Painting

views updated

PAINTING

the age of revolution
romantic naturalism
the avant-garde
modernism
bibliography

Modern art really begins with the French Revolution. Breaking the ruling elite's grip on art and democratically restructuring its institutions, the French Republic lay the foundations for increased production by artists and a wider audience for their works. Modern and often politically charged subjects challenged the old regime of classical, mythological, and religious painting, with its claims to universality. Realistically represented, such new subjects also undermined the hallowed academic principles of idealizing, classical style based on antiquity and the Renaissance. From this point on, discussion of art became divided over the legitimacy of contemporary subjects and the forms of representation they entailed. The conflicts of the first part of the century reached a crisis around 1850 with the emergence of the avant-garde, leading to a now familiar state of constant critical opposition and renewal. From this crucible came impressionism and its aftermaths, which are often grouped under the general category of modernism. Paris was already the cultural center of Europe in the eighteenth century; the closely interrelated political, economic, and artistic events from 1789 to 1914 would transform Western art into something far closer to the art we know today. Other centers—Spain, Germany, England, and Italy—wed much to French art, whether adopting its modes or in opposition to them.

The arts of the nineteenth century were dominated by three overriding, but neither equivalent nor mutually exclusive concepts: Romantic individualism, naturalism, and modernism. The first two can be used generally to describe ideas or practices of both the past and the present, but which in the nineteenth century were elevated to the status of movements. The third has its seeds in the first two but is like neither, since it describes a tradition, mainly internal to artistic thinking, though necessarily supported by the art market, of critical responses to recent art in order to maintain a state of originality and successive innovation.

Romanticism is mistakenly called a style. It is, rather, a set of attitudes that prioritize individual creativity and inner emotion over learned rules and conventional morality. It is a mode of thinking and feeling manifested through a variety of aesthetics, ranging from neoclassicism (as the official style of the Revolution) to naturalism (as in Eugène Delacroix's evocation of the suffering of Greeks under Turkish rule). Naturalism is a mode of representation based primarily on observation rather than on predetermined recipes or ideals, and may also reveal a variety of attitudes, including, for example, a Romantic love of solitude in nature (as in the Barbizon School) or opposition to authoritarian regimes, whether political, artistic, or both (as in Gustave Courbet's realism). Often, but not always, Romanticism and naturalism contain something of one another. Modernism takes off from the Romantic emphasis on the individual and drew sustenance from realism, since the latter constituted a critical challenge to earlier convention. Thus, "early modernism" can be found in many places. When modernity became a value for its own sake, with the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism, innovation became the driving force through which artists staked their claim within an art world in which entrepreneurial dealers, critics, and private collectors, more than government or academies, came to determine financial success and reputation.

the age of revolution

The French revolutionaries wanted to break not only with the politics of the past but also with the art they believed served such politics. Literally, a revolution (a full rotation) is a turning that is simultaneously forward and backward. Reformers prior to the Revolution urged that progress required a return to original principles, such as the heroic and just conduct of the ancients and the classical style of art that supposedly embodied their much revered morality. In Rome, sculptors from places as far-flung as Denmark (Bertel Thorvaldsen, 1768 or 1770–1844), England (John Flaxman, 1755–1826), and Italy (Antonio Canova, 1757–1822) had been pioneering evocations of ancient beauty and sublimity through statues of sleek beauty or imposing power. In a quest to replace the tired conventions of their predecessors and the perceived trivialities of rococo art, they tapped both historical knowledge and inner emotion to produce seductive and moving alternatives. Combining their stylistic rigor with his smoldering political activism, Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) first painted potentially revolutionary themes from ancient Roman history. His Oath of the Horatii (1784) heralded patriotism as an overriding virtue. After 1789 he applied these artistic principles to representations of Revolutionary events and heroes, such as Marat Assassinated (1793). At the same time, David was elected from the radical Jacobin party to the new legislature, which abolished the French Academy and its privileges. He organized public celebrations, using motifs from antiquity to suggest that the new regime had given rebirth to its noble ideals. The neoclassicism (literally new/renewed classicism), for which David's tautly linear, stripped-down, and highly finished style became the model, used significant elements of realism to create its powerful effects. When contemporary models such as the radical journalist Jean-Paul Marat became the basis for his painting, naturalism acquired a progressive, even politically radical dimension, often called realism.

