How Modern Art Began
By: Christopher P Jones
Tags: Art, Culture, Artist, Painting, Art History

Degas painted his image of the circus acrobat at a time when an enormous revolution in media was taking place. Photography, cinema, radio and sound recording began to enter the public arena in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The response of artists was to learn from these forms and also to try to do something they could not.

First and foremost, artists were freed from the arduous task of constantly having to represent reality with evermore more naturalism, which had been treated as one of the primary goals of art from the Renaissance onward. If you could take a photograph of a person or a place, then what was the point in spending hours and hours painting a convincing likeness? Not every artist felt this way, but enough did to begin to affect a change in the value of realistic painting. Artists began to see that photographs and film captured fleeting moments in time. They could do the same, only in paint the effect would be different.

Haystack, Morning Snow Effect (1891) by Claude Monet. Image source Wikimedia Commons

To get a sense of what this all means, take the example of Claude Monet. In the summer, winter and following spring of 1890–91, Monet made a series of paintings of haystacks. In a sense, the subject matter was irreverent. What excited him was the prospect of capturing different light effects upon the same subject as weather and lighting conditions changed.

Monet’s works are not at all like photographs. The brushwork is loose and the paint is thickly applied. Elements in the picture blend into each other. Colour and texture are treated as the main elements of interest in the painting. Just look at the way the nearside of the haystack is painted, how Monet has used large amounts of purple (in the upper triangular part) to suggest shadow; indeed, how much purple and blue there is across the whole painting to bring to life the “atmosphere” of a winter’s day.

Monet established a daily routine of bringing several canvases with him to the field (the haystacks belonged to a neighbour, a farmer by the name of Monsieur Quéruel) and working on whichever half-finished painting most closely resembled the scene at that moment. This fleeting, impromptu style of painting went against the popular vision of worthy art at the time, which saw large-scale paintings of classical history, mythology or Biblical stories — so-called “history paintings” — as the most noble. Monet worked in a manner that was seen as scandalous at the time. Many critics complained that there was no draughtsmanship in the paintings, no subject, no content.

What these critics failed to see was that Monet was working towards a completely new set of aesthetic values. Realistic depiction was steadily being replaced with an overt interest in effects: the effects of light and the way paint could be applied in dabs and dashes to achieve a resonating quality.

Mont Sainte-Victoire (1902–1904) by Paul Cezanne. Source Wikimedia Commons

The same interest in the effects of paint can be seen in the work of the Post-Impressionist artist Paul Cézanne.

Like Monet, Cezanne often painted the same subject many times. One such subject was the view of Mount Sainte-Victoire in his native Provence. In the version shown here, you can see how Cezanne used blocks of faceted paint to represent the forms of the landscape.

The sky, for instance, is made up of simple overlapping tiles of colour that vary in tone to give a rough, patchwork feel. The same patchwork is continued through the mountain and landscape, with fractional more contrast in tones and only a few crude brush marks used to delineate the outline of the land itself. As a painting, works like this pointed the way for later artists to employ abstract forms to evolve the language of art, to find tactile and unified expressions of painted form to stand for life as lived through all of the senses.

As art entered the 20th century, European artists became increasingly aware of the potential for the “formal” qualities of images — in other words, the colours, textures and composition, as opposed to the subject matter — to become the main focus of their work. The traditional sources of art, be it the Bible or Classical texts, was being left behind.

Composition 6 (1913) by Wassily Kandinsky. Oil on canvas. Hermitage Museum, St Petersberg. Image source Wikimedia Commons

Several artists began to refer to music as a way to explain the new emphasis. They hoped to use colours and forms to produce a purer form of art, rather like composers use notes and rhythm to make music. The Russian-born painter Wassily Kandinsky was one of the strongest voices to draw the analogy: “Colour directly influences the soul. Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposively, to cause vibrations in the soul.”

As well as music, artists began to consider the virtues of hitherto marginalised art forms, such as folk art and prehistoric art. “Exotic” art forms also became of interest: Japanese woodcuts, tribal art from Africa and the Americas, along with Persian and Indian painting.

Take Pablo Picasso, for instance, who in 1907 had been living in Paris for three years. He was working at a time when numerous European countries — France included — were expanding their imperial reach. As colonies in Sub-Saharan Africa were established, so African artworks were being brought back to Parisian museums to be gazed at and pondered over.

In that year, Picasso made a visit to Musée d’Ethnographie du Tocadéro (Trocadero Museum of Ethnology) where a collection of tribal masks captivated his attention. The images he saw that day would have a decisive effect on his art. Picasso said of the visit:

“A smell of mold and neglect caught me by the throat. I was so depressed that I would have chosen to leave immediately. But I forced myself to stay, to examine these masks, all these objects that people had created with a sacred, magical purpose, to serve as intermediaries between them and the unknown, hostile forces surrounding them, attempting in that way to overcome their fears by giving them color and form. And then I understood what painting really meant. It’s not an aesthetic process; it’s a form of magic that interposes itself between us and the hostile universe, a means of seizing power by imposing a form on our terrors as well as on our desires. The day I understood that, I had found my path.”

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, by Pablo Picasso (1907). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Source Wikimedia Commons

One of the best descriptions of the new theory of art was written by the Swiss-born painter Paul Klee. In his book On Modern Art (1924), Klee gave his clearest distillation of the creative process as he saw it. To do so, he used an image of a tree as a metaphor.

Ad Parnassum (1932) by Paul Klee. Tempera on linen. Kunstmuseum Basel. Source Wikimedia Commons

The over-arching notion was that when an artist makes their work, they exert a modifying effect on the world around them: that is, they gather and pass on what comes from the depths, as Klee put it.

Following the metaphor of the tree, the roots of are like the artist’s senses, taking in nutrients from their environment. “From the root the sap flows to the artist, flows through him, flows to his eyes.”

The artist is like the trunk of the tree. The crown of the tree is therefore the ultimate outcome, the work itself: “In full view of the world, the crown of the tree unfolds and spreads in time and in space, so with his work.”

Klee’s metaphor of a tree is a potent one, not least because it transfers the value of art away from public judgements of skill and nobility, and onto the personal effort of finding expression for inner thoughts.