Modern & Contemporary Art

In the summer of 1855 Gustave Courbet paid for a shed. The Exposition Universelle had taken over Paris, its fine arts jury had accepted eleven of his paintings and rejected two, and one of the rejects was the enormous canvas he considered the summary of his life so far. So he rented ground on the avenue Montaigne, a short walk from the official pavilions, put up a temporary building at his own expense, hung about forty of his own pictures in it, printed a catalogue with a preface, and charged visitors one franc to come in. The sign over the door said Du Realisme. Attendance was poor and he lost money.

Why this matters: The one-man show, the artist's statement, the paid ticket, the deliberate positioning against an official body: every part of the machinery that later avant-gardes would use was assembled here, by a painter who had been half accepted rather than wholly refused.

What the Salon actually was

Modern art is usually introduced as a rebellion, which tells you nothing until you know what was being rebelled against. The Salon was an annual public exhibition run under the authority of the Academie des Beaux-Arts. By the 1850s it hung in the Palais de l'Industrie and it was enormous: several thousand works, floor to ceiling, in rooms where a picture placed high near the cornice, said to be skied, was effectively invisible. Hundreds of thousands of people came. Reviews ran in the daily papers. For a French painter it was not one opportunity among several. It was the market, the press, and the career, all at one address.

Three mechanisms did the work.

• The jury. A panel, dominated by Academy members, decided what hung. Rejection meant a year of invisibility and, for most painters, no sales.
• The medals. Awards, honourable mentions, and state purchases converted the jury's taste into money and into commissions for public buildings.
• The hierarchy of genres. Inherited from the seventeenth century, it ranked subject matter: history painting first, meaning scenes from scripture, classical literature, and national history, with idealised human bodies as its core skill; then portraiture; then genre scenes of ordinary life; then landscape; then still life at the bottom. Scale followed rank. A history painting was allowed to be huge because its subject was.

Note the shape of the thing. It is not that the Salon rejected new painting. It is that the Salon defined what counted as important painting, and the definition had a hole in it where nineteenth century life should have been.

A village funeral at the scale of a coronation

Courbet's A Burial at Ornans, painted in 1849 and 1850 and now in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, is oil on canvas and measures roughly 3.15 by 6.68 metres. Stand at its centre and the painted figures are close to life size, their heads at about your own eye level. That is the format of a coronation or a battle.

The subject is a funeral in Ornans, the small town in the Franche-Comte where Courbet grew up. He painted the actual residents, using them as models in his studio there: the mayor, the justice of the peace, the pallbearers, the two beadles in red, the kneeling gravedigger, a dog that has wandered in at the right, and a semicircle of women in black at the right edge, some crying, some not. There is no hero. The composition is a long horizontal frieze under a strip of pale sky and a bluff of limestone cliff, with the open grave at the front, empty, aimed at the viewer.

Critics did not object because it was ugly, although many said it was. They objected because the size made a claim. Monumental scale was reserved for elevated subject matter, and Courbet had spent it on provincial people at a burial with no visible salvation, no allegory, and no lesson. He described his ambition as painting a burial in his home town and, in doing so, burying Romanticism.

Key idea: Courbet's provocation was not the brushwork. It was the mismatch between the scale, which announced importance, and the subject, which the Academy's hierarchy said was unimportant.

The word modern is a claim, not a date

Here is a distinction worth fixing early, because the whole course depends on it. Recent is a fact about when something was made. Modern is an argument about what art should be doing.

The argument was made most memorably by the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire in an essay published in Le Figaro in 1863, Le Peintre de la vie moderne, The Painter of Modern Life. Baudelaire was writing about Constantin Guys, an illustrator of no great reputation, and his point was that beauty has two halves. One half is eternal. The other half is the particular dress, gesture, and mood of a single passing moment, and an artist who ignores it produces something dead. He wanted painters to take their subjects from the boulevards, the theatres, the crowd. The word he used for the transient half was modernite.

So modernism, as art historians use it, names a set of overlapping commitments that gathered force from about 1850: that art should confront present life rather than the classical past; that the artist's own judgement outranks academic rule; that the means of the medium, paint on a flat surface, are legitimate subject matter; and that novelty and rupture are values rather than failures.

Two cautions. First, plenty of art made after 1900 is not modernist, and salon painting continued profitably for decades. Second, contemporary art is a different word again, usually meaning work made roughly since 1960 or since 1970, depending on which museum you ask, and it is defined by period rather than by programme. The boundary is administrative and contested. When someone tells you where modern ends and contemporary begins, ask what institution they work for.

1863: the year the jury was overruled

The Salon jury of 1863 was severe, refusing well over half of what was submitted, and the protest was loud enough to reach the Emperor. Napoleon III went to look at the rejected pictures himself and ordered them shown to the public in a separate wing of the Palais de l'Industrie so that visitors could judge the jury's judgement. This was the Salon des Refuses, the Salon of the Refused. Around a thousand works hung there. Crowds came, many of them to laugh.

The picture they laughed at hardest was by Edouard Manet. Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe, exhibited then under the title Le Bain, is oil on canvas, about 2.08 by 2.65 metres, and hangs today in the Musee d'Orsay. Two men in contemporary Parisian clothing sit on the ground in a wood. Beside them a woman sits entirely naked, her clothes in a heap with a spilled basket of fruit. She is not looking at either man. She is looking out at you. A second woman in a shift bends over a stream behind them.

Every element had a respectable source. The pose of the seated trio derives from a group in an engraving after Raphael, and the pastoral arrangement of dressed men and undressed women recalls sixteenth century Venetian painting. What made it unbearable was the collision of those sources with the present tense. The men wear the clothes visitors were wearing. The nude is therefore not a nymph but a woman with no clothes on, in a wood, near Paris, now. The lighting is flat and frontal, so her body reads as a pale silhouette against dark leaves rather than as a rounded classical form, which many critics took for incompetence.

Olympia, and the difference two years makes

Manet painted Olympia in 1863 and showed it at the official Salon of 1865, where it was accepted and then attacked so persistently that guards were posted near it. Oil on canvas, about 1.31 by 1.91 metres, Musee d'Orsay.

The composition is lifted almost directly from Titian's Venus of Urbino of 1534, which hangs in the Uffizi in Florence: a naked woman reclining on white sheets, propped on her right arm, a small animal at her feet, a servant in the background. Manet changes the details, and the changes are the picture.

• Titian's Venus lets her hand rest loosely over her thigh. Olympia's hand is pressed flat and firm, a refusal rather than a veil.
• Titian's little dog, an emblem of fidelity, becomes a black cat with its back arched and its tail up.
• Titian's maids rummage in a chest in the middle distance. Olympia's servant, a Black woman, stands at the bedside holding a large bouquet still in its paper, presumably sent by a client who is standing where you are standing.
• Olympia wears a black ribbon at her throat, a bracelet, a single mule slipper half off her foot, and an orchid in her hair. She is not nude in the academic sense. She is undressed, and accessorised.

The model was Victorine Meurent, who also posed for the Dejeuner and who later exhibited her own paintings at the Salon. The servant was a professional model whose first name, Laure, Manet recorded in a notebook along with an address. That fact matters for how the picture is now taught. For a century she was described in the literature as a compositional foil, a dark shape used to set off pale skin. Recent scholarship, including Denise Murrell's Posing Modernity (2018) and the exhibition Le modele noir at the Musee d'Orsay in 2019, treats her as a sitter with a name, a working life in Paris, and a place in a longer history of Black models in French painting. The older reading is not merely incomplete; it repeated the erasure the picture is often praised for exposing.

The point: Manet did not reject tradition. He quoted it precisely enough that his audience could see exactly which parts he had refused to reproduce.

Two ways to read the same canvas

Modern art history has argued about Manet for over sixty years, and the argument is a good introduction to how this field actually works.

One reading, associated with the American critic Clement Greenberg and set out in his essay Modernist Painting (1960), treats the flatness as the point. Greenberg's account of modernism is a story of each art form purging what it borrowed from the others until only its own irreducible conditions remain. For painting those conditions are the flat surface, the shape of the support, and the properties of pigment. Manet matters, in this account, because he was the first to declare the flatness rather than disguise it.

A second reading, argued by T. J. Clark in The Painting of Modern Life (1984), holds that the flatness is a symptom and not a subject. Clark reads Olympia against the specific social fact of prostitution in Haussmann's rebuilt Paris, where a new commercial class was anxious about exactly which category of woman it was looking at. On this account the scandal was not formal. It was that the picture refused to tell viewers whether she was a courtesan, a working woman, or a wife, and the reviews reveal critics scrambling for a class label and failing to land one.

These are not two halves of a compromise. They rest on different evidence: Greenberg reads the surfaces of the paintings, Clark reads the surfaces plus the press, the police registers, and the property records. You can prefer one, but you should be able to say which evidence you are preferring.

Common misconceptions

• "The Salon rejected all the good painters." Manet was accepted more often than not, including for Olympia. Degas, Renoir, and Cezanne all submitted to it, and Courbet had eleven works accepted in 1855. Rejection was one pressure among several; the deeper problem was the definition of important art, which shaped what was even worth painting.
• "Modern means anything made recently." Modern is a programme, not a date. Academic painters were producing polished mythologies well into the twentieth century, and their work is recent without being modernist.
• "Manet was a bad draughtsman and that is why the bodies look flat." He trained for six years with Thomas Couture, a successful Salon painter, and could model a form conventionally when he wanted to. The flatness is consistent, deliberate, and confined to specific passages.
• "Realism means painting things exactly as a camera would." Courbet's realism was a choice of subject and a political stance about who deserves to be painted at scale, not a claim to optical accuracy. His paint is thick, palette-knifed, and openly handled.

Where this leaves us

• The Salon combined a jury, a medal system, and a hierarchy of genres, and it functioned as the entire market for French painting.
• Courbet's A Burial at Ornans gave monumental scale to unelevated subject matter, and his 1855 Pavilion of Realism invented the independent one-artist exhibition.
• Modern is a claim about what art should do, dated loosely from 1850; contemporary is an administrative period term, usually from about 1960 or 1970.
• The Salon des Refuses of 1863 was ordered by Napoleon III and made the jury itself a public question.
• Olympia quotes Titian exactly in order to change four things, including replacing the emblem of fidelity with a cat and giving the servant, Laure, a documented identity that older scholarship ignored.
• Greenberg reads Manet's flatness as the arrival of medium purity; Clark reads it as a symptom of a social crisis about class and looking. The disagreement is about evidence, not taste.

Sources

1. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Realism. tate.org.uk
2. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Salon. tate.org.uk
3. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Modernism. tate.org.uk
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). A Burial at Ornans. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Olympia (Manet). en.wikipedia.org
6. Clark, T. J. (1984). The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers. Alfred A. Knopf.
7. Nochlin, L. (1971). Realism (Style and Civilization series). Penguin Books.

On 15 April 1874 an exhibition opened at 35 boulevard des Capucines, in a suite of rooms on the second floor that the photographer Nadar had recently moved out of and lent for the purpose. Thirty artists hung about 165 works. They had incorporated themselves, in the previous December, as a joint stock company with the deliberately dull name Societe anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs, sold shares at sixty francs, and set the rules themselves: no jury, no medals, works hung in two rows with position drawn by lot, and a share of any sales going back into the society. Admission was one franc. The show ran for a month and made a loss.

Ten days in, the critic Louis Leroy published a mocking dialogue in the satirical paper Le Charivari. He walked an imaginary academic painter through the rooms and had him lose his mind in front of a small harbour scene by Claude Monet, catalogued as Impression, soleil levant. Leroy's headline called them the Impressionists. The artists, who had spent months arguing about what to call themselves and had settled on nothing, took the insult and used it.

In short: The movement's name was a hostile review of one small painting, adopted by the people it was aimed at.

The painting that supplied the word

Impression, soleil levant is oil on canvas and measures only about 48 by 63 centimetres. It is in the Musee Marmottan Monet in Paris, which is worth knowing because visitors regularly go looking for it at the Orsay. It shows the harbour at Le Havre before the sun has fully risen, seen through mist: a blue-grey field of water and sky with almost no value contrast, cranes and masts of the industrial port dissolved into vertical smudges, two small rowing boats in silhouette, and one thing that is genuinely saturated, a small orange sun with its broken reflection running down the water in a few horizontal strokes.

The technical observation to make is about value, the lightness or darkness of a tone. The sun and the surrounding sky are close to the same value. Photograph the picture in black and white and the sun nearly vanishes. What makes it read as blazing is that it is the only intense hue in a nearly neutral field. Monet is painting the way the eye behaves in low light, when colour perception falls away before brightness perception does.

Monet said later that when he was asked for a title for the catalogue he could not honestly call it a view of Le Havre, so he said to put down impression. That casual answer became a movement label, which should make you suspicious of how tidy movement labels usually sound.

What the technique actually consisted of

Impressionism is often summarised as painting outdoors quickly, which is true and unhelpful. Here are the specific decisions, each of which you can look for.

• Broken colour. Instead of blending a green on the palette, lay separate strokes of blue and yellow beside each other and let the eye combine them at viewing distance. The result is more vibrant than a premixed tone because it never fully settles.
• Coloured shadow. Academic practice darkened a local colour with black or brown. The impressionists painted shadow as the complementary hue, so a shadow on a yellow wheatfield is violet, and a shadow on snow is blue. This is not a style tic; it approximates what happens when a shadow is lit by blue skylight rather than by the sun.
• The suppressed contour. Forms are built by patches of colour meeting, not by drawn outline filled in. Edges therefore dissolve where two tones are close in value.
• Wet into wet, in one or few sittings. Traditional oil practice built up thin layers over weeks, with drying time between. Working alla prima keeps the surface active and the strokes visible.
• The cropped, off-centre composition. Figures cut by the frame, high viewpoints, and empty foregrounds, borrowed in part from Japanese woodblock prints then circulating in Paris and in part from the way a photograph or a glance actually frames the world.

Two pieces of hardware made the outdoor part practical. Ready-ground oil paint in collapsible metal tubes, patented by the American painter John Goffe Rand in 1841, replaced pig bladders and let a painter carry a full palette to a riverbank. New pigments arriving through the century, synthetic ultramarine, cobalt blue, chrome yellow, viridian, gave a brighter and more stable range than the earlier one. Renoir is often quoted saying that without paint in tubes there would have been no impressionism, and while that overstates it, the constraint is real.

Key idea: Impressionism is a set of specific, nameable procedures. If you cannot point to broken colour, a complementary shadow, or a dissolved contour, you are describing a mood rather than a painting.

Why the exhibitions had to exist

Recall the problem from the previous lesson. The Salon was the market. A painter who could not get through the jury could not reach buyers, and a painter who did get through was hung among thousands of works, in a room where placement was decided by people whose taste ran to polished mythology.

Eight independent exhibitions followed between 1874 and 1886, and the group was never stable. Degas wanted a broad anti-Salon front and kept inviting artists the others thought irrelevant. Monet, Renoir, and Sisley kept returning to the Salon when they needed sales, which Degas treated as desertion. Berthe Morisot showed in seven of the eight, missing only 1879, and was one of the group's steadiest members; Mary Cassatt, an American in Paris, joined from 1879. By the eighth and last show in 1886 the room contained Seurat's pointillism, which is a different project altogether, and the label had stopped describing a single practice.

Durand-Ruel, and what a dealer actually does

The person who converted this from a protest into a market was Paul Durand-Ruel, a dealer who inherited his father's business in artists' supplies and pictures. His method was unusual and expensive.

• Buy deep, not wide. Rather than taking one picture on consignment, he bought large blocks of an artist's output, sometimes an entire studio, which gave him control of supply and a reason to promote.
• Pay a stipend. Regular payments in exchange for first refusal let a painter work without a commission in hand. It also tied the artist to the dealer.
• Build a record. He mounted one-artist shows, then a novelty, and published a house journal and catalogues so that a picture came with printed argument attached.
• Find another country. When Paris would not absorb the stock, he took roughly three hundred works to New York in 1886 for a show with the American Art Association, and opened a New York branch in 1888. American collectors, without an academy of their own to defend, bought heavily. He came close to bankruptcy more than once before that.

The sociologists Harrison White and Cynthia White called the arrangement that replaced the Salon the dealer-critic system: the dealer supplies the money and the wall, and a sympathetic critic supplies the story that makes a difficult picture legible. Once you can see that pairing, a great deal of later modern art becomes easier to follow, because the pattern repeats with different names for the next hundred years.

