Mainstreams of
Modern Art - Index

1. Revolution

"David declared that "Art should have no other guide than the torch of Reason", but this dictum is opposed by a sentiment held dear by the French: "The heart has its reasons which Reason does not know." The romantic movement was a revolt of the heart against Reason, of emotion against intellect, of the mysterious against the rational, of the individual against formula--in short, of the sense and the imagination against everything else . . . . " [p. 30]

Romantic Classicism: Atala
Napoleonic Romanticism: Gros
The Romantic Declaration: Géricault and the Raft of the Medusa
Delacroix
Delacroix: His "Classicism"
Delacroix: Early Works and Scandals
Delacroix: His Orientalism
Delacroix: Recognition and Followers

3. Ingres

4. Realism Idealism and Disillusion

"For all their differences, the classicists and the romantics held one convicton in common, and it was a basic one: they thought of life and the world as a mystery that could be explored to discover the reason for man's existence. Niether doubted the assumption that we are here for a reason and that our being is justified and meaningful. For both, nature--all the different facets of life, of the world--was what Delacroix called "a vocabulary" that could be used to study the mystery's solution. Classic or romantic the idealist assumes that within all the conficts and contradictions, all the ambiguities and confusions of life, somewhere there is a harmony, a discoverable truth, by which man can understand the fact that he exists . . . [p. 75]

Goya: His World
Goya: His Isolation
Goya: His Innovations
Daumier: Realism and Bourgeois Culture
Daumier: Social and Political Comment
Daumier: His Faith
Daumier: His Life
Courbet: His Theories versus His Practice
Courbet: His "Socialism"
Courbet: The Painter's Studio
Courbet: The Pavilion of Realism
The State of Landscape
Barbizon: Rousseau, Dupré, Diaz
Daubigny
Millet
Corot: His Popular Success
Corot and the Tradition of Landscape
Corot: Portraits and Figure Studies

5. The Salon at Mid-Century

"By every implication in this story so far, the Academy has been cast in the role of villain. This is type-casting, and like all type-casting it is the result of one magnificent performance. In the decades just after the middle of the century, following the relatively mild persecution of Courbet, the Academy seemed determined to annihilate all French painters of genius, offering its awards, both honorary and financial, to a clique that included some of the most desperately mediocre talents ever to have made their mark in the history of art . . . . " [p. 136]

The Salon of 1855
The Grand Medals of Honor, 1855
Medals First Class, 1855 Œ
Medals Second Class, 1855
The Salon Public

6. Manet

"The year 1863 is the sharpest dividing line in the history of painting since the French Revolution. It is the year of the Salon des RefusÚs --the Salon of the Rejected Painters. It centered around a painter named Édouard Manet [1832-1883] It had been almost exactly a century since David had been admitted as a student of the Royal Academy. Now, within a decade, the leaders of classicism, romanticism, and realism disappeared, as if the decks were being cleared for a new generation of painters ready to make use of everything that had been discovered during a hundred years of revolutions and counterrevolutions . . . . " [p. 156]

Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe: Scandal
Le Déjeuner: Technical Inovations
Le Déjeuner: Borrowed Elements
Olympia
Manet before Le Déjeuner
The Scandal of Olympia
Manet and Zola
Manet and His Contemporarires
Late Pictures and Last Days

7. Impressionism

TWO - The 19th Century Outside France

Outside France, 1800-1850

"A summary of nineteenth-century art outside France must naturally take as its point of departure the development we have just surveyed--at least it must do so in a book that intends to follow mainstreams rather then to be an encyclopedia. French artists crystallized into images the ideas that dominated the century and fought the battles for their reconition. This will not leave much point in going into detail about--for instance--a group of ten American painters [Frank W. Benson, Joseph R. De Camp, Thomas W. Dewing, Childe Hassam, Williard L. Metcalf, Robert Reid, Edward Simmons, Edmund C. Tarbell, John H. Twachtman, and J. Alden Weir.] who formed an asociation to exhibit their work in 1989, even though three of them departed from their academic training to adopt impressionism. They were perfectly respctable impressionists, but by that date impressionism had been developed, fought for, and establishd by the men we have already seen. It had even been abandoned by men we have yet to see--Cézanne, van Gogh, and Gauguin--who set new directions for the twentieth century. Historically speaking, the ten Americans were in a backwater. The fact that Childe Hassam [1859-1935], to choose one of them as an example, painted American subjects instead of Parisian boulevards or meadows bordering the Seine is a small difference between him and the French impressionists whose technique he used very well. Aesthetically his pictures are no better and no worse for having been painted a generation after impressionism's victory, but historically they are footnotes. What we want to do now [p. 237] is to follow classicism, romanticism, and realism-impressionism outside France with attention to painters whose personal or national chracter is exceptional, and to give a nod here and there to painters like Hassam who were excellent practitioners in ways with which we are already familiar. The nod is not meant to be a slight.