From the Revolution onward, modern subjects and the degree to which artists based their work on observed models from reality versus those from the aesthetic repertoire of antiquity and old masters became the touchstone of artistic debate. Under-lying both the neoclassicists of Rome and the politically motivated David had been the commitment to freedom from establishment constraints. Concurrent with the revolutionary rhetoric of liberty and individual rights that proved so explosive in America and France, two aesthetic theories accompanied artistic developments and set the stage for much that followed. First was the notion that artistic creativity came from within the self—from an intuitive basis called genius—which might, according to some, be enhanced through training, but which must never be subjugated by rules and formulas. Second was the ancient concept of the sublime, rearticulated in the eighteenth century by Edmund Burke (1729–1797), better-known for his political writings. The sublime offered the possibility of an aesthetic alternative to beauty, one rooted more in emotion than in reason, yet of equal value. Grand and even fearful works, whether of art or nature, might be morally uplifting as they reveal human limitations and the presence of a grander power—call it Nature or God. These ideas lay the foundation on the one hand for Romanticism, attuned to the individual and his or her feelings, and on the other for naturalism, which found value in aspects of the surrounding world.

Concurrent with the career of Jacques-Louis David, and a barometer of artistic developments from the 1780s to the 1820s, was that of Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828) in Spain. Goya evolved from being a court painter to a liberal inspired by the French Enlightenment, then to a patriot disgusted by the Napoleonic invasion of his country, and finally to a tormented exile grappling with fantasies. Spanish art always had a realist bent, linked as it was through Spain's history to the Netherlands and the Caravaggesque trends of southern Italy, absent the strong academic tradition of the French. Goya's democratic ideals were translated into his Family of Charles IV (1800). Although dressed in their uniforms and gowns, the royals are shown as everyday people, unidealized (some say caricatured, but studies for the painting show the opposite), in a space shared both by their employee, the artist, and with the ordinary viewer, thanks to the picture's construction of perspective. Having suffered an illness that left him deaf, yet at the summit of his career, by 1800 Goya enjoyed a kind of freedom that allowed him to follow his personal preoccupation with the inner nature of humankind. On the one hand, he explored themes of witchcraft and hallucination—the irrational; on the other, he recorded the many acts of violence and terror perpetrated by all sides during warfare. His political and intellectual ideals merged in a profoundly pessimistic yet humanitarian vision that is exemplified in his satirical Los caprichos series of prints in 1796 and his Executions of May 3, 1808 (1815), which showed the fate of Spanish rebels.

Another artist who explored the depths of the human spirit was the Swiss-born Johann Heinrich Füssli (or Fuseli, 1741–1825), who made London his base and joined the Royal Academy. When Füssli drew on the classical tradition, he sometimes parodied it or selected themes that contradicted its ideals of beauty and reason. Seeking shock-value and originality, he explored erotic themes (including pornographic drawings of his wife) and the world of dreams and visions. His many paintings drawn from John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667, 1674) or from Germanic mythology reveal his search for alternatives to the sunny Mediterranean classics of those who hoped to rival France by imitation. His best-known painting, The Nightmare (1781), combines the erotic and the hallucinatory in a style that seems drawn more from Italian mannerism than from nature, and an expressive handling that defied his colleagues' focus on crispness and finish. His quip "Hang nature, she puts me out!" embodies one extreme of the Romantic quest for forms to embody the visions of the inner world with which he was obsessed.

romantic naturalism

While the mainstream of French painters were deeply engaged in the political aftermath of the Revolution and on the Napoleonic battlefield, both England and Germany were discovering nature as the place where they could pursue art peacefully and as a source both satisfying to their personal convictions and to the demands of an increasingly middle-class market. Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) observed his surroundings closely, but he put his studies together into landscape constructions that were intended to reveal the sublime scale of nature and the presence of God. Friedrich hated the French, whom he regarded as godless and imperialistic. His strong Protestant culture believed in searching for direct communion with the divine, in his case through the contemplation of nature, as inspired by the Natur Philosophie of August Wilhelm von Schegel (1767–1845) and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854). His Monk by the Seashore (1809–1810) strips landscape to its bare essentials in order to enhance its didactic impact (ironically, much as David had done in his history paintings). The scale of man to sea, sky, and heavens is minute; that the human figure wears a monk's habit specifies the religious reverence before such grandeur. One of Friedrich's students said the monk was a self-portrait, a statement not to be taken literally—the figure is too small to be identifiable, and Friedrich belonged to no monastery—but to mean that, for Friedrich, art was a vehicle for self-expression elevated to universal experience. This was one of the guiding principles of Romanticism.

In England, the two greatest proponents of landscape during the Romantic period were Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) and John Constable (1776–1837). Turner used the tradition of the sublime to transform his often narrative human subjects into the overarching theme of man's dependency on nature. He usually chose one meteorological extreme or the other for his

setting, from lowly fishermen waiting for the wind to rise to the ancient Carthaginian invader (whose present imperialist successor was Napoleon) beset by howling gales in Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps (1812). Turner's theme was always nature's dominance and the "Fallacies of Hope"—the title he gave to bombastic lines of poetry he wrote to accompany his pictures. With compositional structures that draw the viewer into a vortex to be enveloped by sweeping strokes of paint and flayed by smears and gobs violently applied with the palette knife, Turner conveyed the physical experiences of intense sunlight or the ferocity of wind and rain.

