the birth of modern art --2/18/25

18 Feb 2025

the birth of modern art --2/18/25

0 COMMENTS

Today's selection--from Paris in Ruins by Sebastian Smee. The rise of conservative Catholic and political movements in post-war France set the stage for the first Impressionist exhibition

“As monarchists’ hopes flared, the Catholic Church, too, enjoyed a conspicuous revival. The National Assembly approved a design for a new basilica for Paris. Intended as an act of collective atonement, Sacre-Coeur was to perch atop Montmartre, immediately above where Nadar's balloons had been launched and where the radicals' insurrection had broken out. Excavations began in early May 1874, the same month as Thiers's resignation. The original inspiration for the basilica was a speech given by Bishop Fournier back on the day the Third Republic was proclaimed, in the wake of Sedan and ahead of the Prussian siege. Fournier had interpreted the sudden collapse of the French Army as a form of divine punishment for a ‘century of moral decline.’ (The problems had begun, this implied, not with the Second Empire but with the original French Revolution.)

“But the focus of the penance the basilica was intended to embody gradually shifted from the moral decline of French society in general to the despicable excesses of the Commune. In 1872 Archbishop Darboy's successor claimed to have had a vision as he climbed the Butte Montmartre. The clouds dispersed, and he realized that it was there, ‘where the martyrs’ were (he meant the murdered generals Lecomte and Clement-Thomas), that a new church should be built. And when the Assembly voted to proceed with the construction, legislators specified that its purpose was to ‘expiate the crimes of the Commune.’ The construction of Sacre-Coeur provided a kind of moral drone note accompanying all the political and cultural developments that unfolded in Paris over the next few years.

“So it was against this tense political backdrop—the imminent death of the republic, the likely restoration of a monarchy, and a conservative Catholic revival—that the first Impressionist exhibition took shape.

Basilique du Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre

“An art establishment that had so recently been superintended by Gustave Courbet was no less eager than the Assembly to reassert its conservative credentials. Public calls to renovate French art—to shun radical experiment, to recommit to patriotic subjects, to find again the value in tradition—grew ever louder. Establishment critics, leaders of the Academy, and Salon juries set out to champion noble, edifying forms of art that might help remove the stain of the past year. ‘Art,’ wrote the critic A. Delzant in a review of the 1872 Salon, ‘must produce virile and grand works, worthy of the task in front of us.’ Conservative commentators hearkened back to more glorious periods in French art history. They wondered in print why there were no longer any artists of the caliber of lngres and Delacroix and, before them, Jacques-Louis David and Poussin—artists, that is, who were willing to depict historical events and address biblical themes, artists who could help elevate morals and shape France's national destiny.

“In this reactionary climate, painters who dared to break with conservative notions of artistic excellence were inevitably suspected of political subversion. Thiers had appointed the old art critic Charles Blanc as the government's director of fine arts, and Blanc proceeded to clamp down on the all-important business of jury selection for the annual Salon. All the gains of the final years of the previous decade were now reversed. No longer would everyone be able to vote: only artists who had previously received medals and other honors. The experiment before the war with wider suffrage had proved a disaster, claimed the conservative painter Alexandre Cabanel: ‘It's just like in politics. It makes a fine mess of things.’

“News of Blanc's decisions stirred an immediate outcry among artists. Almost ninety of them, including Corot, Daubigny, and Manet, signed a petition, which was submitted to Thiers. But Blanc did not budge. When the makeup of the jury became known—and it was indeed deeply conservative—Manet led a fresh round of protests. Openly lamenting that Blanc's criteria would prevent younger, disen franchised artists from showing at the Salon, he called for a new Salon des Refuses and was joined in his call by critics in the republican press.

“But for Manet and his onetime followers, the government's reaction against Courbet was both instructive and alarming. Courbet's position on the Communes leadership council and his own statements during the siege meant that, in the public mind, he bore responsibility for tearing down the Vendome Column. It was almost miraculous that he hadn't been executed during or immediately after Bloody Week. And yet he continued to pay a heavy price. Although he had already been imprisoned for nine months and fined 500 francs, the issue erupted again, and in 1873 MacMahon ordered him to pay the costs of rebuilding the column. Unable to afford it, he was forced into exile in Switzerland.

“The most burning question for France's most original artists before the civil war and was still the most burning question after it: whether to break with the Salon or stick with it, trying to effect change from within.

“Before the war, Frederic Bazille had openly pushed for an alternative exhibition, a public display of new work by all the artists inspired by Manet, Courbet, and Delacroix. Bazille was now dead, and Courbet was in exile. But for the artists of Bazille's generation, the fundamental question had not gone away. Other artists now echoed his calls. They didn't want to have to jump through the hoops of the conservative Salon jury or pander to a discredited establishment just to have their work seen. They wanted to assert their freedom. Spellbound by light, entranced by modern life, they wanted to revolt against the inherited burden of a gloomy, moribund iconography. They wanted to paint what it felt like to be outside, liberated both from the artifice of the studio and from the humiliations of the past, to immerse themselves in a kind of perpetual present.

“In the 1860s, Manet had been the clear leader of the new painters and the Batignolles district, their epicenter. But the Batignolles group had now dispersed and spread to the suburbs, especially to Argenteuil and Pontoise. The young painters still gathered socially in the city, but they tended to frequent the Cafe de la Nouvelle Athenes instead of the Guerbois. And as the group became more of a network or cooperative, Manet was displaced, to some extent, from his leadership role. From their perches on Paris's periphery, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and Morisot took to painting pleasure-seekers on the banks of the Seine, the gardens of bourgeois homes, and fashionable women and children enjoying leisure time. It wasn't all reassuring sunshine and pleasure, however. The new painters' vision of beauty was self-consciously modern, and they were not afraid to address darker, more complicated themes, especially when painting the city. The paintings of Degas and Manet, in particular, were laced with indications of class and gender relations. But the other painters, too, found all kinds of ways to register the tensions inherent in an urban economy that revolved around advertising, entertainment, sex, and spectacle.

“By and large, Renoir, Monet, Sisley, and Pissarro as well as Degas, Manet, and Morisot were now depicting not just what they saw all about them but what they yearned for: a secular, open, and democratic society where nature, commerce, and industry were in a provisional, constantly evolving struggle for harmony, in configurations that were as changeable and unsettled as the weather. The crucial thing was that the new painters' work was rooted in the here-and-now. rather than in exhausted mythologies, religious parables, or legends of the ancients. The society they portrayed and the way they painted it—in loose, unfinished-looking brushstrokes that captured colored light and sensations of transience—were pointedly at odds with the conservative establishment's program of national rejuvenation, which required artists to execute a moralistic vision with high degrees of finish and laborious displays of skill. It was in this increasingly stark opposition that the modern avant-garde was born.”