The upshot: Impressionism did not defeat the Salon by argument. It routed around it by building an alternative machine for selling and explaining pictures, and that machine outlived the style.

What the paintings were of, and why that is not innocent

The impressionist subject list is often described as leisure: boating at Argenteuil, the racecourse at Longchamp, cafes, dancers, the Gare Saint-Lazare, weekend crowds on the Seine. All true. The railway that carried Parisians out to Argenteuil in twenty minutes had been built for freight, and the same suburbs held factories that appear at the edges of the canvases as chimneys and smoke. Monet's Argenteuil pictures include an iron road bridge repaired after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to 1871.

Degas is the useful complication. He disliked being called an impressionist, worked indoors from drawings, and painted laundresses, milliners, and dancers at practice, subjects in which the labour is visible and the leisure belongs to somebody else. Cassatt and Morisot painted domestic interiors, women reading and children being dressed, partly by choice and partly because a respectable woman in 1875 could not spend an afternoon sketching alone in a cafe. The subject range of a movement is shaped by who was allowed to stand where.

Common misconceptions

• "The impressionists were rejected outsiders who never sold anything." Several sold well within their lifetimes. Monet was affluent by the 1890s and bought the property at Giverny in 1890. The struggle was concentrated in the 1870s and early 1880s, and was uneven across the group.
• "They painted everything on the spot in a single session." Many canvases were begun outdoors and reworked in the studio for months. Monet's series pictures of the 1890s were finished away from the motif in a studio, which is why the sets are so consistent.
• "Impressionism means blurry." Blur is a by-product of suppressed contour, not the aim. The aim is a colour structure that behaves the way light does. Plenty of impressionist passages are crisp.
• "The 1874 show was the movement's manifesto." There was no manifesto and no shared doctrine. It was a company with bylaws, formed because its members needed somewhere to hang work.

Putting it together

• The first exhibition opened on 15 April 1874 in Nadar's former rooms on the boulevard des Capucines, run by a joint stock company with no jury and no medals.
• Louis Leroy's hostile review in Le Charivari, prompted by Monet's Impression, soleil levant, supplied the name; the picture is small, about 48 by 63 centimetres, and hangs in the Musee Marmottan Monet.
• The technique is a list of decisions: broken colour, complementary shadow, suppressed contour, alla prima handling, cropped composition.
• Tube paint and new synthetic pigments made painting away from the studio practical.
• Paul Durand-Ruel bought in blocks, paid stipends, mounted solo shows, and opened New York in 1888, establishing the dealer-critic system that replaced the Salon.
• The leisure subjects sit next to factories and railways, and who painted what was constrained by who could go where.

Sources

1. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Impressionism. tate.org.uk
2. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (n.d.). Impressionism: Art and modernity. Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. metmuseum.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Impression, Sunrise. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Paul Durand-Ruel. en.wikipedia.org
5. Tate. (n.d.). Claude Monet. tate.org.uk
6. White, H. C., and White, C. A. (1965). Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World. John Wiley and Sons.

In the autumn of 1910 Roger Fry, an English critic who had until recently been a curator at the Metropolitan Museum, needed a title for an exhibition opening at the Grafton Galleries in London. The show, which ran from November 1910 into January 1911, gathered work by Cezanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, and others, most of it barely known in Britain. Fry's secretary, Desmond MacCarthy, later recalled the meeting where the name was settled: nobody could agree, Fry became impatient, and said in effect that the artists all came after the impressionists, so call them post-impressionists. The title stuck to a generation.

Worth holding on to: Post-impressionism is not a movement. It is an exhibition title, applied retrospectively to painters who mostly did not know each other's late work and would have rejected the grouping.

The complaint they shared

What these painters had in common was a dissatisfaction, and it is worth stating precisely because their solutions diverge from it. Impressionism had bought its brilliance at a price. In dissolving contour into patches of coloured light, it had weakened structure: the sense that a painted thing has weight, occupies space, and will still be there tomorrow. In committing to the fleeting effect, it had made permanence and symbolic meaning hard to reach. Cezanne's remark that he wanted to make of impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of the museums, is the clearest statement of the problem.

Four painters, four answers. The table is the fastest way to hold them apart.

Painter	What was missing	The method	A work to hold in mind
Cezanne	Structure and volume	Building form from planes of modulated colour; multiple viewpoints reconciled on one surface	Mont Sainte-Victoire, painted repeatedly from the 1880s to 1906
Seurat	Order and method	Divisionism, small dots of unmixed pigment placed by rule, drawing on colour theory	A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884 to 1886, Art Institute of Chicago
Van Gogh	Feeling made visible	Loaded, directional brushwork and hue pushed past description	The Starry Night, June 1889, Museum of Modern Art
Gauguin	Symbol and the non-visible	Flat fields of arbitrary colour bounded by dark contour; subject as idea rather than sight	Vision after the Sermon, 1888, National Galleries of Scotland

Cezanne: the plane as a unit of construction

Paul Cezanne painted the limestone mountain outside Aix-en-Provence more than sixty times in oil and watercolour. Put two of the late versions side by side and you can watch the landscape being converted into masonry. Foreground fields become rectangular patches of ochre and green, each patch a distinct stroke of the brush laid parallel to its neighbours. The mountain is built from planes of blue, violet, and rose that do not blend into each other. Colour, in this system, is doing the job that shading used to do: warm tones advance, cool tones recede, and volume comes from that push and pull rather than from light and shadow.

Look at one of his still lifes and you will find something stranger. The tabletop on the left of a picture does not line up with the tabletop on the right. A plate is seen slightly from above while the bottle beside it is seen from the front. Cezanne is not making an error, and he is not making a point about relativity. He is composing the surface, adjusting each object to the two-dimensional pattern he needs, and accepting the resulting inconsistency in the illusion. Picasso and Braque took that permission and ran with it, which is why Cezanne is often called the bridge to cubism.

His advice to the younger painter Emile Bernard in 1904, to treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone, has been quoted so often that it has hardened into a formula about geometry. In context he was talking about how to organise recession, and he was still painting from the motif rather than from solids.

Key idea: In Cezanne, colour is structural. A patch of warm ochre is not describing a field, it is holding a position in space and in the pattern at the same time.

Seurat: the rule-governed picture

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884 is oil on canvas, about 2.08 by 3.08 metres, and it has been in the Art Institute of Chicago since 1926. Seurat worked on it for two years, producing dozens of oil sketches on small wood panels and numerous conte crayon drawings before committing. He exhibited it at the eighth and final impressionist exhibition in 1886, where it split the group.

The surface is covered in small, dense touches of unmixed colour. Seurat called the method divisionism, and the term pointillism was coined by critics for the dotted appearance. The theory came from reading: Michel Eugene Chevreul on simultaneous contrast, which describes how a colour shifts the appearance of its neighbour; Ogden Rood on optical mixture; Charles Blanc on colour and drawing. The claim was that mixing on the retina rather than on the palette preserves luminosity, since every pigment mixture is darker than its components.

The claim is not quite right, as it happens. At normal viewing distance the dots do not fully fuse, and the result is often less luminous than a blended passage, not more. The picture works anyway, but for a different reason than the theory predicted, which is a good example of an artist's stated method and an artist's actual achievement coming apart.

Notice also the subject. Parisians of several classes on an island in the Seine on a Sunday afternoon, rendered as stiff, frozen, profile and frontal figures, spaced with the regularity of an Egyptian frieze. Nobody is talking to anybody. The most modern of subjects, urban leisure, is given the most archaic of treatments.

Van Gogh: the mark as evidence of a hand

The Starry Night was painted in June 1889, from a room at the monastery of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Remy-de-Provence, where Vincent van Gogh had admitted himself the previous month. It is oil on canvas, roughly 74 by 92 centimetres, and has been at the Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1941.

The view is from a north-facing window with the mountains of the Alpilles beyond, but the village with its church spire is invented, closer to a Dutch village than a Provencal one, and the sky is not a record of that night. Eleven stars and a crescent moon are painted as concentric rings of yellow and white, each ringed by a halo. A band of blue and white rolls through the upper half in two great curls. A cypress, a tree associated with graveyards in the region, rises in dark flame-like strokes across the entire left edge, tying the ground to the sky.

The important thing to see is the paint itself. The strokes are thick, loaded, and directional. Each one keeps its own identity, and the direction of each records the movement of the hand that made it. In impressionism the stroke serves the light; in van Gogh the stroke has become an independent carrier of energy. That shift is what expressionism, twenty years later, would build on.

He wrote to his brother Theo about wanting to use colour arbitrarily to express himself forcibly. Arbitrary is the key word: the yellow of a night sky is not a report.

Gauguin: flat colour, and a history that has to be told

Paul Gauguin's Vision after the Sermon, painted in Brittany in 1888 and now in the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, divides its canvas with a diagonal tree trunk. On the near side, Breton women in starched white headdresses kneel with their eyes closed, having just heard a sermon. On the far side, small and pushed to the upper corner, Jacob wrestles the angel. The ground between and beneath them is not grass. It is a solid field of vermilion red.

Two things follow. First, the red announces that this is not a scene observed; the picture shows an inward event, the vision the sermon produced, and the colour belongs to the vision rather than to the field. Second, the flat areas bounded by dark outlines come from a deliberate technique. Gauguin and Emile Bernard, working at Pont-Aven, developed what was called cloisonnism, after cloisonne enamel, in which coloured areas sit inside metal partitions, and the broader programme they called synthetism: synthesise the appearance of the subject, the artist's feeling about it, and the demands of the flat design, and paint the result rather than the appearance alone.

Gauguin left for Tahiti in 1891 and spent most of the rest of his life in French Polynesia, where the largest of his paintings, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? of 1897 to 1898, was made; it is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and is about 1.39 by 3.75 metres. His Tahitian pictures are still admired for their colour and are now shown with a fuller account attached. Tahiti was a French colony, and Gauguin arrived as a European with money, a French passport, and colonial authority behind him. He was in his forties and formed sexual relationships with local girls, including some who were about thirteen, which was not hidden and which he wrote about. Museums including the National Gallery in London and the Art Institute of Chicago have revised their wall texts to say this plainly. There is a live argument about how a museum should show him, and the strongest versions on both sides are worth stating: that the work misrepresents Polynesian life through a European fantasy of an untouched paradise, and that removing him from the walls removes the evidence of exactly that. What is not available is the older option of discussing the colour and saying nothing else.

Common misconceptions

• "Post-impressionism was a group with a shared programme." It was Roger Fry's exhibition title from 1910. Cezanne died in 1906 and Van Gogh in 1890, before the term existed.
• "Van Gogh sold only one painting in his life." The number of documented sales is small but the one-painting claim is folklore. The Red Vineyard was sold to the Belgian painter Anna Boch in 1890, and there were other transactions and exchanges; the poverty was real, the tidy figure is not.
• "Pointillism makes colours brighter because the eye mixes them." That was the stated theory. In practice the dots do not fully fuse at normal viewing distance, and the passages are often duller than the theory promised.
• "Cezanne's shifting viewpoints show he could not draw in perspective." He trained in perspective and used it when he wanted it. The shifts are local adjustments made to serve the flat design, and they are consistent across his mature work.

What to carry forward

• The shared complaint was that impressionism had traded structure, permanence, and meaning for optical truth.
• Cezanne rebuilt form from planes of modulated colour and tolerated inconsistent viewpoints, which opened the door to cubism.
• Seurat systematised colour into divisionism, exhibited La Grande Jatte in 1886, and produced an archaic, frozen treatment of a modern subject.
• Van Gogh made the loaded, directional stroke into an independent carrier of feeling, and used colour arbitrarily rather than descriptively.
• Gauguin used flat fields inside dark contours, cloisonnism and synthetism, to paint an inward event rather than a seen one.
• Gauguin's Polynesian years involve documented colonial power and relationships with girls in their early teens, and the current museum argument is about how to show the work, not about whether the facts are true.

Sources

1. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Post-Impressionism. tate.org.uk
2. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Divisionism. tate.org.uk
3. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Synthetism. tate.org.uk
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). The Starry Night. en.wikipedia.org
6. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Vision after the Sermon. en.wikipedia.org
7. Rewald, J. (1978). Post-Impressionism: From Van Gogh to Gauguin (3rd ed.). The Museum of Modern Art.

In October 1905 the critic Louis Vauxcelles walked into Room VII of the Salon d'Automne at the Grand Palais in Paris. The walls held canvases by Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck and others, painted in unmodulated slabs of orange, emerald, and pink, with faces divided by a green stripe and shadows painted in pure blue. In the middle of the floor stood a small bronze bust in a decorous Italianate style by the sculptor Albert Marque. Vauxcelles wrote in Gil Blas that it was Donatello among the wild beasts. Donatello parmi les fauves. Within weeks the painters were the Fauves, and fauvism existed.

One canvas in that room was Matisse's Femme au chapeau, Woman with a Hat: his wife Amelie in an enormous hat, her face built from green, vermilion, and yellow. Visitors were reported to have laughed and one to have tried to scratch it. Leo and Gertrude Stein, American collectors newly settled in Paris, bought it. It is now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Bottom line: A movement can begin as an insult in a newspaper, applied by a hostile critic, and be operating as a brand within a month.

Where the word came from

Avant-garde is a French military term for the advance guard, the small detachment sent ahead of an army. Its transfer to art is datable. In 1825 an essay written by Olinde Rodrigues, published in the circle of the social theorist Henri de Saint-Simon, put a claim in the mouth of an artist: that artists serve as the avant-garde of society, going ahead of the scientist and the industrialist and preparing the public for change. The word arrives, in other words, already carrying a job description. To be avant-garde is not merely to be early. It is to be early on purpose, on behalf of everyone else, and to expect the rest to catch up.

Hold that next to the Salon system and the tension is obvious. A jury rewards work the public already values. An avant-garde defines itself by producing work the public does not yet value, and treats present rejection as evidence of future correctness. That inversion is the single most consequential idea in this course, and it has an obvious failure mode: it makes incomprehension look like proof. Most work rejected in 1905 was rejected because it was not good. A theory that cannot distinguish the two cases is not much of a theory.

The machinery of a movement

From about 1905 to 1930 a repeatable apparatus assembles itself. Once you can name the parts you will recognise them for the rest of the course.

• A label. Usually short, usually ending in ism, and remarkably often invented by an enemy. Impressionism, fauvism, and cubism were all coined by critics, two of the three by Vauxcelles.
• A manifesto. A printed declaration with numbered demands. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti bought the front page of Le Figaro on 20 February 1909 for the founding manifesto of futurism, which is the template: publish first, produce the art afterwards.
• A group. A named membership, exhibitions in common, and expulsions. Andre Breton would later expel surrealists in writing, which only makes sense if membership is a real asset.
• A dealer and a critic. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler contracted with the cubists and kept their work out of public exhibitions on purpose, controlling scarcity. Guillaume Apollinaire supplied the prose.
• A scandal. Ideally one reported in the general press, which converts a small exhibition into a national conversation at no cost.

So what?: A movement is a distribution system as well as a style. Artists who understood that, like Marinetti, got a movement out of thin air; artists who did not, like Cezanne for most of his life, waited for the critics to arrive.

The scandal, worked through: New York, 1913

The International Exhibition of Modern Art opened on 17 February 1913 in the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue, a drill hall hung with pine trees and about 1,300 works. Roughly a third were European, and for most American visitors it was a first encounter with what had happened in Paris over twenty years.

The picture that did the work was Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, oil on canvas, about 1.47 by 0.89 metres, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It shows a figure in overlapping brown and ochre facets, repeated down and across the canvas in the manner of a multiple-exposure photograph, so that the descent is shown as a sequence rather than a moment. Newspapers ran cartoons. One reviewer called it an explosion in a shingle factory. A Chicago showing included students burning an effigy. The former president Theodore Roosevelt published a review objecting that a Navajo rug in his bathroom was a more satisfactory work of art.

Now trace the consequences rather than the noise. The show travelled to Chicago and Boston and was seen by something on the order of a quarter of a million people. Works sold, including to the lawyer John Quinn and later, in the case of Duchamp's Nude, into the Arensberg collection which is why it is in Philadelphia today. American collectors and, in time, American museums acquired a European modernist holding that had not existed in 1912. Alfred Stieglitz's gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue, already showing modern work, gained an audience. The ridicule was the mechanism, not the obstacle.