Constable, on the other hand, eschewed bravado. In the eighteenth century, landed gentry fresh from tours of the Continent commissioned garden designs for their estates and paintings for their country houses that reminded them of Italy's glorious scenery as represented in seventeenth-century art. Eventually, they began to see beauty in their native surroundings, as the Industrial Revolution transformed British cities into sprawling urban nightmares. They developed a nostalgia for the agricultural past, which led Constable to believe there was room for a "natural painter," who could appreciate the beauty with which God endowed even ordinary places. For him, Salisbury Cathedral was the ideal subject, a symbol of God yet surrounded by lush grounds and ample vegetation on which even cattle could graze, unifying the material and spiritual realm. Constable justified his work on utilitarian grounds, claiming both that "painting is a science," but also that it "is a way of feeling." His rich paint surfaces and relatively loose handling made his closely observed trees and clouds appear spontaneously observed and directly available to the senses, seductive in their calm material amplitude rather than spewing, as in Turner, with tumultuous rage. Yet both regarded nature rather than human reason as the source of power and truth, and they appealed to body and soul through symbolic structures and their psychological impact rather than through the narratives of history painting.

While Britain and Germany gave impetus to the rise of landscape painting, the figure tradition still dominated Romanticism in France, which continued struggling with its convulsive politics following the defeat of Napoleon I (r. 1804–1814/15) and a powerful, if waning, academic influence. For Théodore Géricault (1791–1824) the theme of man versus the elements was articulated through a grand figure composition, The Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819), replete with references to historical tradition as well as to contemporary politics. (The ship ran aground and was abandoned by its incompetent captain, a Royalist appointee. Sound familiar?) His younger friend, Eugène Dela-croix (1798–1863), gave new definition to Romanticism when in 1824 he exhibited Scenes from the Massacres at Chios (1822–1824, Musée du Louvre, Paris), a large and ostentatiously naturalistic painting about the cruelty of the Turkish rulers crushing the impoverished Greeks struggling for independence. Delacroix's painting appealed to its viewers' empathy for fellow Christians' suffering as well as to political ideals of freedom. It was an unmistakable challenge to the new darling of the Academy, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867), the former student of David recently returned in triumph from years of residence in Rome. Despite his youthful rebelliousness, Ingres became a professed classicist, whose style was based on first-hand study of the ancients and old masters, particularly Raphael (1483–1520). His Vow of Louis XIII (1824) displayed a respect for both political and artistic authority through its display of unity between church and monarchy (restored to power following Napoleon's defeat) based on traditional compositional and stylistic features—those taught by the Academy. Ingres became associated with a smooth, polished style based on expert drawing and crisp linearity, whereas Delacroix exemplified a looser, more spontaneous-looking style, based on masses of color modeled broadly with light and shade. Romanticism came to be linked with this freedom of execution and liberal politics, hence with feelings of thwarted aspirations to transform the present and transcend tradition; classicism with obstinate academic standards, official power, and the status quo. Ingres was welcomed by the Academy, which he prevented Delacroix from joining until Delacroix ultimately outlived him.

As France, following England, joined in the Industrial Revolution, middle-class patronage encouraged a host of artists to practice portraiture and landscape. The latter in particular, inspired in part by the British, fulfilled a growing need for images that combined both the fantasy of escape and the demand for naturalism. Artists toured the countryside, bringing back to the Parisian art market scenes of rural life and contemplative solitude that satisfied the urban myth of nature as a realm of innocence and purity. The farming village of Barbizon, near the Fontainebleau Forest about a day's travel from Paris, became a settlement for artists (Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, 1796–1875; Théodore Rousseau, 1812–1867; Jean-François Millet, 1814–1875), who exemplified rural virtue by their humble surroundings and unpretentious lifestyle while they catered to their patrons' vicarious yearning for a simpler, quieter life. In literature and politics, as well, a reaction to modernity was forming—a double-edged reaction in which looking backward became revolutionary once again. In the

writings of George Sand (Amandine Dudevant; 1804–1876) and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865), rural ways provided the basis for utopian thinking that showed up the injustices of the oligarchs who ruled France since the 1830s. It was from this crucible that socialism and anarchism were born, flaring in 1848 into the second overthrow of the French monarchy and various uprisings across Europe. It was from the same conditions that the artistic avant-garde emerged.

