Introduction

In 1955, in the A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the French philosopher Étienne Gilson, a member of the Académie Française, presented his analysis of the art of painting. These lectures were published in both English and French in 1958. Early in this discussion, Gilson reflected on the essence of painting:

Art and Globalization

During the twentieth century, the center of the advanced art world shifted from Paris to New York. Yet Paris and New York were not the only places where important innovations were produced. A number of other major cities also served, more briefly, as centers of creative activity.

Throughout the modern era, important artists have originated in diverse places: no one nativity has had a monopoly. During the twentieth century, however, there was a marked increase in the diversity of the geographic origins of innovative artists.

Both the proliferation of artistic centers and the growing number of nationalities represented by important modern artists are important aspects of the globalization of advanced art in the twentieth century. Both are also consequences of the increased diffusion of artistic innovations. Over time, new artistic techniques and styles have spread both more rapidly and more widely than previously. This increased diffusion has in turn been a consequence of the increasingly conceptual nature of advanced art during the past century.

This chapter will provide an overview of how and when the central locations of advanced art changed during the twentieth century. This will be done by surveying some of the key movements. For each, the sources and implications of its principal innovations will be considered.

Introduction

In an essay written for a 1999 exhibition of Rembrandt's self-portraits, the scholar Ernst van de Wetering, professor of art history at the University of Amsterdam and chairman of the Rembrandt Research Project, noted that Rembrandt “had painted himself before the mirror on at least forty occasions, had etched himself thirty-one times, and had made a handful of drawn self-portraits.” On the basis of this enumeration, van de Wetering made a dramatic declaration: “This segment of his oeuvre is unique in art history, not only in its scale and the length of time it spans, but also in its regularity.”

Van de Wetering's striking claim is not even close to being accurate. The scholar Iris Müller-Westermann observed that Edvard Munch “recorded himself in more than seventy painted works and about twenty graphic self-portraits, as well as in more than one hundred watercolors, drawings, and studies; sometimes year by year, at times monthly or even daily.” Munch thus executed considerably more oil portraits of himself than Rembrandt, and Munch's total of more than 190 images of himself in all media was more than double Rembrandt's total of approximately 90. Rembrandt first painted himself at age 20, and continued to do so until near the end of his life at age 63, but this span of 43 years also falls far short of the 62 years that separated Munch's first self-portrait at age 19 from his last at age 81.

Introduction

Important works of art embody important innovations. The most important works of art are those that announce very important innovations.

There is considerable interest in identifying the most important artists, and their most important works, not only among those who study art professionally, but also among a wider public. The distinguished art historian Meyer Schapiro recognized that this is due in large part to the market value of works of art: “The great interest in painting and sculpture (versus poetry) arises precisely from its unique character as art that produces expensive, rare, and speculative commodities.” Schapiro's insight suggests one means of identifying the most important artists, through analysis of prices at public sales. This strategy is less useful in identifying the most important individual works of art, however, for these rarely, if ever, come to market.

An alternative is to survey the judgments of art experts. One way to do this is by analyzing textbooks. The illustrations an author chooses implicitly tell us which works of art he considers most valuable in providing a narrative of the successive innovations that make up the history of art. Surveying a large number of textbooks effectively allows us to poll art historians as to which works are generally considered the most essential to this narrative.

Introduction

The twentieth century was a time of extremely rapid and sustained artistic innovation. One striking feature of this is the increase in the number of kinds of art that occurred during the century. Even casual observers of the art world are aware that some of the most popular forms among contemporary artists, including video and installation, are of recent vintage. Yet although all narratives of the art of the past century discuss many new art forms, none has systematically surveyed these innovations. Doing so shows that dozens of new genres of art were invented during the twentieth century, and reveals some surprisingly strong general characteristics that unite what have usually been considered as widely disparate artistic forms, lacking any overall coherence or commonality. Overall, this survey clarifies our understanding of how and why the art of the twentieth century stands apart from earlier art.