Matisse, and why fauvism is not just loud colour

Consider Le Bonheur de vivre, The Joy of Life, painted in 1905 and 1906, oil on canvas, about 1.75 by 2.41 metres, at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Figures lounge, embrace, play pipes, and dance in a ring in a glade. The ground is pink and orange, the trees are yellow and violet, and the figures have no modelling to speak of, just contour and flat fill. Scale is inconsistent: a reclining pair in the foreground is smaller than a standing figure further back.

What is being tested is whether a picture can be held together by colour relationships alone once modelling, consistent scale, and local colour have all been surrendered. Matisse said his aim was an art of balance and purity, something like a good armchair for a tired businessman, a remark usually quoted to make him sound complacent. Read next to this canvas it is a claim about difficulty: the calm is the achievement, and it is built from a colour structure with nothing else holding it up. Fauvism lasted about three years as a group phenomenon. Nearly everyone in Room VII had moved on by 1908.

Two theories of what all this was

Scholars disagree about what the avant-garde actually attacked, and the disagreement changes what counts as success.

Renato Poggioli, in The Theory of the Avant-Garde, describes it as a recurring cultural posture with identifiable traits: activism, antagonism toward the public, a taste for its own future defeat, and an appetite for the new as such. On this account the avant-garde is a psychology, and it repeats.

Peter Burger, writing in 1974, argues something narrower and sharper. What he calls the historical avant-garde, meaning Dada, early surrealism, and Russian constructivism, was not attacking a style. It was attacking the institution of art itself: the museum, the gallery, the idea of an autonomous artwork disconnected from daily life. Modernism, in Burger's use, replaces one style with a better one and leaves the institution intact. The avant-garde tried to dissolve the institution and, in his view, failed, because the museum absorbed the attacks and hung them on the wall. When you get to Duchamp's urinal in a later lesson, note that it now sits in museum collections in multiple replicas. Burger would say that is the whole story in one object.

The test between them is straightforward. If avant-garde means a posture, then a painter making shocking pictures for a gallery qualifies. If it means an attack on the institution, then that painter is simply a modernist, and the category is much smaller.

Common misconceptions

• "Avant-garde artists rejected the market." Many built a better market. Kahnweiler's exclusive contracts, the Steins' salon, and Durand-Ruel's New York branch are market instruments, not rejections of one.
• "If the public hates it, it must be ahead of its time." This does not follow, and the avant-garde's own rhetoric encourages the error. Public hostility is compatible with a work being early, being bad, or both.
• "Movements were declared by their members." Impressionism, fauvism, and cubism were all named by hostile critics, and the artists adopted the terms afterwards.
• "Fauvism was a long-running school." As a group it lasted roughly from 1905 to 1908. Its participants dispersed quickly, and Matisse spent the next fifty years on other problems.

The short version

• Avant-garde is a military metaphor transferred to artists in 1825, and it arrives carrying the duty of going ahead of the public.
• Vauxcelles named the Fauves in Gil Blas in 1905 after seeing a conventional bust surrounded by Matisse and Derain in Room VII of the Salon d'Automne.
• The movement apparatus has five parts: a label, a manifesto, a group with a membership, a dealer with a critic, and a scandal.
• The 1913 Armory Show turned ridicule into a market, and Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 was the lightning rod.
• Le Bonheur de vivre tests whether colour relationships alone can hold a large figure composition together.
• Poggioli treats the avant-garde as a recurring posture; Burger restricts it to the attack on the institution of art, which makes the museum's absorption of Dada a defeat rather than a triumph.

Sources

1. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Avant-garde. tate.org.uk
2. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Fauvism. tate.org.uk
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Salon d'Automne. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Armory Show. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Futurist Manifesto. en.wikipedia.org
6. Poggioli, R. (1968). The Theory of the Avant-Garde (G. Fitzgerald, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
7. Burger, P. (1984). Theory of the Avant-Garde (M. Shaw, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1974)

Sometime in May 1912 Pablo Picasso took a small oval canvas, about 29 by 37 centimetres, and glued onto it a piece of oilcloth. The oilcloth was machine-printed with a photographic pattern of chair caning, the kind sold as cheap furniture covering. Around the whole thing he tied a length of ordinary rope, which served as the frame. He painted the rest: a fragment of a glass, a slice of lemon, a knife, a pipe, and the letters JOU, the beginning of the word for newspaper and also of the French verb to play. The picture is in the Musee National Picasso in Paris.

Count what is going on in that object. The caning is not caning; it is a printed picture of caning, made by a machine, bought by the metre. The rope is a real rope doing the job of a carved frame, which would normally be a wooden imitation of nothing at all. The painted passages are handmade illusions. And the letters are letters, which are neither pictures nor things but signs. Four different orders of reality are stacked in a picture the size of a place mat.

Key idea: Collage is not a decorative technique. It puts a real object and a depiction of that object on the same surface and forces you to notice you cannot tell which is doing the work.

Before that: taking the object apart

Cubism runs in two phases, and you can tell them apart by looking rather than by remembering dates.

Analytic cubism, roughly 1909 to 1912, is the phase of dismantling. A subject, usually a small one, a violin, a bottle, a seated person, is broken into intersecting semi-transparent planes seen from several angles at once. Facets tilt toward you and away. The palette is deliberately starved: ochres, greys, browns, sometimes a dull green, because colour would compete with the structural job the facets are doing. Space is shallow, more like a low relief pressed against the picture plane than a room. In the densest canvases of 1911 and 1912 the subject nearly disappears, and Picasso and Braque began adding legible clues, a scroll of a violin, a tuning peg, stencilled letters, to keep the picture from becoming unreadable.

Synthetic cubism, from 1912, reverses the direction. Instead of taking an object apart, it builds one up from flat, larger, simpler shapes, and it lets colour and pattern back in. Its characteristic material is not paint alone but pasted paper.

The point of the shift is worth stating carefully. Analytic cubism asks how much a thing can be dissected before it stops being recognisable. Synthetic cubism asks how few signs are needed to build something recognisable in the first place. A trapezoid of newsprint plus two charcoal lines can be a guitar. That is a claim about signs, not about vision.

Papier colle, September 1912

Georges Braque supplied the second move. In September 1912, working at Sorgues in the south of France, he bought rolls of wallpaper printed to imitate oak grain, cut them into strips, and pasted them into a charcoal drawing of a fruit dish and a glass. He and Picasso called the technique papier colle, pasted paper.

Braque had trained as a house painter and decorator, and imitation wood graining was a trade skill he had learned to do by hand. Using a machine-printed substitute for a skill he possessed is a joke with a sharp edge in it. The pasted strip does three things at once: it is a real piece of paper lying on the surface, it stands for a wooden tabletop inside the picture, and it is a manufactured imitation of wood, so it is already a representation before the artist touches it.

Newspaper appears constantly in these works, and the cuttings are not random. Scholars including Patricia Leighten have read the specific clippings Picasso used in 1912 and 1913 and found headlines from the Balkan Wars and from anti-war reporting. Whether that makes the pictures political is contested: the cuttings are often cropped so the text is partial, and Picasso never said. But the fragments are datable, and they anchor these still lifes to particular weeks in a way a painted table never could.

What matters here: After 1912 an artwork can be assembled from bought materials rather than made from scratch, and the found fragment brings its own history with it into the picture.

Guitar, and the hole where the mass used to be

The same logic went into three dimensions. In 1912 Picasso made a guitar out of cardboard, string, and wire, and in 1914 a version in cut and folded sheet metal, now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Sculpture up to that point was either carved out of a block or modelled and cast: in both cases a solid mass. Picasso's guitar is a construction, built by joining flat planes, and its most striking feature is that the sound hole is not a hole. It is a cylinder projecting outward.

He was working from an object he had been given: a Grebo mask from West Africa, in which the eyes are projecting cylinders. The mask solved a problem for him because it demonstrated a sign that works by inversion, a protrusion standing for a cavity. This is a case where the debt is specific and documented, and it is worth being precise about it rather than repeating the vague claim that African art influenced modernism. The Grebo makers were working within their own long tradition of visual convention; Picasso borrowed a solution from it without knowing that tradition, in a Paris whose ethnographic collections had been filled by colonial expeditions. The 1984 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art called Primitivism in 20th Century Art staged this comparison at scale and was attacked at length, notably by the critic Thomas McEvilley in Artforum, for showing African objects as anonymous stimuli for named European artists.

Two cubisms: the private one and the public one

Here is a fact that surprises most students. Picasso and Braque did not exhibit in the Paris salons during the years they invented cubism. Their dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, had them under contract and showed the work privately in his small gallery on the rue Vignon, to a controlled list of buyers. Braque said later that the two of them were roped together like mountaineers.

The cubism the Paris public actually saw was somebody else's. At the Salon des Independants of 1911, a group including Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Henri Le Fauconnier, Robert Delaunay, and Fernand Leger arranged to hang together in Room 41. That room caused the public scandal, produced the newspaper coverage, and made cubism a word ordinary people used. Gleizes and Metzinger then wrote the first book on the subject, Du Cubisme, in 1912. The name itself was older, from Louis Vauxcelles again, who had written in 1908 about Braque reducing everything to cubes.

So the standard account has a gap in it. The two artists now placed at the centre were commercially insulated and publicly invisible during the crucial years, while the artists who took the abuse and did the explaining are the ones the histories tend to demote. Both parts happened. When you read that cubism scandalised Paris in 1911, the pictures involved were mostly not by Picasso.

How to read a cubist picture without frustration

A practical procedure, because these paintings reward method.

• Find the clue. Look for the most legible fragment: a sound hole, a tuning peg, a moustache, a stencilled word, the fringe of a tablecloth. Cubist pictures almost always contain at least one.
• Locate the surface. Ask where the picture plane is. Pasted paper sits exactly on it; painted facets tilt behind and in front of it by small amounts.
• Follow one plane until it fails. Trace a facet edge and watch it turn into the edge of something else. That handoff is the mechanism.
• Read the letters. Stencilled text is doing two jobs: it is flat, since a letter has no depth, so it pins the surface; and it names, since JOURNAL tells you a newspaper is present.
• Stop trying to solve it. There is no single reconstructable object hidden inside. The picture is not a puzzle with an answer; it is an arrangement of partial views that never resolves, and the refusal to resolve is the content.

Common misconceptions

• "Cubism shows an object from all sides at once." A tidy phrase that fails on contact with the canvases. It shows a few partial, incompatible aspects, deliberately unresolved.
• "Picasso invented cubism alone." Between 1909 and 1912 he and Braque worked so closely that individual canvases are sometimes hard to attribute. Braque invented papier colle.
• "Collage was a minor craft experiment." It is the hinge of the century. Dada photomontage, Rauschenberg's combines, and every assemblage in this course descend from a piece of oilcloth glued down in 1912.
• "The muted browns and greys mean cubists disliked colour." The palette was starved on purpose during the analytic phase so that colour would not compete with the faceting. Colour returns immediately in 1912, and Leger and Delaunay never gave it up.

Pulling it together

• Analytic cubism, about 1909 to 1912, dissects a subject into semi-transparent tilting facets in a starved palette and a shallow space.
• Synthetic cubism, from 1912, builds a subject from a few flat signs and lets colour, pattern, and pasted material back in.
• Still Life with Chair Caning, May 1912, stacks printed oilcloth, real rope, painted illusion, and stencilled letters on one small oval canvas.
• Braque's papier colle of September 1912 used machine-printed wood-grain wallpaper, a manufactured imitation standing in for a trade skill he actually had.
• Picasso's Guitar replaced sculptural mass with joined planes, taking the inverted sign of a projecting cylinder for a cavity from a Grebo mask.
• The cubism the public saw and named in 1911 was the Salon group in Room 41, not Picasso and Braque, who were under exclusive contract to Kahnweiler.

Sources

1. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Cubism. tate.org.uk
2. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Collage. tate.org.uk
3. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Primitivism. tate.org.uk
4. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (n.d.). Cubism. Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. metmuseum.org
5. Smarthistory. (n.d.). Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning. smarthistory.org
6. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. en.wikipedia.org
7. Rubin, W. (Ed.). (1989). Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism. The Museum of Modern Art.

In December 1915, in Petrograd, an exhibition opened with the awkward title The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0,10. Kazimir Malevich hung thirty-nine works in one room. One of them, a black square inside a white border, oil on canvas and about 79.5 centimetres on each side, he placed high up, angled across the junction of two walls, near the ceiling.

In a Russian home that position had a name. The corner across from the door, up near the ceiling, was the krasny ugol, the beautiful or red corner, where the household icon hung and where you crossed yourself on entering. Every Russian visitor to that room knew what a picture in that spot was claiming. Malevich had put a black square where God went.

Why this matters: Abstraction did not arrive as a decorative preference. In its first appearances it arrived carrying religious, political, and utopian claims, and the claims are part of the content.

Futurism: the machine, and what came with it

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was a wealthy Italian poet who paid for the front page of Le Figaro on 20 February 1909 to publish eleven numbered demands. He wanted art that praised speed, danger, the factory, the electric moon of the streetlight, and the racing car, which he declared more beautiful than the classical Victory of Samothrace in the Louvre. He wanted museums and libraries destroyed, calling them cemeteries. He also declared war to be the world's only hygiene and included contempt for women in his list of enthusiasms.

That last part is not a footnote to be tidied away. Futurism's admiration for violence and for the purifying force of war was continuous with its members' politics; Marinetti co-wrote a fascist manifesto in 1919 and remained associated with the movement for the rest of his life. The technical achievements are real, and so is the record. Present both.

The painters made speed visible with two devices. Lines of force extend the movement of a body into the space around it, so an object drags its trajectory behind it. Simultaneity repeats a form in successive positions across one surface, borrowed from the multiple-exposure photographs of Etienne-Jules Marey. Giacomo Balla's Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash of 1912, in the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in New York state, is the clearest possible demonstration: a dachshund with roughly twenty legs, its tail a fan of blurred repetitions, the leash a series of arcs.

Umberto Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, modelled in plaster in 1913, is the movement's best object. A striding figure, about 1.2 metres tall, has no arms and no face. Its thighs and torso spread backward into flanges, as if the air it is pushing through has been made solid and attached to it. The original plaster is in Milan; the bronzes you meet in Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum were all cast after Boccioni's death, which came in 1916 when he fell from a horse during army training. The image is on the Italian twenty cent euro coin.

Expressionism: two groups, two cities

German expressionism is easier to hold once you separate the two organisations, which students routinely merge.

	Die Brucke (The Bridge)	Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider)
Founded	Dresden, 1905	Munich, 1911
Core figures	Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff	Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, August Macke
Aim	A bridge to a future art; raw, direct feeling; anti-bourgeois	Spiritual content behind appearances; colour as inner sound
Look	Jagged angular drawing, acid colour, woodcut-derived edges	Freer, more lyrical, moving toward non-representation
Typical subject	City streets, cabarets, nudes in studios and by lakes	Animals, landscape, riders, increasingly nothing nameable

Kirchner's Berlin street pictures of 1913 and 1914 are the emblem of the first group. In the version at the Museum of Modern Art, tall women in feathered hats and dark plumage advance down a pavement that tilts up toward you at an impossible angle, drawn in strokes like knife cuts, with the men behind them reduced to a wall of black coats. The colour is deliberately unpleasant: sour pinks and greens. The claim is that the modern city produces a specific nervous condition and this is what it looks like from inside.

What happened to these artists later belongs in the same paragraph. In July 1937 the Nazi regime opened an exhibition in Munich called Entartete Kunst, Degenerate Art, hanging some 650 confiscated modern works in cramped rooms with mocking slogans painted on the walls, next to prices meant to enrage taxpayers. Kirchner, Nolde, Kandinsky, and many others were included; thousands more works were seized from German museums, some sold abroad for foreign currency and some destroyed. Kirchner killed himself in 1938.

Kandinsky: subtracting the object

Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian who had trained as a lawyer and moved to Munich at thirty, published Uber das Geistige in der Kunst, On the Spiritual in Art, in Munich in December 1911. Its argument is that colours and forms produce inner effects the way musical notes do, that painting can therefore work as music works, without depicting anything, and that art has a spiritual task in a materialist age. He drew on theosophy, then widely read, and on his own synaesthetic experience of hearing colours.

His paintings from about 1910 to 1914 track the subtraction. Titles help: works called Impression respond to something seen, Improvisation to something inward and spontaneous, Composition to a large deliberate construction. Across these years horses, riders, boats, mountains, and church domes dissolve into swelling colour patches and whipping black lines, and if you know the earlier pictures you can still find the rider in the later ones. He dated a watercolour to 1910 and claimed it as the first abstract work; specialists have argued for years that it is more likely from 1913, and the disputed date is itself a good illustration of how much value attaches to being first.

