throughout Russia
in an unsanctioned manner. In each case, the viewer is asked to con¬
front the grim realities of urban work: in Yaroshenko’s case that of an
individual male industrial worker and in Ashkipov’s urban laundresses
toiling on the ground floor of a vast building. Their representational
strategies differ: Yaroshenko elected to suppress his own involvement
with the subject and to establish a seemingly direct confrontation be¬
tween the urban bourgeoisie who view exhibitions and a particular
middle-aged worker who cannot be ignored. Arhkipov, by contrast,
evoked the straining, sweating bodies of his workers with the sort of
sensual strokes of thick paint used by Sargent, Boldini, and the
Swedish artist Anders Zorn (1860—1920) to represent aristocrats and
members of the haute bourgeoisie. Hence the style of representation
can in neither case be associated with the class of the represented sub¬
ject, and one again confronts a situation in which the difficulties of
class-based research are clear.
In spite of the immensity of the social history of art during the last
generation, studies of class representation in modern art are at a very
early stage. Most analyses are confined to a single country, thereby

114 Karoly Ferency

Boys on the Danube, 1890,
oil on canvas
Ferency was among the
most distinctive and original
modernist painters in late-
nineteenth-century Budapest.
Here, heseemsalmostto be
competing with Seurat, whose
Bathers atAsnieres was
completed just six years
earlier. Although it shares with
Seurat’s masterpiece a sort
of timelessness, Ferency’s
painting is as monochromatic
as a photograph and has
dynamic, asymmetrical spatial
structure. Its subject is young
boys with time on their hands
—neither working nor in
school, and its view of their
future is unclear.

176 SOCIAL CLASS AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS

115 Edouard Manet
A Bar at the Folies-Bergere,
1882, oil on canvas
No single modernist work,
save Manet’s Dejeunersur
I’herbeand Olympia, has a
longer bibliography. Manet,
as even this book suggests,
seems to have created the
defining images of modern¬
ism. Here, we confront a
working woman who waits
to serve as we circulate in
the balcony of the luxurious
Parisian night-club. Hence,
the painting seems more to
address issues of commodity
desire than of modern
spectacle, and its impossible
reflection makes it clear that
pictures, whether mirrors or
windows, are unreliable as
indicators of visual or social
truth.

making it difficult to make conclusions about represented class itself.

Studies of the modern representation of industrial workers are also
rare, and bourgeois Marxist scholars have preferred to hound the bour¬
geoisie in representation rather than to analyse images of that, or any
other, class in quantity and depth [114], Exceptions to this rule tend to
be in the area of entertainment workers, particularly popular singers,
service workers, and prostitutes. This may be because their image is
perhaps more common and because it involves class confrontation. A
waiter or waitress, a dance-hall performer or cabaret singer, all these
entertainment workers are defined by their relationship to a customer
or an audience, often, though not always, bourgeois. This condition
provides the representer with occasion for study of class interaction, a
subject more difficult to represent in the case of industrial workers and
their families, who lived and worked in relatively class-confined areas.
Many of the most compelling and morally problematic readings of
modern art concern such class interactions. Perhaps the most canon¬
ical work of art to read in this way is Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergere
(1882). The single figure in the painting is a waitress, who stands
alone behind a bar laden with the goods that she sells, beer, liqueurs,
champagne, and fruit [115], Behind her is a mirror, the reflection in
which has caused more speculation than any depicted mirror in the
history of Western art (including the convex mirror in Parmigianino’s
Self Portrait, the mirror in van Eyck’s Arnolfi n i We deling Portrait, or the
mirror in Velazquez’s Las Meninas). Manet’s mirror is troubling both
because it does not reflect the reality in the picture (and beyond it) in a
comprehensible way and because it contains a reflection of a presumed
costumer, who leans forward to interact with the waitress herself, but is

THE WORKER AND MODERN ART 177

not present in the ‘real’ realm defined by Manet. The countless discus¬
sions of the mirrored and the actual realms of the painting have dealt
with the ontology of painting itself, with the representation of desire,
and with the unbridgeable social gap between the urban working class
and the bourgeois customer or viewer. All these readings are fascinat¬
ing, many are eloquent, and all hinge on social class as a major com¬
ponent of the representation’s various meanings. Thus, during the last
generation, the painting has gone from being an examination of flat¬
ness and complex pictorial illusionism and has become a representa¬
tional examination of many of the class and gender issues raised in an
expanding urban capitalist society. Both views are, of course, correct,
but the class-based reading depends on a thorough knowledge of en¬
tertainment workers, their access to capital, and the milieu in which
they interacted with the urban bourgeoisie.
The future of scholarship that deals with the historical representa¬
tion of class is great. As public collections of modern images become
digitized and widely accessible, the tendency to read (one might say
over-read) a small number of works of art will become less compelling
than new research into modern portraiture and genre painting of all
sorts. The importance of this project to human scholarship is, I think,
great. Artists making representations of particular individuals or
classes of individuals in modern society produced a collective portrait
of that society as compelling as those created by novelists and play¬
wrights, psychologists or anthropologists, or writers of memoirs and
publishable letters. The realm of visual representation they defined is
filled with secrets, with ideas, and with potential for expanding human
discourse.

178 SOCIAL CLASS AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS

 *&&&*< ■i. • ■
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' IH
mmu
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 Anti-Iconography:
Art Without
‘Subject’
How, in a section of a book devoted to the iconography of modern art
can one have a chapter that deals with the artist’s attempts to defy
meaning? The risks are great, and they are perhaps greatest if the thesis
that certain artists attempted to avoid meaning is interpreted as a
return to the formalism of earlier modernist criticism. We have seen in
these pages that representational artists used their arsenals of pictorial
skills to give visual form to modern sexual anxieties, class tensions,
and national myths. We have also seen ways in which certain notions
associated with religion, philosophy, the occult, and even science that
are perhaps best expressed in words were given pictorial form by artists
who worked both in image/modernism and abstraction. Yet it must be
remembered, in looking at many works of canonical modern art, that
the ascription of verbal meaning to them was made difficult by the
artists themselves. How?
The first method was the most obvious, to create representations
from completely banal or, in this sense, unrepresentable subjects. In
this, modern artists followed the lead of the major bourgeois masters of
Dutch seventeenth-century art (before modern scholars began to teach
us about all the hidden moral meanings in those seemingly contentless
paintings). Even among canonical French artists, this deliberate cul¬
tivation of the banal is remarkably prevalent. The dull suburban
streetscapes of Sisley and Maurice Utrillo (1883-1955); the seemingly
random stretches of the Seine by artists from Monet to Vlaminck; the
portraits of anonymous gardeners and servants by Cezanne or Picasso;
the corner market apples and pears by Cezanne, Matisse, and others;
the provincial market scenes by Pissarro; the list could continue easily
for pages. So many of the subjects of avant-garde Realists defy our
attempts to explain just why they were selected to be pictured.

Landscape painting
Monet’s On the Bank of 'the Seine at Bennecourt (1868) has been discussed
enormously because of its almost universal visual availability since its
acquisition by the Art Institute of Chicago in 1922 [116]. It is, in cer¬
tain senses, among the first truly Impressionist landscapes. We know
Detail of 118 from its title where it was painted (in a village west of Paris along the

181
116 Claude Monet
On the Bank of the Seine at
Bennecourt, 1868, oil on
canvas____
Monet signed and dated this
painting nearly ten years after
it was completed and before
its inclusion in the
Impressionist Exhibition of
1879. Its large areas of
relatively undifferentiated
colour suggest that it was
painted largely enpleinair,
but Monet's decision either to
movethefigure orto paint out
a companion is clearly seen
when standing in front of the
actual work of art. Hence, it
hastheairofa spontaneous
reaction to a place that was
later reconsidered and
finished.

Seine, soon to be the setting for the powerful prose portrait of the
modern artist by Zola in L’ceuvre), but what, really, does it represent?
The repoussoir trees are neither interesting nor beautiful (nor do they
make space very well, as such trees are supposed to do). The female
figure (there were two earlier, but Monet has removed one rather
crudely, so as to let the viewer know) is faceless and psychologically
illegible. The reflection of Bennecourt in the Seine cannot face scru¬
tiny: it is improbably schematic when we can see the village and rather
more precise when Monet chooses to screen the village behind the
trees. We see, for example, the full reflection of a hidden house just to
the left of centre, while there are no painted reflections of the visible
houses on the right of the composition. Only the weather, gloriously
sunny and, from the evidence of the figure’s dress and of her being
seated in the shade, wonderfully warm, is picturable. In this sense,
Monet encourages us to join him in this evocation of a summer day.
Yet, again we must ask the question, why this stretch of the river? Why
these buildings? Why only one empty boat and one figure, but two
trees (one of which was obviously added after the composition was
largely achieved)?
Clearly, in painting The Seine at Bennecourt, Monet made many
changes which, in attempting to decode the picture, have no effect on
the subject of the picture and little on its meanings. There are no pages
of prose or poetry that Monet elected to evoke in this painting. There
are no other works of art to which it has anything other than the
most generic of relations. There are not even works of art made by
Monet himself that, taken with this picture, enable us to ascribe

182 anti-iconography: art without ‘subject’

further meaning to the work. We are, in the end, stumped if we try
to interpret the picture in any way that would be familiar to the icon-
ographer. What, in this situation, have art historians and critics done
to develop verbal equivalents for this work?
They have turned to two major sources: early Realist literature, par¬
ticularly the novels of Zola, with whom Monet was living in one of the
houses in the painting at the time it was painted, and the voluminous
travel literature produced to render the environs of Paris accessible to
the tourist.1 Both of these sources create a sort of verbal context in
which Monet s representation can easily be set, but do these contexts in
any real sense explain it? The answer is surely no. The same texts work
as well for many other representations, most of which are different
from Monet’s in virtually every sense. The illustrations in guidebooks
do not look like his painting, indeed they are most often crowded with
figures (we do see a group of rowdy boaters in the middle-ground of
Monet’s composition, hut only after careful looking), regattas, swim¬
mers, and detailed evocations of buildings and trees. And, although
one could easily find certain passages in Zola’s Therese Raquin (pub¬
lished in 1867) that parallel the painting in words, the reading of them
does nothing to affect our interpretation of Monet’s representation.
Zola’s prose passages are, because of their positions within a dramatic
narrative, suffused with meanings that relate to a human drama (in this
case a murder). His words do not form independent pictures like that
of Monet’s representation.
The point of all of this is that, in many ways, Monet clearly
intended to avoid any literary or visual associations that would limit
or determine the meanings of his representation. Indeed, the most
persuasive way to interpret the picture is as an image about painting
as representation. By painting both reality and reflection, Monet
addressed a central mimetic function of visual art, but, oddly, seems to
propose no solution or assert no theory. In constructing the work with
such aggressive strokes of paint, Monet was at pains to reveal himself
as the producer of the work. We see not only his boldly black signature
and date (both probably added later), but also his painted marks on the
canvas. We are asked, in this sense, to interpret the work as a construc¬
tion in paint that uses a particular scene as its organizational scaffold¬
ing. Thus, the houses are not important as houses, nor the trees as
trees. The subject of the picture, the Seine at Bennecourt, is at once
banal and, in its banality, accessible. Any Parisian could get there in less
than an hour from the capital with the expenditure of a small amount
of money. So why did Monet paint it?
The answer is made even more difficult when we compare it to a
photograph of a remarkably similar motif, Eugene Atget’s The Marne
at Varenne [117], made about the time of Monet’s death in 1926. Of
all media, photography seems more than any other to be about the

LANDSCAPE PAINTING 183

117 Eugene Atget
The Marne at Varenne,
1925-7, gold-toned, printing-
out paper
Due largelyto the efforts of
the American photographer
Berenice Abbott, and to the
efforts of American collecting
institutions, Atget has
emerged as the major French
modernist photographer of
the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. His
achievement, like that of many
photographers, was to work
‘in series [that] document
aspects of Parisian and
suburban reality’. Human
figures rarely inhabit Atget’s
poetic urban and suburban
realms, which seem, as a
result, perpetually deserted,
awaiting possibilities. Atget
was a masterful composer
of photographic surfaces
and fully understood—and
therefore exploited—the photographed subject, in this case some abandoned leisure boats on
limitations of the medium. the banks of the Marne river east of Paris, along a stretch that Pissarro
had favoured in the 1860s. Atget has no recourse to rearrangement (un¬
less he moved the boats until they were in the right relationship both to
each other and to the river’s surface that they define), and his contre-
jour effect of light, rather like that of Monet, presents considerably
greater representational challenges in the photographic medium than
in painting. The resulting image is a good deal moodier, quieter, and
more contemplative than Monet’s painting, in spite of the fact that
Atget probably spent less actual time making it. When analysing the
Atget, we are fascinated by the artificiality and contrivance of the rep¬
resentation—by his particular decisions regarding the horizon line, the
hazy space at centre left, and the barely revealed contours of the forms
on the river bank that fill the lower left corner of the composition.
Atget evokes a psychologically satisfying pictorial space; a space of
light and dream that we fill with our fantasies, while Monet gives
you an in-your-face representation in which the brilliant colour and
evidently warm weather are the only attractive components.
Another consciously meaningless landscape representation is
Cezanne’s Houses near Auvers-sur-l'Oise (1873-4) in the Fogg Museum
at Harvard [118], This landscape was among the distinguished group
of works by Cezanne owned by Joachim Gasquet, the most important
French collector of avant-garde painting in the 1870s. It also was exhib¬
ited at the 1904 Salon d’Automne in Paris, and in Roger Fry’s famous
exhibition held at the Grafton Galleries in London m 1910.2 For
those reasons alone, its effect on modern representation has been

184 anti-iconography: art without ‘subject’

118 Paul Cezanne considerable. Painted a little more than five years after Monet’s repre¬
Houses nearAuvers-sur- sentation, Cezanne’s picture was made during the period of the
I'Oise, 1873^1, oil on canvas
This small painting, together
painter’s intensive artistic interaction with Pissarro. He chose a pair of
with others by Pissarro and houses used by rural workers that sat along the small road that ran
Victor Vignon, represents a along the Oise river between the village of Auvers, where he lived, and
farm along the Oise river near
Pontoise. For Cezanne, the
the hamlet of l’Hermitage, where Pissarro lived [119]. They stood
powerful spatial interplay of against a steep hillside and looked down on an alluvial agricultural
the axially contrasting build¬
plane that bordered the Oise river. In a sense, Cezanne’s subject was
ings is emphasized as is the
chromatic tension between almost identical to that of Monet, but Cezanne chose to concentrate
the grey-beige buildings and on the houses themselves and to omit the river and, hence, the
their intensely green setting.
picturable reflections that it would afford. Like Monet, Cezanne also
Yet it is the group of grey-
painted diagonal marks to virtually omitted the sky, squeezing it into a band at the very top of
the right of the buildings that the picture and refusing to grace it with space-giving clouds. Why,
makes this small landscape
one must ask, would Cezanne, or anyone, choose to paint this motif? It
painting revolutionary.
has no architectural interest, no figures for human interest, no old
trees, no harvest scene—in short, nothing that makes it interesting as
a landscape motif.
Clearly, Cezanne chose his motif precisely because it was so banal
and, in making such a successful representation of it, he posed
himself a challenge all the greater because of the very banality of his
subject. Like Monet, he signed the picture (its first owner, Joachim
Gasquet, seems to have insisted) and, also like Monet, he constructed

LANDSCAPE PAINTING 185

119 Camille Pissarro
The Hermitage at Pontoise,
c.1867, oil on canvas
Pissarro’s most important
pupil considered his achieve¬
ment in the late 1860s to be
the greatest of a long career,
and this canvas can easily be
considered as a fully formed
prototype for Cezanne’s
later The MillatCouleuvre,
Pontoise. Pissarro—and later
Cezanne—succeeded in
giving a sort of aesthetic
heroism to the most banal
of su bjects, creating a tension
between the extraordinary
and the ordinary that has its
political dimensions.

it with consciously applied facture. In fact, many of his strokes of

paint function more powerfully as strokes of paint than they do as
representational forms within the landscape he chose to define. Yet
there is, along the right side of the landscape, a group of parallel
strokes of greyish green paint, arranged in almost martial diagonal
lines that are very difficult to interpret in terms of the traditions of
representational painting. No matter how hard we try, it is simply
impossible to read these strokes as either agricultural fields, shrubs, or
buildings. In fact, they represent nothing more than pictorial gestures
and have, for that reason alone, an extraordinary status in the history of
Western representational painting. They are, perhaps, the first strokes
of paint in a finished work of art made for exhibition that have no
representational function. Their status as painted marks is in no way
different than that of the non-representational beige paint strokes in
Picasso’s analytic Cubist pictures of 1910-11. For Monet, and in a
stronger sense Cezanne, representational painting was conceived in
terms that border on abstractness or non-representionality. This idea
thunders through the next hundred years of painting.
One could easily chose a photograph by Atget or even by a contem¬
porary of Cezanne’s (like Achille Quinet) to make the point more
strongly, but it is wise to skip a few years and move to the next canonical
French landscape representation, this one a tiny painting by a minor
French artist, Paul Serusier (i863—1927), made on the advice of a major
one, Gauguin. Called with an intentional mystery The Talisman, this
small panel painting represents a small pond near the Brittany town
of I ont-Aven in the autumn of 1888. Again, the subject itself is
unremarkable, but in this case we know just what Gauguin told
Serusier to do in painting it. When you see a red, chose the reddest red
on your palette. When you see a green, the greenest green.’’1 Thus the
representation is a concentrated chromatic intensification of actual

186 anti-iconography: art without ‘subject’

 yM&Mli

120 Edouard Vuillard sight, -an intensification that tells us more, perhaps, about the available
Large Interior with Six Figures,
materials of the artist than about the scene represented. Here, as with
1897, oil on canvas
The Nabis tended to work on
Monet, the basic subject of the panel is the interplay between actual
eithera very large ora very and reflected landscapes. Yet, like Monet, Serusier renders the differ¬
small scale in painting. This
ence representationally irrelevant.
work has the scale of a Salon
painting made for official Vuillard’s Large Interior with Six Figures has a title that courts ban¬
exhibition. It is, however, ality even more effectively than does the representation itself [120J. In
among the most complex
fact, when we know that Vuillard represents merely an interior with six
compositions by Vuillard
from the 1890s. Its painted figures, we are struck by its fabulous pictorial richness. Almost because
patterns interact with the it has no iconographic richness, the sheer multiplicity of the chromatic,
puzzle-like composition of
spatial, and organizational delights he provides is all the more pleasur¬
figures and furniture to form
a chromatic tapestry of urban able. By referring to the actors in his interior drama simply as figures,
bourgeois life. Although Vuillard removes any precise psychological dimension from the paint¬
Vuillard used his family,
friends, and even himself as
ing. Yet in spite of these efforts, we persist in attempting to decode
models, his decision to embed them. Why six? Why is it easy to find five of them and difficult to find
thefigures in a complex the sixth? Why one male and five females? What are they doing? Yet,
setting suggests that their
identity had no real interest
for all that we ask these questions, Vuillard gives us no clues to the
to him. answers, and we return, after a wonderfully pleasurable period with
the painting, to its title, Large Literior with Six Figures, as an adequate
description of its subject precisely because it becomes clear to us that
the painting is not about its subject but about the act of representation.

Text and image

This gambit of enforced meaninglessness is such an important com¬
ponent of unmediated modernism that its methods deserve careful ana¬
lysis. Unfortunately, iconography, even of the complex postmodernist
sort practised today, does not help. In looking again at the Vuillard, one
is tempted to go rushing to the theatre, or to read the plays by Ibsen
and Strindberg that Vuillard read and saw and for which he created
various designs. Yet, as Belinda Thomson and others have pointed out,

TEXT AND IMAGE 187

121 August Strindberg
The Wave VIII, 1892, oil on
cardboard
Strindberg is known primarily
as a writer, but his paintings
areamongthe most original
and important in the history
of Swedish modernism.
He rejected the image/
modernism of Gauguin, whom
he knew,fora more bracing
form of modernism that
derived from the palette-knife
paintings of Courbet and his
followers. Here, water and air
are literally equivalentto paint.

this practice, while fascinating, enriching, and educational, gets us no

nearer to a solution to the iconological puzzle of Large Interior with Six
Figures than we were before. Indeed, the representation itself has a
good deal more pictorial suggestive ness than comparable scenes in
contemporary theatre and, just as with Odilon Redon’s deliberately
irrelevant illustrations of the poetry of Mallarme, seeing and reading
go together, but do not reinforce each other with any degree of ease.
Indeed, as we learned from the writings of artists from the Impres¬
sionists from Gauguin and Serusier to Matisse, verbally based icono¬
graphy or iconology does not apply to the theory of modern painting.
The very cult of the visual and the non-verbal nature even of repres¬
entational painting is stressed over and over by artists and their most
intelligent critics. In our current obsession with both indirect and dir¬
ect readings of modernist paintings, most of which are textually based,
we must remember this fact. At no earlier time in the history of
Western art did the visual gain greater autonomy from words than in
the period covered by this book.
Among the most fascinating painters to address this issue squarely
was, ironically enough, a great writer. Not since the death of Victor
Hugo had a major European writer been drawn to the practice of visual
representation (though many great writers wrote about painting,
photography, or print-making). Yet in the 1890s, as he was writing his
greatest plays, the Swedish writer August Strindberg (1849-1912)

188 anti-iconography: art without ‘subject’

 painted a series of fascinating visual representations that are profoundly
visual, obsessed with the material ol the painter, and non-literary. One
of the most interesting of these is The Wave VIII (1892) [121], This
remarkable painting has been related to Strindberg’s interest in the
paintings of Turner that he had seen in London. Courbet’s stormy seas
are closer in the intensity of their painted surface and in their almost
complete absence of legible pictorial space. Neither Turner nor
Courbet can explain this canvas, (whose vertical format makes it a
distinct rarity among seascapes), and the absence of any scale-giving
form or any sense of land gives the representation an added terror for
the viewer. That there is a very strong and literary-charged subject
here, the crashing sea, is undeniable. Yet Strindberg conveyed that
subject in ways that have little to do with standard illusionism, and
removed any sense of internal narrative from the canvas. There is no
way in or out of this seascape and, in looking at it, the viewer is at his
own representational peril. One must wait for the late landscapes of
Mark Rothko for anything comparable.
Wave VIII proves that, by denying a very potent natural motif its
narrative and illusionist trappings, the artist can in fact intensify the
very subject that he denies. Yet most anti-iconographers represented
banal subjects; banal either because they were unremarkable in life or
because they had been represented so many times as to have become
banal. (We must remember that even Andy Warhol claimed that
The Last Supper had lost all representational interest.) This sense of
banality reached new heights in the first decade of the twentieth
century with both Cubist and Fauve painters. Although Derain and
Matisse continued the landscape imagery of the Impressionists, they
avoided the great tourist sites of the Mediterranean, preferring the

122 LauraGilpin
Basket of Peaches, 1912
This early colour photograph
has become justly famous.
Although assuredly ‘real’, its
very subjectand composition
have their roots in European
still-life painting, and we think
of Chardin, Manet, and Renoir
still-lifes more than we do of
actual fruit when we look at
this photograph.

TEXT AND IMAGE 189

most ordinary of fishing ports and rocky cliffs. Vlaminck risked almost
complete iconological banality by choosing to represent precisely
the same landscapes painted by the Impressionists, Chatou and
Bougival. His contribution was to inject a chromatic, facturial, and
compositional vitality into these banal scenes, most of which could
easily have been painted by Renoir, Sisley, or Monet more than a
generation earlier. As with the Fauve views of the dreary port of
Antwerp by Braque or the tutti-frutti facades of Mornau by Kandinsky
and the German artist Gabriele Munter (1877-1962), the mode of
representation contrasted utterly with the represented subjects.4

Abstraction
Few artists made smaller demands on iconography than the Cubists,
who insisted on representing the most accessible figures and still lifes
they could find. There were no searches for subjects, no long periods of
doubt in deciding between apples or oranges, a female or a male sitter, a
portrait or a genre scene. Rather, all the excitement in their representa¬
tions came from the particular modes of painting they developed while
staring at their simple subjects. We return again to the cultivation of
meaninglessness. Are there other points in the history of Western art
when such iconographic obfuscation occurs? The mind wanders first
to Dutch seventeenth-century Realism, to the rural peoples of the Le
Nain brothers, to Annibale Carracci’s butchers, or to the plums and
kitchen-maids of Chardin. Yet these all are concerned with problems
of illusionism, and the apparent accessibility of their subjects is part of
a gambit to get one to focus on the extraordinary mimetic likeness
achieved by the artist. The same is true for the French artist Louis-
Leopold Boilly (1761-1845) and other European painters of genre from
the first third of the nineteenth century. In fact, even in the realm of
landscape painting, there are no periods or groups of artist who created
finished paintings that strain the interpretative strategies of the viewers
more persistently than those just discussed.
When we look at the aggressively ordinary subjects of abstract-
realist painters like the American Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), the
strategy continues (see 133). There is nothing inherently interesting
about a particular flower or an apple or a barn, but when O’Keeffe
elected to contemplate these banal subjects for long periods and to
transform these contemplative acts into works of representational art,
the representation became the subject. The viewer has no desire to
pluck or buy a similar flower or to find the barn in upstate New York.
Rather, the sheer pictorial concentration evinced in her act of repres¬
entation becomes in itself interesting. To make the point more
strongly, if we look at a several photographs of simple everyday subjects
made by Laura Gilpin [122], Paul Strand, or Margrethe Mather, we
confront O’Keeffe’s essentially photographic aesthetic. In every case,

190 anti-iconography: art without ‘subject’

123 Lazar El Lissitzky
Proun 12 E, 1923, oil on
canvas
Lissitzky’s career is particu¬
larly importantfor European
art and theory because he
spent a good deal of his
working life outside Russia
and had a profound effect on
German and Dutch modern¬
ism. As a Jew, Lissitzky
participated in the inter¬
connected and profoundly
modern culture of the
diaspora and was among the
most important individuals
in international modernism.

124 Kasimir Malevich

Suprematist Composition:
White on White, 1918, oil on
canvas
Malevich's abstractions of the
late teens are among the most
reductive in the history of art.
Conceived as both independ¬
ent and interdependent, the
separate easel pictures were
positioned in simple spaces
by the artist in ways that
approximate later installation
artand that deny them their
integrity. In museums today,
they are generally enshrined
by beinghungas illusionist
easel pictures at eye level and
lit by designated spotlights.
This—and their continued
publication as plates in art
books—removes them from
the highly experimental, non¬
commodity worlds for which
they were conceived.

ABSTRACTION 191
125 Mikhail Matiushin
Movement in Space,
1917-18, oil on canvas
Russian artists in both St
Petersburg and Moscow were
aware of the latest in French—
and European—art and theory
and when their own revolution
completely transformed the
social and intellectual struc¬
ture of the state many young
artists annexed revolutionary
art to revolutionary action.
Matiushin was among the
artists fascinated by the
aesthetics of flux and tempor¬
ary instability, which had been
an essential part of Euro-
global vanguard art since
Impressionism.

