When Industrial Logic Asphyxiates the Fine Arts
- Art d'Histoire
- May 28
- 5 min read
Mid-19th-century Europe was in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, and its flourishing industry came crashing into the sanctuary of the Fine Arts.
During the inauguration of the first World's Fairs, the space granted to painting and sculpture relative to that accorded to technical innovations posed a problem—always smaller, and increasingly less sacralised.
Imagine, rather, the visitor contemplating, or attempting to contemplate, a painting from the great and noble French school to the sound of the strikes from the new Creusot steam hammer or the rhythmic clatter of power-loom weaving machines.
The cohabitation was enough to bewilder. It marked the end of the regime of exception and privilege that the arts had enjoyed for three centuries.
The Intellectual Heritage of the Partitioning of the Arts
The classical and fundamental distinction between the liberal arts—the fruits of an activity freed from material constraints for the sake of pure intellectual elevation—and the mechanical arts, based on utilitarian manual labor, was institutionalised in the 17th century by the creation of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture.
But with the progressive rehabilitation of the mechanical arts, this distinction tended to lose its meaning. In the 18th century, the encyclopedist d'Alembert had already proposed a revision of the demotion of the mechanical arts by re-evaluating practical artisanal intelligence.
This philosophical evolution found concrete expression in 1789, when simple manufacturers of everyday objects, such as caps or pencils, found themselves described as artists in French public registers, thus marking the beginnings of the recognition of the applied arts and the first signs of the desacralisation of the so-called liberal arts: painting and sculpture.
1855: Industry Asserts its New Power
Sculpture was the first to be, in a certain sense, assimilated into the industrial arts. At the very first World's Fair organised in London in 1851, the British administration made the primary choice to exclude painting, considered much too autonomous a discipline; conversely, it admitted the exhibition of sculptures—their material dimension implying a physical and direct working of matter through carving or casting, bringing them de facto closer to industrial processes.
French painters were offered the possibility of exhibiting in a separate pavilion, but a lack of subsidies led to the cancellation of their participation. Painting was certainly protected and would not sit adjacent to industrial products, being of a more refined nature, but in return, it vanished from the first great international stage of the 19th century.
In reality, the belt installed since the creation of the Royal Academy between vile trades and noble arts was beginning to crack. Opinions were increasingly divided on the question of the superiority of art, even within the French administration:
The head of the national commission representing French interests at the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition, Léon de Laborde, defended a pragmatic vision. He asserted that the artist acquires a restrictive technical education equivalent to that of the worker! He thus questioned the nobility of a work judged solely on its medium, arguing that a painting executed on industrial enamel requires the same virtuosity as an academic canvas. The discourse was shocking.
Paris 1855: A Cordon Sanitaire is Ensured
Four years later, France orchestrated its own World's Fair with the manifest fear of seeing art absorbed and debased by industrial productivist logic.
The spatial arrangement was thus redesigned to protect the works. The government decided at the very last minute on the construction of an autonomous building, the Palais des Beaux-Arts, in order to maintain a strict physical separation from the Palais de l'Industrie.
Isolation was vital to prevent delicate works, such as the sculpture Phryne by Pradier, from finding themselves in direct visual competition with machines.
Nonetheless, the supremacy of industry made itself felt; the group sculpted by Élias Robert, presiding over the summit of the Palais de l'Industrie, represented an allegory of Industry proudly brandishing a hammer, facing that of Art, retreated into a passive and melancholic posture.
Paris 1867: Spatial Confusion and Cacophony
Industry advanced further.
The World's Fair held in Paris confirmed the disappearance of the protective border that had removed the arts from the encroaching industry.
The organisers opted for a single building with a concentric layout, forcing the Fine Arts public to traverse interminable galleries dedicated to engineering before reaching the heart of the structure reserved for the arts.
The critic Émile Galichon could make the distressing observation that agricultural tools brushed against masterpieces, to say nothing of the deafening roar of the machines which hindered aesthetic contemplation—the whole reminding one of a fairground atmosphere. Art was falling from its pedestal. Sculptures were found among effigies made of soap or chocolate, and paintings were piled up for lack of space.
For the space allocated to the French school was proportionally reduced: while the 1855 edition highlighted more than two thousand works, that of 1867 accommodated barely a thousand, even though the overall exhibition surface was significantly larger.
Furthermore, and contrary to foreign delegations that had installed neat carpets and railings, the French installations proved poorly insufficient and of low quality.
The liberal arts had to bow before the noisy triumph of the fascinating modern mechanical arts.
The Advent of Merchant Modernity
This spatial relegation reflected a mutation: that of the rise of the bourgeoisie and capital, at a time when the State was progressively ceasing to ensure the conditions guaranteeing the independence of the artist. It handed over the keys to the organisation of the Salon solely to the artists in December 1879.
From then on, art fully integrated into the economic circuit, becoming a commodity intended to adorn the residences of this new ruling elite. The Salon itself increasingly resembled a bazaar where marketable products were displayed according to the rules of emerging merchandising.
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