Malevich: adding nothing

Malevich took the opposite route. Rather than dissolving an object gradually, he proposed to begin from zero, which is what the 0 in the exhibition title means. He called the system suprematism: the supremacy of pure feeling in art, expressed through basic geometric elements on a white ground that stands for infinite space, with no reference to objects at all.

Black Square is not a tidy object. The paint surface has crazed into a network of fine cracks, and beneath it, using X-ray and infrared examination, conservators at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow reported in 2015 that there are two earlier compositions and a faint pencil inscription. The inscription has been read as a reference to a joke picture by the French humourist Alphonse Allais, a black rectangle captioned as a fight in a cellar at night. Whether the reading is right is disputed. What is not disputed is that the founding object of geometric abstraction is a repainted canvas with something hidden under it.

By 1918 Malevich had produced Suprematist Composition: White on White, now at the Museum of Modern Art, a tilted white square on a white ground, distinguished only by a slight difference in warmth and by the visible direction of the brushwork. There is nowhere further to go in that direction, and he knew it.

Mondrian: subtracting until only relation is left

Piet Mondrian arrived at abstraction through trees. His paintings of a single apple tree from 1908 to 1913 begin as a recognisable tree, then become a lattice of curved lines, then a grid of short arcs and straight segments in ochre and grey where the branching structure has become a rhythm across the surface.

From 1917, with Theo van Doesburg and others in the Netherlands, he founded the journal and movement De Stijl, and named his own practice neo-plasticism. The rules are strict: straight lines only, horizontal and vertical only, black lines dividing rectangular fields, colour restricted to the three primaries plus white, grey, and black. Asymmetry is essential; the point is dynamic equilibrium between unequal parts rather than balance between matching ones. Look at how rarely the black lines run the full width of a canvas without a field interrupting them.

He broke with van Doesburg around 1924 and 1925 because van Doesburg started tilting his compositions to forty-five degrees. From outside, a quarrel about a diagonal looks absurd. From inside, the vertical and the horizontal were the whole content: they stood for the two opposed forces whose balance the work existed to demonstrate, and a diagonal is a compromise between them.

His last completed painting, Broadway Boogie Woogie of 1942 to 1943, made in New York after he fled Europe, is at the Museum of Modern Art. The black lines are gone. The grid is built from small blocks of yellow, red, blue, and grey, stuttering along the lines like traffic, or like the piano music he loved.

Remember: Three artists reached non-representation within about five years by three incompatible routes: Kandinsky dissolved the object, Malevich abolished it and started from zero, Mondrian reduced it to the relations between straight lines. Abstraction is not one idea.

Common misconceptions

• "Abstract art means the artist could not draw." Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian all worked representationally for years first, and the sequence of works showing the transition survives in each case.
• "Abstraction was invented by one person in one year." It emerged in several places between about 1910 and 1915, including Kandinsky in Munich, Malevich in Russia, Mondrian in the Netherlands, Frantisek Kupka in Prague and Paris, and Hilma af Klint in Sweden, who painted large non-representational canvases from 1906 and left instructions that they not be shown for twenty years after her death.
• "Futurism was just an enthusiasm for machines." Its founding manifesto also called for the destruction of museums, praised war, and expressed contempt for women, and Marinetti's later fascist politics were consistent with it.
• "Expressionism is one movement." Die Brucke in Dresden from 1905 and Der Blaue Reiter in Munich from 1911 differ in aim, look, and membership, and neither is the same as the later Austrian or American uses of the word.

What you now know

• Malevich hung Black Square in the icon corner at the 0,10 exhibition in Petrograd in December 1915, and the placement was the argument.
• Futurism made speed visible through lines of force and simultaneity, and its founding manifesto endorsed war and misogyny alongside the machine.
• Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space gives a striding figure flanges of solidified air; the bronzes are posthumous casts.
• Die Brucke, Dresden 1905, and Der Blaue Reiter, Munich 1911, are separate groups with different aims, and both were condemned in the 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition.
• Kandinsky argued from music and the spiritual and dissolved his objects; the date of his first abstract work is disputed.
• Malevich began from zero, and the Black Square conceals two earlier compositions and an inscription reported by the Tretyakov Gallery in 2015.
• Mondrian's neo-plasticism allows only horizontals, verticals, primaries, and asymmetry, and he left De Stijl over van Doesburg's diagonal.

Sources

1. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Futurism. tate.org.uk
2. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Expressionism. tate.org.uk
3. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Suprematism. tate.org.uk
4. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Neo-plasticism. tate.org.uk
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). 0,10 Exhibition. en.wikipedia.org
6. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Der Blaue Reiter. en.wikipedia.org
7. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. en.wikipedia.org
8. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. (n.d.). Vasily Kandinsky. guggenheim.org
9. Kandinsky, W. (1911). Uber das Geistige in der Kunst. R. Piper and Co., Munich.

In April 1917 the Society of Independent Artists opened its first exhibition at the Grand Central Palace in New York. Its founding rule was the whole point of it: no jury, no prizes, and anyone who paid one dollar to join and five dollars in annual dues could hang whatever they submitted. More than two thousand works went up, arranged alphabetically by the artist's surname.

One submission arrived from a Richard Mutt of Philadelphia: a standard porcelain urinal, laid on its back, signed on the rim in black paint R. Mutt 1917, and titled Fountain. The hanging committee, which under its own constitution had no power to refuse anything, argued about it and did not put it out. Marcel Duchamp, who sat on the board of that society, resigned.

The point: The rule under attack was not a rule about taste. It was a rule that claimed there was no rule, and the object was designed to find out whether that claim was true.

Zurich, 1916: what Dada was answering

Back up fourteen months. On 5 February 1916 a nightclub opened at Spiegelgasse 1 in Zurich, in the back room of a tavern, run by the German poet Hugo Ball and the performer Emmy Hennings. They called it the Cabaret Voltaire. Zurich was in a neutral country in the middle of a war that had already killed hundreds of thousands of young men in industrial quantities, and the city had filled with refugees, deserters, and exiles.

The evenings there involved simultaneous poems recited in three languages at once, noise music, masks made of cardboard, and Ball reciting nonsense syllables while dressed in a cylinder of blue cardboard that prevented him from walking. The group took a name, Dada, whose origin they told inconsistently on purpose: a French word for a hobby horse, a Romanian doubling of yes, a baby's first syllable, or a word found by stabbing a dictionary.

The logic runs like this, and it is not nihilism. European civilisation had produced universities, symphonies, railways, chemistry, and reason, and had used them to organise a slaughter. If reason produced that, then unreason is not obviously worse. If high culture decorated it, then attacking high culture is a moral act. Dada is often described as anti-art, and the term is accurate as long as you hear the anger in it.

Two working methods followed. Chance: Hans Arp is said to have torn up a drawing that was not working, let the pieces fall, and glued them where they landed, removing the artist's taste from the decision. Tristan Tzara published instructions for writing a poem by cutting up a newspaper article, shaking the words in a bag, and drawing them out. Photomontage: in Berlin, where Dada was directly political, Hannah Hoch, Raoul Hausmann, and John Heartfield cut printed photographs from mass magazines and reassembled them. Hoch's Cut with the Kitchen Knife of 1919 and 1920, in the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, packs generals, dancers, machine parts, Einstein, and a map showing which countries let women vote into a whirling field about 1.44 by 0.9 metres.

The readymade, defined carefully

Duchamp had been working toward Fountain for four years. In 1913 he mounted a bicycle wheel upside down on a kitchen stool in his studio, which he said he liked to spin the way one watches a fire. In 1914 he bought a galvanised iron bottle-drying rack from a Paris department store. In 1915, in New York, he bought a snow shovel and wrote on it a phrase about being in advance of the broken arm, and around then he began using the English word readymade for these objects.

A readymade is a manufactured object selected by an artist and designated as a work of art, with little or no alteration. Note what each part of that sentence does. Manufactured: nobody made it by hand for this purpose. Selected: the artistic act is a choice, not a skill. Designated: it becomes art by being named as art and placed where art is placed.

Duchamp's stated criterion was indifference. He claimed to choose objects that gave him no aesthetic pleasure at all, on the grounds that liking the shape of the bottle rack would have made it just another sculpture. He attacked what he called retinal art, art aimed only at the eye, and argued for art aimed at the mind. Whether the criterion held is doubtful, since the bottle rack and the urinal are both rather elegant objects, and he knew it.

What actually survives

The original Fountain is lost. It was photographed once, by Alfred Stieglitz in his gallery, against a backdrop, lit so that the porcelain reads as a soft shape somewhere between a seated figure and a Buddha. That photograph was published in May 1917 in the second issue of a small magazine, The Blind Man, alongside an unsigned editorial, The Richard Mutt Case, which argued that whether Mr Mutt made the fountain with his own hands was of no importance; he chose it, gave it a new title and point of view, and created a new thought for that object. The magazine was produced by Duchamp's circle.

Everything you can go and see today is a replica. A handful were made in the 1950s, and in 1964 the dealer Arturo Schwarz produced an edition of eight authorised replicas, made to match the photograph. Tate's Fountain is one of these, acquired in 1999. So the most famous anti-institutional gesture of the century now exists as a numbered edition, made by a dealer, sold to museums, and insured.

In short: The object is gone, the photograph is the evidence, the argument is the artwork, and the museum owns a copy.

The authorship dispute, with the evidence on the table

This is a live scholarly argument, and it is worth working through because it shows what evidence looks like in art history.

The case for someone other than Duchamp rests mainly on one document. On 11 April 1917, days after the submission, Duchamp wrote to his sister Suzanne in Paris. In that letter he says that one of his female friends, using a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt, sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture, and that it was not at all indecent so there was no reason to refuse it. The letter is in his own hand and its date is close to the events. Supporters of this reading, including the scholar Irene Gammel, point to Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a German-born artist and poet then living in New York who made assemblages from found objects, including plumbing fixtures, and whose practice fits the gesture closely. She died in 1927 in poverty and her work went largely unrecorded for decades.

The case for Duchamp rests on the rest of the record. He was making readymades before and after 1917. He resigned from the Society over the rejection. His circle produced The Blind Man defence. He claimed the work publicly for the last fifty years of his life, authorised the replicas, and no one contradicted him at the time. Some scholars read the letter as loose or joking, or as describing a friend acting as the courier or the front for a submission he had arranged.

What would settle it? A second contemporary document naming the Baroness, or correspondence from her claiming it. Neither has been found. The honest position is that the letter is real and hard to explain away, that the surrounding evidence for Duchamp is substantial, and that the question is open. Notice how much rides on it: in 2004 a poll of five hundred art professionals named Fountain the most influential work of modern art, ahead of Picasso and Warhol, so the attribution is not a footnote.

Why the readymade could not be undone

Consider what a readymade forces you to admit. If a urinal in a gallery is art and the identical urinal in a plumbing showroom is not, then the difference cannot be in the object. It is in the context, the designation, and the institution that accepts it. That is either a devastating exposure of how art is made or a reason to reject the whole exercise, and both responses have been argued seriously ever since.

The philosopher Arthur Danto built an entire aesthetics on the problem after seeing Warhol's Brillo boxes, arguing that what makes something art is an atmosphere of theory, an artworld, rather than any visible property. George Dickie's institutional theory of art says roughly that a work is art when someone acting on behalf of the artworld confers that status. Critics of both reply that this makes art whatever the powerful say it is, and turns the question of quality into a question of accreditation. Peter Burger, from the last module, would add that the readymade was meant to destroy the institution and instead became its most valuable holding.

Common misconceptions

• "Dada was meaningless." It was anti-rational on purpose, in response to a war organised by rational institutions. The targets were specific: nationalism, the press, the academy, and the market.
• "Fountain was displayed and caused a riot." It was never hung. The committee suppressed it, and the public knew about it mainly through a photograph in a small magazine.
• "You can see the original in a museum." The original is lost. Every version on display is a replica, most from the 1964 edition of eight.
• "The Baroness theory has been proven." It rests principally on one letter of 11 April 1917. That letter is strong evidence and it has not been corroborated. Treat it as unresolved.

The takeaway

• Dada began at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich on 5 February 1916, in a neutral city full of refugees from an industrialised war.
• Chance procedures and photomontage removed the artist's taste and the artist's hand from parts of the process.
• A readymade is a manufactured object selected and designated as art, with the artistic act relocated from making to choosing.
• Fountain was submitted to a no-jury exhibition in April 1917, suppressed by the hanging committee, and survives only through Stieglitz's photograph and later replicas.
• Duchamp's letter of 11 April 1917 attributes the submission to a female friend; the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven is the proposed candidate, and the question is open.
• The readymade forces the conclusion that the difference between an artwork and an identical object lies in context and designation, which Danto and Dickie theorised and others reject.

Sources

1. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Dada. tate.org.uk
2. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Readymade. tate.org.uk
3. Tate. (n.d.). Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917, replica 1964. tate.org.uk
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Fountain (Duchamp). en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Cabaret Voltaire (Zurich). en.wikipedia.org
6. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. en.wikipedia.org
7. Gammel, I. (2002). Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity. MIT Press.
8. Danto, A. C. (1981). The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art. Harvard University Press.

In 1936, in the Cafe de Flore in Paris, Meret Oppenheim was wearing a bracelet she had made from brass tubing covered in ocelot fur. Pablo Picasso, at the same table with Dora Maar, remarked that you could cover anything in fur. Oppenheim, then twenty-two, said you could cover this cup and saucer, and shortly afterwards went out, bought a plain cup, saucer, and spoon from a department store, and covered them in the pelt of a Chinese gazelle.

The object is small: the cup about eleven centimetres across, the saucer about twenty-four. Alfred Barr bought it for the Museum of Modern Art that same year. It is still there, and it is still difficult to look at for long. Nothing in it is violent or obscene. It simply puts a texture into your mouth that your mouth refuses, and the refusal is physical rather than intellectual. That is the whole surrealist method in one object: not a picture of a strange thing, but an ordinary thing rearranged until your body objects.

What matters here: Surrealism at its best is not about depicting dreams. It is about producing a specific reaction, usually discomfort or recognition, by combining familiar things in a way that no waking logic would allow.

Breton, and where the programme came from

Andre Breton published the first Manifesto of Surrealism in Paris in October 1924. He had a medical training and had spent part of 1916 as an orderly at a neurological centre at Saint-Dizier, treating soldiers whose minds had broken under shellfire, where he used techniques derived from Freud. He read The Interpretation of Dreams. He met Freud in Vienna in 1921, and the meeting was a disappointment to both.

The manifesto's core proposal is psychic automatism: the attempt to record the actual functioning of thought with reason, taste, and moral judgement switched off. The claim behind it is that the mind we present in public is heavily edited, that the editing removes exactly what is most true, and that a method which defeats the editor will produce something more real than realism. Hence the name, from a word Guillaume Apollinaire had coined: sur-realism, above or beyond the real, not unreal.

Breton had come out of Dada and kept its appetite for scandal, but he wanted a programme rather than a demolition. He ran the group like a party. There were meetings at fixed cafes at fixed hours, questionnaires, expulsions, and journals, and he was widely resented for it.

Two ways to defeat the editor

Surrealist practice splits into two strands, and the split is the fastest way to organise the whole movement in your head.

	Automatist	Illusionistic (veristic)
Method	Let the hand or the process decide; interpret afterwards	Paint an impossible scene with academic precision
Look	Loose, biomorphic, often close to abstraction	Sharp-edged, deep space, high finish
Artists	Andre Masson, Joan Miro, much of Max Ernst	Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, Yves Tanguy
Techniques	Automatic drawing, frottage, grattage, decalcomania, collage	Traditional oil technique, borrowed from the academy it mocks

The automatist techniques deserve naming because they are recipes you could follow. Frottage, which Max Ernst developed in 1925, means laying paper on a textured surface such as floorboards and rubbing with graphite until an image suggests itself in the grain. Grattage scrapes paint across a canvas laid over such a surface. Decalcomania presses paint between two surfaces and pulls them apart, producing a branching texture nobody designed. The exquisite corpse is a parlour game: each player draws a section of a figure on a folded sheet, sees only a fragment of what came before, and the assembled body belongs to nobody.

In each case the artist supplies the interpretation rather than the invention. That is a genuine transfer of authorship to accident, and it runs directly forward to the process-driven art of the 1950s and 1960s.