Outside France, then, there was no situation comparable except in the palest way to the academic stranglehold and the original painter's struggle against it, partly because the academies elsewhere were less avid for power and partly because the painters were more content to work within conventional boundaries. France was alone in regarading art as part of the fabric of national life, and her painters were very nearly alone in the kind of theorizing and technical invention that placed upon the artist a moral obligation to define and proselytize forms of painting based on aesthetic, social, and philoophical convictions. And outside France the general public was either apathetic to the art of painting or content to follow its own taste without feeling indignant over any kind of painting it did not understand."

West as an Innovator
John Vanderlyn: The failure of Classicism
Early German Romantics
Blake
An American Romantic: Wasington Allston
Early "Americanism"
The Hudson River School
Thomas Cole
English Romantic Landscape: Constable
Turner
Popular Painting at Mid-century
The American Scene: Bingham

Outside France, 1850-1900

THREE - Transition

Post-Impressionism: Its Classicists

The Explorers

"By the end of the nineteenth century, impressionism had run its course, although Renoir, Degas, and Monet continued to work well into the twentieth. But even while impressionism was still fighting for final recognition, new directions were being followed by several men whose art was to determine the course of painting in the first generation of the new century. Fanning out from impressionism, they explored independently. More than any other painters in the history of art, they developed their theories in isolation, and in contradiction to one another. They are grouped under the catch-all designation of post-impressionists, a term meaning nothing except that these men departed from impressionism to find new ways of painting. The ways they found were too various to be covered by a more descriptive designation; at least so far, no better collective term has abeen found to describe the art of Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh [all of whom, incidentally, died before Renoir, Degas, and Monet--even by as much as thirty-five years, to take the extreme limts betwen the death of Seurat, who died very young, and Monet, who died very old]. The point is made at such length only to remind the reader that chapters in a book follow one another between neater boundary lines than do the birth and death dates of painters or, especially in our time, the genesis and development of new expressions in art. . . . . "

Neo-Impressonism: Seurat
The Salon des Indépendants
Other Neo-Impressionists
Cézanne: His Revolution
Cézanne: Color as Form
Cézanne: Geometrical Form
Cézanne: Distortion and Composition
Cézanne: The Student
Cézanne: The Impressionist
Cézanne: Realization
Cézanne: Fulfillment
Cézanne: The Great Bathers
Sculpture in Transition: Maillol

Post-Impressionism: Its Romantics

Seurat and Cézanne were painters within the classical tradition by its most inclusive definition: they believed that the chaotic material of human experience could be clarified and universalized, and that the means of effecting this transmutation could be discovered through the analysis of form and structure. The fact that their forms were so innovational--especially Cézanne's--makes them no less classical. It simply demonstrates that the classical spirit need not depend for expression on images of gods and heroes foreign to the modern world, but may assume forms as original as those of gods and heroes had been when the classical Greeks invented them so long ago . . . . " [p. 360]

FOUR - 20th Century

Fauvism and Expressionism

Cubism and Abstract Art

Reactions Against Abstraction

[Canaday, John. Mainstreams of Modern Art. New York: Simon and Schustesr. 1961.]

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Notebook, 1993- APPROACHES - Modernism --- The Modern Tradition From: Canaday, John. Mainstreams of Modern Art. New York: Simon and Schustesr. 1961.

Mainstreams of Modern Art - Index

Notebook, 1993-
APPROACHES - Modernism --- The Modern Tradition
From: Canaday, John. Mainstreams of Modern Art. New York: Simon and Schustesr. 1961.

Mainstreams of
Modern Art - Index