The Must-Haves
Understanding these rules is crucial for any comprehensive study of modernity. The modern revolution of the 19th century contravened the rules laid out by the Academy. These criteria were then used to evaluate the quality of a work of art, especially with regard to composition, linear perspective, the primacy of drawing, and the importance of finish. All of these standards were rejected by the modernists. To understand their aesthetic revolution, it is important to first recognise the extent to which their work broke with the artistic conventions of the time.
Why is the nude considered the pinnacle of academic art? At the renowned École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, all teaching was centered on drawing the human body. Year after year, students copied nudes from ancient sculptures before being permitted to draw live models. This was because since the time of Vitruvius, the human body had been at the heart of the concept of absolute beauty. However, this ideal of beauty did not correspond to the anatomical and real beauty favoured by modern artists, who moved away from academic canons even if it meant depicting “ugliness”.
Painting and sculpture were noble arts whose status was jeopardised by modernity. To fully understand the scandal surrounding modern artists such as Manet, Courbet, and the Impressionists, it is important to recognise how their approach - reminiscent of the practices of old craft guilds - challenged established institutional conventions. All critical literature from this period was based on aesthetic criteria associated with the liberal status of painting and sculpture, a status that since the establishment of the Salon kept them separate from commercial concerns.
The Salon rules help us to better understand the frustrations it caused. The Salon's discriminatory system was criticised even more as its standards fell into disuse. It was France's artistic showcase, based on a complex system of juries and awards. It was a guarantor of the grand genre of history painting, inherited from the kings of France. The end of the monarchy, the rise of the bourgeoisie, the public's growing fondness for anecdotal paintings and Ingres' death marked the beginning of the end for the Salon.
Although only the 1863 Salon des Refusés is remembered, the reality was more complex. While the term 'Salon des Refusés' is commonly used to refer to the official exhibition of works rejected by the Salon jury in 1863, it is important to note that this was neither the first nor the last such exhibition. During the Ancien Régime, alternative exhibition spaces already existed to bypass the jury's censorship and connect directly with the public. This system persisted, growing even more after the Revolution as modern ideas challenged the increasingly outdated official norms.
This long-neglected school was brought back into fashion by the Romantics and early Moderns. Critical literature often refers to the Spanish style or the Spanish school. However, what does it actually mean? How and why did this style of painting reappear in Paris? Why was it considered contrary to French academic principles? And more so, how did it influence our great modern painters, specifically Édouard Manet?
1870. France is invaded by Prussia. Some artists went into exile and fled to England. The exile to London of artists like Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Charles Daubigny and many others was not neutral; they were able to socialise, paint and discover English painting, to which their reaction was less enthusiastic than is often claimed. They also exhibited their work, having crossed paths with another exile - and not the least of them - the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. These are all essential stages in the history of Impressionism.
A commercial company with variable capital that has no ambition for stylistic consistency. Before embodying avant-gardism in painting, these young artists simply organised themselves to circumvent the jury's discriminatory policy and exhibit their work with the sole aim of selling it. Their exhibition company was therefore not a stylistic gathering, but rather a commercial organisation driven into bankruptcy, most likely by ambitious pricing.
Young painters who were too often rejected by the Salon's conservative jury decided to take matters into their own hands. From 1874 onwards, exhibitions by the Impressionists — also known as the 'Intransigents' or the 'Enragés' [Enraged]— inscribed a group of young artists into the history books. The layout of the premises, the grouping of works by artist, the unconventional framing, and the new colours on the walls all clashed with the Salon's exhibition principles; some critics reacted both fiercely and memorably.
With no rules to follow except those pertaining to their sales, disagreements quickly divided the group. Manet, who was considered their leader, always refused to participate in Impressionist exhibitions. Degas recruited new exhibitors from among Salon painters, while some of the group's founding members tried their luck at the Salon again. Some even exhibited in both venues simultaneously. Should they be forced into some form of exclusivity? Should a common style be imposed? This would necessitate the establishment of an internal jury and a consensus on the controversial issue of plein air painting.
Painting outdoors was neither a practice exclusive to the Impressionists nor a defining feature of their work. While we may imagine that Monet's studio was his garden, Daniel Wildenstein, author of his catalogue raisonné, casts doubt on his outdoor practice. Degas despised it so much that he sarcastically mocked the habit, while Renoir returned to working in the studio, trying to forget the term altogether. Although we tend to associate the plein air technique with the Impressionists, it had in fact been practised since the invention of tube paint thirty-five years earlier. Initially, people were wary of the raw colours involved in plein air painting, but it eventually became popular in studios.
Seurat and Signac put complex colour theories into practice, inventing Divisionism. The Impressionists had introduced bold colours to painting, favouring a palette similar to that of the solar prism. Then Signac and, above all, the reclusive Seurat came up with the idea of systematising these practices by applying unmixed pigments juxtaposed on the canvas. This technique, known as Divisionism or Pointillism, required an in-depth study of contemporary colour theory.
Realists and Impressionists fantasised about creating an art that was unmediated by previous artistic models and idealisations. In literature however, transparency is never absolute, despite what critics may have written. For painters, this is a delicate subject. Modern artists attempted to reject academic models and depict their perception of reality, but their quest for transparency ended where photographic reproduction began — striking a balance between temperament, accuracy and restraint is difficult.
The American theory behind the genealogy of Modernism in painting. Following the shift of the artistic centre from Paris to New York in 1945, criticism also moved across the Atlantic, focusing on two key figures: Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. Their more formal approaches differed from that of British critic T. J. Clark, who favoured a non-formalist method known as the social history of art. Nevertheless, they engaged in conversation and enriched the discourse around key notions such as ontology, flatness, theatricality and absorption.
Here are some fundamental and well-sourced concepts from these two key philosophers. Although Plato is well known and his work is accessible, his ideas are sometimes oversimplified, making it worth revisiting the original Greek texts with commentary. As for Hegel, his complex, systemic theory of beauty is all the more relevant given that it emerged during the Romantic era, fuelling the ongoing debate between those who defend ideal beauty and those who advocate for a more modern, so-called realistic beauty.
An intelligible psychoanalytic approach can shed light on the gendered history of art. Paintings such as Paul Gauguin's Manao Tupapau, Édouard Manet's Olympia and Gustav Klimt's The Kiss have given rise to psychoanalytic analyses. Notably, feminist readings by Griselda Pollock and Julia Kristeva allow for the deconstruction of these iconic modernist paintings and reveal the supremacy of the civilised white male as spectator.
The infiltration of Japanese aesthetics into Europe is also the story of a lesser known boomerang effect. The shift towards modernism in Western art between the 1870s and 1880s was largely driven by the sudden influx of fabulous Japanese prints and objects. Everyone claimed to be the first to have discovered these wonders, which, unbeknownst to us, had started integrating our laws of composition and perspective, thereby transforming them. As such, these changes profoundly altered our art.