Dali, and the smallness of the famous picture

The Persistence of Memory, painted in 1931, is oil on canvas and measures about 24 by 33 centimetres. It is the size of a sheet of paper. Visitors to the Museum of Modern Art regularly walk past it looking for something larger.

In it a flat plain runs back to the cliffs of Cap de Creus on the Catalan coast, painted with the crispness of a seventeenth century Dutch landscape. Three pocket watches have gone soft: one drapes over the edge of a rectangular block, one hangs from a dead branch, one lies across a pale fleshy form on the ground that has an eyelash and a nose and is generally taken as a self-portrait. A fourth watch, closed and orange, is covered in ants. Dali said the soft watches came from watching Camembert melt.

The technique is the joke. Every device the academy taught for making an illusion convincing, atmospheric perspective, cast shadow, fine glazing, hard contour, is deployed at full strength in the service of an image that cannot exist. Dali called his approach the paranoiac-critical method: deliberately inducing the state in which a paranoid person sees a second image inside a first, then painting both.

Breton expelled him from the group in 1934, largely over remarks about Hitler that Dali refused to withdraw, and later coined an anagram of his name meaning eager for dollars. Dali's commercial career, shop windows, advertisements, and a Hollywood dream sequence, was exactly what the group thought it had organised itself against.

Magritte, and the sentence under the pipe

Rene Magritte's The Treachery of Images, painted in 1929 and now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is about 60 by 81 centimetres. It shows a brown pipe, carefully lit, against a plain ground, with a line of neat schoolroom handwriting beneath it saying that this is not a pipe.

The sentence is true, and that is the point. You cannot smoke it. The object in front of you is a canvas with pigment on it, and the pipe you think you see is a convention you have been trained to read since childhood. Magritte worked as a commercial artist and knew exactly how much persuasion an image can carry. The picture is a lesson in the gap between a thing, a picture of a thing, and the word for a thing, delivered in the tone of a primer.

Key idea: Where Dali overloads illusion, Magritte disables it, and both are attacking the same assumption, that a competent picture gives you reliable access to the world.

Who was in the room

Surrealism's public rhetoric put women at the centre and its practice mostly did not. Breton's writing is full of the femme-enfant, the woman-child whose supposed closeness to the irrational makes her a channel for male inspiration. That is a role, not a job.

The artists themselves are another matter. Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Dorothea Tanning, Leonor Fini, Claude Cahun, Kay Sage, and Oppenheim herself produced work that has been steadily revalued since the 1980s, and museums that once treated them as a footnote to their partners now build exhibitions around them. Carrington and Varo both settled in Mexico and made careers there that had nothing to do with Breton's meetings.

Frida Kahlo is the instructive refusal. Breton visited Mexico in 1938, declared her a natural surrealist, and helped arrange a Paris exhibition. Kahlo, who painted her own body, her own injuries after a streetcar accident in 1925, her miscarriage, and her marriage, rejected the label. She said she had never painted dreams; she painted her own reality. The distinction matters. Surrealism proposed reaching a truth by escaping the conscious mind. Kahlo was recording, in exact detail, things that had actually happened to her. Filing her under a European movement flattens both.

The upshot: A movement's manifesto tells you what it claimed, not who did the work or who got paid. Check the exhibition lists.

Common misconceptions

• "Surrealism means dreamlike or weird." As a historical term it means a specific programme, organised in Paris from 1924 by Breton, with a stated method and an enforced membership. The loose adjective is fine in conversation and useless in an exam.
• "Surrealists painted their dreams." Some depicted dream imagery; the automatists were after the process of thought rather than its pictures, and the objects and games were about producing effects in a viewer.
• "The Persistence of Memory is a big painting." It is about 24 by 33 centimetres, and its scale is part of its strangeness.
• "Kahlo was a surrealist." Breton claimed her; she rejected the term and said she painted her own reality. Her subjects are documented events in her life.
• "Automatism was mystical rather than technical." Frottage, grattage, decalcomania, and the exquisite corpse are repeatable procedures with named inventors and dates.

Summing up

• Oppenheim's fur-covered cup and saucer of 1936, at the Museum of Modern Art, works by physical revulsion rather than by depicting anything odd.
• Breton's manifesto of October 1924 proposed psychic automatism, recording thought with reason and taste switched off, drawing on Freud and on his wartime medical work.
• The automatist strand hands decisions to accident through frottage, grattage, decalcomania, and the exquisite corpse; the illusionistic strand uses academic oil technique to render impossible scenes.
• Dali's small 1931 canvas deploys every device of convincing illusion in the service of an impossible image, and he was expelled in 1934.
• Magritte's 1929 pipe with its denial beneath it separates the thing, the image, and the word.
• The group's rhetoric cast women as inspiration; Carrington, Varo, Tanning, Cahun, Fini, and Oppenheim were artists, and Kahlo rejected the label outright.

Sources

1. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Surrealism. tate.org.uk
2. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Automatism. tate.org.uk
3. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Frottage. tate.org.uk
4. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (n.d.). Surrealism. Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. metmuseum.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Surrealist Manifesto. en.wikipedia.org
6. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). The Persistence of Memory. en.wikipedia.org
7. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). The Treachery of Images. en.wikipedia.org
8. Chadwick, W. (1985). Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. Thames and Hudson.

In 1934 Aaron Douglas finished four large panels for the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library, on the block in Harlem that now houses the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The commission came through the Public Works of Art Project, a federal relief programme that paid artists a weekly wage during the Depression. He called the cycle Aspects of Negro Life.

The panels run in sequence: an African setting with drummers and a carved figure; slavery and Reconstruction, with a Union bugler and cotton; an idyll of the Deep South, with music, lynching, and field labour in the same frame; and finally a city panel in which a figure with a saxophone rises on a spiral of stairs against factory chimneys and the towers of Manhattan.

The style is unmistakable and entirely constructed. Figures are flat silhouettes in a single dark tone, drawn in profile with hard geometric edges, their eyes indicated by a small pale wedge. Across them sweep concentric bands of translucent colour, like ripples spreading in water or the beam of a searchlight, so that a figure is one value where the band is pale and another where it is dark. Nothing is modelled. Nothing recedes into perspective. The result reads at forty feet, which is the correct distance for a library wall.

Why this matters: Douglas was solving a problem no Paris studio had: how to build a modern visual language, legible to a general public, that took African form seriously as ancestry rather than as exotic raw material.

The New Negro, and an argument about sources

In March 1925 the magazine Survey Graphic devoted a whole issue to Harlem, edited by the philosopher Alain Locke. Expanded into a book later that year as The New Negro, it became the manifesto of what we now call the Harlem Renaissance: a concentration of Black writers, musicians, and artists in a New York neighbourhood transformed by the Great Migration, in which roughly six million African Americans left the South between 1916 and 1970.

Locke's argument to visual artists was specific. European modernists, he noted, had been ransacking African sculpture for twenty years and calling it inspiration. African Americans had a claim on that heritage that was not touristic, and should study it as their own ancestral form. Douglas took the advice more literally than most, and the flat profile figures and the rhythmic banding come out of that study combined with Egyptian wall painting, art deco design, and the syncopation of the music being played a few streets away.

Not everyone agreed. Some argued that Black artists in the United States had no more direct connection to Dahomey or Benin than any other Americans, and that the demand to be ancestral was a cage. The disagreement was internal to the movement and it was serious.

Lawrence, and the modernism of the small panel

Jacob Lawrence was a generation younger, trained in Harlem's community workshops, including the centre run by the sculptor Augusta Savage. Between 1940 and 1941, working in his early twenties, he made The Migration Series: sixty panels of tempera on hardboard, each only about thirty by forty-five centimetres, telling the story of the Great Migration in flat, angular, high-keyed shapes with a caption under each.

The method is worth knowing. He laid out all sixty panels at once and painted them colour by colour, working one hue across the entire series before moving to the next, so that the same black, the same mustard, the same blue run through the whole cycle and hold it together. It is a production decision that produces a formal result.

In 1942 the series was bought and split. The Phillips Collection in Washington took the odd-numbered panels; the Museum of Modern Art in New York took the even-numbered ones. They have been reunited for exhibitions since, and the division is a fair emblem of how institutions handle work like this.

Mexico: a state that wanted murals

Now cross the border. The Mexican Revolution ran from 1910 into the early 1920s and left a government that needed to explain itself to a largely rural, multilingual, and often non-literate population. In 1921 Jose Vasconcelos became Secretary of Public Education, and he did something no European ministry did: he handed the walls of government buildings, schools, and courtyards to painters and paid them to cover them.

The medium was true fresco, pigment in water applied to wet lime plaster, which binds chemically as it dries. Fresco cannot be corrected, must be planned in daily sections, and lasts for centuries. It is the opposite of an easel painting in every commercial respect: it cannot be sold, cannot be moved, and belongs to the building.

Three painters dominate, known in Mexico as los tres grandes, and lumping them together hides real differences.

	Diego Rivera	Jose Clemente Orozco	David Alfaro Siqueiros
Politics	Communist, celebratory, programmatic	Sceptical of all ideologies, tragic	Militant communist, activist and soldier
Form	Rounded volumes, clear narrative registers, indigenous subjects	Harsh distortion, flame-like drawing, satire	Aggressive foreshortening, dynamic perspective, monumental scale
Technique	Traditional fresco, superbly executed	Fresco, expressionist handling	Industrial paints, spray guns, deliberate accidents
Key work	Detroit Industry Murals, 1932 to 1933, Detroit Institute of Arts	The Epic of American Civilization, 1932 to 1934, Dartmouth College	America Tropical, 1932, Olvera Street, Los Angeles

Three commissions and what happened to them

Rivera's twenty-seven panels in the courtyard of the Detroit Institute of Arts were paid for by Edsel Ford and made after months spent watching the River Rouge plant. The north and south walls show the assembly line as a single continuous body of workers, arranged with the compositional logic of a Renaissance altarpiece, with the machines themselves given the swelling forms of Aztec sculpture. Local clergy denounced the panels as sacrilegious and industrialists disliked the politics, and Edsel Ford defended them. They are still there.

Rivera's other American commission ended differently. In 1933 he was painting Man at the Crossroads in the lobby of the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center in New York when a newspaper noticed that one of the faces in the crowd was Lenin. Asked to replace it, Rivera offered to add Lincoln for balance but would not remove Lenin. He was paid off, the wall was covered, and in February 1934 the mural was chipped off entirely. He repainted a version the same year at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, where it can be seen.

Siqueiros went to Los Angeles in 1932 and painted America Tropical on an exterior wall on Olvera Street. Patrons expected a picturesque tropical scene. What they got was an indigenous man crucified beneath an American eagle, with armed revolutionaries taking aim at it. Parts of it were whitewashed within a year and the rest within about a decade. Conservation work led by the Getty Conservation Institute stabilised what remained, and the mural was reopened to the public with a viewing platform in 2012.

Orozco's twenty-four panels at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, painted between 1932 and 1934 in the reserve reading room of what is now Baker-Berry Library, run from Aztec migration through Cortes to a modern panel of skeletal academics in gowns presiding over the birth of a stillborn skeleton wearing a mortarboard. He was paid by the college to satirise, among other things, the college.

Remember: Public funding does not mean freedom, and private funding does not mean censorship. Detroit survived a private patron, Rockefeller Center did not, and Los Angeles whitewashed a wall the public could see for free.

Patronage in Harlem, on the same terms

The Harlem Renaissance had its own version of the problem. Charlotte Osgood Mason, a wealthy white widow who required her beneficiaries to call her Godmother, supported Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston with substantial sums and detailed conditions about what she considered authentically primitive and therefore acceptable. Hughes broke with her in 1930, and wrote about the break for years afterwards.

Douglas's route, federal relief money through the Public Works of Art Project and later the Works Progress Administration, came with a different constraint: the work had to go on a public wall, and it had to be intelligible to the people who used the building. Both facts are visible in the panels.

Common misconceptions

• "Modernism happened in Paris and then spread." Mexican muralism was a state-backed public art programme running from 1921, and it influenced artists in the United States directly, including Pollock, who attended Siqueiros's New York workshop in 1936.
• "The Harlem Renaissance was a literary movement." It was literary, musical, and visual at once, and its painters, sculptors, and photographers, including Douglas, Savage, Motley, and Van Der Zee, were central to it.
• "Murals are just big paintings." True fresco binds into wet plaster, cannot be corrected or moved, and is planned in daily sections. It is a different craft with different economics: no market, no resale, no private ownership.
• "Rivera's Rockefeller mural was destroyed by accident during construction." It was deliberately removed in February 1934 after he refused to paint out Lenin, and he repainted a version in Mexico City that year.

Looking back

• Douglas's Aspects of Negro Life, 1934, at what is now the Schomburg Center, uses flat silhouettes and translucent concentric bands so the images read across a public room.
• Alain Locke's The New Negro of 1925 urged Black artists to claim African form as ancestry, a position that was argued about inside the movement.
• Lawrence's sixty-panel Migration Series of 1940 to 1941 was painted colour by colour across all panels at once and was split between the Phillips Collection and the Museum of Modern Art in 1942.
• From 1921 Vasconcelos funded murals on Mexican public buildings, in true fresco, for a largely non-literate public.
• Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros differ in politics, form, and technique, and Siqueiros's industrial paints fed directly into later American painting.
• Detroit survived, Rockefeller Center was destroyed in February 1934, and America Tropical was whitewashed and then conserved and reopened in 2012.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Harlem Renaissance. en.wikipedia.org
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Aaron Douglas. en.wikipedia.org
3. The Phillips Collection. (n.d.). Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series. phillipscollection.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Mexican muralism. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Diego Rivera. en.wikipedia.org
6. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Jose Clemente Orozco. en.wikipedia.org
7. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). David Alfaro Siqueiros. en.wikipedia.org
8. Locke, A. (Ed.). (1925). The New Negro: An Interpretation. Albert and Charles Boni.

In the summer and autumn of 1950 the photographer Hans Namuth spent weekends in a converted barn at Springs, on the eastern end of Long Island, photographing Jackson Pollock at work. For the film he wanted a shot from below, so Pollock painted on a sheet of glass laid horizontally, with Namuth underneath looking up. You can watch the paint arrive.

What the photographs show is not a man having a fit. The canvas is unstretched and lying on the floor. Pollock moves around all four sides of it, mostly walking, sometimes crouching. He works with hardened brushes, sticks, and basting syringes, and with commercial enamel house paint straight from the can, because enamel flows in a continuous thread where artists' oil paint drips and stops. He stops constantly, looks, walks to the other side, and adds a line that answers one already there. It is closer to a slow game than to a frenzy.

After the last filming session Pollock, who had been sober for about two years, started drinking again that evening. He died in a car crash near his home on 11 August 1956.

Bottom line: The drip paintings were made by a repeatable procedure with specific materials and constant editorial judgement, and the myth of pure spontaneity was largely built by photographs.

What Autumn Rhythm actually is

Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), painted in 1950, is enamel on unprimed canvas and measures about 2.67 by 5.26 metres. It is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which bought it in 1957, the year after Pollock died.

Stand at the left end and read across. The canvas ground is a warm unbleached tan and stays visible everywhere, so the painting has air in it. Black enamel lays down first in long loops and whips, then white, then a rusty brown, then a pale teal in smaller quantities, each layer laid over and through the last without ever fully covering it. There is no centre. There is no top or bottom in the compositional sense, no figure, and no depth in the perspectival sense, yet the layers sit at slightly different distances, so you get a shallow flickering space about as deep as a hedge.

The technical term for the result is the all-over composition: no focal point, no hierarchy, incident distributed evenly to the edges, with the picture implying that it could continue beyond them. It is one of the few genuinely new compositional ideas of the century, and its consequences show up later in minimalism.

Two wings of one school

Abstract expressionism, or the New York School, is not one look. It divides into two.

Gesture painting, which the critic Harold Rosenberg called action painting in a 1952 essay in ARTnews, treats the canvas as a place to act rather than a surface to compose. His formulation was that the canvas had become an arena in which to act rather than a space in which to reproduce or analyse. Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Lee Krasner belong here. De Kooning's Woman paintings of the early 1950s, one of which is at the Museum of Modern Art, are the useful counter-case: the figure never disappeared, and the brushwork is savage and reworked over months.