126 Hans Mattis-Teutsch

Composition in Yellow from
‘Flowers of the soul series',
1916-24, oil on canvas
Claimed by both Romania and
Hungary, Mattis-Teutsch was
of German origin and lived in a
part of the world that has been
both Hungary and Romania.
His personal brand of colour
abstraction can be linked with
that of Kupka in Prague,
Kandinsky in Munich, and
Delaunay in Paris.

the viewer is asked to perform an almost Zen-like act of concentration

and to direct that act to something of no particular interest, forcing us
back on ourselves or, with O’Keeffe, on the artist as a more compelling
subject than the ostensible one of the work of art.
This aestheticizing strategy runs throughout the history of modern
art. Artists who represent the everyday do so with a message, that the
picture itself is art and thereby contains its own plastic values and

192 anti-iconography: art without ‘subject’

127 Bertram Brooker
Sounds Assembling, 1928,
oil on canvas
Brooker was one among a
small group of Canadian and
American artists who
embraced transcendentalism
and applied its principles to
painting. Many of them fled
urban areas and formed an
artistic colony in the hills and
mountains of northern New
Mexico. Here they created
universal abstractions des¬
igned to go beyond all political
and ideological boundaries.

its own non-verbal associations. This notion runs so strongly through

the history of modern painting that it should come as no surprise to
anyone who reads painter-theorists like Gauguin or Signac that art
without iconography or representational subject already existed before
the development of abstraction or non-representational painting
around 1910. Whether based on the principles of abstraction from rep¬
resentational forms like the paintings of van de Velde, or whether the
work of art represents concepts, ideas, or values not visible in nature,
like fully mature Mondrian and the painting of the Russian artists
Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935) and El Lissitzky (1890-1941), the con¬
cept of the picture as an autonomous pictorial object without necessary
relationship to the act of representation is intrinsic to a certain type of
modernism [123, 124],
Interestingly, this notion of the painting as expressive in its own
terms does not apply to the pictorial theory of the first legitimate
abstract painter, Kandinsky, for whom painted abstractions are so full

ABSTRACTION 193
of associations from memory, images, and/or visualized emotions that
his pictures are as dependent on notions of the world as are Gauguin’s
late Polynesian fantasies or Cezanne’s bathers. The elision of concepts
of decorative painting, in which the work of art functions as a surface of
organized colours and forms that remain in the middle ground of the
imagination, with abstraction is also remarkable and relatively un¬
explored in the literature ol modern art [125, 126, 127], Each of these
modern traditions has its roots in the kind of painting discussed at the
beginning of this chapter, a kind of representational art in which the
representational meanings of the work are minimized by the artist.
Although there is an immense leap in appearance between Monet’s
Luncheon (Argentueil) (1873-6) and Kupka’s Vertical Planes (1912—13),
the paintings have equally uninteresting subjects (see 6 and 27).
Monet’s functions not as a representation of a luncheon, but as a repres¬
entation per se, and Kupka, though he represents nothing in particular,
does so in a clearly organized and emotionally resonant manner. These
works could hang in a room together.

194 anti-iconography: art without ‘subject’

 Nationalism and
Internationalism in
Modern Art
National identity
On entering the National Museum of Poland in Warsaw, one walks
through galleries ol foreign art before entering a vast suite of skylit
rooms that chart the national history of Polish painting. Any non-
Polish visitor feels that the national character of Polish painting is
difficult to define, and that it is actually the imagery rather than the
representational strategies employed by the painters that makes their
work Polish. But, on entering the largest gallery devoted to nine¬
teenth-century painting, one confronts a truly epic canvas by Jan
Matejko (1838-93) called The Battle of Grunewald (1878). Matejko’s
masterpiece defies description [128]: it is too large and bombastic to fit
into the avant-garde; it is too absorbed with the past to be truly Realist;
it is too finished to be associated with any ol the forms ol action paint¬
ing that litter the history of modern art. Indeed, no great nineteenth-
century nation produced any truly comparable painting. Instead, it was
the new nations, such as Switzerland and Hungary, often with com¬
plex and politically unstable pasts, that specialized in vast representa¬
tional epics. They produced the nationalist icons that continue to this
day to exercise powerful authority in their own countries.
Let us return to Matejko, the beloved patriarch of self-consciously
Polish painting. A native of the earliest capital of Poland, Cracow,
Matejko learned German, the language common to educated Poles of
that city, and travelled as a young artist to Munich and Vienna. When
he returned to Poland, he became consumed with the nationalist
fervour of that troubled country and worked in Cracow. His national
museum in Warsaw had been closed for two years when his Grunewald
painting was exhibited, and exhibition facilities in Cracow were not of
international standard. Matejko flew in the face of all odds by painting
a canvas of dimensions so epic that few rooms in the world could
receive it. He therefore sent it to Paris, where it was first shown as the
Polish painting at the International Exhibition in the art capital of the
world.1
What Matejko did was to seize a moment in the troubled history of
Poland, a battle that took place in 1410, and to represent it in such a way
Detail of 128 that the viewer seems literally immersed in history. One feels sweat,

197
128 Jan Matejko blood, and raw aggression in ways that are simply unexplainable in
The Battle ofGrunewald, words. Few pages of prose in any language (maybe only Caesar’s Gallic
1878, oil on canvas
Wars) have its breadth and majesty. Even today, as Poland attains
The Battle ofGrunewald is
the visual manifesto of Polish another independence, schoolchildren sit in front of it for hours,
Nationalist culture in the their teachers identifying the figures and explaining the historical
nineteenth century. Although
created in a part of Poland
significance of the moment evoked by Matejko.
then controlled by Germany, H ow can one call The Battle of Grunewald modern? Its historicism
it re-enacts on a huge scale
is marked, and its style makes one think of artists from Altdorfer to
a battle in which the Poles
secured their immense Delacroix. Yet its sheer vastness and the urgency with which its nation¬
national territory from the alism is expressed is modern. It was not commanded by a king or gen¬
German Teutonic Knights who
eral; nor was it a state commission, designed to be an emblem of the
ruled a good deal of Lithuania
north of Poland. In this way, glory of the nation for official use. Instead, it was made privately for
the painting used history for
public exhibition in the hope that its lessons of the struggle of the Poles
present-day political ends
and cloaked a fierce but frus¬ and their neighbours against foreign oppression would provide an ex¬
trated nationalism under the ample for young rebels and nationalists. Matejko bet on the survival
mantle of history painting. The
and continued strength of Poland as a nation, that its national museum
sheer pictorial energy of the
canvas is unprecedented in would become home to the glory of Polish painting, and that The
nineteenth-century painting. Battle of Grunewald would occupy a place of pride in it. Few painters
from other nations had such vast dreams for painting, and none of
them attempted anything so magnificent and defiant.
Yet, when thinking about this canvas-spectacle conceived on such a
grand scale, one struggles to find anything quite comparable, and it
might be best at this juncture to contrast it with another battle paint¬
ing, this one painted in 1911 by a Russian painter living and working in
Munich. Kandinsky’s White Cross is everywhere and in every way the
opposite of Matejko’s self-conscious manifesto/masterpiece [129],
Although large by the standards of the modernist easel picture,
Kandinsky s canvas is minuscule when compared to that by Matejko.
With its slashing black lines, hints of spears, mountains, castles, and
battle clashes, it evokes rather than describes war. Yet its brilliant scat¬
tering of colour and its title make one think more readily of musical

198 NATIONALISM AND INTERNATIONALISM

129 Wassily Kandinsky
White Cross, January-June
1922, oil on canvas
This large canvas is a virtual
catalogue of elements
Kandinsky had both observed
and invented during his years
in Russia from 19l4to 1921.
Although he had developed
his early abstract style in
Germanyand published his
important book, Concerning
the Spiritual in Art, in 1912,
he had returned to Russia to
work with Klyun, Rodchenko,
Malevich, and many other
members of The Great Utopia.
When the terrible problems
of the Revolution became
apparent, Kandinsky left for
Berlin, where this powerful
canvas was painted just
before he was appointed
a professor at the Bauhaus.

recitals than historic battles. We all recognize rushing soldiers, boats

with rowers, and landscape elements, yet none of these helps us to
place this battle either geographically or temporally. When we search
for clues in the life of the painter, we learn that this painted representa¬
tion of a battle (the single subject type most readily associated with
national history) was made by a man from one country, living and
working in another, speaking a language foreign to him, and, most
revealingly, working for a completely international group of collectors
and clientele. This, we have long been taught, is modern.2
Why is the cosmopolitan tradition in modern art coequal with
modern itself? We have already learned that a good deal of modern art
associates more readily with the present than with the past, and that it
is all but obsessed with the manner of representation, or what we might
call technique. Yet it must be said that nationalism is among the most
powerful forces in modern society, that it has been at the root of most
cataclysmic political events, and that, in spite of cosmopolitanism, the
history of modern art remains a sequence of largely national histories
written in national languages by historians who view art as the embodi¬
ment of national values. The histories of every eastern European coun¬
try’s art, as well as that of Russia, are not easily accessible to the West,
and even the histories of other nations’ modern art are written largely
for a national audience. The minority of painters who worked in the
modern world are treated as part of their national heritage, both in

NATIONAL IDENTITY 199

130 Leon Wyczotkowski
UWrotChafubihskiego, 1905,
pastel on cardboard_
This pastel view of the moun¬
tains of Poland represents a
portion of the national land¬
scape then controlled by
Germany. Its emptiness and
sublimity created an aesthetic
condition in which it could be
reconquered by each Polish
viewer, thus contributing to
the fundamentally cultural
politics of the ‘Young Poland’
movement.

university courses and, even more pervasively, in the collections of

national and regional museums, and this follows from the earliest
arrangements of works of art into national and regional schools
arranged by geographical area [130]. The histories of Florentine,
Venetian, and Roman painting are treated in most Euro-American art
museums as part of the history of painting in Italy, in spite oi the fact
that Italy didn’t exist as a political unit until the nineteenth century; the
same can be said for German art.

Time and place

Every modern art museum teaches us that place is as important to art
as time, and the primary mode of organization in art museums of both
painting and sculpture is by nation and region, through which time is
allowed to flow. Hence, in every major European museum of European
art, we see works produced in the same geopolitical place at different
times in a single area of the museum, but almost never works produced
at the same time in different places. And, as if this restrictive geo¬
graphical organization in art museums were not sufficient, it extended
also to most of the great temporary exhibitions of art held in inter¬
national exhibitions and other sorts of fairs. For modern institutions in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, art was presented as a product
of nations, not of the Teitgeist or of individual people. Many modern
artists accepted this condition as true, and, for some, such as Mucha in
the Slav Epic and Hodler in the Zurich Landesmuseum, their greatest
efforts as artists were directed toward vast nationalist works with many
vast canvases covering acres of wall.3
It goes without saying that none of these works is included in a
museum of modern art anywhere in the world. Indeed, these

200 NATIONALISM AND INTERNATIONALISM

institutions have conceived of themselves as modern in a way that
is fundamentally dissociated from nationalism (hence the almost
universal distrust of museums of modern art by nationalists in
the United States, the Soviet Union, England, Scotland, etc.). The
theorists of modern art would contend that place is more important
than time in traditional culture (when communications were more
difficult and travel unusual). The modern condition, for them, pro¬
duced a culture in which time replaced place as the signifying variable
in classifying works of art. To put it simply, the fact that a work of
modern art was made in 1890 or 1925 is more important than that it
was made in Munich or Oslo. Baudelaire’s dictum literally became the
rallying cry for modernism—that the modern artist be of his own time.
A good deal of the cosmopolitanism of modern art has to do with
the urban art system created in the nineteenth century, a multi-centred
system of urban communication nodes surrounding a central city,
Paris, and a small number of subsidiary capitals, Vienna, Berlin,
London, St Petersburg, and New York. For that reason, an artist who
worked in a place like Melbourne or Bucharest was focused on one
major centre, about which artists, critics, dealers, and patrons knew a
great deal more than they did about other peripheral places. It is im¬
portant to remember that travelling exhibitions of provincial modern
art were organized to be shown in large geographic areas. One need
only think of the exhibitions organized in Melbourne, San Francisco,
Pittsburgh, Chicago, Buenos Aires, and Copenhagen during the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to recognize just how cosmo¬
politan the system actually was.
Life in the capital city was very much organized around colonies of
foreigners, artists and otherwise. It would not be difficult to read the
art criticism of any great nation as a partial attempt to define the char¬
acter of the national school of art, particularly since some of the most
intensely reviewed exhibitions of the nineteenth century contained the
work of foreign artists or, in the cases of the huge exhibitions held in
conjunction with the World’s Fairs, attempted global coverage in na¬
tional terms. Even the venerated Paris Salon came increasingly to be an
international affair, as artists from most parts of Europe and America
attempted to place their works at the epicentre of world art.
The ability to succeed in a multi-lingual artistic society was seem¬
ingly essential for success as a modern artist, and those who were able
to cross boundaries were often more successful in explicating their art
than were artists who remained at home. The lists of men and women
who ‘passed’ for ‘French’ or ‘British’ when they were Americans or
Romanians are legion. Although most of them eventually returned
home, it was their ability to bring back ideas and stimuli from abroad
that in many ways validated them and gave them important aesthetic
currency. In this way, we have learned from recent studies of Jewish

TIME AND PLACE 201

 contributions to vanguard culture that the Diaspora encouraged
Jewish artists, collectors, critics, and intellectuals to cross national and
linguistic borders, making them, as a group, considerably more mod¬
ern in the sense of international and cosmopolitan culture than others.
It is surely no accident, given this cosmopolitanism, that one of the
most powerful strands in modern art was anti-nationalist. For every
work made to be Polish or Russian, there were others made not to be
classifiable in national terms. We have already noted that Kandinsky
wrote the first full-scale manifesto of international abstraction, Con¬
cerning the Spiritual in Art, in 1911. It is not so far from there to the
Czech Kupka, developing transnational colour abstraction in Paris or
to the Dutchman Mondrian, refining Neo-Plasticism in the same city.
There is plenty of evidence to assert that the inventors of Suprematism
actually believed that they were charting a new aesthetic course for all
humanity as part of the particular revolutionary struggles of the
Russian people. What would American modernism have been without
the presence of Duchamp and Francis Picabia (1879-1953) (among oth¬
ers) in New York during and just after the First World War or without
the critical presences of the Steins or Patrick Henry Bruce in Paris in
the first three decades of the twentieth century? And the travels of
Segantini are crucial for the development of transnational modernism
throughout Europe.

Abstract art, spiritualism, and internationalism

In the context of nationalism, abstraction plays a very small role.
Indeed, the aims and achievements of most abstract painters were, at
the very least, transnational and, at most, cosmic and universal [131].
Again, one can return to our two battle paintings by Matejko and
Kandinsky. In the eailier, and clearly nationalist endeavour, it is neces¬
sary to know Polish history, to know the names of the factions in the
battle, and to decode a good deal of information from the armour, cos¬
tumes, and heraldic devices in the painting. None of these areas of
knowledge applies to Kandinsky s cosmic war, which seems more to
come from memories of childhood tales in which heroic knights
stormed turreted castles in countries with no real existence. The same
kind of comparison can be made between the modernist repres¬
entations of Amsterdam made in both photography and paint by
the Dutchman George Breitner (1857-1923), and the fagades of his
countryman Mondrian that present architecture freed from place.
It has long been known that a good deal of the theory of abstraction
in northern Europe and the Americas developed from forms of trans¬
national mysticism, many of which were textually based.4 Rendering
visible sounds, spirits, cosmic forces, and other invisible forms was a
principal task of a particularly vital form of cosmopolitan modernism
in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Although these

202 NATIONALISM AND INTERNATIONALISM

131 Sandor Bortnyik
Geometric Composition,
1922, paper and watercolour
Bortnyik, like many cosmo¬
politan modernists, refused to
be constrained by what he saw
as the narrow boundaries of
national art. Forthat reason,
he com posed works of a rt
that attem pted to tra nscend
language and national history
and to replace it with a uni¬
versal or, at least, trans¬
national language of form.

advances in pictorial practice were heralded as completely revolution¬

ary in the years following their appearance, recent scholarship
and museological practice have taught us that abstraction grew out of
many ideas powerfully associated with Symbolism and other forms
of occult image/modernism. The representation of unseeable forms
has been a challenge to artists since the beginning of human history,
and representational solutions have tended towards abstraction long
before the development of the various strands of abstract art. The
representation of a chimera, of innocence or of any idea, deity, or
force involved levels of abstraction. Curiously, most of these non-
representable ideas transcend nations and national languages and are
more closely involved with borderless institutions such as religions.
It is not a great leap to assert that well-travelled, multi-lingual cos¬
mopolitan capitalists tended toward such forms of mysticism more
than did their opposite. It is for that reason that many of the greatest
figures in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century mysticism were
voyagers for whom the mundane necessities of daily life were provided

ABSTRACT ART, SPIRITUALISM, AND INTERNATIONALISM 203

132 John Covert
Time, 1919, oil and carpet
tacks on canvas
Covert’s Dada constructions
are rare, but they show both
the sophistication and the
cosmopolitanism that was
possible in urban America in
the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. The
subject of this work is time,
which is visually unrepresent¬
able in a static image, but
which Covert succeeded in
representing with the use of
unorthodox materials. There
are simply no national indi¬
cators in this work of art, which
succeeds in transcending
place while it embodies time.

by others (or, at least, by the fruits of working capital). Whether they

gathered in Sweden, rural England, northern New Mexico, or the
forests of Transylvania, the men and women who created various
Euro-global spiritual revolutions between 1880 and 1930 did so without
feeling great material need. They also did so with a good many books,
diagrams, and representations to explain and embody their visions.
The association of artists with these colonies ol seekers has long been
known, and the anti-national aspiration of most of these groups is an
important component ol their thinking [132],
With the proliferation of public libraries and easily accessible shops
lor illustrated books, an entire range of occult and scientific literature
became available to artists. Whether a Manual of Zen Buddhism, The
Book of Occult Philosophy, or The Principles of Light and Colour, illus¬
trated books had an entire range of visual information documenting,
diagramming, or describing the unseeable, and we know from the last
generation of scholars just how assiduous artists were in their use of
these sources. Kandinsky’s familiarity with popular illustrations to the
Book of Revelations has been documented by Carol Washton Long;
Linda Elenderson has proved that Duchamp used scientific and

204 NATIONALISM AND INTERNATIONALISM

 pseudo-scientific illustrations with all the subtlety ol a connoisseur;
and John Boult has identified connections between the Esoteric
Movement in Russia and both Symbolist and abstract art in that vast
nation.s Indeed, scholars have combed libraries and archives to identify
precise sources in the image world for forms that were previously
thought to have had no such attachment to iconography. The search
was for a utopia beyond nationalism where artists would be viewed as
both inevitable and necessary parts of society rather than as image-
workers for the dominant bourgeoisie.
While it is tempting to consider the various forms of abstraction
developed in Europe and America between 1900 and 1920 as com¬
pletely cosmopolitan or international in character, that conclusion
would be wrong in at least one case—that of Georgia O’Keeffe.
O’Keeffe developed a mode of abstract painting that combined the
mysticism of the American Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922) and
Kandinsky and that seems to have been formed as part of a search, mis¬
guided as it seems now, for a legitimately American art.6 Through her
association with the American-born and German-educated Stieglitz,
she had access to the Cubism of Braque and Picasso as well as to the
English text of Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Although
she rejected Cubism as European, she felt liberated by the ideas of
Kandinsky and attempted to create a kind of abstraction rooted in her
own experiences. As she had never been outside the United States,
and because of her stubborn independence, O’Keeffe seems to have
believed that her abstractions of the late 1910s and early 1920s sprang
from herself and from American soil, although it is much easier to find

133 Georgia O’Keeffe

Blue and Green Music, 1919,
oil on canvas
O'Keeffe sent a series of
abstract drawings to New York
in 1915, and when they were
shown to herfuture husband
Alfred Stieglitz, they were
immediately requested for
exhibition. From these bio-
morphic abstractions in
charcoal and ink, O’Keeffe
proceeded to develop a
painterly abstraction in which
colour played a dominant role.
Like many early abstraction¬
ists, she explained her sub¬
jects by analogy to the equally
abstract language of music.
This form of biomorphic or
nature-based abstraction
runs counterto geometric
abstraction throughout the
1910s and 1920s.

ABSTRACT ART, SPIRITUALISM, AND INTERNATIONALISM 205

 precedents for her work in the theories of European modernists. In
fact, a comparison between a small work on paper by the Belgian artist
Henri van de Velde (1863-1957) entitled Abstraction, made in 1893, and
O’Keeffe’s Blue and Green Music (1919), shows that the similarities of
form and, most likely, intention, are greater than the differences [133].
Van de Velde abstracts from vegetal forms, the origins of which are
pretty clear to the viewer, while O’Keeffe’s title tells us that she is mak¬
ing a representation of music. In each case, the artist is anxious that we
read the sources of the abstraction and, thus, guides us on an aesthetic
journey. Granted, both works were produced by individuals in dif¬
ferent countries for different audiences. Yet O’Keeffe’s is no more
American than van de Velde’s is Belgian.

Nationalist landscape painting

Many of the most compelling efforts to create viable American,
Russian, or many other national artistic identities had to do with mod¬
ernist view painting. The entrapment of the national scene using the
advances in colour perception and painting techniques developed on
the international stage is one of the unifying elements in national art
history. Each one of the great national collections proves that inter¬
national art was produced by national artists using native scenery as
their raw material. In this way, Tom Thomson (1877—1917) or Lawren
Harris (1885-1970) created a bold international image of Canada that
linked the pictorial achievements of avant-garde Europeans with the

134 Tom Thomson

In the Northland, 1915, oil on
canvas
Thomson (1877-1917) was
the most important painter
of the national landscape
in Canada in the first two
decades of this century. His
work is fundamentally Fauvist
in the intensity of its colour
and its fascination with
patterns. Scarcely known
today outside his native
Canada, his work was
exhibited widely in the 1920s
in England, France, and the
United States.

206 NATIONALISM AND INTERNATIONALISM

135 Lawren Harris
From the North Shore, Lake
Superior, 1923, oil on canvas
The three great land-based
nations of the modern world
are Canada, the United States
of America, and Russia, and
each produced a kind of
landscape painting that made
national icons of her land¬
scapes. Harris was the master
of this tradition in Canada, and
his many representations of
mountains and lakes in his
vast native country can be
found in museums, galleries,
and homes throughout that
nation. For him, the landscape
was less particularthan
elemental, and he removed
most of the particularizing
features of a view in orderto
create a vast synthetic whole.

most isolated national scenery of their country [134, 1351.7 Not only
were these paintings emblems of pride in Canada, they were routinely
exported to the nations that mattered most for Canada: Britain,
France, and the United States, for exhibitions of Canadian art. Yet it
was precisely their modernity (and, by implication, foreignness) that
led many Canadian writers and critics to decry them.
We feel the very same forces throughout Europe and the United
States. A selection of modernist landscape paintings that represent
national scenery using international techniques would be very large
and would contain many of the best-loved images in their respective
countries. Whether O’Keeffe, or the American painter John Marin
(1870-1953) evoking the mythic, pre-United States landscapes of New
Mexico, or Tivardar Csontvary Kosztka creating vast ‘Hungarian’
panoramas centred on impressive Greek and Roman ruins like those
at Taormina (Sicily) in 1904-5 [136], modernist painters served the
nationalist rhetoric of much of the capitalist world through powerful
images that could be reproduced and sent throughout the nation
and abroad for exhibition. This aspect of modernism is rarely stressed
in the most theoretically sophisticated texts and exhibitions devoted
to the movement. It was pervasive throughout the period covered
by this volume. Recent scholars of American, French, indeed any
national painting, have carefully analysed the construction of na¬
tional imagery by modernist painters, a process of construction which
was almost never related to government commissions or other less ob¬
vious forms of intervention, but was, rather, part of a general cultural
climate that preferred artists to identify with their own place of birth.

NATIONALIST LANDSCAPE PAINTING 207

208 nationalism and internationalism
136 TivardarCsontvary The fact that many of the greatest modern emblems of America were
Kosztka
Ruins of the Greek Theatre
created by immigrants or foreigners (Bierstadt, Bodmer, Steichen,
at Taormina, 1904-5, oil on Kertesz) has never troubled students of American art, perhaps because
canvas
the immigrant experience is so central to the American experience.
Nationalism also played a
There is no doubt that one could select a very large exhibition of
major role in central and
eastern European landscape modern landscape paintings from the international world. These land¬
painting. Here, in a vast and scapes, when shown together, would demonstrate just how global the
brilliantly coloured landscape,
Kosztka reclaims the classical
modes of representation actually were. The national landscapes pro¬
ruins of Taormina in Sicily duced by the Swiss painter Alexandre Calame (1810—64)in Switzerland
for modern Hungary, making
or Bierstadt in California are in no way different as representations.
overt links between the
brilliant classical past of
Even the vast, land-rich Russia was awash in images of the national
the Mediterranean and the forests, lakes, and villages that stretch almost forever from Europe to
modern urban culture to
Asia, and certain images, like the Russian Nicolai Dubovskoy’s
which he contributed.
(I^59_I91^) Calm before the Storm (1890), were produced in many ver¬
137 Akseli Gallen-Kallela sions to satisfy the national demand for images of Russia. Even the
Lemminkainen's Mother, anti-national regionalism of Brittany in France produced a sort of
1897, tempera on canvas
avant-garde or modernist imagery intended to erode the conservative
Gallen-Kallela painted many
scenes of Finnish national nationalism that was at the core of much political culture in the
mythology and. even before modern world. It is scarcely an accident that Ireland’s first important
his countryman Jena Sibelius
made the sounds of Finland
modernist painter, Roderic O’Conor (1860-1940), lived virtually his
known to Europeans, entire life in Paris, but that he was attracted to the non-French imagery
struggled to bring Nordic
of Brittany as a kind of analogue to his own non-English Ireland.
stories to a large European
audience. Because all the
Again, modernism was both politically elastic and capable of giving
great international exhibitions powerful expression to ideas that are non-cosmopolitan.
of the late nineteenth and
We must remember, however, that all these images, from Matejko’s
early twentieth century were
arranged nationally, it Battle of Grunewald with which we began this essay, to the Finnish
compelled provincial painters Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s (1865-1931) Lemminkainens Mother {137], with
to embrace their national
which we end it, were made for public exhibition both within and out¬
landscapes, people, history,
and mythology so as to be side the national boundaries.8 They were thus national images created
accepted at these enormous to permeate the boundaries of the nation and to bring world-class
international culture fairs. This
techniques and visual ideas to the service of local stories. Gallen-
painting linked the aesthetic
language of Gauguin and Kallela had conceived his great nationalist project while a student in
other Post-Impressionists to Paris and had extended and refined his mission on another extended
the North.
visit to Berlin (where he was impressed by the painting of the
Norwegian Edvard Munch, also an exemplar of his own country in the
international arena). From this melting-pot of sources and ideas, he
created a visual vocabulary that allowed him to construct representa¬
tional re-enactments of his national myths with a power that can be felt
to this day.

