Zoë Wray
Mrs. Chow
AP English Language and Composition
14 March 2011
The History of Modern Art: A Chain of Paintbrushes
To the majority of the general public, modern art seems utterly incomprehensible. What
possible meaning can one derive from the enormous, splattered canvases of Jackson Pollock, or
the random, frantic scattering of lines and colors in paintings by Wasily Kandinsky? When one
compares artists like these to the artists of the Renaissance, there are no apparent common
threads; art history becomes an obscure mystery, left up to the dogged research and explanation
of art historians with PhDs. However, anyone can achieve the understanding and appreciation of
art from all time periods, even the wacky, seemingly convoluted art of today, and find enjoyment
in art that offers more than just a pretty picture.
Acknowledgement of the importance of art is vital to understanding the development of
human nature, values, and culture throughout the ages. Art conveys the deep truths of humanity
that cannot be explained in any other medium. It is a universal language of the visual, and
because it does not require translation, its full, intended meaning is never lost, something that
prohibits writing from its full potential once translation is necessary. Because art has this power
as a universal human language, we as citizens of humanity have a responsibility and a need to
commit ourselves to being able to understand this language. If we truly desire a connection that
brings peace between all peoples and cultures, art is the crucial vehicle we must be willing to
understand and operate to reach the end of ignorance; as with general history, art history gives us
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the background knowledge and strong foundation that allows us to informatively judge and
comprehend the world of today with its culture, values, society, and, most importantly, its art.
Kirk Varnedoe (1946-2003), an American art historian from Savannah, Georgia, found
interest in art from an early age. He had an aptitude for painting and sketching, his caricatures
dotting the pages of his Delaware preparatory school yearbook consistently. His Williams
College professor Lane Faison Jr. piqued his interest in art history, where he felt “encouraged to
believe that you should look hard at paintings and that what you had to say about them would be
worthwhile” (Kimmelman). After earning his graduate degree at Stanford University and
mounting his first exhibition of Rodin drawings at the National Gallery of Art, Varnedoe
proceeded to teaching at Columbia University and the Institute of Fine Arts. While teaching, his
lectures always attracted large crowds of students and the public; his oratory skills made them
“astonishingly fluent, easy and organized in perfectly formed, complex paragraphs that seemed
to flow naturally and without hesitation” (Kimmelman). He co-curated the exhibit “Primitivism”
in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern with William Rubins in 1984 at the
Museum of Modern Art; that same year, he won one of the Macarthur Fellowship Foundation’s
“genius” prizes, a grant that he used to write his study A Fine Disregard: What Makes Modern
Art Modern.
Varnedoe begins the study with an introduction containing an anecdote seemingly
disparate to his thesis on the life of modern art. He describes the inscription on a stone
commemorating the father of rugby, William Webb Ellis. The stone eulogizes Ellis who, with “a
fine disregard for the rules of football as played in his time, first took the ball in his arms and ran
with it, thus originating the distinctive feature of the Rugby game” (9). With these humble
origins, the game has since evolved into a popular pastime in several countries. So too, Varnedoe
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argues, did modern art blossom into the profound and often cryptic appearance it assumes today.
He believes that art transformed and continues to transform in an evolutionary manner:
The record of its history so far—the succession of fault lines and fissures, the mix of
extinctions and expansions of new family trees…is a powerful demonstration of the
creative force of contingency—the interaction of multiple mutations with special
environments that started with a few basic reshufflings of the existing gene pool (21).
Furthermore, art was not “a freshly clever form of oblique social reporting” (17). Varnedoe
disagrees with those who say that art movements represent strict rejections of past art
movements, or that any era of art-making created completely original forms that cannot be traced
to art ancestors. The majority of artists were innovative geniuses who took the old and mixed it
into a cauldron with their own ideas to make a new concoction that made art with deeper, more
moving truths and revelations for the visual delight of the viewer. “A prime intention of this
book is to honor those exploits…it has been the product of individual decisions to reconsider the
complex possibilities within the traditions available to them, and to act on basic options that
were, and remain, broadly available and unconcealed” (22). Varnedoe’s devotion to art, and
particularly artists, is clear; in them he saw an intrinsic value, and his goal is to show the world
the creative, profound souls lying behind the stereotypical insanity and idiosyncrasies so
common in artists.