Colour field painting works in the opposite temperature. Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Still built large canvases from a few great areas of colour, aiming at an immediate and total effect rather than at incident. Rothko's method was thin: layer after layer of diluted paint brushed on quickly, so the rectangles glow from underneath and their edges feather into the ground rather than stopping. He was emphatic that his subject was not colour but basic human emotion, and that anyone who responded only to the colour relationships had missed it. He wanted his paintings hung low and close together in dim light, and specified viewing distances.

Rothko's Seagram commission is the clarifying story. In 1958 he was paid to make murals for a luxury restaurant in the new Seagram Building in New York. He worked for months on a series in dark maroon and black, then went to eat at the restaurant, saw the clientele, and withdrew, returning the fee. Nine of those canvases went to Tate in London, where they arrived on 25 February 1970, the day he was found dead in his studio.

Who is missing from the photograph

On 15 January 1951 Life magazine published a Nina Leen photograph of fifteen painters in suits, taken after eighteen artists signed an open letter attacking the Metropolitan Museum's jury for a contemporary exhibition. The press called them the Irascibles, and the image became the group portrait of the movement.

Look at who is in it. Fourteen men and one woman, Hedda Sterne, standing at the back, who later said the men resented her presence. Lee Krasner, married to Pollock and a serious painter before she met him, is not there. Elaine de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, and Helen Frankenthaler are not there. Norman Lewis, a Black painter working in abstraction in Harlem from the 1940s and a founder of the Spiral group, is not there and was systematically left out of the dealer and museum networks that made the others.

Frankenthaler's exclusion matters technically as well as socially. Her Mountains and Sea of 1952, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, was made by pouring heavily thinned paint onto raw unprimed canvas so that it soaked in and stained rather than sitting on top. Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland saw it and rebuilt their practice around the method. A technique that reorganised the next decade of American painting came from an artist who was twenty-three and not in the photograph.

The Cold War argument, stated at full strength

Here is the claim that has hung over this movement since the 1970s: that abstract expressionism was promoted abroad by American institutions as a demonstration of the freedom of the West, and that the promotion, not the quality, explains its dominance.

The evidence assembled for it is real and should be laid out plainly.

• The Museum of Modern Art established an International Program in 1952, funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, to send American exhibitions abroad, at a time when Congress had refused to fund such touring after a 1946 State Department show was attacked as communist.
• The exhibition The New American Painting toured eight European countries in 1958 and 1959 and was seen by very large audiences.
• MoMA's leadership overlapped with the American foreign policy establishment. Nelson Rockefeller, its president, had run the Office of Inter-American Affairs during the war; other trustees and officers had wartime intelligence backgrounds.
• The Central Intelligence Agency did covertly fund cultural work through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, founded in 1950, which supported magazines including Encounter, concerts, and conferences. A former officer, Thomas Braden, described the practice publicly in a 1967 magazine article.
• The argument was published by Max Kozloff in Artforum in 1973 and, more sharply, by Eva Cockcroft in Artforum in June 1974 under the title Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War, and developed at book length by Serge Guilbaut in 1983 and Frances Stonor Saunders in 1999.

The logic is that a state which wanted to contrast its own freedom with Soviet socialist realism had an obvious use for large, difficult, individualist, apolitical paintings, and that the institutions promoting them were staffed by people who understood that use.

The reply, also at full strength

The objections are not evasions, and several are strong.

• Chronology. The style was formed between 1943 and 1950 in a New York where these painters were poor and largely unsold. The promotion came after, so it can explain the international reputation without explaining the work.
• The artists' politics. Most had been on the left, several had worked on the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, and Rothko and Newman in particular would have been horrified. Newman described himself as an anarchist. Being useful to a government is not the same as serving it.
• The specificity of the evidence. The documented CIA funding is clearest for magazines and conferences. For the touring painting shows the money is largely traceable to private foundations, and direct documentary proof of agency direction of those exhibitions is thinner than the strong version of the thesis implies.
• What it would prove anyway. Michael Kimmelman argued in 1994 that even granting the promotion, it tells you about diplomacy rather than about the pictures. Governments have promoted Shakespeare and Beethoven; the sponsorship does not decide the value.

So what?: The defensible position is narrower than either headline. American institutions did deliberately export this work as evidence of a free society, and that shaped the speed and reach of its international reputation. It does not follow that the painting was manufactured for the purpose, or that its quality is an artefact of publicity.

What would settle the remaining question is ordinary historical work: the internal correspondence of the International Program, the Congress for Cultural Freedom's accounts, and the records of who chose which artists for which tour. Some of that has been published, some remains uncatalogued, and the honest summary is that the strong claim is unproven and the weak claim is established.

Common misconceptions

• "Pollock threw paint at random." He used enamel for its flow, worked from all four sides of a canvas on the floor, and made continual decisions. Physicists have even analysed the fluid dynamics of the pours as controlled.
• "Abstract expressionism is one style." Gesture painting and colour field painting differ in method, tempo, and aim; Rothko disliked being grouped with Pollock.
• "The CIA invented abstract expressionism." No serious version of the argument claims this. The claim concerns promotion abroad after the style existed, and its strongest documentary support concerns magazines rather than painting tours.
• "There were no women or Black artists in the movement." Krasner, Mitchell, Hartigan, Frankenthaler, Elaine de Kooning, and Norman Lewis were all working in it. Frankenthaler's soak-stain method of 1952 redirected American painting.

Recap

• Pollock's method used enamel, an unstretched canvas on the floor, movement around all four sides, and constant judgement; Namuth's 1950 photographs built the opposite impression.
• Autumn Rhythm, about 2.67 by 5.26 metres at the Metropolitan Museum, is an all-over composition with no focal point and a shallow flickering space.
• The school splits into gesture painting, which Rosenberg called action painting in 1952, and colour field painting.
• Rothko withdrew from the Seagram commission and gave nine murals to Tate, where they arrived on the day he died in 1970.
• The 1951 Irascibles photograph omits Krasner, Frankenthaler, Mitchell, and Norman Lewis, and Frankenthaler's soak-stain method of 1952 reorganised the next decade.
• The Cold War argument rests on MoMA's International Program, the 1958 to 1959 European tour, overlapping personnel, and documented CIA cultural funding; the replies rest on chronology, the artists' own politics, and the limits of the documentary trail.

Sources

1. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Abstract expressionism. tate.org.uk
2. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Colour field painting. tate.org.uk
3. Tate. (n.d.). Mark Rothko, Black on Maroon, 1958. tate.org.uk
4. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (n.d.). Abstract Expressionism. Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. metmuseum.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). The Irascibles. en.wikipedia.org
6. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Congress for Cultural Freedom. en.wikipedia.org
7. Guilbaut, S. (1983). How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (A. Goldhammer, Trans.). University of Chicago Press.
8. Saunders, F. S. (1999). Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War. Granta Books.

In July 1962 the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles gave Andy Warhol his first solo exhibition of paintings. He sent thirty-two canvases, each about 51 by 41 centimetres, each showing one can of Campbell's soup, differing only in the flavour printed on the label. There were thirty-two because Campbell's sold thirty-two varieties. Irving Blum, the dealer, set them on a narrow white shelf running around the room at eye level, spaced evenly, like stock on a supermarket rack.

A gallery down the street stacked real cans of Campbell's soup in its window with a sign offering them at a genuine price, cheaper than the paintings. Six of the canvases sold. Blum then decided the set should stay together, bought back the six, and arranged to buy the whole group from Warhol for a thousand dollars, paid in ten monthly instalments of a hundred. The Museum of Modern Art acquired the set in 1996.

In short: The joke told against the exhibition, that these are just soup cans and you can buy the real thing cheaper, is the argument the paintings were making, and the dealer's instalment plan is part of the work's history.

It started in London, and it started as analysis

Pop art is usually filed as American. Its first version was British, older, and considerably more theoretical.

From 1952 a group of artists, architects, and critics met at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and called themselves the Independent Group. They were mostly young, mostly not wealthy, and they were fascinated by American mass culture, which in postwar Britain, still under rationing until 1954, arrived as glossy magazines, science fiction, Detroit car styling, and film. They studied it the way anthropologists study a distant society: seriously, at length, with slide lectures.

Eduardo Paolozzi had been making collages from American magazines since 1947, one of which includes a pistol firing the word POP. In 1956 Richard Hamilton made a small collage, only about 26 by 25 centimetres, for the poster and catalogue of an exhibition called This Is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Gallery. It shows a modern interior containing a bodybuilder holding an outsized lollipop labelled POP, a woman with a lampshade hat, a tape recorder, a tinned ham on the coffee table, a vacuum cleaner advertisement, and a cinema visible through the window. Its title asks what makes today's homes so different, so appealing.

In a letter of 1957 Hamilton listed what pop art should be: popular, transient, expendable, low cost, mass produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and big business. Read that list twice. It is a specification, written before most of the art existed, by someone standing outside the culture he is describing and looking in with a mixture of appetite and diagnosis.

The American version, and what came before it

In New York the ground had been prepared by two painters usually filed under neo-dada. Jasper Johns painted Flag in 1954 and 1955 using encaustic, pigment in hot wax, over collaged newspaper on fabric. It is a painting of a flag that is also, unavoidably, a flag: there is no background, nothing is depicted at an angle or in a setting, and the object and the image have the same boundary. Robert Rauschenberg made what he called combines, among them Monogram, a stuffed Angora goat with a car tyre around its middle standing on a painted horizontal panel, now at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Earlier, in 1953, he had asked Willem de Kooning for a drawing in order to erase it, spent weeks removing it, and exhibited the result as a work of his own.

American pop from about 1961 pushed further into the commercial image. Roy Lichtenstein's Whaam! of 1963, two panels totalling about 1.73 by 4.06 metres and now at Tate, enlarges a single frame from a war comic: a fighter plane firing, the explosion filling the right panel, a caption box, a speech balloon. He reproduced the Ben-Day dots of cheap four-colour printing by hand, using a stencil, so a mechanical shortcut becomes laborious craft at mural scale. The source panel was drawn by a working comics artist, Irv Novick, and Lichtenstein changed the composition and colour but did not credit him. Comics professionals have objected to that for sixty years, and the objection is not frivolous.

Warhol's decisive technical move came in mid-1962, when he began using photographic silkscreen: a photograph is turned into a stencil on a mesh, and ink is pushed through it onto canvas. The consequences are the point. The image is not drawn. It can be repeated exactly, or repeated badly, and the misregistrations, smears, and gaps become the incident in the painting. Assistants can pull the screen. The Marilyn Diptych, made within months of Monroe's death in August 1962 and now at Tate, uses a single publicity still from a 1953 film, repeated fifty times: twenty-five in flat colour on the left, twenty-five in black ink on the right, degrading across the panel until the last impressions are barely legible.

The point: Pop artists did not paint the world. They painted images of the world that already existed, made by other people for commercial reasons, and the second-hand quality is the subject.

Does it celebrate or criticise?

This has never been settled, and both readings have serious support.

The case for critique. Repetition to the point of numbness is not flattery. The Marilyn Diptych takes a dead woman's publicity photograph and runs it until it falls apart, which is a fair description of what publicity did to her. Warhol's Death and Disaster series of the same years silkscreens car crashes, an electric chair, and race riot photographs in the identical deadpan manner, which makes it hard to argue that the manner signals approval. Hamilton's 1957 list reads like a diagnosis. Much pop made outside Britain and the United States is explicitly political: Tate Modern's 2015 exhibition The World Goes Pop assembled work from Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Asia in which pop's flat commercial style was aimed at dictatorship, war, and censorship.

The case for celebration, or at least complicity. Warhol said repeatedly that he liked the things he painted, that he wanted to be a machine, and that there is nothing behind the surface. He took commercial commissions throughout, ran a studio called the Factory with assistants, produced portraits of collectors for a fixed fee, and became extremely rich. Lichtenstein's paintings are handsome objects that hang comfortably in the homes of people the paintings supposedly satirise. If a critique is this profitable and this decorative, the critical reading has some explaining to do.

A third position, which has gained ground, is that the refusal to signal is the achievement. Pop withholds the artist's attitude, and by withholding it forces the viewer to supply one and then to notice they have supplied it. On that reading the deadpan is not evasion but method.

Who else was in it

The standard roster of pop is five or six men. The exhibitions of the last twenty years have made that hard to sustain. Rosalyn Drexler was painting over enlarged press photographs in New York in the early 1960s. Marjorie Strider made shaped canvases with parts projecting into the room. In Britain, Pauline Boty put film stars and political imagery into brightly coloured canvases before her death in 1966 at twenty-eight, and her paintings then sat in a barn for decades. Evelyne Axell in Belgium and Marta Minujin in Argentina were working in the same idiom on their own terms. The 2015 Tate Modern survey and earlier exhibitions of women pop artists did not discover unknown amateurs; they recovered artists who had shown, sold, and been reviewed at the time.

Common misconceptions

• "Pop art began in New York in the 1960s." The Independent Group was meeting in London from 1952, Paolozzi's collages date from 1947, and Hamilton's specification was written in 1957.
• "Warhol's silkscreens are prints, not paintings." The screens were pulled onto canvas, often over painted grounds, and the flaws are one-off. Museums catalogue them as paintings, and the distinction he was attacking is exactly this one.
• "Lichtenstein copied comics exactly." He cropped, recomposed, changed colour, and enlarged enormously. He also worked from panels by named professionals whom he did not credit, which is a separate and legitimate complaint.
• "Pop is obviously a celebration of consumerism." The Death and Disaster paintings use the same deadpan for an electric chair. The refusal to signal an attitude is consistent, and that is what makes the question live.

What to remember

• Warhol's thirty-two soup can canvases were shown at Ferus in Los Angeles in July 1962 on a shelf like supermarket stock, and Blum bought the set for a thousand dollars in instalments.
• British pop came first, out of the Independent Group at the ICA from 1952, and Hamilton's 1957 letter specifies the movement in eleven adjectives.
• Johns's Flag and Rauschenberg's combines removed the gap between an object and its image.
• Photographic silkscreen let Warhol repeat an image exactly, badly, and at speed, making misregistration the incident.
• Lichtenstein enlarged single comic panels and hand-painted the printing dots, without crediting the comics artists whose panels he used.
• Whether pop celebrates or criticises is unsettled; the Death and Disaster paintings and the global pop of The World Goes Pop pull one way, Warhol's own statements and commercial practice pull the other.

Sources

1. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Pop art. tate.org.uk
2. Tate. (n.d.). Roy Lichtenstein, Whaam!, 1963. tate.org.uk
3. Tate. (n.d.). Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, 1962. tate.org.uk
4. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Neo-Dada. tate.org.uk
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Campbell's Soup Cans. en.wikipedia.org
6. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? en.wikipedia.org
7. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. (n.d.). Pop art. guggenheim.org
8. Whiting, C. (1997). A Taste for Pop: Pop Art, Gender, and Consumer Culture. Cambridge University Press.

In 1972 Tate bought a work by the American sculptor Carl Andre consisting of 120 firebricks. They are ordinary sand-lime bricks, arranged in a rectangle six by twenty on the floor, two layers deep, with no fixings. The work is called Equivalent VIII, made in 1966 as one of eight arrangements using the same 120 bricks in different rectangles, all with the same volume and the same height.

In February 1976 a newspaper reported the purchase price, and the British press spent weeks on it. One tabloid ran the headline that it was a load of rubbish. Questions were asked in Parliament. A visitor threw blue dye over it. The gallery's director spent months explaining a purchase made four years earlier.

The interesting part is not the outrage. It is the two questions the outrage could not answer. If the bricks are restacked by a technician after storage, is it the same work? And if you and I buy 120 identical bricks and stack them the same way, what exactly do we lack? Every answer to those questions is a theory of what art is, and by 1976 the available answers had changed.

The core of it: Minimalism moved the artwork out of the crafted object and into the object's relationship with the room and the viewer; conceptual art then moved it out of the object altogether.

What minimalism removed

Minimalism arrived in New York around 1963 to 1966, as a reaction against abstract expressionism, which by then looked to younger artists like a great deal of personality smeared on a surface. Frank Stella's black-striped canvases of 1958 to 1960, painted in commercial enamel with the stripes following the shape of the stretcher, offered no interior drama at all: the pattern is deducible from the shape of the support. Asked to explain them, Stella said in effect that there was nothing there besides what you could see.

Donald Judd's essay Specific Objects, published in Arts Yearbook in 1965, made the case. Painting and sculpture, he argued, were exhausted as categories, and the interesting new work was neither: three-dimensional, whole rather than composed of parts, made of industrial materials, and free of both illusion and internal relationships. His own works follow the description exactly. A stack of twelve identical galvanised iron boxes projects from a wall at equal intervals, the gaps as tall as the boxes. Nothing is arranged. The interval is a number.

