The Chair’s Spot
Posted on Dec 30, 2023One or two members said that they had enjoyed reading my first essay which was on the YBA’s (Young British Artists), so flushed with success I’m encouraged to follow up. Here goes.
‘…isms – don’t we just love ‘em
As artists we love our ‘isms’. I actually have a book titled ‘…Isms’ * in which are listed fifty seven, from the earliest, International Gothicism c.1375, to the last one at the time the book was published – Sensationalism, (actually based around the YBAs) starting in the late 1980s and ending around 2000. No doubt several more have been added since and there will be more to follow as future generations come and go.
Perhaps the most talked and written about ‘ism is ‘Impressionism’. And why not? Arguably it is the most important ‘ism of them all, important because this was the beginning of modern art, with art historians and academics often citing Impressionism as the first truly modern art movement. It has to be remembered that artists in the late 1800s did not have advanced photography, quality printed media, or the internet to show their work. They had to rely on important exhibitions, and the official exhibition and overseer of world art since 1667 was the Paris Salon. Organised by the prestigious Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture (Royal Academy of Painting and of Sculpture) it was led by a jury with the power to pick and choose what work was worth showing, generally the same tired old classical subjects over and over again, and painted in a strict prescriptive technique. This annual event could make or break artists’ careers, and most importantly it had a profound effect on European art as a whole, as it enabled an elite organisation to dictate the definition of art.
Impressionism coalesced in the 1860s when a group of painters including Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley and Pierre Auguste Renoir pursued plein air painting together. American John Rand in 1841 designed a device that would revolutionise the art world: paint in a tube, which offered easily portable pre-mixed paint, and allowed painters to bring their process outdoors. This technological leap allowed spontaneity and a casual quality to the work of the Impressionists.
Realist painter Edouard Manet had a close friendship with the members of this movement who took many of his techniques to heart, particularly his embrace of modernity as subject matter, as well as the spontaneity of his brush strokes and his use of colour and lighting.
An example of this can be seen in his ‘Le Dejeuner sour l’Herbe’ 1863. The painting was intended as a deliberate defiance of the establishment, and although it seems benign by today’s standards, at the time he really was taking the ‘Mick’.
We often find that new ideas aren’t always accepted straight away, and this was especially true in the case of the Impressionists. A disconcerted public felt that their paintings were vulgar and shapeless rough sketches, and took to making fun of the works.
And the situation was slow to change. As a result of repeated rejections by the official Salon, Monet, Degas and their colleagues resolved never to exhibit there again. Instead in 1874 they held what eventually became known as ‘The First Impressionist Exhibition’. They didn’t adopt the name Impressionists, however, until their third exhibition in 1877 when they espoused the critic Louis Leroy’s term of abuse as a badge of honour: the group had been dubbed Impressionists since he derided Monet’s painting ‘Impression, Sunrise’ 1872, saying ‘Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than this seascape’.
There were many more artists associated with the Impressionist movement, and to name a few: Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, the American Mary Cassatt, and Manet’s sister-in-law Berthe Morisot. Painters like James Whistler and Winslow Homer brought Impressionism to America following their European travels. Impressionism became popular in most European countries, none less than in Scotland. Here the Glasgow Boys became well-known Impressionists, the prominent members being James Guthrie and John Lavery.
Lesser known ‘isms……
There are however less well-known ‘isms, but nonetheless important to art, and how art influences people. Take for example Dadaism, a movement in European art formed in Zurich during the First World War, in negative reaction to the horrors and folly of the war. The art, poetry and performance produced by Dada artists is often satirical and nonsensical in nature. Shock was the key tactic for Dadaists who hoped to shake society out of the nationalism and materialism which had led to WW1’s carnage. Dadaism was a literary movement as well as a visual one, and there were independent groups of Dadaists in New York, Berlin and Paris. Unlike the Impressionists, who were exclusively frustrated artists, the Dadaists were responders to the frustrations and plunging mood of the people. Some of the leading Dadaists were, Marcel Duchamp (you may remember his famous urinal), Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters, Man Ray and Hannah Höch.
The work above by Marcel Duchamp was made on a found object, in this case a cheap postcard of the Mona Lisa, on which he drew a moustache and beard, and appended the title L.H.O.O.Q. which is a gramogram; the letters pronounced in French sound like ‘Elle a chaud au cull’, I think I’ll leave it to the reader to do the translation as it refers, in an ungentlemanly but complimentary way, to her posterior. But there is a serious point here, this 1919 work is an example of the many antics that the Dadas got up to in order to help people laugh again after so much misery through WW1.
Many of us are of an age that we recall the 1972 film ‘Cabaret’. The onstage antics of the characters played by Joel Grey and Lisa Minnelli gave an insight of Dada performers, although the story took place a few years after the movement started to fade.
By its very nature Dadaism couldn’t sustain itself indefinitely, and its more serious participants moved beyond gimmickry and shocking people into moulding something with real artistic meaning – this was called Surrealism. Founded in Paris in 1924 by the poet André Breton, Surrealism continued Dadaism’s exploration of everything irrational and subversive in art, but was more explicitly preoccupied with spiritualism, Freudian psychoanalyses and Marxism than Dadaism was. It aimed to create art which was ‘automatic’, meaning that it had emerged directly from the unconscious without being shaped by reason, morality or aesthetic judgements. Leading proponents were Hans Arp, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Frida Karlo, René Magritte, André Masson, Joan Miró and Yves Tanguy.
The adjacent painting has been pronounced as one of the most recognisable works of Surrealism, Salvador Dali’s ‘The Persistance of Memory’ 1931.
The soft melting watch epitomises Dali’s theory of softness and hardness which was central to his thinking at the time. It fuses the banal and the fantastic, the symbolic and the irrational, inviting yet resisting explanation. To talk further about this painting is a work in its own right, as would be further exploration into Surrealism.
What I have written is just the tip of the iceberg in the investigation of some of the ‘isms that help to ‘catalogue’ the history of art. In isolation the term is open to some ridicule, but it has nonetheless proved to be a most useful tool in breaking down philosophies and timings of not only visual art, but also politics, economics, science, literature etc.
I don’t think that we are yet aware of what ‘ism we currently occupy. Like Mary Quant, with her 1960s bobbed hair, miniskirts and Carnaby Street, she didn’t realise that she was an important player in Post-modernism until she was quite old. And out of interest I Googled ‘what is the current ‘ism in art?’ – the answer I got was actually a question.
‘The end of ‘isms: is the art market the most powerful movement of the 21st century?
Is it? – we shall see, that is if we’re around.
David McGuire – October 2023
* ‘…isms. Understanding Art’ Stephen Little. ISBN-10: 07136 7011 8