The majority of art historians agree on the broad categories that characterize modern art,
such as primitivism and distortions of perspective commonly referred to as “The Road to
Flatness” (Varnedoe 25). What comes into dispute, however, is the significance and exigencies
of these movements, as well as how modern art as a whole came to be. Modern art formed just as
every other art era formed, in a process very similar to biological evolution and the way that eras
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of scientific discoveries happen. Art movements are not a result of artists purposely changing
their styles to make political statements or some other overtly direct cause. Artists, whether they
lived during the Industrial Revolution in Paris, post-World War II Germany, or 1950s America,
responded to changes in their environments and changes in culture. They used the tools provided
as a result of those changes or materials that past artists neglected to produce something
innovative, original, and aesthetically moving. The primary goal of all excellent artwork is to
achieve a harmonious, emotionally stirring unity of light, line, color and space. The means to
attain this unity change as time progresses.
The evidence for this kind of development of art lies in the paintings themselves. If one
considers an artwork by itself, without relation to any “message” it may preach, glimpses of
influence from forbearing artists emerge, patterns and artistic elements that retroactively echo the
past appear, and a genealogy of art ingredients materializes. This approach to analyzing artwork
fits many more paintings and sculpture than the opposite approach, by a rote cataloging of
artworks under war protests, rebellions against governments, or even absolute rejection of other
past or present artists’ works. If we take the former approach with Henri Matisse’s (1869-1954)
“The Red Studio,” we can see how he used ordinary materials and reminiscences of past art to
create an original, energetic and lively composition. The painting simultaneously evokes spatial
depth and flatness, reflecting the transition from classical art, which realistically produced depth,
to modern art, which eliminated that optical depth. This brings the painting and its elements right
into the viewer’s face, and the comfort that accompanies personal space is thus lost. Throughout
the studio depicted in the painting, several other canvases and sculptures hang or sit, as tributes
to Matisse’s curvilinear, swirling nudes for which he was known. Matisse borrowed from
himself and from the ocean of truths and feelings artists have pulled from before to express ideas
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and feelings in an original creation of his own. Instead of painting his studio with showers of
light streaming through a window, including himself in the painting ardently at work, and
creating motion and energy through broad brushstrokes, Matisse instead delineates his studio
from others with abstractions of his nudes and an open box of crayons in the foreground. Instead
of sunlight providing the joyous effect and affection he has for his studio, Matisse lets an intense,
juicy red pervade the entire canvas, saturating it and drawing the viewer in with its conflict of
flatness and depth that intrigues the curious mind. Matisse’s colors influenced subsequent artists
such as the Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko (1903-1970), whose late works consisted of
similarly rich blocks of color that soaked up the canvas and were mostly flat; but one could also
argue that they have depth with their profound and penetrating intensity, which beckons viewers
to dwell on the painting and discern its meaning.
This “Road to Flatness” represented the transition from optically perceived depth in
paintings to “psychological depth” which translated into flatness on the canvas, according to art
historian David Joselit in his essay "Notes on Surface: toward a genealogy of flatness.” Joselit
asserts that this psychological depth in modern art was not rejected in later art with even more
abstract and ambiguous compositions, but that instead it explored and intensified psychological
depth even further, making much less room for arbitrary associations with subject matter in
paintings as well as a prompt for the discussion of stereotypes in art (Joselit 20). Experimentation
with color and line, such as that seen in Paul Signac’s (1863-1935) pointillist technique in “The
Harbor at Marseilles” is thus a precursor to a messy application of pointillism in Claude Monet’s
(1840-1926) “The Japanese Bridge.” In “The Japanese Bridge,” it is nearly impossible to discern
the subject, thus forcing the viewer to consider the painting only aesthetically and to not make
superficial judgments based on subject matter.
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Art viewed in this manner not only more accurately portrays its significance through the
ages than labeling it with certain social platitudes would, but also gives it a more poignant
satisfaction. Primitivism, a component of modern art that historians often politicize in the context
of European imperialism, is likewise more pacifying if studied in the praxis of aesthetics instead
of politics. When European countries took their claims over the majority of Africa and parts of
the Orient, the surfacing of what is known as “primitive art” in European artists was attributed to
their glamorization and romantic perspective of exotic peoples and their dismay at the atrocities
government leaders committed against these helpless victims, who were so beautifully in tune
with nature and its beauty. Such a critic is Patricia Leighten, author of the essay “The White Peril
and L'Art negre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism". Leighten argues that
It is well recognized that romantic attitudes toward so-called ‘primitive’ peoples
had a history in modern Europe going back at least to Rousseau, and that
Gauguin's primitivist model appealed strongly to the next generation of
modernists… a compelling nexus of political events and attitudes during the
avant-guerre additionally—and inescapably—informed the response to African
art and the motives of Africanizing artists (609).
Art historians similarly cite paintings such as Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973) “Les
Demoiselles d’Avignon” and Paul Gauguin’s (1848-1903) paintings of Tahitians as clear
examples of such political pedagogy applied to painting. However, as Varnedoe points out,
Picasso’s and Gauguin’s work “demonstrate an important way change within our own culture
intertwines with information about what lies outside it to generate innovative reform” (184).
“Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” was not an unadulterated thievery of African masks, simply
pasted onto the women depicted in the painting who pose provocatively as prostitutes. This
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painting is commonly referred as the ultimate manifestation of the influence of African and
Iberian masks on Picasso. But Picasso, who sketched myriad studies of individual faces for the
painting, provides more evidence supporting that the majority of the design in “Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon” stemmed from his own creativity. In as early as 1900, signs of the distorted, angular
and structural faces seen in Picasso’s Demoiselles already appear. In “Portrait of Gertrude
Stein,” completed a year before the painting in question, we see a face foreshadowing the even
more oblique forms that “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” will display.
William Rubins, a fellow curator of Varnedoe who helped him mount the exhibition
“Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, also argued that
primitivism marked “a fundamental shift of most vanguard art styles rooted in visual perception
to others based on conceptualization” (Knapp 369-370). A conceptualized foundation
additionally pervades the work of Paul Gauguin and his paintings depicting his version of the
Tahitians. These paintings are not a true depiction of Tahitian life and culture, but rather an
amalgamation of sources from which Gauguin drew inspiration and stuck onto the tropical
landscape of Tahiti, which he symbolizes with rich, brilliant colors. In “Ia Orana Maria” and
“The Spirit of the Dead Watching,” Varnedoe points out these sources. In these paintings, the
designs on the fabric depicted are not Tahitian, but “textiles made in places like Manchester and
Frankfurt…what his pictures transmitted back to Paris as alien crafts were in fact products of a
marginal strain of European design” (193). Gauguin admired the Tahitian culture because he saw
a parallel between his own creativity and the Tahitians’ philosophy of life, which injected a
simple, mystical spirituality into everything; a parrot was not just a parrot, but also a spirit (187).
Thus did his paintings of Tahiti, even with European elements, become primitivist:
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“When he [Gauguin] described the way he transformed his initial glimpse of this girl [in
“The Spirit of the Dead Watching”] into the final painting’s symbolic array of colors and
forms (purple is deployed to suggest terror, for example), he made his creative processes
an analog of these most deep-seated origins of human culture—by detailing a stepped
progress from brute sensory reaction to the imposition of independent, invented systems
of meaning” Varnedoe explains (187-189).
Gauguin used quite motionless figures in his Tahitian paintings and simple, effulgent colors and
patterns, which is the true reason why he can be considered a primitivist: his composition and
design were simple, and he, as Rubins tried to convey in his MoMa exhibition, was “getting back
to certain roots, not just artistically, but of our own humanity and psychology… to see that
people who are technologically light-years away from each other have common denominators"
(Knapp 375-376). The simplicity Gauguin sought in these paintings and their ability to clearly
express raw emotions and feelings was a step in a different direction from the symbolism of
classical paintings that only academics, as opposed to the common people, could understand and
appreciate.
Thus the evolutionary line of art into its modern existence continues. Yet despite this
obvious evidence of lineage, some philosophers and critics still reject this connection. In Mary
Gluck’s essay “Toward a Historical Definition of Modernism: Georg Lukacs and the AvantGarde,” she cites such a philosopher and literary critic. Georg Lukacs proscribed Modernists,
specifically the Expressionists, as “a rootless and decomposing petty-bourgeois
intelligentsia…frozen in their immediacy, divested of all subversive potential” (850). He
condemned the Impressionists as an “idle, aimless, irresponsible and self-indulgent elite. It
[Impressionism] was born out of a skeptical empiricism which dissolves the world into
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contingency; it affirmed nothing, accepted everything, and lived for the shallow enjoyment of
passive observation” (857). He saw art's value not in aesthetic terms, or in how well a unity of
light, line, color, and space were achieved in a given painting, but in terms of whether the art's
subject matter or its exigence was intelligent enough; in doing so, he was living up to the ideal he
accused the Impressionists of following by not studying art as if it were artwork, but engaging in
it on a superficial level long enough only to get an equally superficial meaning. Gluck cites critic
Ernst Bloch who points out this lack of thorough analysis in Lukacs’ claim: “Anyone who
actually looks at Lukacs essay will notice at the very outset that nowhere is there any mention of
a single Expressionist painter. Marc, Klee, Kokoschka, Nolde, Kandinsky, Grosz, Dix, Chagall
simply do not figure at all” (852). Lukacs ignores the painters themselves, erroneously
neglecting their intentions. But the Impressionists, like all other artists, did have a purpose that
was wholly focused on art, and nothing else. That was why artists like Renoir and Picasso
painted even after it became unbearably painful for them to do so in their old age, and why artists
like van Gogh painted as many as two or three works a day. If van Gogh’s true concern when
painting “The Potato Eaters” was to lament the laborious, uncompensated work of farmers, then
he never would have so passionately associated love for art with love for one’s wife and children
(van Uitert 225). The Impressionists wanted to expand the realm of subject matter fit for
paintings to everything, even everyday objects that were previously neglected for nobility or
religious subject matter. Instead of rendering them in the typical photographic representation,
they instead relied on a deep, sensuous use of color, light, line, and space. Each Impressionist
interpreted these elements differently, which is why although they are all labeled as
Impressionists, their paintings look quite different; they were all exceptional artists because they
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had originality and their own innovations to contribute to this monumentally revolutionary art
movement.