NATIONALIST LANDSCAPE PAINTING 209

 Wm ;MPpyi
jraK igHf 1 T il % *J

\ '- Mjgaj -Ek

d *'L -Wat.
1 Ml--Jt ■ m .
'Sk, . A n — y r -- J
 Afterword:
The Private
Institutionalization
of'Modern Art’
The opening of the Museum of Modern Art in New York could not
have happened at a worse time, just ten days after the stock market
crash that, within a year, had spun out of control to create the first truly
global capitalist depression. No one knew how to deal with the situ¬
ation. The age of managed capitalist economies in which we now live
had not yet begun, and all the richest capitalists and their politicians
had neither the connections, the data, nor the organizational skills to
combat an economic phenomenon that had little to do with the one
skill they all had, the accumulation of private wealth. Capitalism had
faltered long enough to allow other alternative systems, at least briefly,
to flourish. But what of its modern art?
The idea of modern art as evoked in these pages is linked irreducibly
to urban capitalism and to the loosely structured and decentralized
markets that fostered the sorts of freedoms it needed to flourish [138],
Without independent and personally controlled wealth there could be
no small independent dealers, no real occasion for the exhibitions they
fostered, and, therefore, no impetus for the art criticism that has been
the fodder of most recent art-historical interpretation of modern art.
Yet the depression was only a temporary setback for capitalism and
the informal privately sponsored art system it created. Indeed, the
Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), as it decided to call itself after a
consideration of alternatives that included such unlikely candidates as
‘The Modern Gallery of Art’, was to become within five years the
defining institution of modernism precisely because it was privately
owned and run, reflecting the tastes and ideas of its board and the staff
with whom they elected to work. Names like Rockefeller, Clark, and
Goodyear were not there by accident.1
Modern art has always been a private (meaning independent and
capitalist) affair. Its most important patrons were self-made industrial¬
ists of virtually every nationality, more alike in their socio-economic
ideologies than they were different in their geographical origins. Their
Detail of 42 names are legion, and we have come to admire them more than any of

211
138 Imogen Cunningham
Triangles, 1928, gelatin-
silver print__
The creation of an inter¬
national language of
abstraction was an unlikely
obsession of a large number
of modernist photographers
in the 1910s and 1920s.
These photographers were
highly selective in their
subjects—sometimes photo¬
graphing only small portions
of com plex forms that were
unrecognizable in the
resulting photograph, and
at othertimes literally photo¬
graphing set-ups created from
cut paper and unfunctional
geometric forms. Thus the
photographertaught us that
abstraction can be found
in the world and that it was
not simply the product of the
imagination of the artist.

the government bureaucrats who created the European museums on

which their art was, fundamentally, based. By the mid-i920S there
was no major city in the capitalist world without examples of modern
art in major private collections, and the story of that decade is the story
of the creation of public-private institutions like MOMA that would
perpetuate modern art.
There was almost universal agreement among these rich patrons
about the nature of modern art. Most of them followed the intellectual
lead of either Julius Meier-Graefe or Roger Fry in thinking that mod¬
ern art had begun with Manet, that the Impressionists had invigorated
and collectivized it (even it Renoir was the only artist with enough
ambition to have triumphed over what seemed to them the limitations
ol the movement), but that it lacked masters until the next generation
of artists, Seurat, Gauguin, van Gogh, and Cezanne. From these lour
artists, virtually all Euro-global modernism seemed to them to have
sprung, and their work dominated exhibitions of modern art, before its
ultimate triumph in the painting of Picasso and Matisse. Notice that
this idea of modern art stopped short of abstraction, virtually omitting
Kandinsky, Mondrian, and the Suprematists.
This metaphor of modernism is a French, or Parisian, phenomenon
(to which van Gogh and Picasso gained honorary admission) and is
dominated by ambitious figure-painters with roots in an equally mod¬
ern reappraisal of old master painting. Whereas the pre-modern view
of old master painting had been a complex system of artists grouped in

212 AFTERWORD
Americans: Horace Havemeyer, Dutch: Helene Kroeller-Mueller
Bertha Potter Palmer, Albert Barnes, French: Jean-Baptiste Faure, Henri
Arthur Jerome Eddy, John Quinn, Leo Rouart, Victor Chocquet, Ernest
and Gertrude Stein, Martin Ryerson, Hoschede, Andre Fontainas, August
Frederick K. Bartlett, Katherine Pellerin, Jacques Doucet, Raoul la
Dreier, Duncan Phillips, Galatin, Roche
Ilya Arensberg Germans: Karl Osthaus, Gerstein
British: Samuel Courtauld, Russians: Pavel Tretyakov, Ivan
Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, Morosov, Sergei Shchukin
Sir William Burrell, Sir Hugh Lane Swiss: Joseph Mueller, Oscar
Czechs: Vincenc Kramar Reinhardt, Buehrle
Danes: Alfred Brandes

national and regional schools to which they variously contributed, the

new old-master art, as rewritten by critics like Meier-Graefe and em¬
bodied in collections like those of Duncan Phillips, Albert Barnes, and
Oscar Reinhardt, consisted of a handful of individual geniuses who
stood outside the dominating trends of their times and made, therefore,
timeless and fundamentally personal contributions to the history of
art. It was this modernism that created the nineteenth- and twentieth-
century reputations of Masaccio, Velazquez, El Greco, Rembrandt,
Vermeer, Hals, Watteau, Hogarth, and Goya, all of whom are
perceived as brilliant eccentrics with the talent and the determination
to buck the restrictive aesthetic forces embodied in the scientifically
arranged collections of the nineteenth-century art museum.
It is not accidental that modernism, being a product of the museum
age, seems to have become the first period in the history of Western art
that annexed the museum idea to its own project of definition and
promotion. One can scarcely imagine the friends and patrons of, say,
Rembrandt or Boucher or Goya getting together to start a museum
that would present their work, and its conscious antecedents, in a
seemingly independent way to what we call the general public. But that
is exactly what Tretyakov, Shchukin, Lane, Barnes, Phillips, Courtauld,
Bartlett, Kroeller-Mueller, Osthaus, Dreier, and the small group of
people who started MOMA succeeded in doing. These men and
women perceived themselves as the selfless and generous proponents
of neglected geniuses whose work deserved to be given the highest
possible respect. In order to give it that respect, the art museum, with
its ideas of political power or personal memorial, stretched itself to
include the promotion of the taste and ideas of men and women
with the means and the leisure to make the best judgements about
contemporary works of art. All this is not to say that the public has
not benefited enormously from this enterprise. Rather, it is to point out
the fundamentally private, and hence limited, nature of the vision put
forward by these worthy figures.

AFTERWORD 213
139 Kasimir Malevich
Girls in a Field, 1928-30, oil
on canvas
Malevich’s career is usually
interpreted as a longfree-fall
from the dizzying heights of
inventiveness he achieved in
the years just before and after
the Bolshevik Revolution.
In many ways, however, his
desire to mould his art to the
service of the society in which
he lived was both sincere and
important, as this later work
makes clear. The purely non-
representational anti-imagery
of the 1910s gave waytoa new
form of monumental human¬
ism in which the body itself
carries revolutionary
messages and proletarian
athletes become the heroes
and heroines of modern life.

140 Walker Evans

Brooklyn Bridge, New York,
1929, gelatin-silver print
Evans was America's greatest
‘direct’ photographer. This
beautifully composed repre¬
sentation of the architectural
icon of New York’s modernism
takes a form that had been
painted, photographed, and
printed literally hundreds
of thousands of times and
re-presents it with a new
inevitability and clarity. For
Evans, as for Atget, the photo-
grapher was a silent witness
who rendered sense and order
from the very same chaotic
world in which we are all
immersed.

214 AFTERWORD
 Yet, before either deifying or crucifying these very individual insti¬
tutions, we must recognize that they were not the first public places for
the display of modern art. In fact, there were almost countless places,
official and unofficial, where interested members of the urban public
could see and, hence, judge modern art. Perhaps the most important of
these institutions was the one experienced by the most people, the
Musee de Luxembourg in Paris. Created in the second decade of the
nineteenth century as a state collection of the work of living artists, it
became well organized after the Revolution of 1848 and opened
its doors to the work of living artists, mostly French, whose work
was thought important enough for long-term public display. It was
the comparative neglect of the most progressive trends in modernism
that made this museum seem increasingly irrelevant as the powerful
global collectors of modern art came to form their own galleries and
museums. Many were in the homes of the patrons themselves. The
Russians took the initiative with the creation of private museums
financed by merchant princes as early as 1872, culminating in the 1909
opening to the public of Shchukin’s great collection in the Trubetskoy
Palace [139],
Even MOMA itself opened first in galleries on the twelfth floor of a
private office building, before moving to the Rockefeller town house,
and finally to its own building constructed on the site of the latter. Its
creation resulted from no public hearings, no government commis¬
sions, no debates about the efficacy or morality of this kind versus that
kind of art, no public involvement at all (although the lawyers for
the Museum made sure that private contributions to it would be
deductible from that horrible new phenomenon, income tax). Indeed,
its organization was more like a private club with public days than it
was like any truly public (governmentally run) museum. Yet, because
MOMA followed the British/American civic model in that it was
formed by a group of people, none of whose names appear in that of the
institution, and because it hired a Harvard-trained intellectual as a dir¬
ector, it took on the semblance of institutional balance lacking in other
more personal projects, such as those of Barnes, Phillips, and Osthaus.
For that reason, MOMA took the world by storm. It embraced
architecture, industrial arts, furniture, graphic design, and photo¬
graphy in addition to the fine arts of painting, sculpture, and the
graphic arts preferred by the other private museums of modern art
[140]. Its geographical reach was completely global, and its curators
and advisers felt as comfortable in Berlin, Mexico City, or Moscow
as they did in Paris or London. Within two years of its founding
one of its first trustees, Lilly Bliss, died, leaving MOMA a collection
of works by Cezanne, Gauguin, Picasso, Matisse, and other canonical
artists that it could scarcely then afford to buy. Its first decade was
at once triumphant and full of discord, and the exhibitions and

AFTERWORD 215
publications it generated have become fodder for the art historical
mill to this day. Alfred Barr’s famous genealogical diagram of the
history of abstraction, designed in 1936 as a sort of aide-memoire for a
neo-phyte public, has been reproduced countless times in recent
years and roundly criticized for its narrowness, male-centrism, and
anti-contextualism.
Even now, in its full mid-life crisis, MOMA is forcing all of us to
ask questions about the very nature of modern. Its ‘modern’ still begins
in the 1880s with the Post-Impressionist masters, Cezanne, Gauguin,
Seurat, and van Gogh. It has its spine in Parisian easel painting, but
leels comfortable with Russia, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and
the United States. Its early forays into Latin American painting have
not continued apace, and its holdings of Romanian, Czech, Hungar¬
ian, Polish, and Scandinavian modern art are tiny and mostly in stor¬
age. The collections of photography, industrial design, graphic design,
and applied arts are also shown with a few select examples in residual
galleries, allowing the ‘great’ paintings so defined by a generation of
collectors and scholars to be canonically modern.
In Paris, the situation is even stranger, with two immense institu¬
tions, one devoted to the second half of the nineteenth century and the
other to the twentieth century, dominating the Parisian representation
of the modern art to which the city was a manipulative muse. The best
part of both institutions is that they fear nothing: all the arts and indus¬
tries are included in a way that would have made the originators of the
Crystal Palace exhibition proud. This generous modernism allows aca¬
demic art into the fold, because it too was created for the modern city
and in ways that are fundamentally different than academic paintings
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Many foreigners are a
little uncomfortable with this decision, largelv because our very idea of
modern art has been determined more by MOMA than it has by the
moie recent Parisian institutions, the Musee d’Orsay and Centre
Pompidou. New modern museums have cropped up all over the globe,
with France, Germany, Japan, and the United States leading the way,
but with important contributions by other countries.
It goes without saying that the modern art both protected and rep¬
resented by these museums is not the same modern art. The geograph¬
ical and temporary ranges of each institution have their own character.
Vet the general public who visits these museums know that modern art
is global, urban, and cosmopolitan, and that, from the very beginning
in the mid-nineteenth century, it has forayed into areas of human
production not limited by the concept of fine art. That one of modern
art s principal tasks has been representational has never been denied,
even in the presence of abstraction, and its fundamental attachment
to a shared global culture is still accepted. Its regionalisms are
still debated; there are particular brands of Czech modernism or

2l6 AFTERWORD
American regionalism. But all these institutions make it clear that
modern art is unified in its acceptance of both geographical and
aesthetic variety.
The list of exhibitions of modern art created by MOMA in its first
decade is a sort of prescription for the concept of modern art that sur¬
vives to this day. Many of the principal characteristics of postmod¬
ernism, anti-modernism, and neo-modernism can be identified in
modernism itself. The study of modern art in the year after 1929 is a
study of the interplay between institutions, commercial galleries,
critics, collectors, and artists, an interplay in which the first of these
players has a starring role for the first time in the history of modernism.
For that reason, the history of modern art after 1929 needs to be written
differently. The two principal strands of modernism, unmediated
modernism and image/modernism, persist, as do many of the icono-
logical preoccupations defined in this volume. A good many of the pre¬
occupations of modernism after 1929 are nationalist rather than
cosmopolitan and international as they were before. Mary Cassatt,
John Singer Sargent, or Patrick Henry Bruce, despite their American
names, were uninterested in making American art, as were thousands
of other cosmopolitan modernists of the first three generations of
Euro-global modernism. Yet critics and commentators of modernism
in the years following the great depression and the Second World
War tended to focus on the issue of national achievements and of the
national characteristics of this or that type of modernism.
Too many scholars have followed their lead, forgetting the integrat¬
ing principles of the capitalist city, its markets, and its systems of inter¬
change, the conditions for an international modernism. Nationalism
in modern art has often been used as a sales tool, as a way of making art
palatable to people who conceive of themselves as Polish, Russian,
French, or American. In looking both at the representational art
produced in the modern world and at the values of the people who
bought it, we can see that the commonalities are more important than
the national or regional differences we are often at such pains to
identify. It is precisely the openness, the interpenetrability, and the
exchangeability of modern representations that make them modern,
not their particular formal or iconological characteristics or even the
values that underlie them. This brand of modernism applies as well to
the human past, which has been, for all of us, made accessible through
public museums, universities, and the publishing industry. We can find
precedents for our actions, our thoughts, and our representations in the
various human pasts opened to us through the institutions of our
capitalist cities. These institutions are the accessible diagrams of a
terrifyingly vast human realm in which we can play, which we define,
and through which we become ourselves.

AFTERWORD 217
Notes

Introduction Part I: Realism to Surrealism

1. The first English edition was entitled 1. Seemingly unread today, Renato Poggioli’s
Modern Art: Being a Contribution to a New The Theory of theA-vant- Garde (New York,
System of Aesthetics (London and New York, 1971) was written for literary historians, but
1908). Julius Meier-Graefe was the son of is, in fact, an indispensable structural analysis
a Jewish industrialist from Czechoslovakia of the phenomenon of avant-garde.
(then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) 2. Among the most valuable rehearsals
and was the first major cosmopolitan scholar of modernist theory is Johanna Drucker’s
of modernist art. Theorizing Modernity: Visual Art and The
2. For a modern reprint of the first complete Critical Tradition (New York, 1994). Drucker’s
English translation (by Willa Silverman) work considers three ‘modernist’ tropes—
of Signac’s d 'Eugene Delacroix au Neo- its preoccupation with ‘space’, its sense of
Impressionisme, see Floyd Ratliff’s Pan! Signac ‘objectivity’, and its courting of particular
and Color in Neo-Impressionism (New York, forms of subjectivity. Its brevity and lack of
1992), 193-287. Because of its origins in France, jargon make it an ideal introductory text
Signac’s important text became canonical in on modernist art theory.
the formation of modern aesthetics before 3. There is still no good integrated history
the more complex and subtle book of Meier- of photography, painting, and print-making
Graefe. in the nineteenth and early twentieth cen¬
3. There are numerous studies of the Crystal turies. The old chestnut is Aaron Scharf’s
Palace. While most of them are primarily mistitled Art and Photography (London,
concerned with Paxton’s buildings, Patrick 1968), alongwith Van Deren Coke’s The
Beaver deals with the display itself and with Painter and the Photographfrom Delacroix to
the numerous texts (primarily English) that H^nfo/jAlbuquerque, N. Mex., 1964). For
form a verbal critique of its nature. See Patrick a discussion of the aesthetic character of
Beaver, The Crystal Palace (i8yi-ic>j6): A calotype as opposed to photography see
Portrait of Victorian Enterprise (London, 1970). Richard Brettell et ah, Paper and Light:
Art historians have neglected the Crystal The Calotype in France and Great Britain
Palace exhibition largely because it neglected (Boston, 1984).
‘art’, concentrating on the applied arts and 4. The bibliography on Realism is vast, but
sculpture. However, it set a pattern for there is one general book that is a must for
subsequent exhibitions in Paris, Philadelphia, every beginner. Linda Nochlin’s Realism
Vienna, Chicago, and numerous other cities in (London and New York, 1971) is a book of
which art played a large role. almost unmatched intellectual generosity.
4. See John Gage, Colour and Culture: Practice Rather than focus on canonical figures and
andMeaningfrom Antiquity to Abstraction on the defining moments of the movement in
(London, 1993), 295, fig. 177, n. 51. France, Nochlin cuts a wide swath, including
5. See the Tate Gallery, The Pre-Raphaelites in her survey photography and academic
(London, 1984), 90-2. The entry was written painting as well as the work of major figures
by Malcolm Warner. in England, Germany, Spain, and the United
6. The most accessible English edition of States. Her weakness is Russia and eastern
this and other texts by Baudelaire is The Europe, and the date ot publication explains
Painter of Modern Life, and Other Essays why.
(London, 1964).
5. Oddly, there is no good general book
on French Impressionism, although several

218
scholars and critics are writing at present. summarized in Richard Brettell et al., The Art
Phoebe Poole’s intelligent survey, of Paul Gauguin (New York, 1987). There are
Impressionism (Oxford, 1967), is at once dated many discussions of the ‘School ofPont-
and dull, and one feels more comfortable with Aven’, and most of these stress its multi¬
the big book by Maria and Godfrey Blunden, national and multi-generational aspects. The
Impressionists and Impressionism (Geneva, most accessible is Henri Dorra’s ‘Gauguin’s
1976). A well-intentioned and largely accurate Unsympathetic Observers’, Gazette des Beaux
two-volume survey edited by Inco F. Walther Arts 6/76 (December 1970), 357-72.
and published in 1993 deals with both French 12. The best-illustrated and most evocative
and International Impressionism. Its English recent study of the Nabis is Claire Freches-
edition is Impressionist Art, 1860-11)20, vol. I, Thory and Antoine Terrasse’s The Nabis:
Impressionism in France (New York, 1993) by Bonnard, Vuillard, and their Circle (New York,
Peter H. Feist, and vol. II, Impressionism in 1990).
Europe andNorth America (New York, 1993), 13. The classic book in English on the Fauve
prepared by a host of German scholars. movement is, not surprisingly, an exhibition
Another impressive global study of the catalogue produced for the Museum of Mod¬
movement is Nora Broude (ed.), World ern Art in 1976. This has been reprinted as
Impressionism: The International Movement, The ‘Wild Beasts': Fauvism and Its Affinities
1860-1)20 (New York, 1990), although this is (Oxford, 1987) byjohn Elderfield. A more
hampered by the fact that this supposedly recent and more critically sophisticated
international movement is treated separately treatment of the subject is Jody Freeman et al.,
by nation! The Fauve Landscape (New York, 1989).
6. The best recent publication that deals with 14. The international spread of Fauve
this narrow definition is Charles Moffett et al., painting has been as little studied as has that
The New Painting: Impressionism, 18)4-1886 of Cubism. Perhaps because of the Fauve
(San Francisco, 1986). A two-volume edition painters’ attachment to traditional subjects
of the complete criticism collected for the of representation, their modes of painting
eight Impressionist exhibitions has recently appealed strongly to provincial artists who
been published. The casual reader should were unfamiliar with the pictorial theories
be warned that, although the introductory being developed around Parisian modernism
material and the scholarly apparatus are in in the years around 1910.
English, the texts themselves are printed in 15. The most durable survey of Expressionist
the original French. This can be found painting is Peter Selz’s German Expressionist
(inconveniently) under an almost identical Painting (Berkeley, Calif., 1957). Another
title, The New Painting: Impression ism 18)4- useful general book is R. Samuel and
1886, Documentation (San Francisco and R. H. Thomas, Expressionism in German
Seattle, 1996). Life, Literature, and the Theater (1)10-24)
7. The best recent presentation of the Euro- (Cambridge, 1924). A more recent survey is
global and multi-media aspects of Symbolism Barry Herbert’s German Expressionism: Die
is an immense exhibition catalogue conceived Bruecke unddie Balue Reiter (London, 1983).
and edited byjean Clair, Lost Paradise: Sym¬ A more critically sophisticated book is Joan
bolist Europe (Montreal, 1995). Interestingly, Weinstein’s The End of Expressionism: Art
the American contribution to Symbolism and The November Revolution in Germany,
is dealt with in both the catalogue and the i)i8-i)i) (Chicago, 1990).
exhibition, but not in the title. 16. See Douglas Cooper and Gary
8. See Jacqueline V. Falkenheim, Roger Fry Tinterow, The Essential Cubism: Braque,
and the Beginnings of Formalist Art Criticism Picasso, and Their Friends (New York and
(Ann Arbor, Mich., 1980). London, 1984). For a brilliantly concise
9. See Griselda Pollock,Avant-Garde and non-judgemental study of the aesthetic
Gambits, i888-t8)j, Gender and the Colour of dance between the two protagonists, see
Art History (New York and London, 1993). William Rubin, Picasso and Braque:
10. The best and most sweepingly conceived Pioneering Cubism (New York, 1989).
monograph on Seurat is Michael 17. See Anne Coffin Hanson’s The Futurist
Zimmerman’s Georges Seurat and the Art Imagination, Word + Image (New Haven, 1983).
Theory of his Time{ Antwerp, 1991). For the 18. The most accessible sources in English are
movement at large, see Jean Sutter (ed.), The S. A. Buckberrough, Robert Delaunay: The
Neo-Impressionists (Greenwich, NY, 1970). Discovery of Simultaneity (Ann Arbor, Mich.,
n. The Gauguin literature is vast and is best 1982) and A. A. Cohen’s edition, The New

NOTES 219
 Art of Color: The Writings of Robert and Sonia graphy is written either as a sweeping whole
Delaunay (New York, 1978). from its origins in the 1830s to the present or
19. See Richard Cork, Vorticism andAbstract as two separate histories—one nineteenth-
Art in the First Machine Age (L ondon, 1976), century and originary and the second
2 vols. twentieth-century and vanguard. With the
20. The literature on Constructivism is exception of the writings of Aaron Scharf,
beginning to emerge from a period in which Peter Galassi, Kirk Varnedoe, and a handful
its sheer isolation from other vanguard move¬ of other scholars, photography is completely
ments was exaggerated. See C. Lodder, omitted from the history of modern art
Russian Constructivism (New Haven and particularly as it was written as a history of
London, 1983) and The Great Utopia (New movements. In fact, photography played a
York, 1993). considerable role in Impressionism, Nabis,
21. The term Neo-Plasticism was developed Symbolism, Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism,
by Mondrian in 1920 as a way out of the moving hand-in-hand with painting and the
constrictions of De Stijl: it is best expressed in graphic arts.
his own writings, Plastic Art and Pure Plastic 26. The most accessible study of Alfred
Art (New York, 1937)and Other Essays (New Stieglitz and his role as a promoter of vanguard
York, 1941-3). Also see The Collected Writings European and American art is William Innes
of Mondrian (London, 1987). Homer’s Alfred Stieglitz and the American
22. The classic description of Dada can be Avant-Garde (Boston, 1977). A definitive
found in William Rubin’s exhibition cata¬ analysis of Stieglitz as a collector-dealer will
logue, Dada, Surrealism, and their Heritage have to await a planned exhibition of the
(New York, 1968). More recent work on the Stieglitz Collection by the Metropolitan
movement by D. Ades and Francis Nauman Museum, The Philadelphia Museum, and
have deepened our understanding of Dada and The Art Institute of Chicago in 2000.
made clear the connections between it and
other vanguard movements, particularly in Part II: The Conditions for Modern Art
literature and performance. A major study Chapter 1. Urban Capitalism
ot performance art (and of the strand of anti- 1. There are many studies of Parisian urban
object-image making connected with verbal development in the nineteenth century. The
discourse) throughout the history of modem classic book is David Pinkney’s Napoleon III
art remains to be written. From the absurdist and The Reconstruction of Paris (Princeton,
cafes ofi88os Paris through Fluxus and the 1972). Readers should also consult the
California performance cults, there is a strand extensive bibliography in Robert L. Herbert’s
of engaged art that is precisely disengaged Impressionism, Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society
from the art world. (New Haven and London, 1988).
23. Perhaps because of its apparent 2. See John Caldwell, Theory oj Fertility
conservatism, the movement of Purism has Decline (New York, 1982).
also failed to attract much contemporary 3. See Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris—The Capital
attention, and there is no book about the ot the Nineteenth Century’, New Left Review
movement written in this generation. It 48 (March-April 1968), 77-88.
emerged from a manifesto written by Amedee 4. See Maxime du Camp, Paris, ses Organes et
Ozenfant and Charles-Edouardjeanneret sesFonctions (Paris, 1869-75), 6 vols.
(Le Corbusier) published in 1924 and called 5. See Molly Nesbit’s weirdly written yet
‘La Peinture Moderne’. Readers should
evocative, Atget s Seven Albums (New Haven
consult the writings of both men, both of and London, 1992).
which have been published in translation. 6. For an early recognition of
24. See Andre Breton, What is Surrealism?:
Haussmannization, see Henri Clouzot’s
Selected Writings (New York, 1978); H. N.
essay‘L'Haussmannization de Paris’, Gazette
Finkelstein, Surrealism and the Crisis of the
des Beaux Arts 4/ 4 (1910), 348—66. No one is
Object (Ann Arbor, 1979); J. H. Matthews,
better on the ‘ringstrasse’ mentality than Carl
Ihe Surrealist Mind (ConAon and Toronto,
Schorske in Fin-de-Siec/e Vienna: Politics and
1991); F. Rosemont, Andre Breton and the First
Culture (New York, 1979). My favourite,
Principles ojSurrealism (London, 1978); and
widely accessible book that deals with Euro-
William Rubins Dada and Surrealist Art
American urbanism in clear jargon-free terms
(London, 1968).
is F. Roy Willis, Western Civilization, An
25. Not surprisingly, the history of photo¬
Urban Perspective: Vol. Ill From 18rg to the

220 NOTES
 Contemporary Age (New York, 1973). there is no bibliography), and Nathanial Burt’s
7. This point is clearly made in Pierre Palacesfor the People: A Social History of The
Bourdieu’s great book, Distinction: A Social American Art Museum (Boston, 19 77).
Critique ofthe Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, 3. This tendency is discussed in two
Mass., 1984). However, Bourdieu is not exemplary recent books, Christopher Green’s
particularly revealing in his remarks about Cubism and its Enemies: Movements and
works of art, largely because, for him, they are Reactions in French Art, 1916-1918 (New
nothing but parts of a class-driven system of Haven and London, 1987) and, more aptly,
cultural signs. Romy Golan’s Modernity and Nostalgia: Art
8. John Rewald’s contribution to modernist and Politics in France between the Wars (New
studies, though much discredited today, is Haven and London, 1995).
of great historical importance. The various 4. For an intelligent study limited to two
editions ofhis histories oflmpressionism and international expositions in France, see
Post-Impressionism, initially published by Patricia Mainardi’s Art and Politics ofthe Second
the Museum ofModern Art, have defined Empire: The Universal Expositions of1855 and
modernist studies. i86y (New Haven, 1987). Perhaps the most
9. ‘Reception Art History’ of modern art is magisterial achievement in publishing with
so much the social history of modern art that regard to modern exhibitions is Modern Art in
one can scarcely summarize it in a note. The Paris, 1855-1900: Two Hundred Catalogues of
essential writer is T. J. Clark, whose precise Major Exhibitions, Reproduced in Facsimile in
and nuanced reading of contemporary texts as Forty-Seven Volumes (New York and London,
evidence of meaning has given rise to the work 1981), selected and organized by Theodore
of numerous followers including Martha Reff. With a similar project for London,
Ward, Hollis Clayson, and others. Vienna, Munich, Berlin, and St Petersburg,
10. Arnold Hauser, ‘Impressionism’ and ‘The and with an extension well into the twentieth
Film Age’ in The Social History of Art (London, century, the quality of art historical research
1951), 869-979. To me, Hauser’s essay on would increase dramatically.
Impressionism is unsurpassed. 5. See Fernand Leger, ‘The Street, Objects,
11. See B. W. Kean’s chatty but essential^// Spectacles’, Functions of Painting (London
The Empty Palaces: The Merchant Patrons of and New York, 1973), 78-80, translated by
Modern Art in Pre-Revolutionary Russia (New E. F. Fry.
York, 1983), 241—3. 6. See Domenico Porzio (ed.), lithography:
200 Years of History and Technique (New York,
Chapter 2. Modernity, Representation, 1984); Wilhelm Weber, A History of Litho¬
and the Accessible Image graphy (London, 1966); and Michael Twyman,
1. Andre Malraux’s conception of the image Lithography 1800-1850 (Oxford, 1970).
world is little remembered today, but it 7. Perhaps the best modern study of this
deserves reconsideration. Malraux was phenomenon is Peter Marzio’s A Democratic
actually the first museum director who Art: An Exhibition on the History of Chromo¬
understood the pressures against museums lithography in America (Fort Worth, Tex.,
from reproductions and who attempted to I979)-
understand and, therefore, control them. See 8. The tide is changing, but mostly in the
Andre Malraux, The Voices of Silence (New study of the relationship between photography
York, 1933) (inexplicably, the translation of and painting. With major studies devoted to
Le Muse'e Imaginaire de la Sculpture Mondiale Gauguin, Mucha, Picasso, Bonnard, and
(Paris, 1952)). Wonderfully enough, Malraux Vuillard, we know a good deal more about the
called the history of art‘The History of What complex uses to which artists put photographs
can be Photographed’, Voices of Silence (New (or memories of photographs). An analogous
York, 1953), 645. study of pre-photographic reproductions
2. See Andrew McClellan, Inventing the remains to be written.
Louvre: Art, Politics, and The Origins of the 9. See Phillip Dennis Cate, The Color
Modern Museum in Eighteenth- Century Paris Revolutions: Color Lithography in France,
(Cambridge and New York, 1994). The most 1890-1900 (Santa Barbara, Calif., 1978).
accessible general studies of the art museum 10. See Estelle Jussim’s ground-breaking
are Germain Bazin’s The Museum Age (New book, Visual Communications and the Graphic
York, 1967) (of which only three chapters are Arts: Photographic Technologies in the 19th
devoted to the modern museum and in which Century (New York, 1983) and, fortheUnited

