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"Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation." (Angela Davis, Women, Culture, and Politics, 'Art on the Frontline', 1985)
The Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution combined to create an atmosphere of change. The rise of liberal capitalism and democracy shatters the old order and establishes new politics and ideologies, dismantling old aristocracies, old beliefs, and old expectations. The crumbling of the social order also dismantles the old culture. Deeply shaken, established artists allied themselves with the remnants of the old order in churches or salons. A new class of artists emerged whose allegiance was to the art itself. Covens of artists collected in cafes and saloons where they generated theoretical visions for new art.
The Left wing has long encouraged these artists and artists have often allied themselves with 'Progressive' notions, however the marriage of the two has remained fairly sterile. Modern art is linked intimately with the Progressive avante-garde who hoped to be leaders of social change. Occasionally artists allied themselves with political revolutionaries, but usually at the cost of their association with leading artist circles, (Crane, 1987, pg.140). Art rarely produced good propaganda, (Rosenberg, 1964, pp.137-143). Revolution in the modern art world has tended to remain confined to aesthetics and cultural issues.
Culturally, artists were in the thick of change. Courbet and other artists began to successfully upset the viewing public, and, proving the integrity of their argument, open the door to further aesthetic revolutions. Artists as cultural revolutionaries (the avante-garde) set the tone for Modern art. While the avante-garde artists often held radical political views, they were willing to sublimate them in favor of their commitment to unconventional aesthetic values. In other words, their art came before politics, (Crane, 1987, pg.42).
When Gustave Courbet's work and his realist theories were attacked by the Right, Courbet relished the opportunity it gave him to espouse himself all the more, (Myers, 1967, pg.346). While his paintings and what he had to say about them fades in significance, (Hughes, 1980, pp.368-371), his outspokenness and willingness to shock the public with his 'Realism' makes him significant. He was living in the time of the Paris Commune of 1848, and fully believed in his own importance. The more that was said about him, positive or negative, the greater swelled his ego. He was delighted by the controversy which surrounded him. "My painting is the only true one," he declared, "I am the first and unique artist of this century. The others are students and drivellers." (Hughes, 1980, pg.369).
As an artist, Courbet was pronouncing his independence from all previous social bonds that held for the artist. While his liberation is not a singular event, for painters, Courbet was the most flamboyant of the early avante-garde. His high visibility makes him more than the father of 'Realism', but also the father of the avante-garde itself. The impressionist who followed were very consciously revolutionary.
The concept of revolution has never strayed very far from Modern art. Revolution comes in several stripes. Herbert Spencer published his Principles of Psychology in 1855, the same year that Courbet finished his painting 'The Studio' that shocked Paris by its banal allegory in monumental size (12' tall by 20' wide). Only seven years earlier, 1848, The Communist Manifesto was published, and the Paris Commune brought down Louis Phillipe, bringing Napoleon to power. Courbet stood in the capital of a revolutionary whirlwind. While Courbet's technique was still entrenched in tradition, he tantalized the public in a new way. 'The Studio' called into question contemporary notions of what was proper subject matter, or more provocatively, what is heroic stature. Unlike the socialists of the Paris Commune, Courbet was questioning the viewer's assumptions.
Courbet's puffery aside, he had exposed a cultural nerve. Like it or not, the grand epics of history, the stories of noble victory or tragedy, were becoming superfluous to a society caught in industrial transformation. Nobility was losing all significance in the new politics of industry. By focusing his sights on the small and insignificant, Courbet gave a naughty wink and skipped away from the hollow shell of a dying age. Spirituality in France had declined to a very low ebb. Protestant reformers, the Huguenots, had been brutally suppressed, while the Roman church was so intertwined with the monarchy that scores of priests and nuns were led to the guillotine during the French revolution. Courbet was pointing out flowers sprouting up in a fire ravaged landscape.
Courbet's independence as an artist is further capitalized on by the Impressionists. "Never before in history have artists been so isolated from society and from official sources of patronage as were the so-called Impressionists. Their sensuous approach to landscape through the medium of colour seems to have no connection with the intellectual currents of the time." (Clark, 1969, pg.341). While the patronized art continued with little change, in their isolation, the Impressionists were free to carry out bold experiments in aesthetics. Monet, Cezanne and Van Gogh, inspired by the aesthetics of Realism, were free to try new color theories and test new pigments. Of the three, only Cezanne remained in Paris. Monet and Van Gogh retired to the countryside to paint. Their isolation protected them from public criticism.