Here is the checklist minimalism removed, and it is worth being precise because the list is what makes the movement radical rather than merely plain: composition in the sense of balancing parts, the artist's touch, illusionistic space, symbolic reference, hierarchy between elements, and fabrication by hand. Judd's boxes were made by a metal shop from drawings.

What replaced all that was the situation. A minimalist work is designed to be experienced in a specific space, from a moving body, over time. Walk along Andre's floor pieces and you experience them as a change in the floor. Robert Morris, in his Notes on Sculpture of 1966, argued explicitly that the object is only one term, and the viewer's body in the space is another.

Fried's objection, which is not stupid

In June 1967 the critic Michael Fried published Art and Objecthood in Artforum, attacking what he called literalist art. His objection was precise. If the work's effect depends on the viewer's presence, on approaching it, walking around it, and taking time, then it has become theatre. It stages an encounter rather than being a thing to be apprehended. Fried thought that placed it outside the modernist tradition entirely, which he understood as offering an experience complete at every instant.

You can disagree, and most subsequent art history has. But notice that Fried was describing the situation accurately and drawing the opposite conclusion from the same facts. He saw that minimalism made the encounter, not the object, the site of the work, and he thought that was a loss. Everything that comes next in this course, installation, performance, land art, relational work, is exactly the theatre he was warning against. He identified the future correctly and disliked it.

Remember: The most useful critic of a movement is often the one who understands it best and rejects it, because the description survives even when the verdict does not.

Who is left out of the minimalist story

Anne Truitt was making tall painted wooden columns in Washington from 1961 and 1962, before Judd's boxes, and Clement Greenberg championed her. Because she painted the wood herself in soft, layered colours, her work was often read as personal and therefore not properly minimalist, a judgement that used the movement's own hostility to touch as a filter. Agnes Martin's grids, drawn in pencil over pale washes, sit in a similar position. Both are now shown as central; neither was in the founding accounts.

Conceptual art: the object becomes optional

If minimalism reduced the object to a bare fact, conceptual art asked why the object was needed.

Sol LeWitt published Paragraphs on Conceptual Art in Artforum in June 1967. His claim was that the idea or plan is the machine that makes the art, that the execution is a perfunctory affair, and that all the planning is done in advance. His own practice made this literal. A LeWitt wall drawing is a set of written instructions and a diagram, for instance to draw a set of lines in four directions and four colours within a given area, executed on a wall by anyone competent, painted over when the exhibition closes, and drawn again elsewhere. The certificate and the instructions are what a museum owns.

Joseph Kosuth's One and Three Chairs of 1965, in the Museum of Modern Art, sets out a wooden folding chair, a full-size photograph of that chair in that position, and a photostat of a dictionary definition of the word chair. Three ways of presenting a chair, none of which is the chair itself in any complete sense, and the work is the relation between them. Kosuth argued that art after Duchamp is the investigation of the nature of art, and that a work is a proposition about art rather than an object in the world.

Lawrence Weiner drew the practical conclusion in a short declaration in 1968: the piece may be built by the artist, or built by someone else, or not built at all, and each possibility is equal. Ownership of such a work is ownership of a statement and a right, recorded in a certificate. In Britain, the Art and Language group turned art into published argument, producing a journal rather than objects.

The dealer Seth Siegelaub organised exhibitions in 1968 and 1969 that existed as catalogues, since the works could be printed as instructions. If the show is the catalogue, then the gallery, the shipping, the insurance, and the wall have all been made optional, which is a direct attack on the economics of the art world and not only on its aesthetics.

The catch

Conceptual art set out to make work that could not be bought, hoarded, or turned into a luxury good. Within fifteen years, certificates, instructions, documentation photographs, and typewritten statements were being sold, collected, and auctioned. A LeWitt wall drawing sells for a great deal, and what changes hands is paper.

This is the Burger problem from Module 2 arriving on schedule. The market did not refute conceptual art; it simply extended itself to cover the new object, which was a document. Whether that counts as absorption or as a demonstration of the point is still argued. Adrian Piper's response was to work in ways that made the collector's position uncomfortable rather than impossible, including street actions in 1970 and 1971 in which she made herself an object of unwanted attention in public and recorded the reactions.

Common misconceptions

• "Minimalism means simple or empty." It means a specific set of removals, composition, touch, illusion, symbolism, hierarchy, and handmaking, replaced by the viewer's experience in a particular room.
• "Anyone could stack the bricks." Physically, yes. The question that follows, what makes the gallery arrangement a work, is the one minimalism raises deliberately, and the answers involve authorship, designation, and context rather than skill.
• "Michael Fried failed to understand minimalism." His 1967 description of it as theatre is accurate and is now used approvingly by people who reject his verdict.
• "Conceptual art has no objects." It usually has documents: certificates, instructions, photographs, typescripts. The object is demoted, not abolished, and the documents entered the market quickly.

The short version

• Andre's Equivalent VIII, 120 firebricks bought by Tate in 1972, produced a press storm in 1976 and two hard questions about identity and authorship.
• Judd's Specific Objects of 1965 argued for work that is neither painting nor sculpture: whole, industrial, and free of internal relationships.
• Minimalism replaced composition and touch with the encounter between an object, a room, and a moving viewer.
• Fried's Art and Objecthood of 1967 named that encounter theatre and rejected it, describing the next fifty years accurately in the process.
• LeWitt's 1967 Paragraphs made the idea the machine that makes the art; his wall drawings are instructions executed by others and painted over afterwards.
• Kosuth's One and Three Chairs presents object, photograph, and definition as three incomplete presentations, and Weiner made building the work optional.
• The market adapted by trading certificates and documentation, which is either absorption or proof of the argument, depending on who is speaking.

Sources

1. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Minimalism. tate.org.uk
2. Tate. (n.d.). Carl Andre, Equivalent VIII, 1966. tate.org.uk
3. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Conceptual art. tate.org.uk
4. Tate. (n.d.). Sol LeWitt. tate.org.uk
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). One and Three Chairs. en.wikipedia.org
6. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Equivalent VIII. en.wikipedia.org
7. Fried, M. (1967). Art and objecthood. Artforum, 5(10), 12-23.
8. Meyer, J. (2001). Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties. Yale University Press.

In April 1970 Robert Smithson hired two dump trucks, a tractor, and a front loader, and had them move roughly six thousand tons of black basalt and earth off the shore at Rozel Point into the north arm of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. The result is a coil that runs out from the shore for about 460 metres, roughly 4.5 metres wide, curling counterclockwise. He called it Spiral Jetty. The water there is red, coloured by salt-tolerant micro-organisms, and the basalt crusts over with white salt.

Within two years the lake rose and the jetty went under. It stayed invisible for about thirty years, reappearing in 2002 after a long drought, and it has surfaced and submerged since. Smithson died in 1973, at thirty-five, when a light aircraft he had chartered to survey another earthwork crashed in Texas. The Dia Art Foundation now holds Spiral Jetty, and to see it you drive several hours from Salt Lake City, the last stretch on unpaved road, and there is no admission desk.

Why this matters: A work that cannot be moved, cannot be insured in any ordinary way, changes with the weather, and disappears for decades at a time is a direct attack on every assumption the gallery is built on.

What land art was for

Land art, or earth art, emerged in the United States in the late 1960s from artists who had come out of minimalism and wanted the same directness at a scale no room could hold. The motives were mixed and it is worth separating them.

• Escape the market. You cannot hang a mile of desert in an apartment. Sales would have to be of land, documentation, or access.
• Escape the gallery's neutrality. A white room implies that a work has no location. A jetty in a salt lake is nothing but location.
• Deep time. Smithson was fascinated by entropy, by geological duration, and by industrial ruin; Rozel Point had an abandoned oil jetty and rusting equipment when he chose it, which is part of why he chose it.
• The viewer's journey. Getting there takes a day. That is not an inconvenience attached to the work; it is a designed part of it.

Three other works to know. Michael Heizer's Double Negative of 1969 and 1970 cut two enormous trenches facing each other across a gap in Mormon Mesa in Nevada, displacing about 240,000 tons of rock; it belongs to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels, made in the Great Basin Desert in Utah between 1973 and 1976, sets four concrete cylinders in an open X so that they frame the sun on the solstices, with holes drilled through them in the patterns of four constellations, throwing spots of light inside during the day. Walter De Maria's The Lightning Field of 1977 in western New Mexico is a grid of four hundred polished stainless steel poles spread over a mile by a kilometre; visitors book a cabin and stay a night, and the Dia Art Foundation limits the number of people present.

The criticisms are worth stating. Heavy machinery in fragile desert ecosystems is not an obviously neutral act, and the works were built on land with prior histories and prior claimants, including Indigenous nations, that the artists mostly did not address. And the anti-market intention did not survive contact: these works are owned by foundations and museums, are photographed for books, and generate travel, permits, and admission systems. Land art escaped the gallery and built a smaller, stranger institution around itself.

Dematerialisation, named

In February 1968 the critic Lucy Lippard and John Chandler published an essay in Art International arguing that a great deal of new art was moving away from objecthood toward process, idea, and event, a movement they called dematerialisation. Lippard's 1973 book collected the evidence: a chronological, deliberately messy compilation of works, statements, exhibitions, and correspondence from 1966 to 1972, its title naming the dematerialisation of the art object.

Her later position is the useful one. She had hoped that work with no saleable object might escape the market, and she wrote candidly that it had not, that the documentation became the commodity, and that the dealers adapted faster than the artists. Hold that alongside Burger and the readymade: the same result, reached a third time, from a third direction.

Performance: the body as the material

Performance art has several sources and they matter because the practices differ.

• The happening. Allan Kaprow staged 18 Happenings in 6 Parts at the Reuben Gallery in New York in October 1959: visitors were given cards, moved between three rooms on a schedule, and were part of the event. Kaprow had studied with the composer John Cage, whose interest in chance and in ambient sound is the direct ancestor.
• Gutai. In Japan from 1954, the Gutai group had artists throw paint-filled bottles, hurl themselves through paper screens, and, in Kazuo Shiraga's case, wrestle a heap of mud for the duration of a performance. This precedes the American work and was long left out of Western accounts.
• Fluxus. From the early 1960s, an international network producing short event scores, printed instructions for actions anybody could perform, deliberately modest and often funny.
• Body art. From the late 1960s, work where the artist's own body is the material and endurance, risk, or vulnerability is the content.

Yoko Ono's Cut Piece is the clearest early example of the fourth kind. She first performed it in Kyoto in July 1964 and again in New York in 1965. She sat still on a stage with a pair of scissors in front of her and invited the audience, one at a time, to come up and cut away a piece of her clothing and keep it. The work is a structure, not a script: what happens depends entirely on what an audience decides to do to a woman who has announced she will not resist. Some approached apologetically and took a small square. Others cut through her shoulder straps.

Marina Abramovic pushed the same structure to its limit in Rhythm 0 at a Naples gallery in 1974. She placed seventy-two objects on a table, including a rose, honey, scissors, a scalpel, and a loaded pistol, with a notice saying she was the object and the audience could use any of them on her for six hours. It began politely. By the later hours her clothes had been cut off, she had been marked and cut, and someone put the pistol in her hand and pointed it at her neck before another visitor intervened. When the six hours ended and she began to move as herself again, the audience left rather than face her.

The upshot: These works are not spectacles of suffering. They are structured experiments in which the audience's behaviour is the result, and the artist has designed the conditions and given up control of the outcome.

Maintenance, and the other kind of performance

Not all performance is extreme. In 1969 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, a young artist with a small child, wrote a manifesto for maintenance art, dividing human effort into development, which is celebrated, and maintenance, which is invisible: cleaning, feeding, repairing, doing it again tomorrow. She proposed to do her own maintenance work inside a museum and call it art.

From 1977 she was the unsalaried artist in residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation, a position she has held ever since. For Touch Sanitation, over eleven months in 1979 and 1980, she walked the routes and shook the hand of every one of the roughly eight and a half thousand sanitation workers in the city, thanking each of them for keeping New York alive. It has no object, no gallery, and no shock, and it is one of the most influential performance works of the century.

The documentation problem

Here is the difficulty every one of these works creates. If a performance lasted six hours in Naples in 1974 and you are looking at a black and white photograph, what are you looking at?

Three positions are current. The first says the photograph is only evidence, and the work is gone; you missed it, and that is the point. The second says the documentation is the work as it now exists, since almost everyone's access is through it, and artists have long known this and posed accordingly. The third says the work can be re-performed, which Abramovic tested in 2005 at the Guggenheim by performing five works by other artists plus two of her own over seven nights, and which raises the question of whether a re-performance is the same work, a cover version, or a new piece.

The same problem lands on land art, where photographs by professionals are what almost everyone sees, and on conceptual art, where the certificate outlives the wall.

Common misconceptions

• "Land art was made in untouched wilderness." Smithson chose Rozel Point partly for its abandoned oil jetty and industrial debris, and the land in question has owners, histories, and prior claimants.
• "Performance art means shocking the audience." Ukeles shook hands with sanitation workers for eleven months. Fluxus scores are often a single quiet instruction.
• "Dematerialised art escaped the market." Lippard herself concluded that it did not; the documentation became the commodity.
• "Performance began in New York in the 1960s." The Gutai group in Japan was doing this from 1954, and Western surveys omitted it for decades.

Putting it together

• Spiral Jetty, built in April 1970 from about six thousand tons of basalt and earth, is around 460 metres long, submerges and resurfaces, and is held by the Dia Art Foundation.
• Land art sought scale, location, deep time, and a journey, and attracted fair criticism about ecological damage and prior claims to the land.
• Lippard and Chandler named dematerialisation in 1968; Lippard later concluded that the documentation simply became the commodity.
• Performance has four distinct sources: the happening, Gutai from 1954, Fluxus event scores, and body art.
• Cut Piece and Rhythm 0 are structures in which the audience's behaviour is the result, not scripts for the artist to act out.
• Ukeles's maintenance art and Touch Sanitation show the same period producing performance with no object and no shock.
• Documentation raises a live question: evidence of a lost work, the work as it now exists, or a thing that can be re-performed.

Sources

1. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Land art. tate.org.uk
2. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Performance art. tate.org.uk
3. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Gutai. tate.org.uk
4. Dia Art Foundation. (n.d.). Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty. diaart.org
5. Dia Art Foundation. (n.d.). Walter De Maria, The Lightning Field. diaart.org
6. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Cut Piece 1964. en.wikipedia.org
7. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Rhythm 0. en.wikipedia.org
8. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Mierle Laderman Ukeles. en.wikipedia.org
9. Lippard, L. R. (1973). Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. Praeger.

Between 30 January and 28 February 1972, an abandoned mansion at 533 Mariposa Street in Hollywood was open to the public. Twenty-one students on the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts, working with Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, had spent months repairing the derelict house and turning each room into an installation. They called it Womanhouse.

A linen closet contained a mannequin trapped between the shelves, the shelf edges cutting through her body. A kitchen was painted uniformly pink, with fried eggs on the ceiling that turned into breasts as they climbed the wall. A bathroom was filled with lipsticks. One room was hung entirely with crocheted webbing. Performances ran in the house: a woman ironing a sheet with total concentration for the length of the piece, a scripted scrubbing of a floor. About ten thousand people came through in a month.

The choice of building was the argument. Not a gallery, and not a studio, but a house, since the house was where women's labour was performed and where it was invisible.

The point: Feminist art of the 1970s did not mainly add female subject matter to existing forms. It attacked the settings, materials, and hierarchies that had decided what counted as art in the first place.

Nochlin's question, and the trap in it

In January 1971 the art historian Linda Nochlin published an essay in ARTnews asking why there have been no great women artists. The essay's power is that it refuses the two obvious answers.

The first bad answer is that there simply were none, because of some deficiency. The second bad answer, which Nochlin thought was worse because it looks progressive, is to scramble for a list of neglected geniuses and argue that they were secretly as great as the men. That accepts the terms of the question: that greatness is an individual property that shows up regardless of circumstances.

Her actual answer is institutional. Until the late nineteenth century, women were barred from the life drawing class in the European academies, and the nude was the foundation of the training that led to history painting, the highest genre. They were largely excluded from apprenticeships, from workshops, from studying anatomy, from travelling to Rome, and often from owning property or refusing marriage. The question is not why no great women artists, but why anyone imagines that art is made by unconstrained individual genius rather than by people with access to training, materials, patrons, and time.