NOTES 221
 States, Michael L. Carlebach’s The Origins from the 1891 edn). No one seriously interested
of Photojournalism in America (Washington, in modern art can neglect this text.
1992). 11. See Robert L. Herbert, ‘Method and
Meaning in Monet’, Art in America S7I5
Part III: The Artist’s Response (September 1979), 90—108, and John House,
Chapter 3. Representation, Vision, Claude Monet: Nature into Art (New Haven
and ‘Reality’: the Art of Seeing and London, 1986).
1. See Doris Shadbolt, The Art of Emily Carr 12. For the most accessible discussion of this
(Seattle, Wash., 1979), 36. The lecture was famous picture, see Claire Freche-Tory
given to the Victoria Women’s Canadian Club and Antoine Terrasse, TheNabis: Bonnard,
and under the title Fresh Seeingvms published Vuillard, and Their Circle (NewYork, 1991),
in book form (with another lecture) in 12—13. ‘What colour do you see the tree?’
Toronto, 1972. Gauguin reputedly asked Serusier. ‘Is it green?
2. Seejonathan Fineberg, The Innocent Then use green, the finest green on your
Eye: Children's Art and The Modern Artist palette. And the shadow? It’s blue, if anything?
(Princeton, 1997). Don’t be afraid to paint it as blue as you
3. This most theoretically interesting notion possibly can’.
occurs only in Frederic Henriet’s memoirs of 13. The most accessible summary with
1891, Les campagnes d’unpaysagiste (Paris, 1891), quotations of Allard’s criticism in English can
69ff. be found in Lynn Gamwell’s Cubist Criticism
4. See Michael Fried, Absorption and (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1981). The following will
Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age do: ‘To react with violence against instant¬
of Diderot (Berkeley, Calif., 1980). This is aneous notation, insidious anecdote, and all
without doubt the most stimulating and useful the substitutes for impressionism ...’ (p. 28).
of Fried’s many brilliant essays and books, and 14. Richard Shiff’s Cezanne and the End of
its concepts have held considerable sway over Impressionism (Chicago, 1984), derives from a
students of modernism, many ofwhom have brilliant essay that Shiff had published earlier
been all but obsessed with the ‘beholder’ and for the Metropolitan Museum. In all his work,
the ‘gaze’ for the past decade. Shiff recognizes the roots of most modernist
5. These notions are summarized in English representational strategies in Impressionism.
in Richard Brettell’s ‘Pissarro in He is, among contemporary theorists of
Louveciennes: An Inscription and Three modernism, almost unique in this recognition.
Paintings’, Apollo (November 1992), 315-19.
6. S ee Charles Cros’ fragmentary essay (his Chapter 4. Image/Modernism and the
lover reputedly burned the original, and it is Graphic Traffic
only known from manuscript fragments) 1. Information about these borrowings is
‘LaMecanique Cerebrale’, Oeuvre Complete scattered through the vast Gauguin biblio¬
(Paris, 1970), which to my knowledge has graphy, which is summarized in Richard
never been translated, and Jules Laforgue’s Brettell et al., The Art of Paul Gauguin (New
well-translated, ‘Impressionism’ in Linda York, 1988).
Nochlin’s Sources and Documents in The History 2. I am reminded of a maxim currently
of Art: Impressionism and Post Impressionism, fashionable among university students:
1874-11904 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1966), 14-21. 'To steal ideas from one source is plagiarism,
7. Ibid. p. 18.
while to steal from many is research'.
8. See Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The 3. See Camille Pissarro, Letters to his Son
Fourth Dimension and non-Euclidean Geometry Lucien (NewYork, 1972,3rd edn), 164-5, edited
in Modern Art (Princeton, 1983). Also, much and translated byjohn Rewald with assistance
of the literature related to Neo-Impressionism from Lucien Pissarro.
as well as to the connections between Cubists 4. The most exciting discussion of this
and such thinkers as Poincare and Bergson
phenomenon is William Ivins’, Prints and
makes similar points.
Visual Communications (Cambridge, Mass.,
9. Many have talked about doing the obvious
1953). See also Beatrice Farwell’s French
book and/or exhibition that links these seem¬
Popular L ithographic Imagery, 1815—1870
ingly disparate artists (most ofwhom knew (Chicago, 1981-97), 12 vols.
each other), but it has not yet happened.
5* For an exemplary discussion of Cezanne's
10. See Peter Henry Emerson’s Naturalistic
plundering of the Louvre, see Theodore Reff
Photography for Students of Art and The Death of
and Innis Howe Shoemaker, Paul Cezanne:
Naturalistic Photography (NewYork, 1973^ repr.
Two Sketchbooks (Philadelphia, 1989).

222 NOTES
6. Manchester Exhibition of 1857 4. The most intelligent and accessible book
7- See Gaston Diehl, Henri Matisse (Paris, on Manet’s Olympia is Theodore Reff’s
1925), 11. Manet, Olympia: Art In Context (New York,
1976).
Part IV: Iconology 5. The most easily accessible treatment of
Introduction Manet’s religious paintings can be found in
1. The scholarship that unpacked the early Michael Driskel’s Representing Belief, Religion,
abstractions of Kandinsky has been particu¬ Art, and Society in Nineteenth Century France
larly interesting in this regard. See Rose-Carol (University Park, Pa., 1992), 188—93.
Washton Longs Kandinsky, The Development 6. See Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of
of an Abstract Style (Oxford and New York, Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge,
1980). Mass., 1993); Abigail Solomon-Godeau,
2. This research is summarized and, in part, ‘Going Native’ Art in America (July 1989);
synthesized in Christine Poggi’s In Defiance of Hollis Clayson, Painted Love: Prostitution in
Painting: Cubism, Futurism, andTheInvention French Art ofthe Impressionist Era (New
of Collage (New Haven and London, 1992). For Haven, 1991); Eunice Lipton, Alias Olympia:A
Schwitters, see Dorothea Dietrich’s dutiful Womans Searchfor Manet’s Notorious Model and
book, The Collages of Kurt Schwitters: Tradition Her own Desire (New York, 1992); and James
and Innovation (Cambridge and New York, H. Rubin, Manet’s Silence and the Poetics of
1993). An alternative and deeply contextual Bouquets (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).
view of these same works can be found in 7. See Alexandre Dumas fils, Theatre complet
Annegreth Nill’s ‘Rethinking Kurt Schwitters, (Paris, 1870-99), 8 vols.
Part One: An Interpretation of “Hansi” ’ and 8. See Theodor Siegl’s The Thomas Eakins
‘Rethinking Kurt Schwitters, Part Two: An Collection (Philadelphia, 1978), 88-90.
Interpretation of“Grunfleck” ’ Arts Magazine 9. See Reinholdt Heller’s Munch: His Life and
55/5 (January 1981), 112-25. Work (Chicago, 1984).
10. Linda Nochlin has been the most per¬
Chapter 5. Sexuality and the Body sistent student ofbathing and its modernist
1. This bibliography would itself be as long as iconographies, but has yet to publish her work
the present book. Here are some relatively in any complete way. For Eakins, the recent
accessible sources for the beginner: Linda publication entitled Thomas Eakins and The
Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Swimming Picture (Fort Worth, Tex., 1996),
Sexuality (London, 1992); Kathleen Adler and summarizes the literature and includes dis¬
Marcia Pointon (eds), The Body Imaged: The cussion of male bathers in European art.
Human Form and Visual Culture Since the 11. See Mary Louise Krumrine, Paul Cezanne:
Renaissance (Cambridge and New York, 1993); The Bathers (New York, 1990).
The Female Body in Western Culture: Con¬ 12. The most virulent critics of Gauguin
temporary Perspectives (Cambridge, Mass., as both a sexist and colonialist are Abigail
1986). There is also an oddly excellent book Solomon-Godeau and Griselda Pollock in
with an even odder title, Bram Dijkstra’s Idols Avant-Garde Gambits, 1888-1895: Gender and
of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in the Colour of Art History (New York and
Fin-de-Siecle Culture (Oxford, 1986), London, 1993).
2. Few individual paintings in the history
of art have a bibliography that can match in Chapter 6. Social Class and Class
quantity that devoted to Manet’s Dejeunersur Consciousness
Therbe and its successor, Olympia. Most of I. The social readings of the Grande Jatte by
these have been summarized in Franqoise Clark are summarized and discussed in Robert
Cachin’s concise and well-conceived catalogue L. Herbert’s thoughtful essay on the painting
entries in the great Paris/New York Manet in Georges Seurat, 1859-1891 (New York, 1991),
catalogue of 1984, Manet, 1852-1885 (New 170-9; see particularly 179, n. 16.
York, 1983), 165-91. The most influential and 2. This view, put forward byjohn House in
debated recent discussion of the paintings ‘Reading the Grande Jatte’, Museum Studies
can be found in T.J. Clark’s ThePaintingof 14/2 (Chicago, 1989), 115-31, is disputed by
Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Robert Herbert in the essay cited above.
Followers (New York, 1985). Herbert’s view is that the paintings don’t
3. This phrase can be found in Champa’s actually function visually as pendants and that
brilliant review of the Chicago Bazille such a view is forced. However, there is much
exhibition, evidence to suggest that the second painting

NOTES 223
was begun as the pendant of the first and then Chapter 7. Anti-Iconography: Art without
assumed a life quite independent of it. ‘Subject’
3. These identifications have been made most 1. These connections can be found in several
strongly by Richard Thomson both in his recent studies: Richard Brettell, Scott
amusing public lectures and in his excellent Schaefer, and Sylvie Patin, A Day in The
monograph Seurat (Oxford, 1985). Country, Impressionism and The French
4. Perhaps because his life was largely spent Landscape (Los Angeles, 1984); Paul Hayes
painting, Renoir’s biography has yet to be Tucker, Monet at Argenteuil (New Haven,
written. His famous son, Jean Renoir, tried 1982); Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism:Art,
(Renoir: My Father (London, i962)),buthe Leisure, and Parisian Society (New Haven,
was born too late to be of much use in the early 1988); and Charles S. Moffett et al.,
or formative part of the artist’s life. Barbara Impressionists on the Seine (Washington, DC,
Ehrlich White’s Renoir: His Life, Art, and 1996).
Letters (New York, 1984), is the best modem 2. See John Rewald, Cezanne: A Catalogue
source. Colin Bailey, in his highly detailed new Raisonne'(New York, 1997), and Richard R.
study Renoir Portraits: Impressions ofan Age Brettell, ‘Cezanne/Pissarro, Eleve/Eleve’,
(New Haven, 1997) is very subtle in his Coloque Cezanne (Paris, 1997).
discussion of class issues. For Bastien-Lepage 3. Discussions of this tiny painting abound.
the reader needs a very good library. Perhaps Perhaps the most accessible to an anglophone
the best early biographies in English are is Claire Freches-Thory and Antoine Terrasse,
Andre Theuriet’s Jules Bastien-Lepage and his The Nabis: Bonnard, Vuillard, and their Circle
Art (London, 1892) and Julia Cartwright’s Jules (New York, 1990), 12-13, where this translation
Bastien-Lepage (London, 1894). of the Gauguin text is to be found.
5. The best of these are Beth Archer 4. For highly politically motivated reading
Brombert, Edouard Manet: Rebel in a Frock of Fauve landscape subjects, see James D.
Coat (Boston, 1996); David Sweetman, Paul Herbert, Fauve Painting: TheMakingof
Gauguin: A Complete Life (London, 1995); Cultural Politics (New Haven and London,
and Julia Bloch Frey, Toulouse-Lautrec: 1992).
A Life (London, 1994). These, together with
the competing biographies of Picasso and Chapter 8. Nationalism and
Georgia O’Keeffe, are all that modern art Internationalism in Modern Art
has contributed to modern biography. 1. Studies ofPolish nineteenth-century
6. And, when they were not, as in the case painting are not widely accessible outside
of Sargent’s infamous Madame X ox Renoir’s Poland, and the bibliography in English is very
Riding in the Bois de Boulogne, they appeared small. There is a brief discussion of Matejko’s
to be. historical painting in Agnieszka Morawinska’s
7. The exemplary book in this arena is Symbolism in Polish Painting, 1890-1914
Elizabeth Ann McCauley’s^. A. E. Disderi (Detroit, 1984), 16-20. One should also find
and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph T. Drobokowlski s Polish Paintingfrom the
(New Haven, 1985). Enlightenment to Recent Times (Warsaw-
8. A thorough survey of representations of Cracow, 1981) as well as the English language
peasants in all media is Richard and Caroline publication, The National Museum in Warsaw,
Brettell’s Painters and Peasants in the 19th Painting (Warsaw, 1994).
Century (Geneva, 1983). 2. One of the most powerful studies of
9. Again, this literature is largely confined to nationalism as a modernist idea is Benedict
the study of French art and, more specifically, Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections
to the images of Manet and Degas. The on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism
literature for the latter is staggering in its size. (London, 1983). See also Ernest Gellner,
The most accessible are Richard Kendall’s and Nations and Nationalism (Ithica, 1983).
Griselda Pollock’s collection of essays by 3. The most persistent and informed student
British scholars (and Linda Nochlin and of Hodler’s Swiss subject-matter is the
Hollis Clayson) entitled Dealing with Degas: American art historian Sharon L. Hirsch. Her
Representations of Women and The Politics of most easily accessible study is her monograph,
Vision (New York, 1992). Also important is
Ferdinand Hod/er (New York, 1982). Mucha’s
Carol Armstrong’s Odd Man Out: Reading career has been well served by his son Jiri
ofthe Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas
Mucha, who has a well-documented chapter
(Chicago, 1991).
on the Slav Epic in Alphonse Maris Mucha:
His Life and Art (New York, 1989), 240-67.

224 NOTES
4- The single best and most accessible intro¬ Afterword: The Private
duction to these ideas is Maurice Tuchman Institutionalization of Modern Art
et al., The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1. There is, to my knowledge, no single
i8go~u)2g (Los Angeles, 1987). critical history of the Museum of Modern Art.
5. All these discussions can be found There are, however, several insider studies
summarized in Tuchman et al., ibid., 165-84, that contain a wealth of information. These
201-18, and 219-38. are Alice Goldfarb Marquis, Alfred H. Barr Jr:
6. Dow’s teaching is summarized in Arthur Missionary for the Modern (N ew York and
Wesley Dow, Composition: A Series of Exercises Chicago, 1989); Russell Lynes, Good Old
in Art Structurefor the use of Students and Modern: An Intimate Portrait of the Museum
Teachers (New York, 1920; first edn, 1899). of Modern Art (New York, 1973); and Sam
7. See Charles S. Hill, The Group of Seven: Hunter, et. al, The Museum of Modern Art,
ArtforaNation (Ottawa, 1995). New York: the History and the Collection (New
8. The most accessible English language York, 1984). The latter focuses more on the
study of Finnish painting and of the career of collections than on the institutional history.
Akseli Gallen-Kallela is Dreams of A Summer
Night: Scandinavian Painting at the Turn of the
Century (London, 1986), 104-21.

NOTES 225
 List of Illustrations

The Publisher would like to thank the Oil on canvas. 79 x 118 cm. Hermitage
following individuals and institutions who Museum, St Petersburg/photo Novosti
have kindly given permission to reproduce (London).
the illustrations listed below. 10. Oscar Gustave Rejlander: The Two Ways
of Life, 1857. Composite photograph from 32
p.x Phillip Henry Delamotte: Rebuilding the negatives. The Royal Photographic Society,
Crystal Palace at Sydenham, 1853. Gernsheim Bath.
Collection, Harry Ransom Humanitites 11. Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: The Wheel
Research Center, The University ofTexas of Fortune, 1870. Oil on canvas. 200 x 100 cm.
at Austin. Detail. Musee d’Orsay, Paris/© Reunion des Musees
1. Phillip Henry Delamotte: Upper Gallery Nationaux.
of the Crystal Palace, 1855. Albumen print 12. JacekMalczewski: Melancholia, 1894. Oil
mounted on card. 28.2X22.8 cm. Gernsheim on canvas. 139 X 240 cm. National Museum of
Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Poland, Poznan.
Research Center, The University ofTexas 13. JozefMehoffer: Strange Garden (Dziwny
at Austin. Ogrod), 1903. Oil on canvas. 217X 208 cm.
2. William Holman Hunt: Valentine Rescuing National Museum ot Poland, Warsaw.
Sylviafrom Proteus (Two Gentlemen of Verona), 14. Paul Cezanne: The Mill on the Couleuvre
1830-1. Oil on canvas. 98.5 X 133.3 cm- atPontoise, 1881. Oil on canvas. 72.4 X 92.1 cm.
Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery. National Gallerv, Berlin/photo Bildarchiv
3. Gustave Courbet: The Studio of the Painter, Preussischer Kulturbesitz.
A Real Allegory, 1834-5. Oil on canvas. 15. Vincent van Gogh: The Night Cafe', 1888.
361X598 cm. Musee d’Orsay, Paris/© Reunion Oil on canvas. 72.4 X 92.1 cm. Yale University
des Musees Nationaux. Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Bequest of
4. Thomas Eakins: The Gross Clinic, 1875. Oil Stephen Carlton Clark, BA, 1903.
on canvas. 243.8 X 198.1 cm. Jefferson Medical 16. Odilon Redon: Decorative Panel, c. 1902.
College ofThomas Jefferson University, Tempera and oil on canvas. 183.8 X 254 cm.
Philadelphia, PA. RijksmuseumTwenthe, Enschede.
5. William Powell Frith: The Railway Station, 17. Paul Signac: Two Milliners (TheModistes),
1862. Oil on canvas. 116.7X256.4 cm. Royal 1885-6. Oil on canvas. 116 x 89 cm. The
Holloway and Bedford New College, Foundation E. G. Biihrle Collection, Zurich.
Surrey/photo Bridgeman Art Library, © AD AGP, Paris and DACS, London 1999.
London. 18. Paul Gauguin: Vision after the Sermon: Jacob
6. Claude Monet: The Luncheon: Monet's Wrestling with the Angel, 1888. Oil on canvas.
Garden atArgentueil, 1873-6. Oil on canvas. 72 X 92 cm. National Gallery of Scotland,
162 x 203 cm. Musee d'Orsay, Paris/photo Edinburgh.
Bridgeman Art Library, London. 19. Edouard Vuillard: Mina and Vallotton in the
7. Pierre-Auguste Renoir: Ball at the Moulin de Dining Room, 1899. Oil on cardboard. 70.5 x
la Galette, 1876. Oil on canvas. 130.8 X 175.3 cm. 50.8 cm. Collection William Kelly Simpson,
Musee d’Orsay, Paris/photo Bridgeman Art New York. ©ADAGP, Paris and DACS,
Library, London. London 1999.

8. Edgar Degas: The Race Track: Amateur 20. Maurice Vlaminck: Bougival, 01905. Oil
Jockeys near a Carriage, 1876-87. Oil on canvas. on canvas. 82.6 X 100.6 cm. Dallas Museum of
66 X 81 cm. Musee d’Orsay, Paris/© Reunion Art, The Wendy and Emery Reves Collection.
des Musees Nationaux/photo Gerard Blot. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 1999.
9. Edgar Degas: Place de la Concorde, 1874-7. 21. Henri Matisse: The Red Studio, Issy-les-

226
 Moulineaux, 1911. Oil on canvas. 181 x 219.1 cm. Houghton P. Metcalf in memory of her
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, husband, Houghton P. Metcalf/photo Erik
Mrs Simon Guggenheim Fund/photo Gould. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London
© 1999 The Museum of Modern Art, New 1999.
York. © Succession H. Matisse/DACS 1999 34. Salvador Dali: Little Cinders, 1927. Oil
22. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Nude Woman on panel. 64X48 cm. Museo Nacional Centro
CombingherHair, 1913. Oil on canvas. de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid. © Salvador
125 x 90 cm. Briicke-Museum, Berlin. Dali-Foundation Gaia-Salvador Dali/DACS
Courtesy Dr Wolfgang Henze. 1999.
23. Pablo Picasso: Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, 35. Fernand Leger: The City, 1919. Oil on
1909—1°. Oil on canvas. 92 X 64.9 cm. Pushkin canvas. 230.5 x 297.8 cm. Philadelphia
Museum, Moscow/photo Novosti (London). Museum of Art. A. E. Gallatin Collection.
© Succession Picasso/DACS 1999. ©ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 1999.
24. Pablo Picasso: The Bird Cage, 1923. Oil 36. James Wallace Black: Bostonfrom the Air,
on canvas. 201 x 140 cm. Private collection i860. Albumen print. Courtesy of the Boston
© Succession Picasso/DACS 1999. Public Library, Print Department.
25. Umberto Boccioni: The City Rises, 1910. 37. Gustave Caillebotte: Paris Street; Rainy
Oil on canvas. 199.3 X301 cm. The Museum Day, 1876—7. Oil on canvas. 212.2 X 276.2 cm.
ot Modern Art, New York, Mrs Simon Charles H. and Mary F. Worcester Collection,
Guggenheim Fund/photo © 1999 The 1964.336/photo © 1997 The Art Institute °f
Museum of Modern Art, New York. Chicago. All rights reserved.
26. Robert Delaunay: Circular Forms: Sun, 38. Pierre Bonnard: Morning in Paris, 1911.
Moon, Simultane1,1912-13. Oil on canvas. Oil on canvas. 76 X121 cm. State Hermitage
65X100 cm. StedelijkMuseum, Amsterdam. Museum, St Petersburg/photo Scala,
Courtesyjean-Louis Delaunay. © L &M Florence. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS,
Services BV Amsterdam 98095. London 1999.
27. Frantisek Kupka: Vertical Planes III, 39. Charles Marville:
1912-13. Oil on canvas. 220 X118 cm. The TearingDown the Avenue de I'Opera, c. 1877.
National Gallery (Collection ofModern and Albumen print. Musee Carnavalet,
Contemporary Art), Prague. © ADAGP, Paris/Phototheque des Musees de la Ville de
Paris and DACS, London 1999. Paris.
28. David Bomberg: The Mud Bath, 1914. 40. Joseph Stella: New York Interpreted (The
Oil on canvas. 152.4 x 224.2 cm. Tate Gallery, Voice of the City), 1920-2. Oil and tempera on
London. canvas. Side panels, 223 X137 cm; centre panel,
29. Kasimir Malevich: Suprematist Com¬ 251 x 137 cm. The NewarkMuseum, Newark,
position: Black Trapezium and Red Square, NJ/photo Art Resource, New York.
after 1915. Oil on canvas. 101 x 61.9 cm. 41. Edward J. Steichen: The Flatiron, 1905.
S tedelijk Museum, Amsterdam/photo Brown pigment gum-bichromate over
Bridgeman Art Library, London. gelatin-silver print from 1904 negative. 49.9 x
30. Theo van Doesburg: Pure Painting, 1920. 38.9 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Oil on canvas. 135.8 x 86.5 cm. Musee New York. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933
Nationale d’ArtModerne, Centre Georges (33-43-44)-
Pompidou, Paris. © DACS 1999 42. Aristarkh Lentulof: Moscow, 1913. Oil and
31. Piet Mondrian: Composition with Large metal foil on canvas. 97 X129 cm. Tretyakov
Blue Plane, Red, Black, Yellow and Gray, 1921. Gallery, Moscow/photo Scala, Florence.
Oil on canvas. 60.5 x50 cm. Dallas Museum 43. Charles Sheeler: Church Street El, 1920. Oil
of Art, Foundation for the Arts Collection, on canvas. 40.6 X 48.5 cm. © The Cleveland
Gift ofMrs James H. Clark. © Museum of Art, 1998. Mr and Mrs William
Mondrian/Holtzman Trust, c/o Beeldrecht H. Marlatt Fund 1977.43.
Amsterdam, Holland and DACS, London 44. Edouard Manet, Portrait of Emile Zola,
1999. 1868. Oil on canvas. 146.5 x 114 cm. Musee
32. Francis Picabia: Universal Prostitution, d’Orsay, © Paris. © Reunion des Musees
1916-19. Ink, tempera, and metallic paint on Nationaux/ photo H. Lewandowski.
cardboard. 74.5 X 94.2 cm. Yale University Art 45. Eugene Delacroix: The Triumph of Apollo,
Gallery, New Haven, CT. Gift of Collection 1850-1. Oil on canvas. 800 X 750 cm. Musee du
Societe Anonyme. © DACS 1999. Louvre, (Salle d’Apollon), Paris. © Reunion
33. Amedee Ozenfant: The Jug, 1926. Oil des Musees Nationaux.
on canvas. 304.2 x 148.6 cm. Museum of Art, 46. Charles Negre: Chimney-sweeps Walking,
Rhode Island School of Design. Gift ofMrs 1851. Salted paper print from a paper negative.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 227

 15.2X19.8 cm. National Gallery of Canada, The Museum of Somogy County, Rippl-
Ottawa. Ronai Museum, Kaposvar, Hungary/photo
47. Andrew J. Russell: Hanging Rock, Foot of Gozsy Gaborne.
Echo Canyon, Utah, 1867-8. Albumen print 60. Konrad Krzyzanoswki: The Landscape
from a collodion glass negative. The Yale from Finland, 1908. Oil on canvas, no x 125 cm.
Collection ofWestern Americana, Beinecke National Museum of Poland, Cracow.
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale 61. Per Krohg: Female Nude, 1919. Oil on
University, New Haven, CT. canvas. 81.5 x 60 cm. © Nasjonalgalleriet,
48. Edouard Manet: The Balcony, 1868-9. Oil Oslo/photo J. Lathion. © ADAGP, Paris
on canvas. 170 x 125 cm. Musee d’Orsay, Paris. and DACS, London 1999.
© Reunion des Musees Nationaux/photo H. 62. MorizMelzer: Bridge-City, 1921-3.
Lewandowski. Oil on canvas. 131X 98.3 cm. Stadtmuseum
49. Mary Cassatt: Little Girl in a Blue Berlin/photo Hans -Joachim Bartsch, Berlin.
Armchair, 1878. Oil on canvas. 89.5 x 129.8 cm. 63. Nils von Dardel: The Trans-Siberian
Collection of Mr and Mrs Paul Mellon © 1998 Express, 1918. Oil on canvas. 95 x 150 cm.
Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Private Collection/photo Tord Lund,
Washington, DC. ModernaMuseet, Stockholm/Statens
50. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: At the Moulin Konstmuseer © BUS.
Rouge: The Dance, 1890. Oil on canvas. 115.6 x 64. Wyndham Lewis: The Crowd, 1914-15. Oil
149.8 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Henry and pencil on canvas. 79 X 60 cm. Tate Gallery,
P. Mcllhenny Collection in memory of London. Estate ofMrs G. W. Wyndham
Frances P. Mcllhenny. Lewis. By permission.
51. Paul Cezanne: The Artist’s Father, 1866. 65. George Grosz: The Street, 1915. Oil on
Oil on canvas. 198.5 X 119.3 cm. Collection canvas. 45.5 x35.5 cm. Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart.
of Mr and Mrs Paul Mellon © 1998 Board © DACS 1999.
of Trustees, N ational Gallery of Art, 66. Gosta Adrian-Nilsson: The City by the
Washington, DC. Sea, 1919. Oil on canvas. 31X33 cm. Moderna
52. Anders Zorn: Self-Portrait, 1896. Oil Museet Stockholm/photo Statens
on canvas. 117X 94 cm. Nationalmuseum, Konstmuseer. © DACS 1999.
Stockholm/© photo Statens Konstmuseer 67. Stanislaw Wyspiariski: Gtowka Helenki,
53. Unknown photographer: A London Slum, 1900. Pastel on cardboard. 34 x 25 cm. National
1889. Gelatin-silver print. Getty Images, Museum of Poland, Cracow.
Ltd, London. 68. Ferdinand Hodler: The Night, 1890. Oil on
54. Jacob A. Riis: Flashlight Photograph of canvas. 116 X 299 cm. Kunstmuseum Berne/
One of Four Peddlers who Slept in a Cellar, photo Peter Lauri.
r.1890. Gelatin-silver print. The Jacob A. 69. Stanley Spencer: Christ's Entry into
Riis Collection #203, Museum of the City Jerusalem, c. 1920. Oil on canvas. 47 x57 cm.
ot New York.
City Art Gallery/Leeds Museums and
55. Evelyn George Carey: View of the Internal Galleries/photo Bridgeman Art Library.
Viaduct Near One ojthe Cantilever Towers, © Estate of Stanley Spencer 1999. All rights
Forth Bridge, Scotland, r.1888. Gelatin-silver reserved, DACS.
print from a collodion negative. 48.3 X 40 cm.
70. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes: The Shepherd's
Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture/ Song, 1891. Oil on canvas. 104.5 x I09-9 cm.
Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
56. Margaret Bourke-White: High Level Rogers Fund, 1906.
Bridge, Cleveland, 1929. Gelatin-silver print. 71. Gustave Moreau: The Chimeras, 1884.
Margaret Bourke-White Collection,
Oil on canvas. 236 X137 cm. Musee Gustave-
Department of Special Collections, Syracuse Moreau, Paris. © Reunion des Musees
University Library/The Estate of Margaret Nationaux/photo R. G. Ojeda.
Bourke-White.
72. Witold Wojtkiewicz: Bash Zimowa, 1908.
57* Claude Monet: Weeping Willow, 1919.
Oil on canvas. 80 X 70 cm. National Museum
Oil on canvas. 99.7 X120 cm. Kimbell Art ol Poland, Poznan.
Museum, Fort Worth, Tx/photo Michael
73. Hans von Marees: Golden Age II, 1880—3.
Bodycomb.
Oil on canvas. 185.5 x 149.5 cm. Neue
58. John Dudleyjohnston: Liverpool an
I inakothek, Munich/photo Kunstdia-archiv
Impression, 1908. Gum-bichromate print.
Artothek, Peissenberg.
The Royal Photographic Society, Bath.
74. Edvard Munch: The Scream, 1893. Tempera
59. Sandor Galimberti: View of a Street in
and oil pastel on card board. 91 x 73.5 cm. ©
Nagybdnya, 1907. Oil on canvas. 64 x 75 cm.
Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo/photo J. Lathion.

