The Impressionist Era

Claude Monet and his friends rejected the neoclassical imagery officially sanctioned by the Second Republic as imperial propaganda, and the academic exercise of drawing plaster casts as fear of reality. They hated working in a dusty atelier and painting in grays and browns that reminded them of mud, or worse. While working outdoors they discovered their real subject: a personal response to the natural world. Realized in distinct brushstokes left separate, not blended together as in academic practice, these paintings responded to how artists believed light and vision actually interact. The paintings' relation to nature was one of analogy, not illusion, and that made it modern and interesting: a reminiscence of the physical world constructed by the same means the artists believed that nature used.

Post-Impressionism

Like software, art may be thought of as a sort of machine that can be changed by those who use it. Already embedded was the strong classical tradition that runs through all European art, enshrining values of order, seriousness, and restraint. By these standards, some contemporaries of Impressionism found it lacking in formal rigor. Paul Cézanne sought to “treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone,” bringing out primal forms inherent in the motif. Paul Gauguin and his followers sought another alternative to Impressionism in remote and picturesque Brittany, using the region as a setting for symbolic works that went beyond narrative allegory and visualized primal spiritual situations, while Vincent van Gogh adapted the Impressionist method to realize his visionary landscapes and portraits.

Rodin

Before becoming Europe's most important sculptor, Auguste Rodin failed the exam for the Prix de Rome three times. Resigning himself to work as a journeyman, he developed his own course of study through enforced independence. During several months in Italy studying Michelangelo's sculptures and drawings, Rodin discovered his essential subject: the human figure as a vessel for spiritual experience, the supreme expressive instrument. Rodin's fans insisted on reading his figures allegorically, and he did not forbid this, but nevertheless avoided literal illustration. His goal was the creation of images general enough to evoke an individual resonance in the viewer through archetypal forms that suggest the result of some inchoate natural process. Their tragic grandeur was his vision of humanity's relation to existence.

Picasso and the Avant-Garde

The adventures of Post-Impressionism taught artists that form could be invented and represented by means other than illusion, so artists began to visualize aspects of experience that would otherwise remain hidden. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque invented a language that tremendously expanded the capacity of artists to change the world instead of passively accepting its appearance. And yet Cubism was no flight from reality, but a research program aimed at redefining it. Other examples of experimental daring include Frantisek Kupka's mystic union of color and form, Henri Matisse's paradise of color, and Surrealism's struggle for psychological insight. The explosion of new styles in painting and writing during the belle époque and the revelation of Cubism fostered an appetite for novelty that accelerated innovation through the 20th century.

Modernism in Northern Europe

At first centered in Paris, the realization that art could transcend literal depiction, that color could be explored for its own sake, and that form could be invented instead of passively accepted exerted a tremendous centripetal force and gave artists of Northern Europe new vocabularies with which to address subjects proper to their chilly homelands. An earnest engagement with social problems characterizes the work of most artists from Holland and Belgium, whereas Piet Mondrian devoted himself to formal inventions that became as influential as the work of Pablo Picasso or Henri Matisse. In Germany and Scandinavia the human figure became the focus of striking expressive strategies, from Lovis Corinth's feverishly expressive impressionistic painting to the bitter incisiveness of Otto Dix. In the British Isles, where the portraits of Harold Gilman and William Orpen responded to post-Impressionist trends, Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore created some of the century's most enduring works of abstractions.