What Is Modern Art? Late-19th-century artists broke with tradition to create art for the modern age.

The birth of modernism and?modern?art can be traced to the Industrial Revolution. This period of rapid changes in manufacturing, transportation, and technology began around the mid-18th century and lasted through the 19th century, profoundly affecting the social, economic, and?cultural?conditions of life in Western Europe, North America, and eventually the world. New forms of transportation, including the railroad, the steam engine, and the subway, changed the way people lived, worked, and traveled, expanding their worldview and access to new ideas. As urban centers prospered, workers flocked to cities for industrial jobs and urban populations boomed.

Before the 19th century, artists were most often?commissioned?to make artwork by wealthy patrons or institutions like the church. Much of this art depicted religious or mythological?scenes?that told stories intended to instruct the viewer. During the 19th century, many artists started to make art based in their own, personal experiences and about topics that they chose. With the publication of psychologist Sigmund Freud’s?The Interpretation of Dreams?(1899) and the popularization of the idea of a?subconsciousmind, many artists began exploring dreams,?symbolism, and personal?iconography?as avenues for the depiction of their subjective experiences. Challenging the notion that art must realistically depict the world, some artists experimented with the expressive use of?color, non-traditional?materials, and new?techniques?and?mediums. Among these new mediums was photography, whose invention in 1839 offered radical possibilities for depicting and interpreting the world.

Artists living in the rapidly modernizing world of late-19th-century Europe sought not only to depict?modern?life, but also to convey the emotional and psychological effects of navigating a world in rapid flux. Though artists like Henri Matisse and Paul Cézanne continued to?paint?traditional?subject matter—like?landscapes,?portraits?and?still lifes—they explored these subjects in ways that shocked their contemporaries.

In?The Bather, Paul Cézanne depicts an adolescent boy mid-step in a watery?landscape. Though the male?figure?was among the most traditional artistic?subjects, the way in which Cézanne?representedthe young figure in his?painting?broke with precedent. His bather appears pensive, even anxious, his body soft, slightly out of?proportion, and decidedly unheroic. He is set into ambiguous, semi-abstract?surroundings that offer no firm sense of place. And like his surroundings, the bather himself seems anonymous. By stripping his painting of specificity,?Cézanne conveys a sense of the ambiguity or uncertainty that for many people typified the experience of?modern?life.

The Bather?is not allegorical; it does not tell a story or convey an idea. Instead, the?composition?became an outlet for Cézanne to explore new ways of painting, to loosely apply?paint?and develop his composition out of visible gestures and brushstrokes. It reflects his modern sensibility, influenced by the new understanding of vision and light developed by the?Impressionists. Additionally, Cézanne painted from a?photograph?of a?model?posing in a studio rather than from a real life?scene—a novel?technique?utilizing a thoroughly modern invention.

Painting Meets Photography

In 1884, a year before Paul Cézanne painted?The Bather, inventor George Eastman developed a method for photographing on?film, rather than on glass plates. The technique eliminated the need to carry toxic chemicals and the cumbersome glass plates, and soon made photography available to everyone. Within a few years, it became common for?painters, including Cézanne and later Pablo Picasso, to work from photographs or otherwise include photography as part of their painting process.

Still Life with Three Puppies

Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903) 1888. Oil on wood, 36 1/8 x 24 5/8" (91.8 x 62.6 cm)

When Gauguin painted?Still Life with Three Puppies, he was living in Brittany among a group of experimental painters. He abandoned naturalistic depictions and colors, declaring that “art is an abstraction” to be derived “from nature while dreaming before it.” The puppies’ bodies, for example, are outlined in bold blue, and the patterning of their coats mirrors the botanic print of the tablecloth.

This painting features three distinct zones: a still life of fruit in the foreground, a row of three blue goblets and apples diagonally bisecting the canvas, and three puppies drinking from a large pan.?The incongruous scale and placement of the animals and objects on a dramatically upturned tabletop results in a disorienting composition.

Sourcing Style from Print and Page

It is thought that Gauguin drew stylistic inspiration for this painting from Japanese prints, which were introduced to him by his friend and fellow artist Vincent van Gogh that same year, and from children’s book illustrations.

Still Life with Apples

Paul Cézanne (French, 1839–1906) 1898. Oil on canvas, 27 x 36 1/2" (68.6 x 92.7 cm)

“Painting from nature is not copying the object,” Paul Cézanne wrote, “it is realizing one’s sensations.”?Still Life with Apples?reflects this view and the artist’s steady fascination with?color, light, pictorial space, and how we see.

In?Still Life with Apples?and his many other paintings, Cézanne concentrated on the visual and physical qualities of the?paint?and?canvas?and worked to capture the full complexity of how our eyes take in the sights before us. He never aimed for mere illusionism. This is apparent, for example, in the edges of a number of the apples, which appear to be undefined, almost shifting, and in the two sides of the table, which do not align. Cézanne left some areas of canvas bare. Other areas, like the right drape of the bunched tablecloth, appear unfinished.

Some Perspective

Optics fascinated Cézanne. He tried to distill naturally occurring?forms?to their?geometric?essentials: the cone, the cube, the sphere. He used layers of color to build up surfaces, and outlined his forms for emphasis. His deep study of geometry in?painting?led to his becoming a master of?perspective. Cézanne had little public success and was repeatedly rejected by the Paris Salon. In his final years and particularly after his death, younger artists, among them Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, discovered and drew from his work.

Landscape at Collioure Henri Matisse

(French, 1869–1954) 1905. Oil on canvas, 15 1/4 x 18 3/8" (38.8 x 46.6 cm)

In?Landscape at Collioure, Henri Matisse applied?oil paint?to an unprimed?canvas, mostly with quick, sketchy brushstrokes and sometimes using?paint?directly from the tube. Though he left parts of the canvas unpainted, so that its raw, woven surface shows through between his brushstrokes, this painting is considered a finished work.

Landscape at Collioure?reflects the point at which Matisse began to use a more instinctive, spontaneous way of?painting, unparalleled among his contemporaries. The?landscapes?he painted in the summer of 1905 were “wilder, more reckless than any subsequently produced in his career,” according to Matisse scholar and former MoMA curator John Elderfield. “In the works of that period?color?speaks for itself with a directness previously unknown in Western painting, and speaks directly too of the emotional response to the natural world that required changing the color of this world the better to render that emotion.”

In our next article we will discuss "The rise of the modern city" Discovering the ways on how modern artists and architects engaged with the landscape of cities to further define the Modern Art movement.

Rahul Thakur

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