228 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

 © The Munch Museum/The Munch- 87. Pierre-Auguste Renoir: The Promenade,
Ellingsen Group/DACS 1999. 1870. Oil on canvas.81.3 x 65 cm. The J. Paul
75. Paul Gauguin: Ancestors of Tehamana, 1893. Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA.
Oil on canvas. 76.3 X 54.3 cm. Gift of Mr and 88. Paul Gauguin: Where Do We Come From?
Mrs Charles DeeringMcCormick, 1980.613/ What Are We? WhereAre We Going?, 1897. Oil
photo © 1997 The Art Institue of Chicago. on canvas. 139.1X374.6 cm. Courtesy Museum
All rights reserved. of Fine Arts, Boston, Tompkins Collection.
76. Paul Cezanne: An Old Woman with a 89. Jean Frederic Bazille: Summer Scene, 1869.
Rosary, 1896. Oil on canvas. 80.6 X 65.5 cm. Oil on canvas. 160 X 160.7 cm. Courtesy of the
© The National Gallery, London (NG 6195). Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art
77* Hans Christian Anderson: Wandschirm, Museums, Gift of Mr and Mrs F. Meynier de
^73~A'- Germany (left) and France (right). Salinelles.
Collage on linen, 2 of 8 panels shown here, 90. Max Liebermann: In the Bathhouse, 1875—8.
each panel, 153 x 62.5 cm. H. C. Andersen Oil on canvas. 181 x 225.1 cm. Dallas Museum
House/Odense Bys Museer. of Art, Foundation for the Arts Collection,
78. George Grosz and John Heartfield: Life Mrs John B. O’Hara Fund. © DACS 1999.
and Activity in Universal City at 12. Oy Midday, 91. Thomas Eakins: Swimming, 1885. Oil
1920. Photomontage. Akademie der Ktinste, on canvas. 69.5 x 92.4 cm. © Amon Carter
Berlin (John Heartfield Archiv). © DACS Museum, Fort Worth, Tx(i99o.i9.i).
1999. 92. Gustave Caillebotte: Man at his Bath, 1884.
79. Paul Citroen: Metropolis, 1923. Collage of Oil on canvas. 170 x 125 cm. Private Collection
photographs, prints, and postcards. 76.1 X 58.4 (on extended loan to The
cm. Courtesy of Study and Documentation National Gallery, London).
Centre for Photography, Leiden University, 93. Paul Gauguin: Manau tupapau (Spirit of the
The Netherlands. © DACS 1999. Dead Watching), 1892. Oil on burlap mounted
80. Stuart Davis: Lucky Strike, 1921. Oil on on canvas. 72.4 x 92.4 cm. Albright-Knox Art
canvas. 84.5 x 45.7 cm. The Museum of Gallery, Buffalo, NY, A. Conger Goodyear
Modern Art, New York. Gift of the American Collection, 1965.
Tobacco Company, Inc./photo © 1999 The 94. Marcel Duchamp: The Bride Stripped
Museum ofModern Art, New York. © Estate Bare by her Bachelors, Even or The Large Glass,
of Stuart Davis/DACS, London/VAGA, 1915-23. Front view. Oil and lead wire on glass.
NewYorki999. 277.5 x 175.6 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art,
81. Victor Brauner: Composition, f.1929. Oil Bequest of Katherine S. Dreier. © ADAGP,
on canvas. 53.5 x 64.5 cm. National Museum Paris and DACS, London 1999.
of Art, Bucharest/photo Art Services 95. Hannah Hoch: The Sweet One (Die Siisse),
International, Alexandra, VA. © ADAGP, 01926, from ‘From an Ethnographic Museum’
Paris and DACS, London 1999. series. Photomontage with watercolour. 30 X
82. Edouard Manet: Olympia, 1863. Oil on 15.5 cm. Museum FolkwangEssen. © DACS
canvas. 130.5 x 190 cm. Musee d’Orsay, Paris/ 1999.
© Reunion des Musees Nationaux/photo 96. Georges-Pierre Seurat \ A Summer Sunday
H. Lewandowski. on the Island of the GrandeJatte, 1884,1884-6.
83. Edouard Manet: TheMockingof Christ, Oil on canvas. 207X308 cm. Helen Birch
1865. Oil on canvas. 190.8 X 148.3 cm. Gift of Bartlett Memorial Collection, 1926.224/photo
James Deering, 1925.703/photo ©The Art © 1997 The Art Institute of Chicago. All
Institute of Chicago. All rights reserved. rights reserved.
84. Edvard Munch: Ate, 1894. Oil 97. Georges-Pierre Seurat: Bathers at Asnieres,
and tempera on canvas. 120.7x141 cm. 1883-4. Oil on canvas. 201X300 cm. ©The
© Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo/photo J. Lathion. National Gallery, London (NG3908).
© The Munch Museum/The Munch- 98. Lukian Popov: Mobilized, 1904. Oil on
Ellingsen Group/DACS 1999. canvas. The Russian Museum, St Petersburg.
85. Magnus Enckell: TheAwakenmg, 1894. Oil 99. Adolph Menzel: Supper at the Ball, 1878.
on canvas. 113 X 86 cm. The Finnish National Oil on canvas. 71X 90 cm. National Gallery,
Gallery/Atenuem/The An tell Collection, Berlin/photo Staatliche Museen Preussicher
Helsinki/photo The Central Art Archives. Kulterbesitz.
86. Pablo Picasso: Family of Saltimbanques, 100. Ilya Repin: Religious Procession in the
1905. Oil on canvas. 212.8 x 229.6 cm. Chester Province of Kursk, 1880-3. Oilon canvas. 175 x
Dale Collection © 1998 Board ofTrustees, 280 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow/photo
N ational Gallery of Art, Washington. Scala, Florence.
© Succession Picasso/D ACS 1999. 101. Henri Matisse: The Conversation, 1909.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 229

 State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg/ 115. Edouard Manet\ABar at the Folies-
photo Bridgeman Art Library, London. © Bergere, 1882. Oil on canvas. 96 x 130 cm. The
Succession H. Matisse/DACS 1999. Courtauld Gallery, Courtauld Institute of Art,
102. Fernand Leger: Soldiers Playing at Cards, London, Gift of Samuel Courtauld, 1934.
1917. Oil on canvas. 129 x 193 cm. Rijksmuseum 116. ClaudeMonet: On the Bank of the Seine at
Kroller-Muller, Otterlo. © ADAGP, Paris Bennecourt, 1868. Oil on canvas. 81.5 x 100.7
and DACS, London 1999. cm. Mr and Mrs Potter Palmer Collection,
103. Kasimir Malevich: Portrait of the Artist 1922.427/photo © 1997 The Art Institute of
Ivan Vasilievich Klyun (1873-1942) as a Builder, Chicago. All rights reserved.
1911. Oil on canvas. 111X 70 cm. State Russian 117. Eugene Atget: La Marne at Varenne,
Museum, St Petersburg/photo Bridgeman Art 19x3-7. Albumen-silver print. 18 x 24 cm. The
Library, London. Museum ofModern Art, New York. Abott-
104. Raoul Hausmann: Tatlin at Home, 1920. Levy Collection. Partial gift of Shirley C.
Collage of pasted papers and gouache. 41 x 28 Burden. Copy print © 1998 The Museum of
cm. ModernaMuseet, Stockholm/Statens Modern Art, New York.
Konstmuseer. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, 118. Paul Cezanne: Houses nearAuvers-sur-
London 1999. Oise, 1873-4. Oil on canvas. 39.4X53.3 cm.
205. Arthur G. Dove: Grandmother, 1925. Courtesy ol the Fogg Museum, Harvard
Collage of shingles, needlepoint, page from University Art Museums, Bequest of Annie
the Concordance, pressed flowers, and ferns. Swan Coburn.
50.8 x 54 cm. The Museum ofModern Art, 119. Camille Pissarro: The Hermitage at
New York, Gift of Philip L. Goodwin (by Pontoise, 01867. Oilon canvas. 91X 150.5
exchange)/photo © 1999 The Museum of cm.Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne.
Modern Art, New York. The Estate of Arthur 120. Edouard Vuillard: Large Interior with
Dove (Terry Dintenfass Inc, New York). Six Figures, 1897. Oil on canvas. 88 X193 cm.
ro6. Katherine Dreier: Psychological Abstract Kunsthaus, Zurich. © 1999 by Kunsthaus
Portrait of Ted Shawn, 1929. Oil on canvas. Zurich. © All rights reserved. © ADAGP,
76.2 X 63.5 cm. Munson-Williams-Proctor Paris and DACS, London 1999.
Institute Museum of Art, Utica, New York, 121. August Strindberg: The Wave VIII, 1892.
96.29. Oil on cardboard. 99 x 69 cm. Nordiska
107. Lucia Moholy: Florence Henri, 1926—7. Museet, Stockholm/photo Birgit Branvall.
Gelatin-silver print. 37x27.8 cm. Julien Levy 122. Laura Gilpin: Basket op Peaches, 1912.
Collection, gift ofjean and Julien Levy, Autochrome. 7.6 x 13 cm. © 1979 Amon
1975.1141. Art Institute, Chicago. Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Tx, Gift of
108. Margrethe Mather: Semi-Nude (Billy the Estate ot Laura Gilpin (P1979.146.50).
Justema in Mans Summer Kimono), r.1923. 123. Lazar El Lissitzky: Proun 12 E, 1923.
Gelatin-silver print. 8.8 X11.5 cm. Center for Oil on canvas. 57.2 x 42.5 cm. Courtesy of
Creative Photography, University of Arizona, the Busch Reisinger Museum. Harvard
Tucson, AZ.
University Art Museums Association Fund.
109. Vanessa Bell: Stud/and Beach, c. 1912. © DACS 1999.
Oil on canvas. 76.2 x 101.6 cm.Tate Gallery,
124. Kasimir Malevich: Suprematist
London. © 1961 Estate of Vanessa Bell.
Composition: White on White, 1918. Oil on
no. Rudolph Thygesen: Barbarians, 1914. Oil canvas. 79.4 x 79.4 cm. The Museum of
on canvas. 199 x 139.5 cm. © Nasjonalgalleriet,
Modern Art, New York/photo © 1999
Oslo/photo J. Lathion. © DACS 1999.
The Museum ofModern Art, New York/
in. Camille Pissarro: The Apple Pickers,
photo Bridgeman Art Library, London.
1884-6. Oil on canvas. 127 X127 cm. Ohara
125. Mikhail Matiushin: Movement m
Museum of Art, Kurashiki Japan.
Space, 1917-18. State Russian Museum,
112. Nikolai Yaroshenko: The Stoker, 1878. Oil St Petersburg.
on canvas. 124 X 89 cm. Tretyakov Gallery/
126. Hans Mattis-Teutsch: Compositiion
photo Novosti (London).
in Yellow from ‘Flowers of the Soul’ series,
W Abrham Arkhipov: Laundresses, 1901. Oil
1916-24. Oil on canvas. 80 x 90 cm. National
on canvas. 97 X 65 cm. State Russian Museum,
Museum of Art, Bucharest.
St Petersburg/photo Novosti (London).
127. Bertram Brooker: Sounds Assembling, 1928.
114. Karoly Ferency: Boys on the Danube, 1890.
Oil on canvas. 112.3 x 91.7 cm. Collection of the
Oil on canvas. 119 x 149 cm. Hungarian
Winnipeg Art Gallery/photo Ernest Mayer,
National Gallery, Budapest/photo Tibor
Winnipeg Art Gallery. Courtesy Phyllis
Mester.
Brooker Smith.

230 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

128. Jan Matejko: The Battle of Grunewald, Superior, 1923. Oil on canvas. 121.9 X 152.4 cm.
1878. Oil on canvas. 426 X 987 cm. National London Regional Art &Historical Museums,
Museum of Poland, Warsaw. Ontario. Courtesy Mrs Margaret Knox.
129. Wasilly Kandinsky: White Cross, 136. Tivardar Csontvary Kosztka: Ruins of the
January-June 1922. Oil on canvas. 100.5 x no.6 Greek Theatre at Taormina, 1904-5. Oil on
cm. Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice/ canvas. 302 X 570 cm. Hungarian National
photo Robert E. Mates. © ADAGP, Paris and Gallery, Budapest/photo Tibor Mester.
DACS, London 1999. 137. Akseli Gallen-Kallela: Lemminkainens
130. Leon Wyczolkowski: UWrot Mother, 1897. Tempera on canvas. 85.5 X 108.5
Chaiubihskiego, 1905. Pastel on cardboard. cm. The Finnish National
80 Xno cm. National Museum of Poland, Gallery/Ateneum/The Anted Collection,
Cracow. Heksinki/photo The Central Art Archives.
131. Sandor Bortnyik: Geometric Composition, © Mrs Aivi Gallen-Kallela.
1922. Paper and watercolour. 36.3 X 25.5 cm. 138. Imogen Cunningham: Triangles, 1928.
Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest/photo Gelatin-silver print. Photograph by Imogen
TiborMester. Cunningham © AH Rights Reserved by
132. John Covert: Time, 1919. Oil and carpet The Imogen Cunningham Trust, Berkeley,
tacks on canvas. 61X 61 cm. Yale University CA.
Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Gift of 139. Kasimir Malevich: Girls in a Field,
Collection Societe Anonyme. 1928^0. Oil on canvas. 106 X125 cm. State
133. Georgia O’Keeffe: Blue and Green Music, Russian Museum, St Petersburg/photo
1919. Oil on canvas. 58.4 X 48.3 cm. Alfred Bridgeman Art Library, London.
Stieglitz Collection, Gift of Georgia 140. Walker Evans: Brooklyn Bridge, New York,
O’Keeffe, 1969.835/photo © 1997 The Art 1929. Gelatin-silver print. 22.2 X14 cm. The
Institute of Chicago. All rights reserved. Museum ofModern Art, New York. Mr and
© ARS, New York and DACS, London 1999. Mrs John Spencer Fund. Copy print© 1999
134. Tom Thomson: In the Northland, 1915. The Museum ofModern Art, New York.
Oil on canvas. 101.7 X 114.5 cm. The Montreal Courtesy the Estate ofWalker Evans (The
Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of the Friends of Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).
the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts/photo the The Publisher and Author apologize for
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. © ARS, New any errors or omissions in the above list.
York and DACS, London 1999. If contacted they will be pleased to rectify
135. Lawren Harris: From the North Shore, Lake these at the earliest opportunity.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 23I

Bibliographic Essay

General Art has defined the various avenues in twenti¬

The bibliography devoted to modernism is eth century art history with particular clarity
so complex and large that it is not possible to and accuracy. Two of his texts deserve special
cover it all in a short essay. The following is mention.
a guide for the beginner and includes works Rosenblum, Robert, Cubism andTwentieth
written in English and accessible in most large Century Art (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1976).
libraries. It is not intended for the specialist Rubin, William, Dada and Surrealism (place,
and includes few works that are outside what 1968).
might be called the traditional history of art— Rubin, William, Primitivism and Twentieth
those devoted direcdy to the histories of paint¬ Century Art (place, 1984).
ing, photography, and printmaking. Students
who are fascinated by the theoretical literature Studies of artistic cosmopolitanism are not
and to studies of modernist culture itself must as common as one would like. The Centre
look elsewhere. Pompidou has been active in a series of exhibi¬
Most large histories of visual modernism tions that measure the culture and artistic
tend to divide the nineteenth and the twenti¬ boundaries of Paris, by negotiating binary
eth centuries. Certain of them, following studies. These are, unfortunately, only avail¬
Alfred Barr’s Museum ofModernArt, annex able in French. There are also several studies
the final twenty years ol the nineteenth to the of foreign artists in Paris.
twentieth century. Hamilton’s text is the most The national histories of modern art are
distinguished of the general studies ol mod¬ legion, and mostly unremarkable except in a
ernism and the most accurate, clear-headed, descriptive sense. The best-studied traditions
and descriptive. Thus, it is the one essential outside France and the United States can be
book. Its most recent edition also contains the found in the literature devoted to German,
best—and largest—bibliography for use by the Austrian, and British art. Careful synthetic
new student. Rosenblum’s book is the most studies of Russian, Polish, Swiss, Danish,
inclusive, international survey of nineteenth Norwegian, and other European traditions
century art, with an excellent bibliography, await publication in accessible English-
and his co-authored and compiled text on the language works. However, Italian modernism
nineteenth century is the most up-to-date in has been well studied in English with works by
terms of recent methodological developments, Norma Broude, Anne Coffin Hanson, Susan
and also has a fascinating bibliography. Barnes Robinson, and others. A single sys¬
Hamilton, George Heard, Painting and tematic study of foreigners in Paris has not
Sculpture in Europe, 1880—igyy (New Haven been written.
and London, 1993). Centre Pompidou, Paris/Moscow (1979),
Rosenblum, Robert, Nineteenth Century Art Paris/Berlin (1978), and Paris/New York (1977).
(New York, 1984). Weinberg, Barbara, The Lure of Paris (New
Rosenblum, Robert and Eisenman, Stephen, York, 1991).
et al., Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical
History (New York, 1994). In England, nineteenth century studies of
French modernism have been particularly
The twentieth century has faired less well in sophisticated with major contributions by
the area of general surveys, but Rosenblum’s John House of the Courtauld Institute and
graceful and intelligent study remains useful. both Richard and Belinda Thomson, writing
The work of Rubin at the Museum of Modern separately. Christopher Green has also been a

232
highly productive scholar in twentieth- but the majority ofwomen fought to gain
century European art. positions of gender equality with the men who
Art museums have been major centres dominated discourse and, hence, power in all
of scholarly research and publication in the fields of human activity except the home. In
area of modernist art, and projects for major certain ways, women now dominate the visual
museums by Charles Stuckey, John House, arts numerically, but their struggle to be in
Douglas Druick, Paul Hayes Tucker, Judi senior positions of power in universities,
Freeman, Gary Tinterow, Charles Moffett, museums, commercial galleries, and profes¬
Patrice Marandel, Joseph Rishel, Henri sional organizations continues apace.
Loyrette, Francoise Cachin, Kirk Varnedoe, The study of women as artists and as direct
Joachim Pissarro, and others have become contributors to the modernist enterprise, is
standard works. dominated by women scholars, particularly
Twentieth century modernism has been the bibliographies devoted to the careers
firmly divided from that of the nineteenth cen¬ ofMary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Sonia
tury in academic teaching and research, and Delaunay, Florine Stettheimer, Georgia
most large academic departments have divided O’Keeffe, and Vanessa Bell, men apparently
modernism chronologically simply to accom¬ feeling unequipped for the task. These studies,
modate the large numbers of students in and the small, but fascinating general litera¬
courses on modern art. This has not created ture on women artists, have been significant
conditions of collaboration and exchange and additions to the bibliography of modernism.
has lead to excessive specialization in graduate Indeed, the comparative rarity of successful
training. professional women artists, even in modern
art, has meant that, when their careers are
Feminist Studies and the Study of documented and understood, they take on
Modernism an importance that is, perhaps, greater than
There is litde doubt that the feminist critique certain of their male colleagues.
of culture has been the most powerful method¬ A bibliography of feminist contributions
ological force in the humanities for the past to modernists studies would be enormously
generation. Now, one can no longer seriously long. From the intense and driven writings
read formerly crucial books and articles on the of Pollock to the critically nuanced essays of
history of art written by male art historians Nochlin, the tone of feminists studies is as
about male artists for a male audience. So diverse as its contributors. There is, however,
many canonical texts, and the canonical artists no doubt that the central text of feminist
they worship, can clearly and convincingly be scholarship is Pollock’s collection of challeng¬
identified as sexist. The feminist project has ing essays, Vision and Difference. The current
been particularly important in its relationship work of feminist art historians serves both as
to modernism and visual representation. It is a critique of the phallo-centric world of tradi¬
not possible to think about modern art with¬ tional art history and as a propagator of con¬
out reading the feminist critiques of its cepts of the ‘gaze’ and the ‘other’, many of
imagery, marketing, connoisseurship, criti¬ which have their roots in anthropology and
cism, and scholarship by historians like Linda other social sciences rather than in the history
Nochlin, Griselda Pollock, Norma Broude, of art per se. Broude and Gerrard’s anthology
Hollis Clayson, Eunice Lipton, Abigail offers a diverse general reader on the subject.
Solomon-Godeau, Anne Higgonet, Nancy Broude, Norma and Gerrard, Mary D., The
Mathews, Molly Nesbitt, Carol Duncan, ExpandingDiscourse, Feminism and Art History
Rosalind Krauss and, increasingly, the work (New York, 1992).
of male feminists like Stephen Eisenman, Nochlin, Linda, The Politics of Vision (New
Kenneth Silver, and John House. York, 1989).
Not surprisingly, a good deal of this critical Pollock, Griselda, Vision and Difference:
literature springs directly from modernism Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art
itself. It is, in fact, impossible to write the his¬ (London and New York, 1988).
tory of modern art, collecting, curating, or art Pollock, Griselda, Avant-Garde Gambits
scholarship without women. Though women i888-i8yj: Gender and the Colour of Art History
have often fought for their place at the table, (New York and London, 1993).
once taken that place has been firmly main¬
tained, and an increasing number ofwomen Part I Realism to Surrealism
have been invited to join the ranks. In certain The most reliable style histories are the some¬
cases, the gatherings were confined to women, what overlapping books written for the Pelican

233
History of Art by Novotny and Hamilton. of representational form. This idea that the

The many books on the various styles of move¬ city itself is the condition of modernism has its

ments treated separately are too legion—and roots in the writings of Victor Hugo. Whilst
generally too mediocre—to mention individu¬ he was living in exile he wrote an essay on Paris

ally. Exceptions are Nochlin’s brilliant and for the International Exhibition of 1867 which
broadly inclusive book on Realism, and Cork’s is perhaps the most powerful single expression
two volume masterpiece of detailed documen¬ of urban-modern linkage. The best early book
tation. These two books are the best of two is du Camp’s, and modern studies are legion,
types of historiography—one that takes an but the most widely accessible texts are those
international modern movement in all its by Pinkney, Schorske, and Oisen.
breadth and diversity and the other that docu¬ du Camp, Maxime, Paris, ses Organes etses
ments the complexities within a single, local¬ Fonctions (Paris, 1869, repr. 1975).
ized movement. Books of the latter type tend Oisen, Donald J., The City as a Work of Art:
to be better, because their aims are more clear¬ Paris, London, Vienna (New York and London,
ly described and the material relating to them 1986).
narrower and easier to access. One wishes for Pinkney, David, Napoleon III and the
more and better books in the manner of Reconstruction of Paris (Princeton, 1972).
Nochlin’s study. Yet most general books of this Schorske, Carl, Fin de Siecle Vienna: Politics
type are commissioned by large publishers and Culture (New York, 1979).
from scholars who are forced to produce them
in very short order, more to make money than There are major studies of most modern Euro-
seriously to rethink and research their con¬ global cities in print, and Eastern European
tents. Oddly enough, there is not a good book cities have fared particularly well with mono¬
on international impressionism, although graphs on modern Prague, Budapest, and
several country-by-country surveys exist. Bucharest leading the way. Unfortunately
Cork, Richard, Vorticism and Abstract Art in most of these texts are not available in general
the First Machine Age (Berkeley, 1976). art libraries in Britain and the United States
Hamilton, George Heard, Painting and largely because they are published in Eastern
Sculpture in Europe 1880—1945 (New Haven Europe and are not distributed widely in
and London, 1993). the West. One ot the most delightful and
Nochlin, Linda, Realism (London and New informative of these is a multi-authored
York, 1970). bilingual guide to Cubist Prague (published by
Novotny, Fritz, Painting and Sculpture in Ceska Pojistovna, Prague). Lukacs wonderful
Europeijjo-1880 (Baltimore, i960). book on Budapest is more widely accessible,
but it is comparatively weak in its analysis of
Two theoretical books worth reading are the visual arts. I am also fond of a book written
Poggioli’s classic text and Drucker’s more by Boyer that interprets the modern city as
recent and critically laden one. In general the a sort of collage.
theoretical literature devoted to modernism Boyer, M. Christine, The City of Collective
concerns itself with contemporary art and does Memory: Its Historical Imagery and
not make concerted use of historical analyses, Architectural Entertainments (Cambridge,
even of theoretical texts. In general, the style 1996).
art history perfected in the nineteenth century Lukacs, John, Budapest 1900: A Historical
persists in all types of art history, no matter the Portrait of a City and its Culture (N ew York,
methodological or theoretical interests of the 1988).
individual scholar.
Drucker Joanna, Theorizing Modernity: Chapter 2. Modernity, Representation
Visual Culture and the Critical Tradition (New and the Accessible Image
York, 1994). The essay most frequently read by advanced
Poggioli, Renato, The Theory of the Avant- students of modernism as an urban phenome¬
Garde (New York, 1971). non is the now canonical text by Benjamin.
This has now been supplanted by a larger sam¬
Part II The Conditions for Modern Art pling in English, and by Gilloch’s analysis of
Chapter 1. Urban Capitalism all the urban writings.
The study ot the development of the modern Benjamin, Walter, ‘Paris—The Capital of the
city and its socio-economic systems is vast and N ineteenth Century’ New Left Review 48
fascinating. A good many of its central conclu¬ (March-April 1968), 77-88.
sions have been simply annexed by historians Benjamin, Walter, Selected Writings

234 BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY

 (Cambridge, Mass., 1996). rated from the history of art itself, thus further
Gilloch, Graeme, Myth and Metropolis: Walter marginalizing museum scholarship from that
Benjamin and the City (Cambridge, 1996). produced in the academy and for independent
publishing houses. Perhaps the best com¬
Writings on reproduction, photography, pendium of sources available on the early his¬
print distribution, museums, temporary tory of museums and exhibitions is Holt’s
exhibitions and commercial galleries are anthology.
also numerous and uncollected. There is Bazin, Germain, The Museum Age (New York,
no core text that deals with capitalist image 1967).
exploitation. The graphic traffic is best studied Burt, Nathaniel, Palaces for the People: A Social
in the separate histories of the reproductive History of the American A rt Museum (Boston,
graphic arts, photography, and lithography. I971)-
All ol the following books have important Holt, Elizabeth Gilmore, The Triumph of Art
bibliographies. for the Public: The Merging Role of Exhibitions
Jussim, Estelle, Visual Communication and and Critics (New York, 1979).
the Graphic Arts: Photographic Technologies in
the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1983). Other valuable studies of museums include:
Henisch, Heinz K. and Henisch, Bridget A., Alexander, Edward P., Museums in Motion:
The Photographic Experience i8yg—1914: Images An Introduction to the History and Functions of
and Attitudes (Pennsylvania, 1994). Museums (Nashville, 1979).
Rosenblum, Naomie, A World of Photography Alexander, Edward P., Museum Masters: Their
(New York, 1984). Museums and Their Influence (Nashville, 1983).
Twyman, Michael, Lithography 1800—i8yo Duncan, Carol, Civilizing Rituals: Inside
(Oxford, 1970). Public Art Museums (London and New York,
Weber, Wilhelm, A History of Lithography t99S)'
(London, 1966). Henderson, Amy and Coupler, Adrienne L.
(eds), ExhibitingDilemmas: Issues of
There is also an excellent new series called Representation at the Smithsonian (Washington
Documenting the Image published by Gordon and London, 1997).
and Breach, Amsterdam. The aim of the series Kaplan, Flora E. S. (ed.), Museums and the
is to create a viable history of the image rather Making of'Ourselves’: The Role of Objects in
than of art. Hamber’s recent book is particu¬ National Identity (London and New York,
larly relevant to my arguments, and the second I994)-
volume in the series is also useful. Root, Deborah, Cannibal Culture: Art,
Hamber, AnthonyJ., A Higher Branch of the Appropriation, and the Commodification of
ArtPhotographing the Fine Arts in England Difference (Boulder, Col., and Oxford, 1996).
i8jp-i88o (Amsterdam, 1996). Weil, Stephen E., A Cabinet of Curiosities:
Roberts, Helene E., Art History Through the Inquiries into Museums and their Prospects
Camera's Lens (Amsterdam, 1995). (Washington and London, 1995).