The Impressionists completely divorced art from any political, spiritual or religious roots. By choosing mundane everyday subject matter, itself a political statement of diffidence, Impressionist painters toyed with atmospheres and techniques. Impressionist paintings are about painting. Impressionism takes no interest in politics or religion. Impressionism is not sentimental. It is as if the subject matter where the most uninteresting snapshots of life.
When the Impressionists did broach their isolation, they had crystalized many earlier experiments in a startling new ways. "Their eight cooperative exhibitions, held between 1874 and 1886, usually irritated the public. But their technique was actually less radical than it seemed at the time; in certain respects they were merely developing the color theories of Leonardo and the actual practice of Rubens, Constable, Turner, and Delacroix." (Gardner, 1959, pg.662). The impact of the Impressionist's paintings was nothing like that of Rubens or Delacroix, the saturated colors were so prominent as to startle the unprepared viewer. The choppy strokes of brilliant color, common to Rubens and Delacroix, made all the more obvious by the subdued subject matter of Realism suddenly rushed to the surface. The bland subject matter faded in brilliant impressionistic atmospheres.
The concept of the Avante-Garde was coming of age. The artists were now clearly independent and capable of taking a leading role in re-defining aesthetics. But, could new aesthetics re-define culture? To quote Hughes, "The idea of a fusion between radical art and radical politics, of art as a direct means of social subversion and reconstruction has haunted the Avante-Garde since Courbet's time." (Hughes, 1980, pg.371). In fairness to the Avante-Garde few artists have been comfortable with radical politics. While the political left is arguing for structural change, the artist is engaging the individual through the senses. Outside of blatant propagandistic 'art', there is no attempt to analyse or engage the political structure. The revolution in the arts being first of all one of aesthetics, modern art is built on a string of changes in the way we see art; subsequently, in the hopes of many in the artistic community, the way we see the world.
The Impressionists perfected Courbet's Bohemian diffidence into an art form in and of itself. By retiring from the cultural circle and cultural style in opposition to contemporary trends, they established an archetype of reclusiveness, which Tom Wolfe lovingly dubs the 'boho dance', (Wolfe, 1975, pg.19). He likens this to a brief dance craze called the Apache dance, where the female alternately stamps about wildly or feigns indifference, always enticing the male, while resisting his every advance. The dance builds in passionate fury until the female submits in one last crescendo of ecstasy. So the artist retires to Bohemian purity, but continues to wave the red banner of aesthetic superiority before the bulls of culture. They almost always eventually come in the door and claim their prize, an invitation to all the best dinner parties and a prominent place in the discussions of the day. The history of modern art is a history of Bohemian invasions of the meccas of art.
In painting and sculpture, there is also powerful trend away from social or political engagement, but at the same time an intense desire to be revolutionary. This continued from the time of Courbet until it seemed to collapse of exhaustion lacking any further fuel to burn. For Courbet, in particular, it appears that he has two mules hitched to opposite ends of the wagon. On the one hand, he was eschewing the tradition of painting honored events and legends from the culture's archive and withdrew from the honored myths. He was renowned for his paintings of working people and mundane events. On the other hand, his painting 'The Studio', although a painting of historical figures known to him, represents a fanciful event chock full of allegories and innuendoes. He was still painting in a traditional way, but turned and facing a different direction. Courbet, although a socialist, never tried to use his art for socialist propaganda. The Impressionists retired from painting meaningful events altogether, preferring to paint atmospheres. They purported to be uninterested in la condition humanaine, (Levey, pg.290). As artists, they were concerned with the way we see things, not what we see. Many of the Modern figurative painters express a similar disposition to withdraw and deal strictly with technical aspects of visualization and aesthetic representation, (Crane 1987, pg.94).
In America, the Abstract Expressionist felt they were being ignored by the public. Sociologist Diana Crane: "Critics often characterized these artists as 'manque' religious men, 'seers,' and myth-makers." (Crane, 1987, pg.48). Their painting attempted to shut out the exterior world entirely, allowing only the interior world to be expressed in their paintings, (Crane, 1987, pp.47-52). Barnett Newman painted large canvases of monotone color with perhaps a stripe or two of another color breaking the flatness. According to the critics, "the colour is not used to overwhelm the senses, so much as in its curious muteness and dumbness, to shock the mind," (Lucie-Smith, 1969, pg.103, quoting Max Kozoloff). The expressionist artists were trying to speak to the human soul directly.
