Modern Art

Modern Art

Conflicts between traditional values and new ideas also raged in the arts as artists distanced themselves further from classical Western styles. French painter Paul Cézanne initiated one of the most powerful trends in modern art by using rectangular daubs of paint to portray his geometric vision of dishes, fruit, drapery, and the human body. Cézanne’s art accentuated structure—the lines and planes found in nature—instead of presenting nature as it appeared in everyday life. Following in Cézanne’s footsteps, Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) developed a style called cubism. Its radical emphasis on planes and surfaces converted his models into bizarre, almost unrecognizable forms. Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), for example, depicted the bodies of the demoiselles (“young ladies” or in this case “prostitutes”) as fragmented and angular, with their heads modeled on African masks. Picasso’s work showed the profound influences of African, Asian, and South American arts, but his use of these features was less decorative and more brutal than that of many other modern artists. Like imperialists who recounted their brutal exploits in speeches and memoirs, Picasso brought knowledge of the empire home in a disturbing style that captured the jarring uncertainties of society and politics in these decades.

Across Europe, artists made stylistic changes in their work that incorporated political criticism and even outrage. “Show the people how hideous is their actual life,” anarchists challenged. Picasso, who had spent his youth in working-class Barcelona, a hotbed of anarchist thought, aimed to present the plain truth about industrial society in his art. In 1912, Picasso and French painter Georges Braque devised a new kind of collage that incorporated bits of newspaper stories, string, and various useless objects. The effect was a work of art that appeared to be made of trash. The newspaper clippings Picasso included described battles and murders, suggesting that Western civilization was not as refined as it claimed to be. In eastern and central Europe, artists criticized the boastful nationalism that determined royal purchases of sculpture and painting: “The whole empire is littered with monuments to soldiers and monuments to Kaiser William,” one German artist complained.

Scandinavian and eastern European artists produced works expressing the torment many felt at the time. Like the ideas of Freud, their style of portraying inner feelings—called expressionism—broke with middle-class optimism. Norwegian painter Edvard Munch aimed “to make the emotional mood ring out again as happens on a gramophone.” His painting The Scream (1893), shown in the chapter-opening illustration, used twisting lines and a tortured skeletal human form to convey the horror of modern life that many artists perceived. The Blue Rider group of artists, led by German painter Gabriele Münter and Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, used geometric forms and striking colors to express an inner, spiritual truth. Kandinsky is often credited with producing the first fully abstract paintings around 1909; shapes in these paintings no longer bear any resemblance whatsoever to physical objects or reality but are meant to express deep feelings. The work of expressionists and cubists before World War I was a commercial failure in a marketplace run not only by museum curators but by professional dealers—“experts”—like the professionals in medicine and law.

Only one style of this period, art nouveau (“new art”), was an immediate, commercial success. Designers manufactured everything from dishes, calendars, and advertising posters to streetlamps and even entire buildings in this new style. As one French official said about the first art nouveau coins issued in 1895, “Soon even the most humble among us will be able to have a masterpiece in his pocket.” Adapting elements from Asian design, art nouveau replaced the impersonality of machines with vines and flowers and the softly curving bodies of female nudes intended to soothe the individual viewer. This idea directly contrasted with Picasso’s artistic vision. Art nouveau was the notable exception to public rage at innovations in the visual arts. (See “Seeing History: Outrage and Consumption in Modern Art.”)