The art museum has been most profitably Part III the Artist’s Response
studied as part of the larger history of Chapter 3. Representation, Vision and
museums in Euro-global culture. Aside from ‘Reality’: The Art of Seeing
Bazin’s descriptive summary, there is no reli¬ Chapter 4. Image/ Modernism and the
able general history of the art museum in mod¬ Graphic Traffic
ern capitalist cultures. The majority of‘great’ There is no text that has organized the history
museums have commissioned some form of of modernism into the two strands proposed
institutional history, mostly dealing with the here, and, for that reason, a bibliographical
heroism of early collectors, directors, curators, essay for these two chapters will be extremely
or trustees. For America these have been sum¬ long or non-existent. The reader is urged
marized in Burt’s Palacesfor the People. to consult the notes to these sections. The
However, many of the best specialized studies literature on symbolism and its imageries
of collectors, directors and the like, have has been richer than that associated with
appeared since the publication of this book. collage, photo-collage, and Surrealism.
Students who want to delve into the mass of Frechette and Rannou have compiled a
this material should consult museum publica¬ thorough bibliography of art historical and
tions produced by the maj or American and critical texts published between 1984 and 1994
European art museums. All of these are sepa¬ for the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1995

BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY 235

exhibition catalogue. The general reader many scholars have followed Clark’s lead and

might wish to consult Dorra’s brilliantly considered class as primary in the sexually
composed anthology of Symbolist art theories, charged imagery of such modernists as Manet,

and the summary of the best writing on the Degas, and Seurat. The most often read of

iconology of collage by Poggi. these texts is by Clark’s student, Hollis

Claire, Jean and Cogeval, Guy, Lost Paradise: Clayson. All of this material has been analysed

Symbolist Europe (Montreal, 1995), 533“52- and summarized in the notes and bibliography
Dorra, Henri, Symbolist Art Theories: A of Eisenmann’s edited social history of mod¬
Critical Anthology (Berkeley, 1994). ernism.
Poggi, Christine, In Defiance of Painting: Clark, TimothyJ., The Painter of Modern Life:
Cubism, Futurism and the Invention of Collage Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (New
(New Haven, 1992). York and London, 1984).
Clayson, Hollis, Painted Love: Prostitution in
Part IV Iconology French Art ofthe Impression 1st Era (New
Chapter 5. Sexuality and the Body Haven, 1991).
The subjects of modern pictures have been Eisenman, Stephen (ed.), Nineteenth Century
dissected with real passion by the last two gen¬ Art: A Critical History (New York and London,
erations of art historians on both sides of the 1994)-
Atlantic. The most passionate type of analysis
decodes body imagery and is so prevalent that The second major force in the publishing and
one can only summarize the recent trends. graduate teaching of the social history ol art is
That a good deal of this literature is faddish Robert L. Herbert, whose students have con¬
and loaded with dated jargon goes without quered vast territories in both the nineteenth
saying, but there is litde doubt that millennial and twentieth centuries. The recent texts of
anxieties about gender and its discourses has Kenneth Silver, Judy Freeman, James D.
produced the most sustained discussion of the Herbert, Molly Nesbit, and many others have
body in art since the Renaissance. conjoined issues related to gender and social
Brooks, Peter, Body Works: Objects of Desire class in readings of twentieth-century art that
in Modern Narrative (Cambridge, 1993), an are highly nuanced and remarkably tree from
interdisciplinary text produced by an eminent ‘vulgar’ Marxism. Following their lead, it has
literary critic. now become completely standard, even in
Feher, Michel and Nadaff, Ramona and Tazi, museum displays ol masterpieces, to place
Nadia (eds), Fragments for a History of the them in their socio-political contexts in both
Human Body (2 vols, New York, 1989). wall labels and accompanying publications.
Herdt, Gilbert (ed.), Third Sex, Third Gender: This is particularly true ol the study of
Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and Fauvism.
History (New York, 1994). Freeman et al., The Fauve Landscape (New
Nead, Lynda, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, York, 1990).
and Sexuality (London, 1992). Herbert, James D., Fauve Painting: The
Makingofa Cultural Landscape (flew Haven,
Chapter 6. Social Class and Class 1992).
Consciousness
The social history of art has been as important The social history- of art has been equally active
as the sexual or gender history. Following the in Britain and the United States during the
lead of Marxist scholars like Arnold Hauser past generation, and class-based image analy¬
and Walter Benjamin, students of the social sis is so pervasive that no single text can serve
history of modern art have become immensely to summarize it. A particularly thorough and
subtle in their decoding of the bourgeois detailed example is a study of British landscape
drama of modernism, with its anxieties and painting by Hemingway, and its ‘continuation’
unconscious manipulations of categories of in the work of Thomson.
social class. There is no doubt that TimothyJ. Hemingway, Andrew, Landscape Imagery and
Clark is the most important of these figures. Urban Culture in Early Nineteenth Century
While teaching at Harvard and Berkeley he Britain (Cambridge, 1992).
trained an entire generation of social histori¬ Thomson, Richard, Monet to Matisse:
ans ol canonical modern art. His most impor¬ Landscape Painting in France i8y4~igi4
tant book, The Painter of Modern Life, has (Edinburgh, 1994).
produced a veritable fountain of responses,
particularly from lemimst historians who view There has been abundant literature in the his¬
Clark’s preoccupation with class as sexist. Yet, tory of photography that exploits the tech-

236 BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY

niques of the Marxist or class-based social his¬ History (Cambridge, 1991).
tory ol art. Nesbit has written a fascinating and Shiff, Richard, ‘Corot and the Painter’s Mark:
sophisticated book on Eugene Atget. Readers Natural, Personal, Pictorial’y^o/Zo (May
might well consult her extensive interdiscipli¬ 1998), 3-8.
nary bibliography. Also McCaulay’s books are
models of exhaustive research and socio-his- A good deal of this anti-iconography stems
torical methods applied to the mass produc¬ from landscape painting, whose vast literature
tion of photographic imagery. is predominantly nineteenth century. The idea
McCaulay, Anne, A. A. E. Disderi and the that the landscape provided the painter with
Carte de Visile Portrait (New Haven, 1985). infinite compositions that simply needed to be
McCaulay, Anne, Industrial Madness: transcribed takes away from the painter the
Commercial Photography in Paris i8y8-i8yi realm of verbal meanings. The various searches
(New Haven, 1994). for meaning in modern landscape have
Nesbit, Molly, Atget's Seven Albums (New been summarized in my own synopsis of
Haven, 1994). nineteenth-century French landscape theory
in Champa’s anthology. His own fascinating
Much of this literature stresses the bourgeois text in this book makes links between land¬
conventions of modernist imagery, regardless scape painting and music, links that deprive
of the class represented in the work of art. The the landscapes studied of social and cultural
smaller literature on the representation of meanings. It is no accident that Champa’s
social classes as part of the larger portrait of thought has developed in this manner, as his
modern society is confined to the analysis of early writings were concerned with colour-
urban leisure workers and, to a lesser extent, to field abstraction in America. So far, a book
peasants and rural workers. There is also a that explores the connections between
large and critically unsophisticated literature subjectless landscape, still-life and genre
on the representation of the rich—either aris¬ paintings of the nineteenth century and
tocrats or bourgeois. These books tend to be theories of abstraction in the twentieth
compendia of images and short biographies. century has yet to be written.
The most intelligent and bibliographically Champa, Kermit, The Rise of Landscape
complex of these is by Lucie-Smith. Paintingin France, Corot to Monet (New
Brettell, Richard and Brettell, Caroline, York, 1991). See especially pp. 15-22 for my
Painters and Peasants in the Nineteenth Century own essay.
(Geneva, 1983).
Lucie-Smith, Edward, How the Rich Lived: Chapter 8. Nationalism and
The Painter as Witness 1870-^14 (New York Internationalism in Modern Art
and London, 1976). A single comparative study of nationalism and
the representational arts has not been written.
Chapter 7. Anti-Iconography: Art Without Rather, nationally based historians in virtually
‘Subject’ ever)' modern European and American coun¬
The study of anti-iconography is in its infancy try have written independent studies that deal
The theory of independent pictorial meanings with individual national schools or aesthetic
is tied to the concept of a plastic art without trends. Such studies tend to decry or de-
necessary connection to the verbal equivalent emphasize foreign contributions to national
of the visual world. Perhaps the most impor¬ aesthetic systems, and in certain cases, the
tant figure in this study is Richard Shiff, direc¬ study of international movements like
tor of the Center for the Study of Modernism Impressionism and Symbolism have been
at the University of Texas at Austin. His dis¬ divided in a country-by-country manner.
sertation on Cezanne was enlarged and pub¬ Perhaps the most virulent and defensive of
lished, and his work has continued to defy these literatures involves the study of
stereotypes and to insist on an integrated study American art, which has, for that very reason,
of medium, technique, and imager}', thus sought too often to study works produced by
stressing the move away from a verbally based American artists in a cultural vacuum called
iconography. He has also written two recent ‘America’. Examples of this are so numerous
investigations of pictorial method. that they can scarcely be listed, but a couple of
Shiff, Richard, Cezanne and the End of texts come to mind. Miller’s book on this sub¬
Impressionism (Chicago, 1984). ject is a particularly subtle example, based on
Shiff, Richard, ‘Cezanne’s Physicality: The the work of such American scholars as Novak,
Politics ofTouch’ in Kemal, Salim and whose text is cited by virtually every student of
Gaskell, Ivan (eds), The Language of Art American art. Novak also bases a good many

BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY 237

 of her conclusions on the extensive study ol book. The study of nationalism in French
British and English landscape imagery, most painting has also largely been confined to
ofwhich concentrate on English landscape landscape painting and this is summarized in
painting of the eighteenth and early nine¬ the anthology by Brettell et al. and House’s
teenth centuries. book. Hill’s text covers nationalism in Canada.
Miller, Angela, The Empire of the Eye: Brettell, Richard et a\.,ADay in the Country:
Landscape Representation and American Impressionism and the French Landscape (New
Cultural Politics (Ithaca and London, 1993). York, 1984).
Novak, Barbara, Nature and Culture: American Daniel, Stephen, Fields of Vision: Landscape
Landscape Paintings 1825—75 (Oxford and New Imagery and National Identity in England and
York, 1980). the United States (Princeton, 1993).
Hill, Charles S., The Group of Seven: Art for
A comparative study of the national land¬ a Nation (Ottawa, 1995).
scapes of England and the United States in the House, John, Landscapes of France:
nineteenth century can be found in Daniel’s Impressionism and its Rivals (London, 1995).

238 BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY

Timeline Timeline compiled by Julie Lawrence Cochran.

Art ■ Events

1851 1851 George Sigl, Vienna, develops mechanical press 1851 Coup d’etat, France
for lithography Paxton’s Crystal Palace, London
Courbet, Young Ladies from the Village New York Times founded
Holman Hunt, Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Ruskin, Stones of Venice
Proteus [2] Liszt, Grandes Etudes de Paganini
Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware Verdi, Rigoletto
1852 van Klenze completes Hermitage, St Petersburg 1852 Proclamation of French Empire, Louis-Napoleon
Daumier's lithograph, The Orchestra During the becomes Napoleon III
Performance of a Tragedy Vast urban renewal in Paris
Baudelaire's translation of The Raven published
in L'Artiste
Roget's Thesaurus
1853 Russian critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky's essay, The 1853 Crimean War begins
Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality Commodore Perry visits Tokyo, thus opening up
Bonheur, The Horse Fair Japan
Delacroix, Alfred Bruyas Dickens. Bleak House
Verdi, II Trovatore
1854 Delacroix. Christ on the Sea of Galilee 1854 England and France side with Turkey against
Holman Hunt. The Light of the World Russia in Crimean War
Rossetti, Found Orange Free State founded by Boers
Le Figaro published in Paris
Baudelaire's translations of Poe's short stories
published in Le Pays
Smetana, Triomphesymphony
1855 1855 Courbet exhibits paintings including The Studio of 1855 Opening of railway to Lyon and Mediterranean
the Painterl3], in his Pavilion of Realism Turgenev, Russian Life in the Interior
International Exposition Paris Longfellow, Hiawatha
Church, Andes of Ecuador Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Degas, Portrait of the Duchess Morbilli Berlioz, Les Troyens
Chopin, Seven Polish Songs
1856 Tretiakovacquires hisfirst Russian paintings 1856 Peace Congress in Paris
Ingres, Madame Moitessier Seated and La Source Burton and Speke discover Lakes Tanganyika and
Millais, The Blind Girl Victoria
France and Britain attack China, taking Tientsin
and Peking
Rebuilt Bolshoi theatre opens, Moscow
Flaubert, Madame Bovary
1857 Church, Niagara 1857 Italian National Association founded by Garibaldi
Millet, The Gleaners Cuneiform script deciphered by Rawlinson and
Rejlander, The Two Ways of Life [10] others
Whistler, Self-Portrait Bjornson's first tales of rural life in Sweden
Deaths: Musset; Glinka
1858 National Gallery of Scotland opens 1858 Suez Canal Company founded
Millet, Angelus Bernadette’s visions at Lourdes
Church, Heart of the Andes Laying of trans-Atlantic cable begins
Moran, Ruins of the Nile French begin conquest of Viet-Nam
Deaths: Hiroshige FrankfurterZe/'fungbegins publication
Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonne de
/'architecture frangaise(medieval and gothic)
Bulfinch, Age of Chivalry
1859 Manet's Absinthe Drinker rejected by the Salon 1859 War of Italian Unification
Manet registers as copyist at the Louvre Boulevard Saint-Michel completed. Paris
Courbet meets Baudelaire, Boudin, and Monet in Charles Blanc (ed.), Gazette des Beaux-Arts
Honfleur Darwin, The Origin of Species
Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Fitzgerald's translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar
Kayyam
1860 1860 Renoir registers as copyist at the Louvre 1860 Free trade treaty between France and Britain
Monet drafted and sent to Algeria Lincoln elected US president
Carpeaux, Hugolino Gamier Opera House begun, Paris
Wagner concerts in Paris
Turgenev, First Love
Collins, Woman in White
Ostrovsky, The Storm

240 TIMELINE
 Art Events
1861 1861 Delacroixfinishesfrescos in StSulpice 1861 Start of American Civil War
Manet has 2 paintings accepted at the Salon Russia abolishes serfdom
Inness, Delaware Water Gap Baudelaire,Richard Wagner
Dore’s illustrations for Dante’s Inferno Brahms, Piano Concerto No, 1
Mussorgsky, Intermezzo in modo classico
Rimsky-Korsakov, Symphony No. 1
1862 Renoir admitted to Ecole des Beaux-Arts 1862 French annexation of Cochin-China
Founding of and exhibition bySociete des French forces invade Mexico
Aqua-Fortistes, Paris Otto von Bismarck become president of German
Manet exhibits etchings discussed by Baudelaire Diet
Astruc founds LeSalon Wielpolski becomes chief of civilian government,
National Museum of Warsaw opened Kingdom of Poland
Daumier, Third Class Carriage World’s Fair, London
Frith, The Railway Station [5] Viollet-le-Duc’s essay criticizes the Academy,
Whistler, Symphony in White Ecole des Beaux-Arts and recommends reforms
Hugo, Les Miserables
1863 Baudelaire's, Peintre dela viemoderne 1863 Russo-Prussian Convention against Polish
Monet, Renoir, Sisleyand Bazille in Chantilly insurrection
Galerie Martinet exhibits works by David, Courbet, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address
Rousseau, Diaz, Corot and Manet King of Sweden-Norway tries to create united
13 students withdraw from Academy of Arts, St Scandinavian kingdom
Petersburg, and set up St Petersburg Artists' German Federation declares war on Denmark
Co-operative (Artel) Nadar launches his hot-air balloon, Champs de
Manet, Dejeunersurl’herbeand Olympia!82] Mars
Deaths: Delacroix Lamartine, Memoires politiques
Renan, Vie de Jesus
1864 Delacroix retrospective and estate sales 1864 Pasteur develops germ theory of disease
Finnish Artists’ Association founded First Geneva Convention on medical and general
Fantin-Latour,Hommagea Delacroix treatment of prisoners-of-wa r
Rodin, Man with the Broken Nose Laroussevol. 1
Corot, Souvenir de Mortefontaine Grand Dictionnaire UniverseI
of
Cameron, Portrait of Ellen Terry Verne, Journey to the Centre of the Earth
Deaths: Flandrin Grieg, Symphony
1865 1865 First book published using chromolithography 1865 President Lincoln assassinated
toreproduceworksofart 13th Amendment abolishes slavery in US
Manet, Olympia and The Mocking of Christ! 83] Tolstoy,War and Peace
at Paris Salon Carroll,Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Reopening of Luxembourg Museum, Paris Wagner, Tristan and Isolde
Courbet paints Proudhon on his deathbed Grieg, Violin Sonata No. 1
Homer, Pitching Horseshoes Dvorak, Bells of Zlonice
Nadar, Portrait of George Sand
1866 Zola writes 'Mon Salon’ dedicated to Cezanne 1866 Nobel invents dynamite
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, founded Swinburne, PoemsandBallads
Bierstadt, Storm in the Rockies Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Cezanne, The Artist's Father [51] Rimsky-Korsakov, Overture on Russian Themes
Offenbach, La Vie Parisienne
1867 Proudhon’s Le Principe de Tartetsa destination 1867 Canada granted dominion status
sociale Russia sells Alaska to US
Ingres’s retrospective, Ecole des Beaux-Arts Coronation of Emperor Franz-Joseph I. Hungary
Pissarro, The Hermitage at PontoiseII18] Universal Exposition, Paris
Deaths: Rousseau; Ingres ThereseRaquin
Zola,
Ibsen,PeerGynt
Mussorgsky, Night on the Bare Mountain
Deaths: Baudelaire
1868 Cezanneand Degas apply to copy at the Louvre 1868 Impeachment of US President Johnson, Grant
Gauguin enlists in the Navy elected president
Manet, Renoir and Pissarro at Salon Serbian Prince Michael III assassinated
Bibliotheque National, Paris, opens Grape phylloxera devastates European vineyards,
Spanish Royal Museum renamed The Prado replacement stock sent from New York
Manet, Portrait of Emile Zola [44] and The Balcony Dostoevsky, The Idiot
[48] Alcott, Little Women
Deaths: Wyspianski; St Gaudens J. Strauss, Tales from the Vienna Woods
Deaths: Rossini

TIMELINE 241
 Art Events

1869 1869 Bazille, Summer Scene [89] 1869 First transcontinental railway in US completed
Carpeaux, La Danse Medelijeff’s Periodic Law of the elements
Monet and Renoir, La Grenouillere De Lesseps completes Suez Canal
Deaths: Thore (William Burger); La Caze, collector Twain, Innocents Abroad
and benefactor of the Louvre Petipa, Don Quixote ballet
1870 1870 Bazille killed in Franco-Prussian War 1870 France declares war on Prussia
Boston Museum of Fine Arts founded Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea
Association of Travelling Art Exhibits (The Kivi, Seitseman veljesta (Seven Brothers), first
Wanderers) formed, Moscow Finnish novel
Burne-Jones, The Wheel of Fortunel 11] Wagner, Die Walkure
Renoir, The Promenade [87] Deaths: Dickens; Dumas; Merimee
1871 Courbet becomes president of Commune Art 1871 Franco-Prussian Armistice
Commission and is imprisoned for his role in French government troops fail to remove guns
the destruction of the Vendome Column from the Commune; Versaillais enter Paris;
First travelling exhibition of The Wanderers Fall of Commune
Proclamation of German Reich
Rimbaud, Bateauivre
Middtemarch
Eliot,
Verdi, Aida debuts in Egypt to celebrate Suez Canal
opening
1872 Ontario Society of Artists founded 1872 Grant re-elected President of US
Plomer, Snap the Whip Yellowstone National Park. US, established
Brooklyn Bridge opened
Schliemann's excavations of Troy
Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 2
1873 New Salon des Refuses in Paris 1873 Death of Napoleon III
Jointauction sale by Monet, Renoir, Sisley, and End of German occupation of France
Morisot World Exposition Vienna
Anderson, Wandschirm[77] Foundation stone of Sacre Coeur laid, Paris
Cezanne, Small Houses at Auversl 119] Academy of Sciences and Letters established,
Monet, The Luncheon (Argentueil) [6] Cracow, Poland
Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
1874 First Exhibition of Societe Anonyme des Artistes, 1874 Disraeli becomes Prime Minister of Britain
Peintres, Sculpteurs, et Graveurs, at Nadar’s Iceland Centenary
Blvd des Capucines, Paris Gamier Opera House opens
Degas, Place de la Concorde [9] Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd
Alarcon, Three-Cornered Hat
Verdi, Requiem
Saint-Saens, Danse Macabre
Offenbach, Orpheus in the Underworld
1875 1875 Art Students League founded, New York 1875 Dissolution of French National Assembly
Impressionists hold auction at Drouot Berlin's population reaches 1 million
Degas, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, and Sisley exhibit James, The Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales
in London
Gilbert & Sullivan. Trial by Jury
Eakins, The Gross Clinic 14] Bizet, Carmen
Liebermann, In the Bathhouse!90] Deaths: Bizet
Deaths: Corot; Millet; Carpeaux
1876 Second Impressionist Exhibition 1876 Bell invents telephone
Manet, Portrait of Mallarme
Russia abolishes separate court system and
Rodin, Age of Bronze
introduces Russian to Polish courts
Whistler, Peacock Room
Wagner Festival debuts at new Bayreuth Opera
House
LApres-midid'un
Manet illustrates Mallarme’s
faune
Twain, Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Deaths: Sand
1877 Third Impressionist Exhibition includes
1877 Edison invents phonograph
Caillebotte s Paris Street; Rainy Day[37}:
Republican victory in French legislative elections
Monet's Gare St-Lazare, Renoir’s Ball at the
Ibsen, Pillars of Society
Moulin de la Galette [7]
Mozart Festivals held in Salzburg
Whistler, Nocturne in Blue and Gold
Tchaikovsky, Swan Lake ballet premieres at Bolshoi
Deaths: Courbet

242 TIMELINE
 Art Events
1878 1878 Duret publishes Les Peintres Impressionistes 1878 Congress of Berlin
Whistler plans law suit against Ruskin Austria occupies Bosnia and Herzegovina
Cassatt, Little Girl in a Blue Armchair[49] World Exposition, Paris
Matjeko, Battle of Grunewald[ 128] Greece declares war on Turkey
Menzel, Supper at the Ball[ 99] Gilbert & Sullivan, FIMS Pinafore
Yaroshenko, TheStokerlll2] Hardy, Return of the Native
1879 Fourth Impressionist Exhibition 1879 Edison invents electric light bulb
Charpentier forms ‘La Vie Moderne1 for one man Alta Mira cave paintings discovered
show Ibsen,A Doll's Fiouse premieres in Copenhagen
Deaths: Daumier; Viollet-le-Duc Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Strindberg, The Red Room
Tchaikovsky, Piano Concerto No. 2
1880 1880 Fifth Impressionist Exhibition 1880 France grants full amnesty for exiles of Commune
National Gallery of Canada and Royal Canadian Rhodes founds DeBeers Mining Corporation
Academy founded Zola, Nanaand new art criticism
Bocklin, Island of the Dead Harris, Uncle Remus
Repin, Religious Procession [ 100]
Ryder, The Flying Dutchman
von Marees, Golden Age II [73]
1881 Sixth Impressionist Exhibition 1881 French Protectorate over Tunisia
Societe des Artistes founded Tsar Alexander II assassinated
Icelandic Realists periodical Veranda National Theatre, Prague, opens
Nordic art exhibition, Gothenburg C. Rossetti, A Pageant and Other Poems
Cezanne, Mill on the Couleuvrel 14] Offenbach, Tales of Hoffmann
Deaths: Disraeli; Dostoevsky
1882 Seventh Impressionist Exhibition 1882 Union Generale crash in France
Courbet retrospective, Ecole des Beaux-Arts Italy joins Austro-German Alliance
Artists’ Association of Finland holds first exhibition Ismaelillopoems
Marti,
in protest at Fine Arts Association Maupassant, MademoiselleFifi
Danish Royal Academy of Fine Arts reforms after Wilde, Vera, orthe Nihilists
protests by progressive artists Wagner, Parsifal
Manet, A BarattheFolies-Bergeres[115] Deaths: Trollope; Emerson; Longfellow
1883 Durand-Ruel Impressionist exhibitions London, 1883 British flee Sudan after defeat by forces of Mahdi
Berlin, Rotterdam, and Boston Orient Express train introduced
Monet, Renoir, and Sisley one-man shows at Paris Gaudi begins Sagrada Familia, Barcelona
gallery Metropolitan Opera opens, New York
Renoirand Monet visit south of France Nietzche, AlsoSprachZarathustra
Exhibition of Japanese prints, Petit’s Stevenson, Treasure Island
Nordic art exhibition, Copenhagen Deaths: Wagner
Huysman's L’Artmoderne
Deaths: Manet; Gonzales
1884 Manet exhibition at Ecole des Beaux-Arts and 1884 Mergenthaler invents Linotype machine,
Studio sale Baltimore, US
Societe des Vingt founded, Brussels Reform in Denmark’s Royal Academy
First exhibition of Les XX, Brussels Art Workers Guild founded, Britain
National Gallery of Iceland founded Nellie Melba debuts as Gilda in Rigoletto, Brussels
Seurat, Bathers a! Asnicres 97. rejected by Hungarian State Opera House opens
Salon, shown with ‘Groupe des Artistes Twain, Huckleberry Finn
Independants’ Chekhov, The Shooting Party
Caillebotte, Man at his Bath [92] Ibsen, Wild Duck
Moreau, Chimeras!71] Debussy, Enfant prodigue
Pissarro, Apple Pickers [111] Massenet, Manon
Rodin, Burghers of Calais
Sargent, MadameX
Seurat, La Grande Jatte[96]
1885 1885 Delacroix retrospective, Ecole des Beaux-Arts 1885 First internal combustion engine
Durand-Ruel Group exhibit in Brussels Indian National Congress founded
80 Swedish artists hold 2 independent exhibitions Belgium takes Congo
Madsen’s Japansk MalenKunstamuses interest in Revue Wagneriennefounded, Paris
Japonism in Scandinavian arts and crafts Richardson’s Marshall Field’s department store,
Great official ‘Salon’ in Helsinki Chicago
Gonzales Exhibition at La Vie Moderne Zola, Germinal
Eakins, Swimming!91] Maupassant, Bel-Ami
Signac, The Modistes [17] Massenet, Le Cid
Dvovrak, Hymn of the Czech Peasants
Deaths: Hugo

