Mainstreams of Modern Art

638 Pages·1959·98.924 MB·English

by  John Canaday

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Mainstreams of modern art /
N6450 .C33 12865
Canaday, John,
NEW COLLEGE OF CALIFORNIA (SF)
N Canaday, John.
6450 Mainstreams of modern
C33 art.
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MAINSTREAMS OF MODERN ART
)
Ingres The Bather of Valpingon
:
On the principle that anyone beginning a trip should have a general idea of
the route he is to take, the following fifteen paintings are ofiFered as an
introduction to this book. They are waystops, and they reappear in the body
of the text.
As the nineteenth century opened, painting was dominated by France
(as it continued to be), and French painting was dominated by the classi-
cists. As an adjunct to the political idealism of the French Revolution in its
first days, classicism in painting was dedicated to a revival of the intellectual
purity and the moral force of ancient Greece and Rome as they were cur-
rently imagined by philosophers and aestheticians. But before long, classi-
cism degenerated into a fettering code of arbitrary rules and standards. By
the middle of the century the demigod of the school was a pedantic tyrant
and a great artist named Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, who mercilessly
dictated these sterile recipes, yet rose above them in his own art. His The
BatherofValpingon observes the rules in its precision, its enamellike surface,
its carefully controlled drawing, its limitation of color within sharply defined
boundaries. But in spirit the picture is sensuous beneath its careful surface.
Ingres was a classicist by habitual conviction, but by the evidence of his
work he had more in common than he realized with the warmth and senti-
ment of the men who were in revolt against his dogma —the romantics.
(Louvre, Paris. Reproduction courtesy Phaidon Press, Ltd.
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Delacroix: The Abduction of Rebecca
The romantics believed in the expression of emotion at whatever violation
of convention, believed in originality rather than in rule, in complication
rather than in purity, and preferred risk to safety. Romanticism was a way
of life as well as a revolt in the arts, and its triumph was inevitable in times
when theworld's disorder gave little supportto the classical ideal ofultimate
order and serenity. Romanticism was international, with a strong early im-
pulse in Germany, but found its leader and spokesman, as far as painting
was concerned, in Eugene Delacroix, another Frenchman. His Abduction of
Rebecca contrasts in everywaywith Ingres's The Bather ofValpingon; it is a
turbulent subject turbulently painted in rich colors that shatter and explode
across swarming and fluttering masses, expressing everywhere the agony and
excitementofthehuman spirit. Yetfor allthis emotionalized e£Fect, Delacroix
as much as Ingres, or even more than Ingres, achieved his ends by intellectu-
alized use of his means. He regarded himself as a true classicist and the
nominal classicists as false ones, since his goal was the total expression of
human emotion on the grand scale, in images of universal significance.
(Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Wolfe Fund.)

)
Eakins: Miss Van Buren
In spite of their differences, the classicists and the romantics shared a mutual
characteristic: they were idealists who ignored the world around them to
explore imagined ones. As the century began to coalesce into the great age
of the common man, dominated not by theoretical ideals but by bourgeois
practicality, a new school triumphed over the two earlier ones and put an
end to their war with one another. The Ingres and the Delacroix of realism
was Gustave Courbet, who said, "Show me an angel and I will paint one."
In one form or another, realism dominated painting until near the end of the
century, and in America it found a great man in Thomas Eakins, for whom
Ingres's serene bathers and Delacroix's abducted maidens were less inter-
esting than the people he saw going about their daily affairs in his native
Philadelphia. Eakins's portrait of Miss Van Buren is one of the most impres-
siveofhisrevelations ofpersonalityandhis creations ofpoeticmoodachieved
through what seems to be nothing more than the objective recreation of the
natural appearance of an everyday subject. (Phillips Collection, Washing-
ton, D. C.