What was modernism? This is certainly a difficult question to be answered. With the development of modern art, we have seen multiple movements and different strategies used to create art and confer meaning to art in various ways. However, was there also a global trend for the evolution of the concept of art, for the definition of modernism? I think there is. In this essay, I would like to discuss this trend with three exemplar movements and strategies – Impressionism, Fauvism, and the readymade. As we will see, there was a gradual increase in the negation of classical, narrative paintings, the embracement of non-mimetic forms and abstraction, and an overall expansion of the contour for the concept of art.
It was with Impressionism that we first saw a clear demarcation from the narrative, history paintings. Without the guide from texts, without the smooth brushstrokes, without much chiaroscuro techniques, Impressionist art has turned its focus onto modern life, onto the visual. Using Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines (1872) as an example, we can see how the perfect forms and the divine were gone. Instead, a bird’s-eye view city landscape was captured, without any central figure involved. From the color to the brushstrokes, we can see how Monet was painting in a painterly style (Wolfflin 18), attending to how color, light, and shadow interact to create this unique visual experience. And most importantly, it was a signature for embracing the transient and the contingent, which would also present in later movements and was arguably a central theme in the development of modern art. This was specifically “modernist” as Impressionists have started to value the beauty involved in daily life moments, instead of returning back to the idealized forms in the academic paintings.
Despite the huge switch in style and philosophy, Impressionist artworks have largely remained to be mimetic, depicting the world as it is, and prioritizing the naturalistic visual experience. However, as it turned to the development of Fauvism, we can see a further rejection of mimesis. Those artists seemed to have further emphasized the painterly qualities and the ultimate freeing of color in the creation process. Matisse’s Woman with a Hat (1905) could be used an example to illustrate this point. At first glance, we can see that the brushstrokes were even more unpolished than Monet’s, moving further away from the traditional history painting styles. The colors were applied almost without reference to the outside world, with the face of the woman looking blue, green, and purple, in front of an extremely flat while colorful background. As Herschel B. Chipp has mentioned in his book, color was actually used by Matisse or Fauvists as a tool for expression, only inspired by the painter’s feeling and sensation (134). To conclude, both the embracement of non-mimetic forms and the unrealistic use of colors for expression could be viewed as the most significant contributions of Fauvism to the evolution of modernism. Later artists have also inevitably been influenced by these two modern approaches.
Then, along with the development of multiple movements, especially Cubism and Dada, we can see how the concept of art has been further extended. The boundaries between painting, sculptures, and other media have been ruptured. And even the process of art creation has been juxtaposed with the process of industrial production through the incorporation of the so-called readymades into the field of art, which was unconceivable in the academic art traditions. Picasso, for instance, has created the famous work Still Life with Chair Caning (1912). Aside from the Cubism paintings on the canvas, he has cut and pasted a piece of oil cloth onto the plane, surrounding the canvas with a rope, serving as a frame. He has brought these commercially produced industrial objects into the autonomous world of art, inventing collage as a new strategy in modern art creation. Some people have also argued that these collage elements could be interpreted as a system of signs and representations, bringing into works new medium for signifying and expression (Krauss 17).
Viewing backward from now, the development of modernism was indeed an interesting journey. Multiple generations of artists have been influenced by their antecessors while kept finding new ways and media to create art. In this process, the concept of art has been constantly updated, starting to embrace those previously unconceivable elements, and almost every movement has resulted in scandals and criticism. However, turning to the central argument of this essay, I think there have been several general themes that were observed in the development of modern art, including but not limited to the rejection of the narrative, history painting tradition and the trend toward non-mimetic forms and abstraction. And the last crucial point, which I consider to be partially contradictive, is the increasing autonomy of art, independent of texts and narratives, and then independent of real-world representations. Art has formed a world by itself, and greater level of freedom could be executed in the creation of art. Nevertheless, later movements like Cubism and Dada have again invited the world to be joined with the artworks. But this is drastically different from the kind of connection art used to have with the world. And this, I ponder, might be the most crucial change modernism has brought to art. Modernism as art’s progressive growth in autonomy, the process through which art was separated from and then reconnected with the world.