“Abstract Painting” by Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967) looks at first glance like a canvas
doused in black paint, a piece that surely could not be called real art because anyone could
reproduce an identical work. But this 1960 painting, with further examination, reveals layers of
complexities that legitimize its home in the MoMa collection. The painting consists of several,
subtly differing shades of black that form geometric squares in a 3-by-3 grid. The discrepancy
between each hue is so inconspicuous that it is impossible to discern more than black unless one
views the painting in person, with intense investigation. Reinhardt’s incredibly acute sensitivity
to color realizes its potential to create meticulous yet deceiving artwork; only those with the most
patience, the most appreciation and open-mindedness for art’s purpose could appreciate this
painting. It requires its viewers to have the purest, most objective of minds, and only enlightens
them once they have achieved this virtuosity, rewarding them highly once they get there. If we
were to judge this painting, and subsequently all paintings, exclusively by their subject matter,
than we will find ourselves dissatisfied with most of the paintings that exist. But if we consider
paintings aesthetically, by how they have used light, color, line, and space to make an
aesthetically moving artwork, then we will appreciate and enjoy its obscurity.
By approaching artwork through its intrinsic, literal characteristics, the history of modern
art unravels into connections of forms, patterns, styles, and designs that forge a chain between
the oldest art and the newest, no matter how incongruous they may seem as a whole. As we study
that progression of connections and influences, that development is just as incredible and
fascinating as the evolution of life on Earth.
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Works Cited
Barnes, Albert C. The Art In Painting. 3rd ed. 1925. Merion Station: The Barnes Foundation
Press, 1995. Print.
Gauguin, Paul. “Ia Orana Maria.” 1891-92. Oil on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York.
- - -. The Spirit of the Dead Watching (Manao Tupapau). 1892. Oil on burlap mounted on
canvas. Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.
Gluck, Mary. “Toward a Historical Definition of Modernism: Georg Lukacs and the AvantGarde.” The Journal of Modern History 58.4 (1986): 845-882. JSTOR. Web. 4 Mar.
2011.
Joselit, David. “Notes on Surface: toward a genealogy of flatness.” Art History 23.1 (2000): 1934. JSTOR. Web. 3 Mar. 2011.
Kimmelman, Michael. “Kirk Varnedoe, 57, Curator Who Changed the Modern’s Collection and
Thinking, Dies.” The New York Times [New York] 15 Aug. 2003: n. pag. The New York
Times. Web. 7 Mar. 2011.
Knapp, James F. “Primitivism and the Modern.” boundary 2 15.1/(1986-1987): 365-379. JSTOR.
Web. 4 Mar. 2011.
Leighten, Patricia. “The White Peril and L’Art negre: Picasso, Primitivism, and
Anticolonialism.” The Art Bulletin 72.4 (1990): 609-630. JSTOR. Web. 4 Mar. 2011.
Matisse, Henri. The Red Studio. 1911. Oil on canvas. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Monet, Claude. The Japanese Bridge. 1918-24. Oil on canvas. Musee Marmottan, Paris.
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Picasso, Pablo. Gertrude Stein. 1906. Oil on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Same as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
- - -. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. 1907. Oil on canvas. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
- - -. Sheet of Caricatures. 1900. Conte pencil and colored pencil on paper. Picasso Museum,
Barcelona.
Reinhardt, Ed. Abstract Painting. 1960-61. Oil on canvas. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Rothko, Mark. Untitled. 1968. Synthetic polymer paint on paper. Museum of Modern Art, New
York.
Signac, Paul. The Harbor at Marseilles. 1907. Oil on canvas. State Hermitage Museum, St.
Petersburg.
Van Uitert, Evert. “Van Gogh’s Concept of His Oeuvre.” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for
the History of Art 12.4 (1981-1982): 223-244. JSTOR. Web. 10 Mar. 2011.
Varnedoe, Kirk. A Fine Disregard: What Makes Modern Art Modern. New York: Harry N.
Abrams, Inc., 1994. Print.