Format

This chapter will present a chronological narrative of forty-nine artistic genres that were invented during the twentieth century. These vary considerably in importance: some are widely used today, while others are rare or extinct. Of the forty-nine genres, twenty-two are contained as entries in the Oxford English Dictionary. Each of these, when first mentioned, will be footnoted to its OED entry; unless noted otherwise, these references will be to the second edition, as reprinted in 1991.

The Accusation

When Edouard Manet exhibited Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe at the Salon des Refusés in 1863, the critic Louis Etienne described the painting as an “unbecoming rebus,” and denounced it as “a young man's practical joke, a shameful open sore not worth exhibiting this way.” Two years later, when Manet's Olympia was shown at the Salon, the critic Félix Jahyer wrote that the painting was indecent, and declared that “I cannot take this painter's intentions seriously.” The critic Ernest Fillonneau claimed this reaction was a common one, for “an epidemic of crazy laughter prevails…in front of the canvases by Manet.” Another critic, Jules Clarétie, described Manet's two paintings at the Salon as “challenges hurled at the public, mockeries or parodies, how can one tell?” In his review of the Salon, the critic Théophile Gautier concluded his condemnation of Manet's paintings by remarking that “Here there is nothing, we are sorry to say, but the desire to attract attention at any price.”

The most decisive rejection of these charges against Manet was made in a series of articles published in 1866–67 by the young critic and writer Emile Zola. Zola began by declaring that those who laughed at Manet were fools: “There isn't the least thing laughable in all this. There is only a sincere artist following his own bent.”

Making it New

It has long been recognized that innovation is the core value of modern art. In 1952, for example, the critic Harold Rosenberg could remark that “the only thing that counts for Modern Art is that a work shall be NEW.” The recognition of this association first arose roughly a century earlier. In 1855, Charles Baudelaire, the poet and critic who was one of the earliest prophets of modern art, observed that the growing acceptance of change in nineteenth-century society would inevitably have an impact on artists' practices. He reasoned that the widespread appreciation of the great economic benefits of technological change in industry would lead to a demand for visible progress in all spheres, including art. In a celebrated essay published in 1863, “The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire proposed no less than a new “rational and historical theory of beauty,” that explained why artistic change must occur. He posited that although beauty did have “an eternal, invariant element,” it also had a “relative, circumstantial element,” that represented the contemporary – “the age, its fashions, its morals, its emotions.”

Introduction

Recent decades have witnessed an intense interest in the role of women in the art of the past. Scores of museum exhibitions have been devoted to the work of women artists, and scores of monographs have examined the contributions of women to our artistic heritage.

As is common in the humanities, however, the scholarly attention devoted to the role of women artists has been qualitative rather than quantitative. As a result, we now have a large amount of scholarship that analyzes the contributions of individual women artists, or of particular groups of women artists, but we do not have studies that provide systematic evaluation of the relative importance of different women artists. This chapter will begin to remedy this deficiency.

Specifically, this chapter will investigate the question of which women made the greatest contributions to art during the past century. Women played a far greater role in the art of the twentieth century than in any earlier time. So for example the third edition of Nancy Heller's Women Artists, published in 1997, a textbook written “to provide a richly illustrated overview of some of the most interesting professional women painters and sculptors in the Western world, from the Renaissance to the present,” devotes fully 144 pages to the twentieth century, substantially more than the total of only 97 pages devoted to all earlier centuries. This concentration is a product of the fact that the twentieth century witnessed, in Heller's words, “a profusion of women artists.”

Breakthroughs

The true subject of art history is the narrative and analysis of the succession of innovations that have changed the practices of artists over the course of time. This is a source of considerable confusion not only among the public at large, but even among many art scholars, for there is a persistent belief that art history is the story of the lives of great artists. However widespread, this belief is mistaken. Artists' contributions to their discipline do not consist of their entire body of work, but rather only that part of it that embodies inventions that are subsequently deemed useful by other artists. The chief curator of painting and sculpture at New York's Museum of Modern Art, perhaps the world's preeminent museum of twentieth-century art, recently expressed this succinctly in explaining the mission of his institution: “MOMA is a museum interested in telling the story of successive innovations rather than a museum interested in the longevity of individual careers.” Scholarly surveys follow this same model, as for example in the statement that opens the preface to their recent textbook, Art Since 1900, Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin Buchloh declare not that their work is arranged around the careers of artists, but rather that “This book is organized as a succession of important events, each keyed to an appropriate date, and can thus be read as a chronological account of twentieth-century art.”