That reframing did the real work. It made the institution the object of study, which is precisely what the next twenty years of practice took up.

The Dinner Party, and the argument inside the movement

Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, made between 1974 and 1979 with hundreds of collaborators, is an open triangular table about 14.6 metres on each side, laid with thirty-nine place settings for named women from mythology and history. Each has an embroidered runner in a period-appropriate needlework technique and a painted porcelain plate, most carrying a raised, roughly vulvar central form. It stands on a floor of 999 hand-lettered tiles naming further women. Since 2007 it has been permanently installed at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.

The formal claim is deliberate: china painting and needlework, dismissed for centuries as craft and women's work, are used at monumental scale for a subject of the highest seriousness. That is the same move Courbet made with scale in 1850, applied to medium and hierarchy instead.

The criticisms came quickly and came largely from other feminists. One is essentialism: reducing thirty-nine different women, across three thousand years, to variations on a single anatomical form makes biology the thing that defines them, which is the position feminism had spent a century attacking. A second is more specific. The setting for Sojourner Truth departs from the scheme and shows three faces instead of the vulvar motif, and Black feminist critics, including the writer Alice Walker, argued that the one Black woman at the table was thereby denied the body every other woman was given, which reproduces a particular history of how Black women's bodies had been treated. Chicago has responded to this over the years. The disagreement is not a footnote; it is the point at which the movement had to confront the fact that woman is not one category.

Making the mechanism visible

Several artists shifted from depicting women to exposing how images of women work.

• Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975, a six-minute black and white video. Standing behind a counter in an apron, she demonstrates kitchen implements alphabetically, from apron to tenderiser, but each demonstration is wrong: the ice pick is stabbed, the ladle flung, the knife slashed at the air. The cooking programme's cheerful form is kept and its content is replaced with rage.
• Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Stills, sixty-nine black and white photographs made between 1977 and 1980, of which the Museum of Modern Art bought the complete set in 1995. In each she photographs herself as a different woman in a scene that looks like a still from a film you almost remember: the girl in the city, the woman in the doorway, the runaway on the highway. There is no film. The images are of a type, not a person, and she is both photographer and subject, which removes the male photographer from a picture built entirely out of his conventions.
• Barbara Kruger, who worked as a magazine designer, laid blunt white-on-red text over found black and white photographs in the visual language of advertising. Her 1989 poster stating that your body is a battleground was made for the April 1989 march in Washington in support of legal abortion, and reached hundreds of thousands of people outside any gallery.
• Ana Mendieta, whose Siluetas of 1973 to 1980 pressed the outline of her own body into earth, sand, mud, and grass in Iowa and Mexico, sometimes marked with flowers, gunpowder, or fire, and photographed as they eroded. Her death in 1985, in a fall from the window of the New York apartment she shared with the sculptor Carl Andre, and Andre's acquittal at trial in 1988, have made her name a recurring point of protest at museums that show him, from the Guggenheim in 1992 to Tate Modern in 2016.

The Guerrilla Girls, and counting as method

In 1984 the Museum of Modern Art reopened with a survey exhibition of recent painting and sculpture containing 169 artists, of whom 13 were women. In 1985 a group of women artists formed in response, wearing gorilla masks in public, taking the names of dead women artists as pseudonyms, and pasting posters around New York.

Their method was arithmetic. Their best known poster, from 1989, asks whether women have to be naked to get into the Metropolitan Museum, and reports the count they had made of the modern galleries: under five per cent of the artists were women, while eighty-five per cent of the nudes were female. Museums could dispute an opinion. It is much harder to dispute a count, and the posters are now themselves in the collections of Tate and the Museum of Modern Art, which is either a victory or a demonstration of how absorption works.

What matters here: Turning a grievance into a number changed the conversation, because a number can be checked, repeated next year, and compared between institutions.

Identity, race, and the museum as material

The same logic ran through work on race and history in the 1980s and 1990s.

Faith Ringgold, excluded from the New York gallery system in the 1960s, moved from painting into quilts, a form with a long African American history, and made narrative story quilts with text sewn into the border. Her painting American People Series 20: Die of 1967 is now at the Museum of Modern Art.

Adrian Piper, trained as an analytic philosopher, made confrontation the medium: printed cards handed to people at dinner parties informing them that the recipient had just made a racist remark in the presence of a Black woman they had assumed was white.

Fred Wilson's Mining the Museum, staged at the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore in 1992, is the clearest single demonstration of institutional critique in this period. Given access to the collection and the storerooms, he rearranged what the museum already owned. Under a label reading Metalwork he placed a set of ornate silver repousse vessels beside a pair of iron slave shackles. Under Cabinetmaking he set fine chairs facing a whipping post. He did not make an object. He changed the labels and the adjacencies, and the museum's own holdings said something it had never said.

Kara Walker's cut-paper silhouettes, begun in 1994, use an elegant genteel technique from the antebellum parlour to stage scenes of violence and sex on plantations, in life-size friezes around a room. The work was attacked from within, most publicly by the older artist Betye Saar, who organised a letter-writing campaign in 1997 arguing that circulating the imagery of racist caricature reproduces it whatever the intention. Walker's defenders reply that refusing to depict it lets it stay comfortably in the past. Both positions are held by serious people and the argument is not settled.

Common misconceptions

• "Feminist art means art about women's bodies." Rosler's video is about a cooking show, Ukeles's work is about refuse collection, and the Guerrilla Girls' medium is statistics.
• "Nochlin argued that there were secretly many great women artists." She argued the opposite, that the search for neglected geniuses accepts a false model of how art gets made, and that the institutions are the explanation.
• "The criticisms of this work came from conservatives." The sharpest criticisms of The Dinner Party and of Kara Walker came from other feminists and from other Black artists, and they concerned essentialism and the circulation of racist imagery.
• "Institutional critique requires making new objects." Wilson made almost nothing at Baltimore. He rearranged the collection and rewrote the labels.

What to remember

• Womanhouse, open for a month in early 1972, put installations and performances in a derelict Hollywood house because the house was the site of the invisible labour.
• Nochlin's 1971 essay relocated the question from individual genius to access: life class, apprenticeship, travel, property, and time.
• The Dinner Party uses china painting and needlework at monumental scale, and was criticised from inside feminism for essentialism and for the Sojourner Truth setting.
• Rosler, Sherman, Kruger, and Mendieta shifted the work from depicting women to exposing how images of women operate.
• The Guerrilla Girls turned exclusion into arithmetic, beginning from the 13 women among 169 artists at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984.
• Ringgold, Piper, Wilson, and Walker made race and the museum itself the material; Mining the Museum changed only labels and adjacencies.
• The internal disputes, essentialism and the ethics of reproducing racist imagery, are unresolved and are held by serious people on both sides.

Sources

1. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Feminist art. tate.org.uk
2. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Guerrilla Girls. tate.org.uk
3. Tate. (n.d.). Cindy Sherman. tate.org.uk
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Womanhouse. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). The Dinner Party. en.wikipedia.org
6. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Semiotics of the Kitchen. en.wikipedia.org
7. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Ana Mendieta. en.wikipedia.org
8. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Fred Wilson (artist). en.wikipedia.org
9. Nochlin, L. (1971). Why have there been no great women artists? ARTnews, 69(9), 22-39, 67-71.
10. Parker, R., and Pollock, G. (1981). Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology. Routledge and Kegan Paul.

On the evening of 15 November 2017, Christie's in New York sold a painting of Christ holding a crystal orb for 450.3 million dollars including fees. The picture, Salvator Mundi, had sold at a regional English auction in 1958 for forty-five pounds, when it was catalogued as the work of a follower rather than of Leonardo da Vinci. It was bought again in 2005 for a low five-figure sum, cleaned and restored over several years, and re-attributed by a group of specialists, though not all of them, and the attribution remains disputed.

Christie's did not put it in an old master sale. It was placed in a postwar and contemporary evening auction, next to Warhol and Twombly, and marketed with a video of famous visitors reacting to it. The buyer was later reported to be acting for Abu Dhabi. Since the sale the painting has not been publicly exhibited; it was not included in the Louvre's Leonardo exhibition in 2019, and there has been sustained argument about why.

Key idea: That sale contains almost every feature of the contemporary art system in one object: contested expertise, restoration, marketing, category-blurring, state-scale money, and a work that becomes less visible as it becomes more valuable.

The biennial circuit

The dominant exhibition form of the last forty years is the large recurring international exhibition. There were a handful in 1950. The count is now in the hundreds, on every inhabited continent.

The oldest is the Venice Biennale, founded in 1895. Its structure is inherited from the nineteenth century world's fair: permanent national pavilions in a park, the Giardini, each country selecting and funding its own artists, plus a central curated exhibition. Sao Paulo followed in 1951, Kassel's Documenta in 1955, and the Havana Biennial in 1984.

The national pavilion system carries an assumption worth pulling out. It treats art as something countries have, which made sense in 1895 and makes trouble now, because the Giardini's pavilions were built by whichever states had the standing to build them, so most of the world has no permanent building and must rent space elsewhere in the city. Artists routinely represent countries they no longer live in. The structure of the exhibition is itself a nineteenth-century political map.

Two events changed the terms. In 1989 the Centre Pompidou staged Magiciens de la Terre in Paris, with a hundred artists, half of them from outside Europe and North America, in explicit response to the observation that international exhibitions had been almost entirely Western. It was influential and heavily criticised, mainly for placing contemporary Western works beside ritual objects from other societies with little explanation, so that the non-Western material read as timeless and anonymous while the Western material had authors and dates.

Then in 2002 the Nigerian-born curator Okwui Enwezor directed Documenta 11 in Kassel. He restructured it as five platforms: public discussions and events staged in Vienna, Berlin, New Delhi, St Lucia, and Lagos over more than a year, with the exhibition in Germany as only the last of them. The point was structural rather than decorative. If the argument happens in Kassel and the artists are flown in, the centre has not moved. Enwezor went on to direct the Venice Biennale in 2015.

The market, in figures and in shape

The global art market has been estimated in recent years, by the annual report published by Art Basel and UBS, at somewhere in the region of sixty billion dollars a year in total sales. Two features of that number matter more than its size.

First, extreme concentration. A very small number of artists, galleries, and buyers account for a disproportionate share of the value. A handful of dealers with branches in several cities operate at a scale no one else can match, and the top lots at a single evening auction can exceed the annual turnover of a national museum's acquisition budget.

Second, opacity. Prices at auction are public; prices in private sales, which are a large share of the whole, are not. Works are held in freeports, high-security tax-free warehouses near Geneva, Luxembourg, and Singapore, where art can be bought, sold, and stored without entering the country or attracting duty. A painting can change hands several times without leaving the building or being seen.

The 2021 sale of a digital work by the artist known as Beeple, a composite of five thousand daily images sold at Christie's as a non-fungible token for 69.3 million dollars, extended the same machinery to a file. The prices in that market collapsed afterwards, which is itself informative about what the earlier prices were measuring.

So what?: Prices are not a measure of quality, and they are not meaningless either. They are a good measure of scarcity, of confidence in future resale, and of the number of very rich buyers competing for a name at a given moment.

Two artists, and what the global circuit lets them do

El Anatsui, born in Ghana and long based in Nigeria, makes hangings from flattened aluminium bottle caps and seals from local distilleries, thousands of them stitched with copper wire into sheets that can cover a building's facade. They fall in folds like cloth, catch light like metal, and carry the history of the drink trade, since alcohol was a currency in the Atlantic slave trade. He works with a large studio team, and the pieces are reinstalled differently each time, with the folds set by whoever hangs them, so the artist deliberately gives up final control of the shape. He received the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at Venice in 2015 and filled Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2023.

Ai Weiwei filled the same Turbine Hall in 2010 with what appeared to be a bed of husks: a hundred million porcelain sunflower seeds, each individually moulded and hand-painted by workers in Jingdezhen, the town that has produced Chinese porcelain for centuries. Visitors were allowed to walk on them until dust concerns closed the surface. The work is about mass production and the individual within it, about a Chinese cultural export made by hand at industrial scale, and about the Cultural Revolution image of the people as sunflowers turning toward Mao. Ai was detained by Chinese authorities for eighty-one days in 2011, which is part of how his work is read internationally, and he has been open about the risk that the political story eclipses the objects.

Access, restitution, and who this is for

Three arguments run through the contemporary period, and they are arguments rather than settled positions.

Access. Museum attendance is at historic highs, and the national museums in the United Kingdom have had free general admission since December 2001. Against that: blockbuster exhibitions are ticketed and expensive, art schools cost money and unpaid internships filter who can afford to enter the field, and the language used in wall texts and press releases is frequently impenetrable in ways that are not accidental.

Restitution. Museums built during the colonial period hold enormous quantities of material taken by force or under conditions that make consent meaningless. A report commissioned by the French president and delivered in 2018 by Felwine Sarr and Benedicte Savoy recommended returning African cultural objects acquired without consent, and it moved the argument from whether to how. Germany transferred ownership of Benin material in 2022, and British institutions including the Horniman Museum have returned objects. The objections are also real: that dispersal to hundreds of claimants makes comparative study impossible, that some receiving institutions lack capacity, and that a universal museum has a value of its own. The counter-objection is that those arguments were also made for a century by people who benefited from keeping the objects.

Value. The most common complaint about contemporary art is that its value is decided by a small network of dealers, curators, and collectors who all know each other, and that nothing in it can be judged from outside. Its defenders answer that this describes every specialised field, that discrimination requires training, and that the price of a Hirst is not a claim about its quality. Both sides are partly right, and the honest description is that the contemporary art world is a small, interlocking, largely self-certifying professional culture that also produces work of real seriousness, and that separating the two takes more than a headline.

Worth holding on to: Do not resolve this by deciding that it is all a racket or that all criticism is philistinism. Ask instead who selected the work, who paid, who benefits, and what the work does that nothing else does.

Where the story leaves the frame

Look back over these fifteen lessons and one line runs through them. In 1850 the question was what may be painted at what scale. By 1912 it was what a picture may be made of. By 1917 it was whether the artist must make anything. By 1967 it was whether an object is needed. By 1970 it was whether a gallery is needed. By the 1990s the museum itself had become material for artists to work with, and by now the exhibition circuit, the market, and the ownership of collections are among the most active subjects in the field.

That is not a decline. It is a discipline that has been examining its own conditions for a century and a half, which is what the break with the Salon set in motion.

Common misconceptions

• "Contemporary art prices reflect critical judgement." They measure scarcity, confidence in resale, and competition among a small number of very wealthy buyers. Many highly regarded artists sell for modest sums.
• "Biennials are neutral international showcases." Venice's national pavilion structure is a nineteenth-century world's-fair arrangement, and which countries have permanent buildings in the Giardini is a historical accident with continuing effects.
• "Magiciens de la Terre solved the exclusion problem." It raised it, and was criticised for presenting non-Western works as timeless and anonymous alongside Western works with authors and dates.
• "Restitution debates are only about whether to return objects." Since the 2018 Sarr and Savoy report the practical argument has largely moved to how, on what terms, and with what support for receiving institutions.

What to carry forward

• The 2017 Salvator Mundi sale, at 450.3 million dollars in a contemporary auction, packs contested attribution, restoration, marketing, and invisibility into a single case.
• The biennial circuit runs from Venice in 1895 through Sao Paulo in 1951, Documenta in 1955, and Havana in 1984, and its national pavilion structure encodes a nineteenth-century map.
• Magiciens de la Terre in 1989 and Enwezor's Documenta 11 in 2002 are the two turning points in how global inclusion was attempted.
• The market is large, extremely concentrated, and partly opaque, with private sales and freeport storage outside public view.
• El Anatsui and Ai Weiwei both use large teams and mass-produced units, and both hand part of the outcome to installers or to workers.
• Access, restitution, and value are live arguments in which the strongest version of each position is worth stating before choosing.

Sources

1. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Biennial. tate.org.uk
2. Tate. (n.d.). Art term: Postcolonial art. tate.org.uk
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Venice Biennale. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Documenta 11. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Magiciens de la Terre. en.wikipedia.org
6. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Salvator Mundi (Leonardo). en.wikipedia.org
7. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). El Anatsui. en.wikipedia.org
8. Smarthistory. (n.d.). Repatriating artworks. smarthistory.org
9. Sarr, F., and Savoy, B. (2018). The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics. Report to the President of the French Republic.