TIMELINE 243
 Art Events

1886 Eighth and last Impressionist Exhibition 1886 Foundation of Polish League
1886
Klimt, Vienna City Theatre murals Trans-Canadian Railway completed
Toronto Art Students’ League founded Introduction of Home Rule bill for Ireland

Second Salon des Independants Peace of Bucharest between Serbia and Bulgaria
Statue of Liberty erected in New York Harbor
Zola,Oeuvre
Stevenson, The Strange Case ofDrJekylland Mr
Hyde
Saint-Saens, Carnival of the Animals

1887 Gauguin sails for Martinique 1887 War between Italy and Abyssinia
Art Museum of the Ateneum opens, Helsinki Portugal takes Macao from China

Muybridge, Animal Locomotion Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, Britain

Renoir, The Bathers Theatre Libre founded, Paris
Conan Doyle,A Study in Scarlet
Otello
Verdi,
Bruckner, Symphony No. 8
Deaths: Borodin
1888 Durand-Ruel opens New York Gallery 1888 Institut Pasteur founded
First Arts and Crafts exhibition, London Wilhelm II becomes Emperor of Germany
Exhibition French art, Copenhagen Mallarme translates poems of Poe
Gauguin visits van Gogh in Arles; Sargent visits Kipling, Plain Tales and Soldiers Three
Monet in Giverny Debussy, Ariettes Oubliees
Bierstadt, The Last of the Buffalo Gilbert & Sullivan, Yeoman of the Guard
Ensor, Entry of Christ into Brussels Paderewski, Piano Concerto
Gauguin, Vision after the Sermon [ 18] Rimsky-Korsakov, Sheherazade
van Gogh, The Night Cafe [15]
Serusier, The Talisman
1889 Gauguin organizes exhibit'Paintings of the 1889 World Exposition, Paris
Impressionistand Synthetist Group’, Cafe Eiffel Tower completed
Volpini Crown Prince Archduke Rudolf of Austria commits
Large Monet exhibit, Petit's suicide at Mayerling
Munch studies in Paris Yeats, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems
Monet begins Haystack’ series Kipling, The Man Who Would Be King
Impressionist exhibition at Kustforeninen, R. Strauss, Don Juan
Copenhagen
1890 1890 Monet collects funds to buy Manet’s Olympia 1890 First Workers'May Day, Poland
which is then hung in the Palais de Luxembourg Kaiser Wilhelm II dismisses Bismarck
Exhibition of over 900 Ukiyo-e prints at Ecoledes Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray
Beaux-Arts Riis,How the Other Half Lives
Sargent begins murals, Boston Public Library Petipa and Tchaikovsky, Sleeping Beauty ballet
Ferenczy, BoysontheDanube[114] debuts, St Petersburg
Holder, The Night [681 Borodin, Prince Igor
Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge [50] Deaths: Franck; Richard Francis Burton (explorer
Deaths: van Gogh and writer)
1891 First Independent exhibition of Finnish artists 1891 Triple Alliance (Italy, Germany, Austria) renewed
Gauguin sails for Tahiti Construction of Trans-Siberian Railway
Monet's ‘Haystacks’ series, Durand-Ruel Carnegie Hall New York, built
First Nabis exhibition, Le Bare de Boutteville Hardy, Tessofthed'Urbervilles
France buys Whistler’s Study in Grey and Black Whitman’s final collection of poems
PuvisdeChavannes, Shepherd's Song\70\ Rachmaninoff, Piano Concerto No. 1
Deaths: Seurat; Jongkind; Choquet Deaths; Delibes; Rimbaud; Alarcon
1892 First exhibition of Rose + Croix group, Paris 1892 Founding of Polish Socialist Party
Pissarro and Renoir one-man shows, Durand- New York’s Ellis Island immigration station opened
Ruel; Morisot at Boussof& Valadon Cholera epidemic in France
The Secession exhibitions, Berlin and Munich Stendhal, Souvenirs d’egotisme
Swedish Artists’ Association’s first exhibitions, Tchaikovsky, The NutcrackerbaWet debuts, St
Stockholm and Copenhagen Petersburg
Topkapi Saray Palace, Istanbul made a museum Sibelius, EnSagaand Kullervo
Gauguin, Manau Tupapau[93! Deaths: Whitman; Tennyson; Renan
1893 Cassatt’s World’s Columbian Exposition murals 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition Chicago
Vollard opens gallery, Paris French protectorate over Laos
Free exhibition in Copenhagen includes works by Rossetti,Verses
Gauguin and van Gogh Shaw, Mrs Warren's Profession
Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters for Moulin Rouge, Paris Wilde, A Woman of No Importance
Bonnard’s lithographs for La Revue Blanche Puccini, Manon Lescaut
Sisley one-man exhibition, Boussof & Valadon Dvorak, Symphony No. 9, From the New World

244 TIMELINE
 Art Events
Enckell, TheAwakening{85] Riegl, Stifragen
Gauguin, Ancestors of Tehamana[7 5] Deaths: Gounod; Tchaikovsky; Maupassant
Munch, The Scream [74]
1894 1894 Large Pissarro show Durand-Ruel 1894 Armenian massacres in Turkey
Redon exhibition, Haagse Kunstring Mahatma Ghandi organizes Natal Indian Congress
Swedish Artists'exhibit, Secessionist show, Sino-Japanese War begins
Munich Tsar Alexander III dies, succeeded by Nicholas II
Caillebotte bequest to nation and retrospective, Edison invents motion picture
Durand-Ruel Lumiere Brothers make first films
Berenson publishes Venetian Painters of the The Jungle Book
Kipling,
Renaissance Gorky, Goremkya Pavel
Malczewski, Melancholia\12\ Debussy, Prelude a TApres-midi d'un faune
Meier-Graefe, Edvard Munch
Munch, Ashes[84]
Deaths: Caillebotte
1895 1895 Munch and Gallen-Kallela joint exhibition, Berlin 1895 Cuban Warof Independence from Spain
Cezanne exhibition, Vollard’s gallery Keil Canal opened
Deaths: Morisot Roentgen discovers X-ray
First public presentation of projected film, Berlin
Wells, Time Machine
Mahler, Symphony No. 2, Resurrection
Deaths: Engels; Pasteur; Dumas fils
1896 Munch's scenery for Ibsen’s PeerGynt, Paris 1896 Olympic Games re-established, Athens
Morisot retrospective, Durand-Ruel Becquerel discovers radioactivity
Galerie Art Nouveau opens, Paris Housman, A Shropshire Lad
Degas exhibits photographs W. Morris, KelmscottChaucer
Cezanne, Old Woman with Rosary]76] Puccini, La Boheme
Zorn, Self-Portrait[521 Strauss, AlsosprachZarathustra
Deaths: W. Morris
1897 Tate Gallery, London, opens 1897 Gold strike in Klondike
Sezession group, Vienna, founded Greece and Turkey at war
Rennie Macintosh begins Glasgow School of Art Chekhov, Uncle Vanya
Sisley one-man show, Petit's Bram Stoker, Dracula
Kollwitz begins Weavers’ Revolt etchings Wells, Invisible Man
Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac
Where Are We Going? [ 88 ] Dukas, The Sorcerer's Apprentice
Rousseau, The Sleeping Gypsy Deaths: Daudet; Brahms
1898 Larsson decorates Stockholm Opera House 1898 Anti-Polish emergency in Prussian-annexed Poland
Guimard’s Art Nouveau Castel Berenger built Social Democratic Party founded in Russia
Rodin, Balzac Spanish-American War, Spain cedes Cuba to US
Deaths: Boudin; Beardsley; Moreau; Burne-Jones; The Curies discover radium, radioactivity
PuvisdeChavannes Paris Metro opens
Moscow Art Theatre founded; Stockholm Royal
Opera House opens
Wells, Warof the Worlds
Ravel, Sheherazade
Deaths: Mallarme; Carroll; Fontane
1899 Monet begins painting his water-lily pond 1899 Second Boer War
Signac’s From Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism Invention of aspirin
Sisleyexhibitionsat Berheim-Jeune, Paris, and US—Phillippine War begins
Durand-Ruel, New York A. J, Evans begins excavations of Minoan culture,
Choquet estate sale Crete
Ensor, Portrait of the Artist Surrounded by Masks Kipling, White Man's Burden
Vuillard, Misiaand Vallotton [19] Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra
Deaths: Sisley Elgar, Enigma Variations
Deaths: J. Strauss

1900 1900 Hunt begins fagade of Metropolitan Museum of Art 1900 World Exposition, Paris
Finnish Pavilion at World’s Fairdesigned by DuBois organizes First Pan-African Congress,
Gesellius, Lindgren & Saarinen with frescos by London
Gallen-Kallela Reed discovers mosquitoes carry yellowfever
Art Nouveau Pavilion at World’s Fair Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams
Wyspianski, Glowka Helenskil67] Australia given Commonwealth status
Deaths: Church Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Potter,The Tale of Peter Rabbit
Puccini, Tosca
Deaths: Ruskin; Wilde

TIMELINE 245
 Art Events

1901 Picasso’s‘Blue Period’ 1901 Queen Victoria dies

1901
Galle directs newly founded School of Nancy US President McKinley assassinated

Muybridge’s photographic series The Human Body Marconi transmits first transatlantic telegraph
in Motion message

Arkhipov, Laundressesl 113] Polish school children strike against Germanization

Strindberg, The Wave VIII[121] of schools

Deaths: Toulouse-Lautrec; Boecklin Chekhov, Three Sisters
Elgar, Pomp and Circumstance MarchesNo. 1 and
No. 2
1902 Meier-Graefe’s book on Manet 1902 BoerWarends
Duret's Histoire d'Edouard Manet etson oeuvre The Times begins weekly Literary Supplement
Stieglitz's Photo-Secession group Melies,Un Voyage dans la Lune, first feature-
Redon, Decorative Panel [ 16] length silent film
Deaths: Bierstadt; Twachtman Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Gorky, The Lower Depths
Deaths: Zola
1903 Large memorial exhibition of works by Gauguin, 1903 Wright Brothers firstflight
Salon d'Automne Lenin establishes Bolshevik wing of Russian Social-
Stieglitz founds Camera Works magazine Democratic Workers Party
Kandinsky, The Blue Rider Cuba becomes American protectorate under Treaty
Mehoffer, Strange Garden [13] of 1903
Steichen, J. P. Morgan and Eleanora Duse Panama wins independence from Colombia
Deaths: Pissarro; Gauguin; Whistler Bjornson wins Nobel Prize for Literature
New York Lyric, Hudson, and New Amsterdam
theatres open
Ibanez, The Shadow of the Cathedral
Shaw, Man and Superman
1904 Cassatt made Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur 1904 Russo-Japanese War
Wright begins Larkin Building Entente Cordiale formed by Britain and France
McKim begins Pennsylvania Station, New York Rubel invents offset Lithography, New York
Kosztka, Ruins of the Greek Theatre at Taormina T. Roosevelt elected to full term as President of US
[136] Abbey Theatre opens, Dublin
Matisse, Luxe, CalmeetVolupte Reymont's The Peasants begins publication
Popov, Mobilized [98] Puccini, Madame Butterfly
Deaths: Fantin-Latour; Muybridge; Bartholdi Cohan, Give My Regards to Broadway
Deaths: Chekhov; Dvorak
1905 1905 Picasso's‘Rose Period' 1905 Einstein s Special Theory of Relativity
Vauxcelles creates the name ‘Les Fauves’ Sinn Fein political party in Ireland
First Die Briicke exhibitions Norway s independence from Sweden
Picasso, Family of Saltimbanques [86] Revolution in Russia
Steichen, The Flatiron Buildingl41] Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread
Vlaminck, Bougivall20] Lehar, The Merry Widow
Deaths: Verne
1906 Salon Russe first important presentation of 1906 Reign of Terror in Russia
Symbolist art of Moscow in the West San Francisco earthquake
Wright begins Unity Temple Nexo, Pete the Conqueror
Matisse, Joie de Vivre Prokofiev, Ten Pieces for Piano
Ritter, Study of Foreign Art Deaths: Ibsen
Deaths: Cezanne
1907 Charpentier collection sold 1907 Triple Entente (Great Britain, France, and Russia)
Moreau-Nelaton collection in Musee des Arts formed to balance Triple Alliance
Decoratifs Famine in Russia
Braque and Picasso paint at L’Estaque Nobel Prize for Literature to Kipling
Cezanne retrospective Salon d’Automne Melies film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Galimberti, View of a Street in Nagybanya [59] Synge, The Playboy of the Western World
Picasso, Demoiselles dAvignon Deaths: Grieg; Huysmans
1908 Ashcan School of Realist painting forms with works 1908 General Motors founded; US produces 63,500
by‘The Eight’ cars; Ford creates Model T
The Salon shows painting in ‘little cubes' by Worst-ever earthquake in Europe (Sicily) kills
Picasso and Braque 75.000
Kandinsky, Murneau Ibanez, Blood and Sand
Klimt, The Kiss Forster, A Room with a View
Krzyzanowski, The Landscape from Finland [60] Deaths: Rimsky-Korsakov
Matisse, Harmony in Red
Wojtkiewicz, BasnZimowa [72]

246 TIMELINE
 Art Events
1909 1909 Vauxcelles coins the term Cubism 1909 Peary and Henson travel to North Pole
Marinetti publishes the Futurist Manifesto Bleriot flies the English Channel
Matisse, Conversation 1101] Lagerlof becomes first woman to win Nobel Prize
Monet, Waterlilies, at Durand-Ruei for Literature
Picasso, Portrait of Ambroise Vollard Strauss, Elektra
[241 Deaths: Swinburne; Meredith; Albeniz
1910 1910 Kandinsky paints abstract watercolours 1910 Union of South Africa founded
Exhibition of Independent Artists in US Death of Ki ng George V, succeeded by Edward V11,
Technical Manifesto of the Futurist Painters Britain
published Eliot,The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Canadian Art Exhibition, Walker Art Gallery, Premiers of Diaghilev,Sheherazade (with Nijinsky)
Liverpool and The Firebird; Puccini, La Fanciulla del West
■ First modern art exhibition, Romania (with Caruso); Massenet, Don Quichotto(with
Russian artists join ‘Suprematism’ Chaliapin)
Boccioni, The City Rises!25] Deaths: Tolstoy; Twain; Bjornson
Deaths: Homer; Nadar; Marc
1911 The Blaue Reiter group form and hold first 1911 Sun Yat Sen provisional president, establishes
exhibition Chinese Republic
van der Rohe's Peris house, Berlin Italy declares war on Turkey
Wright’s Taliesin Premier Stolypin assassinated in Kiev
Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase No. 1 Machu Picchu discovered by American Hiram
Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning Bingham
Malevich, Portrait of Ivan Klyun [103] Brooke’s poems
Matisse. The RedStudiol21] R. Strauss, DerRosenkavalier
Marc, Blue Horses Deaths: Mahler; Nielsen
1912 National Gallery of Canada opens 1912 Balkan Wars
Epstein’s tomb of OscarWilde, Paris Titanic sinks on maiden voyage
First major Blaue Reiter exhibition and publication Wilson becomes US President
of the Blaue Reiter almanac Last Emperor of China Henry p’u Yi abdicates
Balia, Speeding Automobile Hauptman wins Nobel Prize for Literature
Bell, StudlandBeach [ 109] Mann, Death in Venice
Delaunay, CircularForms[26] Quo Vadis
Guazzoni’ssilentfilm epic,
Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 and Berg,Five Altenberg Songs
The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes Schoenberg, PierrotLunaire
Gilpin, Basket of Peaches [122] Deaths: Strindberg; Massenet; Stoker
K u p ka Vertical Planes I III 27]
1913 The Armory Show, New York, first major exhibition 1913 Second Balkan War begins
of 20th-century art 300th anniversary of Romanov dynasty
Goncharova solo exhibition, Moscow Bohr develops model of structure of the atom
Kandinsky’s A Question of Form Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu
Picasso’s first assemblages and object sculptures Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
Boccioni, Unity of Forms in Space Ives, Holiday Symphony and The Fourth of July
Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel Apollinaire, Alcools
Kirchner, Nude Woman Combing her Hair[22]
Lentulof, MoscowlAZ]
1914 Tatlin s public viewing of Synthetic-Static 1914 Panama Canal opens
compositions Archduke Ferdinand assassinated at Sarajevo
Bomberg, Mud Bath [28] triggering First World War
Duchamp, Stoppages-Etalon Joyce, Dubliners
Lewis, The Crowd [64] Shaw, Pygmalion
Thygesen, Barbarians [110] Prokofiev, Sarcasms

1915 1915 Rodin’s Les Cathedrales de France essay 1915 Italy joins Allies in War
Inauguration of Suprematism Lusitania sunk byGerman U-boat off Ireland
Duchamp, The Large Glass [94] Germans use poison gas on British, Ypres
Grosz, The Street [65] Gallipoli expedition, the Dardanelles
Malevich, Suprematist Composition: Black German and Russian armiesfightfor Kingdom of
Trapezium, Red Square [29] Poland
Thomson, In the Northland[134] Brooke, 1914 and Other Poems
Weber, Rush Hour, New York Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
1916 Foundation of Dada movement 1916 Battle of the Somme
Mattis-Teutsch, Composition in Yellow! 126] Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army in failed
Matisse, The Piano Lesson. Easter Rising, Dublin
O'Keeffe, Blue Lines Einstein's General Theory of Relativity
Picabia, Universal Prostitution [32] Holst, The Planets
Deaths: Eakins; Chase Deaths: Rasputin

TIMELINE 247
 Art Events

1917 1917 Dada exhibition, GalerieCorray, Zurich (renamed 1917 Russian Revolution
Galerie Dada) US declares war on Germany
De Stijl group forms, advocating basic forms in art Millay,Renascence and Other Poems
Popova’s Painterly Architectonics series O’Neill,The Long Voyage Home
Leger. Soldiers Playing at Cards [102] Prokofiev, Symphony No. 1
Matiushin, Movement in Space [125] Ravel, Le Tombeau de Couperin
Mondrian, Composition no. 3[31] Deaths: 'Buffalo Bill'
Deaths: Degas; Thomson; Ryder
1918 Monet offers his Nympheasto France in honour of 1918 Revolution in Germany forces abdication of Kaiser
end of war Wilhelm II
Auctions of Degas’s Old Master and contemporary 11 November Armistice, end of First World War
collections Formation of Yugoslavia
Shchukin and Morozov collections nationalized Influenza pandemic
Da rde I, Trans-Siberian Express [63] Iceland gains independence from Denmark
Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White on Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons (Pulitzer
White [124] Prize)
Rouault, The Crucifixion
Deaths: Klimt; Hodler
1919 Bauhaus founded by Walter Gropius 1919 Treaty of Versailles signed at Paris Peace
Malevich teaches in Popular Art School founded Conference
by Chagall, latertransformed into UNISOVA Founding of League of Nations
Witkiewicz, The New Forms in Painting and Permanent Court of World Justice established
Misunderstandings which Result Prohibition begins in US with 18th Amendment
Breton, Litterature magazine Mussolini establishes Fascist society
Adrian-Nilsson, The City by the Sea [66] Kafka, The Trial
Covert. 77me[132] Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence
Johnston, Liverpool an lmpression[58] Gide, La Symphoniepastorale
Krohg, Female Nude 161] Charles Chaplin, MaryPickford Douglas
Leger The City [35] Fairbanks, and D. S. Griffiths establish United
Monet, WeepingWillow[57] Artists
O’Keeffe, BlueandGreen Music] 133]
1920 1920 Group of Seven first exhibition, Toronto 1920 Women’s Suffrage approved in US
Mattis-Teusch first solo exhibition, Bucharest Treaty of Riga closes Soviet-Polish War after Battle
Mondrian’s essay‘Neo-Plasticism’ of Warsaw
Ozenfantand Le Corbusier magazine, LEspirit Lithuanian and Estonian independence
Nouveau Kemal defeats Greeks and forms Turkish Republic
Gabo and Pevsner, The Realist Manifestoon Romanian Composers'Society established,
Constructivism Bucharest
Doesburg, PurePaintingl30] Lawrence, Women in Love
Hausmann, TatlinatFlome[ 104] Shaw, Heartbreak House
Sheeler. Church Street El [43] Wharton, Age of/nnocence (Pulitzer Prize)
Spencer, Christ's Entry into Jerusalem [69]
Stella, The Voice of the City of New York Interpreted
[401
El Lissitsky, Almanac #1
1921 Louvre re-opens after evacuation during war 1921 Irish Civil War
Philips Gallery opens, Washington DC Ahmad Shah deposed, Shah Reza Pahlevi takes
Hausmann, Moholy-Nagy, and Arp, Manifesto of power in Iran
Elemental Art Maugham. Rain
Doesburg’s Dada essay ‘Anti-philosophy’ Capek, R. U. R
Man Ray and Duchamp, New York Dada Magazine Rudolph Valentino stars in The Sheikh-, Greta Garbo
Davis, Lucky Strike] 801 stars in Gosta Berling’s Saga
Melzer, Bridge-City]62] Prokofiev, The Love for Three Oranges
Deaths: Caruso; Saint-Saens
1922 First Constructivist magazine, Contimporanul 1922 Mussolini becomes Premier, Fascists seize Italian
(Contemporary Man) government
Bell’s essay, Since Cezanne
Polish President Narutowicz assassinated
Grosz designs costumes for Golfs play Methusalem Sun Yat-Sen reorganizes Kuomintang Party on
or the Eternal Bourgeois Bolshevik model
Bortnyik, Geometric Composition [131] Tomb of King Tut excavated by Carter
Kandinsky, White Cross [129] Joyce, Ulysses
Eliot, The Waste Land
Duke Ellington forms his jazz band
1923 Bauhausexhibition, Weimar
1923 Hitler imprisoned after failed coup
Le Corbusier’s Villa, La Roche, Paris
Franceand Belgium occupy the Ruhrdueto
Kurt Schwitter’s first Merzbau
unpaid German reparations

248 TIMELINE
 Art Events

Harris, From the North Shore Lake Superior [135] Yeats, Nobel Prize for Literature
Lissitzky, Proun 12E[123] Borges, Fervor de Buenos Aires
Mather, Semi-Nude (BillyJustema) [1081 Vaughan Williams, English Folk Song Suite
Picasso, Bird Cage [23] Deaths: Hasek; Bernhardt
Deaths: Eiffel
1924 1924 Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism 1924 Hitler’s Mein Kampf published
First exhibition of Contimporanul' group, Forster, A Passage to India
Bucharest Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue
Degas retrospective, Petit's Deaths: Lenin; Conrad; Kafka; Puccini
Brancusi, TheBeginningofthe World
Citroen, Metropolis!79]
Deaths: Sullivan; Bakst
1925 1925 Exposition International des Arts Decoratifset 1925 Scopes Trial in Tennessee challenges Creationism
Industries Modernes, Paris Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Introduction of Art Deco style Eisenstein’sfilm, Potemkin
First Surrealist exhibition, Paris Chaplin's film, The Gold Rush
Breuer develops tubular steel chair Balanchine is chief choreographer of Ballets
Atget, The Marne at VarennelWl] Russes
Dove, Grand mother [\QS\ Deaths: Satie; Reymont
Deaths: Sargent
1926 van der Rohe’s Liebknecht-Luxembourg 1926 Pilsudski coup d’etat in Poland
Monument, Berlin Goddard launches liquid-propelled rocket
Gropius’s Toerten Housing Development, Dessau Hirohito becomes emperor of Japan
Man Ray and Duchamp's film, Anemic Cinema Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Giacometti The Spoon-Woman Bernanos, Sous le Sole'll de Satan
Hoch, The Sweet One[95] Faulkner, Soldier’s Pay
Moholy, Florence Henri[ 107] La ng's fi I m, Metropolis
Ozenfant, TheJug[33] Deaths: Rilke; Valentino
Deaths: Monet; Cassatt; Gaudi: Moran
1927 Brancusi exhibition, Chicago organized by 1927 Lindbergh flies solo non-stop New York to Paris
Duchamp Pavlov's Conditioned Reflexes
Le Corbusier's Villa Stein, Garches Fossils of ‘Peking Man' found
Dali, Little Cinders!34] Woolf, To The Lighthouse
Deaths: Atget; Guillaumin; Gris Hammerstein II and Kern’s musical, Showboat
1928 International Abstraction exhibition, Berlin 1928 Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin
Museum of Modern Art, New York, opens Stalinist reign of terror begins
Brooker, SoundsAssembling[\27] Huxley,Point Counter Point
Chaga 11, Bride and Groom with Eiffel Tower Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover
Cunningham, Triangles! 138] Nabokov, King, Queen, Knave
Dem uth, / Saw the Figure 5 in Gold Deaths: Hardy; Ibanez
Malevich, Girls in a Field! 139]
1929 van der Rohe designs German Pavilion for 1929 US Stock Market crash and Great Depression
Barcelona's World’s Fair Nehru’s Indian Congress party demands full
Bourke-White, High Level Bridge, Cleveland!56] independence from Britain
Brauner, Composition [81] Graf Zeppelin makes round the world trip
Drier, Psychological Abstract Portrait of Ted Shawn Columbia Broadcasting System founded
[106] Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
Evans, Brooklyn Bridge [140] Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

TIMELINE 249
 Index

Note'. Page numbers in italics refer to Bastien-Lepage,Jules 26,162

illustrations. Titles of works of art are only Baudelaire, Charles 5-6,72, 76,101, 201
included if they are illustrated. Articles have Bazille, Jean Frederic 14.2,144
been omitted from these titles. Bazin, Germaine 235
Beardsley, Aubrey 107
Abbott, Berenice 184 Becquerel, Alexandre-Edmond 86
absorption in representation 84 Bell, Vanessa: Stud/and Beach 170,777
abstraction 190-4 Bellmer, Hans 153
and internationalism 202-6, 212 Bellows, George 16
and spiritualism 202-5 Benjamin, Walter 54,72,234
accessible image and representation 64—78, Bernard, Emile 27
221—2, 234-5 Bernhardt, Sarah 162
Adrian-Nilsson, Gosta: City by Sea ioj Bevan, Robert 27
Alexander, Edward P. 235 Black, James Wallace: Bostonfrom Air jj
Allard, Roger 99—100 Blanc, Charles 66
allegorical nude 146—7 Blaue Reiter, Der 31
Amiet, Cuno 27 Bliss, Lilly 215
Analytic Cubism 34 Boccioni, Umberto 35
Anderson, Hans Christian: Wandschirm 118,779 City Rises j6
Annan, Thomas 55 body tee nudes; sexuality and body
anti-iconography 180-94,224> 237 Boilly, Louis-Leopold 89,190
abstraction 190-4 Boldini, Giovanni 90,176
landscape painting 181—7 Bomberg, David 39
text and image 187—90 Mud Bath j8
Apollinaire, Guillaume 36,38 Bonnard, Pierre 27-8, 74- 83
Arensberg, Ilya 68 Morning in Paris 55
Arkhipov, Abrham: Laundresses 775,176 Bonnat, Leon 136
Arosa, Gustave 105 borrowing see copying; image/modernism
art schools 68-9 Bortnyik, Sandor: Geometric Composition 20J
Atget, Eugene 55 Boucher, Francois 147
Marne at Varenne 183,757 Boult,John 205
Austen, Jane 159 Bourdieu, Pierre 59
‘automatic drawing’ 46 Bourke-White, Margaret:
avant-garde High-Level Bridge 94
defined 11—12 Boyer, M. Christine 234
exhibitions 116-20 Braque, Georges 32
image/modernism outside m-13 and body/nude 147,151-2
markets for 58 and Cezanne 33, 98,118
movements 26-7,31,38,40,42-4 and Fauvism 190
and prostitution 141
and image/modernism and sources 118,122,
127, 205
Balia, G iacomo 35
Brauner, Victor: Composition 12J
banality see anti-iconography Breitner, George 202
Barnes, Albert 68,72, 213 Breton, Andre 45-6
Barr, Alfred 23,216,232
Brettell, Caroline 237