During my last semester in college, I took a course on the history of modern art. I loved it; what I learned has increased the pleasure I have gotten ever since from visiting museums and art galleries. When I took that course, however, I never imagined that more than three decades later I would write a book that would provide a very different analysis of the art of the twentieth century.

I still have the textbook from my college course, George Heard Hamilton's excellent Painting and Sculpture in Europe, 1880–1940. It began with a clear statement of the problem to be explored, which I dutifully underlined:

The book's cover illustrated what Hamilton called the “watershed between the old pictorial world and the new,” Picasso's jarring painting of 1907, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

Hamilton's book, and the professor's lectures, provided a detailed narrative of the shift from an art that represented the natural world to one that recorded the artist's ideas and emotions.

Introduction

A distinctive feature of visual art in the twentieth century is its use of language. Words had appeared in paintings and sculptures since classical times, but their use was generally restricted to a few specific functions. From an early date, inscriptions served religious purposes, identifying the protagonists in a biblical scene or referring to a relevant biblical text. Artists' signatures identified the person responsible for a work, and dates were often included to specify when a work was completed. And artists sometimes included the title of a painting within the work's image. In the early twentieth century, however, some artists began using language in their works for very different reasons. Over time this practice spread, as words and even sentences became more conspicuous in a number of artists' work. Eventually, in some cases language became more important than images, and for some artists words replaced images altogether.

The introduction of language into art for new purposes is a symptom of the increasingly conceptual nature of visual art during the twentieth century. The increasing acceptance of the use of language equally became an independent factor fueling the conceptual orientation of art, for the possibility of using language appealed to many young artists with conceptual goals: the example of important visual artists whose work featured language helped make visual art an attractive activity for many conceptually oriented artists, and provided them with points of departure for new conceptual innovations.

Introduction

Important artists are innovators: they are important because they change the way their successors work. The more widespread, and the more profound, the changes due to the work of any artist, the greater is the importance of that artist.

Recognizing the source of artistic importance points to a method of measuring it. Surveys of art history are narratives of the contributions of individual artists. These narratives describe and explain the changes that have occurred over time in artists' practices. It follows that the importance of an artist can be measured by the attention to his work in these narratives. The most important artists, whose contributions fundamentally change the course of their discipline, cannot be omitted from any such narrative, and their innovations must be analyzed at length; less important artists can either be included or excluded, depending on the length of the specific narrative treatment and the tastes of the author, and if they are included their contributions can be treated more summarily. The judgments of different authors can of course differ. Surveying a large number of narratives can reduce the impact of idiosyncratic opinions, and serves to reveal the general consensus of expert opinion as to the relative importance of the artists considered.

The title immortalized by Monty Python has three distinct meanings in the present context. Most generally, it is a remarkably apt description of the history of visual art in the twentieth century. Innovation has always been the distinguishing feature of important art, but the need for innovation to be conspicuous is a particular hallmark of the modern era, and the pace of change has accelerated within that era. For example the critic Clement Greenberg observed in 1968 that “Until the middle of the last century innovation in Western art had not had to be startling or upsetting; since then…it has had to be that.” Only a year earlier, a critic of very different sensibility, Lucy Lippard, wrote that “Today movements are just that; they have no time to stagnate before they are replaced…Younger critics and artists have matured in a period accustomed to rapid change.” The twentieth century witnessed artistic changes that had no precedent in the history of our civilization, and it is now time to recognize the century as the Age of Something Completely Different.

The Monty Python effect also neatly characterizes a new model of artistic behavior that was invented early in the twentieth century, and went on to thrive over time.