On the Terrace Pierre-Auguste Renoir

This is a reader question from Lisa, which I received last week:

I took my kids to  an art show just for young people last week. It was supposed to get them excited about classic works of art. The question my kids had (which the lady who was giving the talk couldn’t answer) was what is up with modern art? Why does it look like that? I think Monet and Renoir are kind of pretty, but even they weren’t drawing the way people always used to paint. The lady said, “Oh, it’s just a different style” and went on to talk about different art movements in the last 150 years. I can’t get away from it though. I was assuming you might know if there was a specific reason why art changed so much in the mid 1800s. If so, please share with the rest of the class. LOL.

Hi Lisa. Well, you are correct! More correct than the lady from that museum…blech. Sure, they were part of a new movement in art, but what caused the movement itself? It didn’t just happen.

Let’s go back a bit. When we are learning Art History, it is so very important to keep in mind what is going on in the history of the world, and the history of inventions. What is going on around us will affect art. This makes sense, when you think about it.

In this case, not only where there massive changes in philosophy going on (including, on the religious front, the rise of textural criticism and Darwin publishing On the Origin of Species ), which caused societal changes and some cynicism about traditional things. On the invention front, there was a HUGE invention that caused realistic paintings to become virtually obsolete for practical purposes. That invention was the camera.

An invention called the Camera Obscura had been around in different forms since around 1000 AD (we think). They were different from modern cameras because they were room sized, and the pictures weren’t permanent — you had to trace over them. In the mid to late 1800s a variety of people nearly simultaneously began to experiment with the concept of film and making permanent photographs from cameras using paper or celluloid film (including George Eastman who invented the Kodak around 1875).

With this more portable, and less expensive picture taking method, painting accurate portraiture was no longer the bread and butter of your average artist, whereas before, that is how they made most of their money. Artists began to experiment with doing things that photographs and photographers simply couldn’t do. Instead of just accurately displaying a picture of  a person or scene, they worked on conveying the mood, the emotions, the feeling, the impression of the scene, using color, brush strokes, and so forth. Before this, you were considered an amazing artist if you can’t detect brush strokes in a painting. If you ever get to see a Rembrandt up close, have a very close look at it. He was a master at this.  On the other hand, Monet, Renoir, and Van Gogh’s paintings (among others) are beautiful BECAUSE of their bold, visible brush strokes adding a sense of mood and movement to the painting.

The artwork of the first modern artists (the impressionists) would not have been very well know, except that they were exhibited together in a show called the Salon of the Refused, after all of their works were rejected by France’s annual national art show. Napoleon III wanted the people to judge the works, but this backfired when the Salon of the Refused attracted more visitors than the regular salon of traditional artwork.

After the Impressionists made it okay for artists to break the rules, other art movements emerged in different decades. Many of the art movements were affected, naturally, but what was going on in the world. The fascination with tribal cultures heavily influenced men like Cezanne.  The cynicism of life after World War 1 (which people thought would be a bloodless war fought with machines) led to the emergence of the Dada group. The emergence of Freud’s teachings and an interest in dreams heavily influenced the Surrealist movement and men like Salvador Dali. The Jugendstil or Art Nouveau movement was birthed out of a renewed interest in classical Roman and Greek culture,  mixed with the emergence of print advertising (this is my favorite art movement by the way).  Photorealism was a sort of rebellion against modern art, trying to recapture the techniques of super-realistic paintings with barely any visible brush strokes. The idea behind these Photorealistic paintings was to cause the viewer to look closely at them and wonder….is it a photo or a painting?

The really start of modern art though was the changes brought about with the emergence of photography.