Possible originary dates for the birth of modern art
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Several possible originary moments in the birth of modern art are proposed. They include some of the works of Goya, the work of Delacroix, Daumier, Courbet and Manet at the first Salon des Refusés. Most accounts agree that modern art began in Paris, then capital of the 19th century and capital of the arts.
Charles Baudelaire, for example, thought of Delacroix as the originator of modern art. He said in his review of the Paris Salon of 1846 that "The majority of the public have long since, indeed from his very first work, dubbed him leader of the modern school" (tr. P. E. Charvet).
On of the most distinguishing features of modern art revolves around the concept of realism. On the one hand modern artists rejected the idealized photographic realism which was typical of academic art (e.g. Jean-Léon Gérôme) and on the other hand they embraced social realism (Millet, Courbet) and rejected of allegory, mythological painting and academic art.
Arthur Danto in 2000, in his review of 'Making Choices', part of the 'MoMA 2000' exhibition (which marked the start of modern art in 1880) said that "there is no consensus as to when modern art began[1]. The question cannot be separated from the deeper question of how Modernism is to be defined. The art historian T.J. Clark recently proposed that modern art began with The Death of Marat, completed by Jacques-Louis David in October 1793--but that is because he construes Modernism politically, as art 'no longer reserved for a privileged minority.' Clement Greenberg thought it began with Manet, whose flat, thinly shadowed forms were derived from photographs--a modern technology of representation."
Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe[2] notes that the birth of modern art is the celebration of the cult of ugliness.
- "It is from Delacroix that the line of progressive modernism extends directly to Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet. In the conservative view, Delacroix's Romanticism, Courbet's Realism, and Manet's Naturalism were all manifestations of the cult of ugliness that opposed the Academic ideal of the beautiful. Delacroix, Courbet, and Manet, were each in turn accused by conservatives of carrying on subversive work that was intended to undermine the State."
See also
- Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999) by T.J. Clark
- "Modernist Painting" by Greenberg