250 INDEX
Brettell, Richard 237,238 Clark, TimothyJ. 134,156,161,236
Brooker, Bertram: Sounds Assembling 193 class see social class
Brooks, Peter 236 Clayson, Hollis 236
Broude, Norma 233 Cogeval, Guy 236
Bruce, Patrick Henry 90, 202, 217 collage and montage 118-19,120-3, I27> 153,165
Brticke, Die 31 colonialism and nude 147-50
Burne-Jones, Edward Coley: commodification of art 58
Wheel of Fortune 20 Constable,John 6,83
Burt, Nathaniel 235 Constructivism 39-40,71
copying in museums 69-70,112-13,115-16
Caillebotte, Gustave 15,16,17 see also image/modernism
and nudes 142 Corinth, Lovis 31
Man at his Bath 143,145,146 Cork, Richard 234
Pans Street; Rainy Day 54 Corot,Jean-Baptiste-Camille 29,120
and social class 162,167 cosmopolitanism see internationalism
and window image 101-2 Coupler, Adrienne L. 235
Calame, Alexandre 209 Courbet, Gustave 14
calotype 94 and image/modernism and sources 105,
see also photography 107,120
Cameron, Julia Margaret 169 and social class 173
Camoin, Charles 112 Studio of Painter 6,12,13,131
capitalism, urban 1,51-63,220-1 death 120
and institutionalization of modern art 210-17 Courtauld, Samuel 68,213
Carey, Evelyn George: View of Internal Covert, John: Time 204
Viaduct 93 Cranach, Lucas 105
Carr, Emily 83,89 criticism, contemporary, art market and 58-9
Carra, Carlo 35 Cross, Henri-Edmond 26,29
Carracci, Annibale 190 Crow, Thomas 1
Carroll, Lewis 138 Cubism 32-5,36
Casagemas, Carlos 139 and anti-iconography 190-1
Cassatt, Mary 17,138,161,167, 217 and image/modernism 118,122,127
Little Girl in Blue Armchair 88 and Impressionism 33,98,99-100,118
catalogues of exhibitions 71-2,105 Orphic 38
Catherine the Great 68 and representation and vision 87,89,
Cezanne, Paul 14,16,22,69,72,212 97-100,102
and anti-iconography 184-6 and sexuality and body 151-2
Artist's Father 90 and social class 170
and body/nude 142,146 time and city in 100^3
Grand Baigneur 140,146,147 see also Braque; Delaunay; Duchamp;
and Cubism 33,98,118 Leger; Picasso
Houses nearAuvers-sur-l'Oise 180,184, Cunningham, Imogen: Triangles 212
183,186 Cursiter, Stanley 72
and image/modernism and sources 70,74,
106,120 Dada 12,42-3,71,122,127,152;
Mill on Couleuvre at Pontoise 23 see also Duchamp
Old Woman with Rosary 118 Dagnan-Bouveret, Paul Adolphe 173
and Realism 14 Daguerre, Louis Jacques-Mande 75
and social class 162,163,173 daguerreotype 5,14,75,89,94
and surface fetishism 91-2 see also photography
death 116,120 Dalf, Salvador 46,72
Champa, Kermit 132, 237 Little Cinders 43
Chardin, Jean Baptiste 69,70,190 Daniel, Stephen 238
Cheney, Sheldon 23 Daubigny, Charles-Fran^ois 83
Chevreul, Michel-Eugene 38, 86 Daumier, Honore 139
child/adolescent nudes 138-41 David, Jacques-Louis 109
Chirico, Giorgio de 45,46 Davis, Stuart: Lucky Strike 122
Citroen, Paul: Metropolis 120,121 Day, John Holland 141
Claire,Jean 236 de la Fresnaye, Roger 33

INDEX 251
Degas, Edgar 15,16,28, 61, 69 Emerson, PH. 94-5
and body 142,145,146 Enckell, Magnus: Awakening 138,139,140

pornography 137-8 Ernst, Max 107,123,153

and lithography 72 Esoteric Movement 205
and Mediated Impressionism 17-18 Evans, Walker: Brooklyn Bridge 214
Place de la Concorde 17,18 exhibitions 69,75
Race Track iy avant-garde 116-20
and representation and vision 91-2,96,98 Great (1851) 2,3,5, 6
and social class 163-4,167,169 temporary 33,70-2,106, no, 135,139,155-6,
Delacroix, Ferdinand-Vistor-Eugene 105 166, 217
Triumph of Apollo 67 see also museum, art
Delamotte, Philip Henry: Rebuilding Crystal Expressionism 30-2, 60,190;
Palace at Sydenham x,i see also Kandinsky; Liebermann
Upper Gallery of Crystal Palace 3,4 eye, human 86-7
Delaroche, Paul 3,65
Delaunay, Robert 33,36,38 Farwell, Beatrice 106
Circular Forms jy Fauconnier, Henri le 33
and representation and vision 88,90,100,102 Faure, Elie 3
Delvaux, Paul 46 Fauves 29-30,38,40,87,89,118,190
Denis, Maurice 27,102 see also Derain; Matisse; Vlaminck
Derain, Andre 29,118-19, 189 Feher, Michel 236
Desvallieres, Georges 112 feminists 134
Dickens, Charles 159 Ferencv, Karoly: Boys on Danube iy6
Dietz-Monin, Mme 167 fetishism, surface 89—92
dislocation, fragmentation and recombination Flaubert, Gustave 132-3,159
120-3 Fox Talbot, William Henry 3,75
Divisionists 35 fragmentation, dislocation and recombination
Doesburg, Theo van: Pure Painting 41 120-3
Dorra, Henri 236 Freeman,Judy 236
Dove, Arthur G.: Grandmother 166 Fresnaye, Roger de la 33
Dow, Arthur Wesley 205 Freud, Sigmund 46,139
Dreier, Katherine 213 Fried, Michael 1, 84
Psychological Abstract Portrait of Frith, William Powell: Railway Station
Ted Shawm i6y 14,87
du Camp, Maxime 54,234 Fry, Roger 21-3,72,184,185,212
Dubovskoy, Nicolai 209 Futurism 35-6,38,40,60,170
Duchamp, Marcel 33,42,43,58,202 time and city in 100-3
and image/modernism 108 see also Severini
Large Glass 134,150,75/
and movement 78 Gage,John 5
and science 204—5 Galimberti, Sandor: View of Street in
and window display 71 Nagybdnya 96
Dufy, Raoul 29 Gallen-Kallela, Akseli: Lemminkainens
Dumas, Alexandre, fils 134 Mother 208,209
Duncan, Carol 235 Gasquet, Joachim 57,184
Duranty, Edmond 167 Gauguin, Paul 15,21, 22, 23,28,29,58,71, 212
Durrio, Paco 27 Ancestors of Tehemana 116,777
andbody/nude 136,137,139,141,146,147-50
Eakins, Thomas 77 and image/modernism and sources 105,
Gross Clinic ij 106,107,118,120
and male nudes 136,140,142,145 Manau tupapau 148,149
and social class 163,169 and photography 47,105,137
Swimming 145 and Serusier 97
Eastlake, Charles no and social class 162,173
Eastlake, Lady 76 Vision after Sermon 26,27
Eisenman, Stephen 147, 232, 236 Where Do We Come From? 141,142-3,149
El Lissitzky, Lazar 193 death 116
Prouni2E 797
gender see sexuality and body

252 INDEX
 Gerome,Jean-Leon 13 Impressionism 14,15-19
Gerrard, MaryD. 233
and anti-iconography 181-2
Gilloch, Graeme 235 collector (Gasquet) 57,184
Gilpin, Laura 190
and Cubism 33,98,99-100,118
Basket of Peaches i8g and image/modernism 105,106,107,118,120
Gleizes, Albert 33,34, 60 and light and colour 86-7
Gothic revival no major artists see Caillebotte; Cassatt;
graphic traffic see image/modernism Cezanne; Degas; Gauguin; Monet;
Gray, Gustave le 94 Morisot; Pissarro; Renoir; Seurat;
Great Exhibition (1851) 2,3,5,6 Sisley
GreatLJtopia 40-1,199 Mediated 17-18
Green, Christopher 232-3 and oil sketch 95-7
Gris,Juan 33,122 and photography 93
Grosz, George and picture display style 71
Life and Activity in Universal City 120 and representation and vision 86-7,88-9,101
Street 102 and social class 161—2,170,173
and urban capitalism 54, 60
Haan, Mayer de 27 see also Neo-Impressionism; Post-
Hamber, AnthonyJ. 235 Impressionism
Hamilton, George Heard 11,232,234 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 89,147
Harris, Lawren 206 institutionalization of modern art 210—17
From the North Shore, Lake Superior 207 internationalism 200-1,207,209
Hauser, Arnold 60 and abstract art 202-6,212
Hausmann, Raoul: Tatlin at Home 165 and spiritualism 202-5
Haussmann, Baron Georges 54,56 see also nationalism
Heartfield, John: Life and Activity in Universal Ivins, William 106
City 120
Hemingway, Andrew 236 Jarry, Alfred 43
Henderson, Amy 235 Johnston, John Dudley: Liverpool an
Henderson, Linda 88,204 Impression g6
Henisch, Heinz and Bridget 235 Jussim, Estelle 106, 235
Herbert,James D. 236
Herbert, Robert L. 1 Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henri 98
Herdt, Gilbert 236 Kandinsky, Wassily 31-2,127
Hill, Charles S. 238 and anti-iconography 190,193-4
Hoch, Hannah 123,165 and children’s drawings 83
Sweet One lyj and image/modernism 204,205
Hodler, Ferdinand 21,116,140,141,146, 200 and nudes, mechanical 152
Night log and surface fetishism 90
Holt, Elizabeth Gilmore 235 White Cross 198, igg, 202
House, John 232, 238 and window display 71
Hunt, William Holman: Valentine Rescuing Kaplan, Flora 235
Sylvia from Proteus 4,5 Khnopff, Fernand 21
Kirchner, Ernst 31, 60
Ibsen, H. 187 Nude Woman Combing her Hair 32
iconology 126-8, 223-4 Klee, Paul 83
see also anti-iconography; nationalism; Klimt, Gustave 107
sexuality and body; social class Kodak 78
identity, national 197-200 Koons,Jeff 83
image and text 187^90 Kostenevitz, Alberty 72
image/modernism 104-23, 222-3,235~6 Kosztka, Tivardar Csontvary: Ruins of Greek
avant-garde exhibitions 116-20 Theatre at Taormina 207,208,209
fragmentation, dislocation and Kroeller-Mueller, Helene 213
recombination 120-3 Krohg, Per: Female Nude g8
outside avant-garde m-13 Krzyzanowski, Konrad: Landscape'from
outside France 114-16 Finland 97
Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood iro-11 Kupka, Frantisek38,88, 202
see also lithography; photography Vertical Planes jy, 194

INDEX 253
La Caze bequest 69 Marin, John 207

Laforgue,Jules 86,87 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 35,40

landscape painting 181—7 market, art 58-9, 63

nationalist 206-9 Marville, Charles: TearingDownAvenuede

Lane, Sir Hugh 213 VOpera 55

Le Corbusier 43 Marx, Karl/Marxism 52,56-7,60,155

LeNain brothers 190 Masson, Andre 46

LeFevre, Claude 106 Matejko, Jan: Battle of Grunewald 196,197,
Leger, Fernand 33,43 198,202,209
City 51,52 Mather, Margrethe 190
and nudes 152 Semi-Nude 169
Soldiers Playing at Cards i6j Matisse, Henri 29, 212
and surface fetishism 90 and anti-iconography 189
and window display 71 and body/nude 146,147
Lemercier (printer) 74 Conversation 161
Lentulof, Aristarkh: Moscow 62,210 and image/modernism and sources 111,
Lepic, Viscomte Ludovic-Napoleon 15 ix8,119

Lewis, Wyndham 38—9 Red Studio 30,37

Crowd 101 and urban capitalism 58, 63
Liebermann, Max 31,142 Matiushin, Mikhail: Movement in Space 192
Bathhouse, In the ijo, 144 Mattis-Teutsch, Hans: Composition in
light 86-7 Yellow 192
Lissitzky see El Lissitzky meaninglessness see anti-iconography
lithography 65,72-4, no Mediated Impressionism 17-18
see also image/modernism Mediated (self-conscious) Realism 14-15
Long, Carol Washton 204 Mehoffer,Jozef: Strange Garden 22
Louvre 67-8,69,70,112—13 Meier-Graefe, Julius 1, 23-4,31,114,212, 213
Luce, Maximilian 173 Meissonier, Ernest 78
Lucie-Smith, Edward 237 Melzer, Moriz: Bridge-City 82,99
Lukacs,John 234 Menzel, Adolph: Supper at ball 158,759
Metzinger,Jean 33,34
McCaulay, Anne 237 microscope 88
McDonald-Wright, Stanton 36 Miller, Angela 238
McLuhan, Marshall 4 Millet, Jean-Franpois 120,170,173
Magritte, Rene 46,107 Miro,Joan 45,46
Maillol, Aristide 28 mirror 177-8
Malczewski, Jacek 116,146 modern art/modernism
Melancholia 21 beginnings of 5-7
Malevich, Kasimir 33,40,42,193 conditions tor see representation; urban
Girls in Field 214 capitalism
Portrait of Artist Ivan Vasi/ievich Klyun 164 movements and '-isms’ (from Realism to
Suprematist Composition 39, 191 Surrealism) 9-47, 219-20,233-4
Mallarme, Stephane 38,188 see also anti-iconography;
Malraux, Andre 66,72 image/modernism; nationalism and
Manet, Edouard 69 internationalism; sexuality and body;
Balcony 84,85,86,101 social class; unmediated modernism;
Bar at Folies-Bergeres iyy, 178 vision
and body/nude 131-6,137 modern condition 60-3
DejeunersurPherbe 6,131-2,134 Moholy, Lucia: Florence Henri 168
and image/modernism and sources 105, Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo 60
106,111-12,120,132 MOMA see under museum
Mocking of Christ 733,134,135 Mondrian, Piet 33,40,42, 83,161, 202
Olympia 65-6,105,732,133,134-5 Composition with Great Blue Plane 41
Portrait of Emile Zola 64,65, 66 Monet, Claude 6-7,26,71
and social class 162,163 and anti-iconography 181—3, 186
death 116,120 and image/modernism 109
Manquin, Henri 112
Impressionism named after work by 15-16
Marc, Franz 31, 60 Luncheon (Argenteuil) 75,194

254 INDEX
 On Bank of Seine at Bennecourt 17, 1B1,182,183 as machine 150-1,152
and photography 93-4 male 133,134,135,136,138-9,140,142,
and representation and vision 87, 97, 98,101
143-5.146
and urban capitalism 58 Manet’s 131-6
Weeping Willow 95 and modernist cycle of life 138-41
montage see collage and montage
Morbelli, Angelo 26,35 O’Connor, Roderic 27,209
Moreau, Gustave 108,109 oil sketch, beyond 95-7
Chimeras 104,112, 113 Oisen, DonaldJ. 234
Morisot, Berthe 15,17, 69, 84, 85 O Keeffe, Georgia 20, 68,190,192, 207
Mucha, Alphonse 6,21,74, 200 Blue and Green Music 205,206
Munch, Edvard 21,108,141,142, 209 Orphism 36-8,100
Ashes 137 see also Delaunay; Kupka
Scream 116 Osthaus, Karl 63, 213
Miinter, Gabriele 31,190 Ozenfant, Amedee 43
Murphy, Gerald 122 Jug 44
museum, art 65, 67-70,106,197-8, 200-1
Museum ofModernArt (MOMA) 2,7,33, paint, nature of 89-91
211,212, 213, 215-17 Palmer, Bertha Potter 91
private institutionalization 210-17 Paris 3,43,52-6
see also copying; exhibitions; Louvre patrons 212-13
mysticism 202-5 Paxton, Joseph 2
peasantry, images of 170-4
Nabis 27-9 Pellizza del Volpeda, Guiseppe 26,35
see also Vuillard Philipps, Duncan 213
Nadaff, Ramona 236 photography 2,3-4,5,47, 65,74-8
Nadar 169 and anti-iconography 183-4
Napoleon III 6,54 of exhibitions 71
Nathanson family 29 and image/modernism 105, no
nationalism and internationalism 196-209, and nationalism and internationalism
224-5, 237-8 202, 212
landscape painting 206—9 photomontage see collage and montage
national identity 197-200 and private institutionalization 214
time and place 200—2 and Realism 14-15
see also internationalism and representation and vision 88, 89, 92-6
Nead, Lynda 236 and sexuality and body 136-8,140—1,153
Negre, Charles: Chimney-sweeps Walking 75 and social class 165,169
Neo-Impressionism 24-6,87,106,156,173 and unmediated modernism 92-5
see also Seurat; Signac and urban capitalism 55, 60
Neo-Plasticism 40-2, 202 see also image/modernism
see also Mondrian Picabia, Francis 202
Nesbitt, Molly 55, 237 Universal Prostitution 42
Nevinson, C. R. W. 39 Picasso, Pablo 83,212
Nicolas I, Tsar 68 and anti-iconography 186
Nittis, Giuseppe de 15 Bird Cage 33
Nochlin, Linda 134,141, 233, 234 andbody/nude 147,150,152
non-sexual nude 146—7 and Cezanne 33, 98,118
Novak, Barbara 238 Family of Saltimbanques 139
Novotnoy, Fritz 234 and image/modernism and sources 72,118,
nudes 122,127, 205
allegorical or non-sexual 146-7 Portrait of Ambroise Vollard 34
bathing 141—5 and social class 161,173
body parts and fragments 152-3 and surface fetishism 91
child/adolescent 138-41 Pinkney, David 234
colonialism and 147—50 Pissarro, Camille 14,15,24,26
female 65-6,105,132,133,134-8,140-3,145, Apple Pickers 133,184
146-53 on Gauguin 105
and image/modernism 114-15 Hermitage at Pontoise 1^3,186

INDEX 255
 Pissarro (cont.): lithography 65,72-4, no
and image/modernism and sources 79,109 see also exhibitions; image; museum;
and Realism 14 photography
and representation 71, 87,96 and capitalism 57,59
and social class 173-4 lack of see anti-iconography
place and time 200-2 portraiture and class 163-70
Poggi, Christine 236 see also vision
Poggioli, Renato 11 reproductions 65,72-4
Pollock, Griselda 22,134, 233 see also image/modernism
Pont-Aven, School of see Synthetism revivalism 110-11
Popov, Lukian: Mobilized ij8 Rewald,John 59
pornography 105,136-8,141 Rigaud, Hyacinthe 70
portraiture and class 163—70 Riis, Jacob A.: Flashlight Photograph of...
Post-Impressionism 21-3 Peddlers g2
see also Cezanne; Gauguin; Seurat; van Gogh Rippl-Ronai, Jozsef 27
Pound, Ezra 38 Rivera, Diego 3
Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood 110-11 Roberts, Helene 235
private institutionalization of modern art Roberts, William 39
210-17 Robinson 94
Pugin, Augustus no Root, Deborah 235
Purism 41,43-4 Rosenblum, Naomie 235
see also Leger Rosenblum, Robert 1, 232
Puteaux Cubists 33 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 107,108
Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre 105,109, in, 116 Rothko, Mark 189
and body/nude 146,157 Rouault, Georges 112
Shepherd's Song 112 Roussel, Ker-Xavier 28
Rubin, William 232
Quinet, Achille 186 Ruskin,John 76, no
Russell, AndrewJ.: Hanging Rock 77
Ranson, Paul 27 Russell, Morgan 36
Ray, Man 47
Realism 13-15 Said, Edward 147
and anti-iconography 181,183,190 Salon des Refuses 6,132
and Impressionism 14,16 Sargent, John Singer 90,164,166-7,l7&> 217
Mediated 14-15 savoir-voir 83—4
and photography 14-15 Schorske, Carl 234
and representation and vision 87,101 Schwitters, Kurt 43,122,127
see also Courbet Scientific Impressionism see Neo-
‘reality’, representation and vision 83-103, 222, Impressionism
235-6 Scott Fitzgerald, F. 159
recombination, fragmentation and dislocation seeing tee vision
120-3
Segantini, Giovanni 26,35
Redon, Odilon 6, 21, 28,108,188 Self-conscious Realism 14-15
Decorative Panel 24 Serusier, Paul 27, 97,186-7
Reinhardt, Oscar 213
Seurat, Georges 15, 22,23,26,29, 212
Rejlander, Oscar Gustave 94 Bathers at Asnieres 757,158
Two Ways of Life ig
Grande Jatte, Summer Sunday on Island of
Renan, Ernest 135
24“5> !54> i55> G6, i57“9> 173-4
Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 15,18, 212
and image/modernism and sources 106,120
Ball at Moulin de la Galette 16
and representation and vision 87, 97
and body/nude 142,147
and social class 160—1,170
and image/modernism 107 death 116
Promenade 17,140
Severini, Gino 33,35,72,100,122,127
and representation and vision 91, 96,98
sexuality and body 130-53,158-9, 223, 236
and social class 162
machine, body as 150-1
Repin, Ilya: Religious Procession... 160
parts and fragments 152-3
representation
pornography 105,136-8,141
and accessible image 64-78-, 221-2, 234-5 see also nudes

256 INDEX
 Shchukin, Sergei 63, 68,213
Thygesen, Rudolph: Barbarians 172,173
Sheeler, Charles: Church Street 63 time
Shift, Richard 103,237
and city in Futurism and Cubism 100—3
Signac, Paul 1, 24,29, 97,102,174 and place 200-2
Two Milliners 25,26,173—4 time line 240-9
Sisley, Alfred 15, 96,181 Tissot,James 87
Slewinski, Wladyslaw 92 Toorop,Jan 21,107
Sloan,John 60
Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 28, 61,74, 93
social class and class consciousness 18,108, At Moulin Rouge 89
154-78,223-4,236-7 and pornography 137-8
and capitalism 52,57 and social class 162
images of peasantry 170-4 transparency
issues 159-63 Transparent Impressionism 17,46
portraiture 163-70 Transparent Realism 14-15, 88
Seurat and GrandeJatte 24—5,154—9,173-4 and unmediated modernism 87-9
worker 174-8 Turner, J. M. W. 6, 189
Solomon-Godeau, Abigail 134,147 Twyman, Michael 235
Sorollay Bastida, Joaquin 69
and Louvre 69 unfinished pictures 91
sources see image/modernism unmediated modernism
Spencer, Stanley: Christ's Entry into and photography 92-5
Jerusalem in and surface fetishism 89- 92
spiritualism and abstraction 202-5 and transparency 87-9
Steichen, Edward}.\Flatiron 61 urban areas
Stein, Leo and Gertrude 68,202 capitalist 1,51-63,220-1,234
Steinberg, Leo 33 and representation and vision 92, 94,100-1
Stella,Joseph:NewYorkInterpreted 50, 60 time and city in Futurism and Cubism
Stieglitz, Alfred 47, 60,205 100-3
Stijl, de 40,41 see also museum; Paris
Strand, Paul 190 Utrillo, Maurice 181
Strindberg, August 187
Wave 188,189 Vallotton, Felix 28, 60
subject van de Velde, Henri 193,206
art without see anti-iconography van Gloeden, Baron 141
obvious see transparency van Gogh, Vincent 22, 29-30, 212
Suprematism 39—40, 202 and image/modernism and sources
see also Malevich 118-19,120
surface fetishism and unmediated modernism Night Cafe 23
89-92 and representation and vision 90
Surrealism 44-6,72,106,152 and social class 173
Symbolism 19-21,42,106,114,203, 205 death 116,120
see also Gauguin; Hodler; Mucha; Munch; Vaszary, Janos 21
Redon Vauxcelles, Louis 29,32
Synthetic Cubism 34,38 Verne,Jules 108
Synthetism 26—7 Vernet, Claude-Joseph 106
see also Gauguin vision, ‘reality’ and representation 83-103, 222,
235-6
Talbot, William Henry Fox 3,75 and Cubism 87,89,97-100,102
Tazi, Nadia 236 human eye 86-7
technique 88-9 see also unmediated modernism
technology, new 3-5 Vlaminck, Maurice de 29,118,181,190
Terk, Sonia 36 Bougival 10,30
Tessen, Peter 63 Vollard, Anbroise 74,98
text and image 187-90 Volpeda see Pellizza del Volpeda
theatricality in representation 84 von Dardel, Nils: Trans-Siberian Express 100
Thomson, Belinda 187,232 von Klenze, Otto 68
Thomson, Richard 161,232, 236 von Marees, Hans 114,116,146
Thomson, Tom: In the Northland 126,206 Golden Age 113

INDEX 257
 Vorticism 38-9,101 window metaphor 102-3
Vuillard, Edouard 6, 27,71, 83 Wojtkiewicz, Witold: Basri Zimowa 114
Vuillard (cont.): workers, images of 174-8
and image/modernism 108 Wyczofkowski, Leon: U Wrot
Large Interior with Six Figures 29, r8y, 188 Chaiubinskiego 200
Misia and Vallotton in Dining Room 28 Wyspiariski, Stanislaw: Glowka Helenki
and museum 69 107,108
and social class 169
Yaroshenko, Nikolai: Stoker 175,176
Wallace, John Laurie 136
war depicted 163 Zimmermann, Michael 161
Warhol, Andy 105,189 Zola, Emile 16,38,182
Weber, Wilhelm 235 Manet’s portrait of 64, 65, 66
Weil, Stephen E. 235 Zorn, Anders 90,176
Wells, H. G. 108 Self-Portrait 91

258 INDEX
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Ann Bermingham Robin Cormack
Photography in the United States
Modern Art 1851-1929 Celtic Art Miles Orvell
Richard R. Brettell Art in China Documentary Photography
Art 1920-1945 Craig Clunas
Contemporary Photography
Art since 1945 HA East European Art
David Hopkins Jeremy Howard SPECIAL VOLUMES
Ancient Egyptian Art Art and Film
WESTERN ARCHITECTURE Marianne Eaton- Krauss LyndaNead

Greek Architecture Art in India Landscape

David Small Partha Mitter Malcolm Andrews

Roman Architecture Art and Islam Art and the New Technology
Janet Delaine Irene Bierman
Art and Science
Early Medieval Architecture Art in Japan
Art and Sexuality
Roger Stalley Karen Brock
Art Theory
Late Medieval Architecture Melanesian Art
Michael O’Hanlon The Art of Art History:
Nicola Coldstream
A Critical Anthology
European Architecture 1400-1600 Latin American Art
Donald Preziosi (ed.)
Christy Anderson Mesoamerican Art
Portraiture
European Architecture 1600-1750 Cecelia Klein
Shearer West
Hilary Ballon Native North American Art
Women in Art
European Architecture 1750-1890 Janet C. Berio & Ruth B. Phillips
Barry Bergdoll Palaeolithic Art
Modern Architecture 1890-1965 Polynesian and Micronesian Art
Alan Colquhoun Adrienne Kaeppler
Oxford
History of

Art The Oxford History of Art is a major series of ground-breaking,

authoritative, and beautifully illustrated books by art historians
at the forefront of new thinking.

Modern Art 1851-1929

Richard R. Brettell

‘Very refreshing and

The period 1851 to 1929 witnessed the rise of the major European
original. . . The visual
range—Czech and avant-garde groups: the Realists, Impressionists, Post-Impressionists,
Canadian, Finnish and Symbolists, Cubists, and Surrealists. It was also a time of rapid social,
French—wrenches our
tired assumptions about economic, and political change, encompassing a revolution in com¬
pictorial modernism into munication systems and technology, and an unprecedented growth
vivid new perspectives.’
in the availability of printed images.
Professor Richard Thomson,
Edinburgh University
Richard Brettell’s innovative account explores the aims and
‘Uniquely valuable ...
achievements- the beautiful and the bizarre—of artists such as
a magisterial survey of
the cultural, economic, Monet, Gauguin, Picasso, and Dali, in relation to urban capitalism
and historical conditions and expansion, colonialism, nationalism and internationalism, and
in which modern art
flourished.’
the museum. Tracing common themes ol representation, imagin¬
Professor Stephen ation, perception, and sexuality across works in a wide range of
Eisenman, Northwestern
different media, he presents a fresh approach to the fine art and
University
photography of this remarkable era.
‘A history of modern
art of the highest
quality, informative
and enthusiastic.'
Frangoise Cachin, Directeur
des Museesde France

Cover illustration: detail

from Robert Delaunay: ISBN 0-1 9-284220-X
Circular Forms: Sun, Moon,
Simulante I, 1912-13.
Stedelijk Museum,
OXFORD
Amsterdam. Courtesy UNIVERSITY PRESS
Jean-Louis Delaunay. 78 0192 842206
© L&M Services
BV Amsterdam 98095. UAhvViU
^$18.95 A www.oup.com