The Minimalists went a step further, shutting out both aesthetic and social values. Minimalist Tadaaki Kuwayuma expresses it, "Ideas, thoughts, philosophy, reasons, meanings, even the humanity of the artist, do not enter into my work at all. There is only the art itself. That is all." (Crane, 1987, pg.53).
Duchamp turns against the aesthetic tradition itself. He wanted to "burn up all aesthetics" (Lipsey, 1988, pg.108). Inspired by his Dada-esk antics, composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham poked fun at the traditions of high art, (Crane, 1987, pg.65). Several artists began to create 'Happenings' to force confrontation with "manic transformations" of ordinary everyday objects, (Crane, 1987, pp.66-71).
Merchandising, itself, was the favorite theme of Pop painters. Andy Warhol's multiple images of Marilyn Monroe, Cambell's soup cans, or Coke bottles represented a stripping away of all pretensions until the image just is. Warhol makes no attempt to sharpen or clarify the image. In fact, his portraits are typically grainy, posterized silk screen taken from snapshots. While Pop dealt with the artifacts of culture, Pattern painters and Neo-Expressionists focus on themes of mass media: violence, explicate sexuality, and romance, (Crane,1987, pp.73-74).
Finally, "In the sixties and seventies, criticism militated on two fronts against styles that were based on continuity instead of rupture with an existing tradition. The term 'radical' vied with 'advanced' as the greatest accolade in the critic's vocabulary." (Rose, 1988, pg.277). Gradually, however, the fire cooled. Crane suggests, "While the Neo-Expressionists desired a larger audience that the prototypical avante-garde artist had ever sought, they were for the most part, not aiming to challenge the public's preconceptions." (Crane, 1987, pg.75). Leading artists, if they can still be called an avante-garde, have changed from setting trends in culture to following trends in popular culture, (Crane, pp.76-77). As one Neo-Expressionist artist puts it, "I don't feel responsibility to have a vision." (Crane, pg.82). This must be in part attributed to the commercialization of the art market itself. The contemporary artist is trying desperately to sell themself to the largest market possible.
In this century, the artist has left his dwellings along the fringes of the bourgeois and, particularly in America, becomes fully integrated into the middle-class society. Many artists have successful teaching careers. There are few starving artists these days. The result is that art is drawing away from rebellion and becoming normalized as a professional activity. The role of artist as social critic is almost entirely gone, leaving only the artist as aesthetic innovator, (Crane, 1987, pg.45).
The Modern and Post-Modern worlds greatly empowered the unrestrained practice of art. Today, art that is shocking or revolutionary seems ordinary. Are there any more revolutions possible? This century in the arts has seen nudity, sex, blank or monotone canvases, music created by tossing beans, self-immolation, chain saws and meat, and on and on. Are there any further revolutions to be pursued down these alleys? My college art class (1973) tried in vain to discuss the aesthetics of a spaghetti dinner tossed in a jar and brought in as an art project. Like the emperor's clothing, no one wants to suggest that the 'art' itself has evaporated for fear of becoming marginalized. If no cogent aesthetic statement is being made, why should a piece be given so much benefit of doubt? Do we so greatly fear the undiscovered artifact that we cannot bear to discard the trash?
Edward Lucie-Smith, in his book Late Modern, criticizes Picasso's later works, accusing the painter of being "unable to work except with previously 'cooked' ingredients." (1969, pg.54). Unfortunately, it is the nature of revolution to exist within a window of opportunity. Like invention, when the cat's out of the bag, the cat is out of the bag. "Increasing permissiveness has created a state of desperation in the minds of artists whose principal tactic for engagement has been shock." (Rose, 1988, pg.261).
"The position of the artist as a kind of favoured outcast in our society creates many difficulties for us in our attempt to define his role. Perhaps the most logical way of dealing with it is to adopt the existentialist position and see the man who makes art as one offers a challenge to the rest of society and at the same time accepts a kind of bet with existence. ...Though existentialism was the most popular of philosophies in the immediate post-war period, it cannot be said that the artists themselves have succeeded in fulfilling it programs. What existentialism did do, however, was to promote a general feeling that man was alone in the world, was now detached from all systems of belief, and that the creator must find his salvation in art alone, reinventing it from the very beginning. Hence the somewhat tendentious emphasis on the idea of 'originality'—the artist was willing to have descendants, but not ancestors, and was, to an extent at least, as subjective as Sartre could have wished." (Lucie-Smith, 1969, pg.10).
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