the avant-garde

Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) seized public attention by embodying the 1848 revolution's violent rupture with the past. He became the first leader of the avant-garde. His images of common people from his home province (Franche-Comté, near Switzerland) lacked the veneer of nostalgia. His Stonebreakers (1848) were contemporary workers whose presence revealed that actual social and economic conditions in the countryside had little to do with the mythology of his Romantic Barbizon predecessors. The Second French Republic lasted briefly, however, ending in 1851 with Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's coup d'état, which established him as Emperor Napoleon III (r. 1852–1871) and his regime as the Second Empire. Courbet's art was seen as a democratic challenge to this politics as well as to government dominance of the arts through official patronage. His A Burial at Ornans (1849–1850) dared treat the theme of death from an everyday, down-to-earth rather than religious point of view. To its insulted Parisian audience, it appeared crudely painted in a manner appropriate to its gawky subjects and to the workman-like painter they assumed Courbet to be. His The Painter's Studio; A Real Allegory (1855) placed the artist himself at the center of a crowd representing French society, claiming leadership in a revolution

of consciousness—hence both political and artistic—for vision based on honest observation and independence from convention. He exhibited the painting at a self-funded pavilion, called Realism, set up across from the officially sponsored art shows of the Exposition Universelle. He published what is now called the Realist Manifesto, in which he stated that his aim was "to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my epoch, according to my own estimation." The painting and its manifesto became a touchstone for the free artist of the avant-garde, establishing a tradition of questioning old shibboleths while self-consciously expressing one's own way of seeing.

At the same time, England was experiencing a minor artistic revolution. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, founded by some pious Catholic Oxford students in 1848 (William Holman Hunt, 1827–1910; John Everett Millais, 1829–1896; and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1828–1882), was also a protest against authority and tradition. Yet its ideals were far more conservative than Courbet's. They paralleled the critic John Ruskin's (1819–1900) call for an art that would reveal the greatness of God through meticulous observation of nature. Ruskin had been writing about Turner in the 1840s; but the Pre-Raphaelites took inspiration from the religious art of the German Nazarenes and the moralizing social art of Ford Madox Brown (1821–1893). As exemplified by Hunt's The Light of the World (1853), they fused archaic quattrocento composition and simplification with the precision and ultraoptical naturalism of scientific studies. The result was a strange and stifling realism that quite effectively conveys Victorian society's alienating combination of materialism and high moral aspirations based on oppressive sensual self-denial.

The other artist who defined the early French avant-garde was Édouard Manet (1832–1883). Of very different origins from the reputedly coarse provincial Courbet, the elegant Parisian Manet represented his Parisian peers to become what in a famous essay his friend the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) called "The Painter of Modern Life." Following Courbet's strategy of attracting public attention through controversy, Manet painted his Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1862; Picnic on the grass), which showed a naked woman staring out at the viewer while accompanied by two clothed men. Following protests when this and a number of other paintings were rejected by the Salon Jury of 1863, Emperor Napoleon III instituted a Salon des Refusés, in which Manet's painting starred. Reforms of the selection process for 1865 allowed Manet to exhibit an even more confrontational picture, his Olympia (1863). In it, a naked woman, visibly a prostitute with a servant from the colonies bringing an admirer's bouquet, is on display as if in a shop window. She is accompanied by her black cat, an animal celebrated in recent literature for its independence (as well as reputed promiscuity) and its companionship with poets and artists. Manet stripped away the seductive ideal of womanhood, which he now placed in the demimonde of Paris's thriving culture of courtesans and prostitutes. Through her gaze and Manet's palpable painting of her flesh, Manet reduced male fantasies of sexual conquest to a business transaction. At the same time, he flaunted a style of painting through broad strokes and patches of color, imposing a willful lack of finish that drew attention to a technical deliberateness that shattered the possibility of illusion. In defining this mode of painting, which gave rise to impressionism, Manet's admirer, the novelist Émile Zola (1840–1902), called art "a corner of nature seen through a temperament"—rephrasing Courbet's commitment to representing the observable world through his own way of seeing.

The impressionists were guided by this principle. But unlike Courbet and Manet, many of them concentrated on landscape, which in the early to mid 1870s they vowed to make a reflection of modern France. The best known are Claude Monet (1840–1926), Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), and Paul Cézanne (1839–1906). No longer would landscape painting offer a refuge in nature from the effects of modernity; it would celebrate the human impact on the landscape through cityscapes as well as the new economic and leisure activities in suburbs and countryside that signaled contemporary prosperity and optimism. Contemporary technology, such as train travel, made the countryside accessible and underlay expansion of the suburbs, while photography provided a new standard for naturalism and often documented modern industrial constructions such as train stations, new bridges, and the metallic framework of the architect Charles Garnier's new Opera House. The impressionists' utopia could be found, thus, in their own surroundings. One such place was La Grenouillère (1869), where Monet developed his characteristic style of broken, sketch-like brushwork, rather than in some solitary wooded glen or isolated province. That technique itself conveyed the spontaneity of direct observation associated with painting en plein-air (outdoors). It embodied both the artist's creative energies and the ever-changing world, which Baudelaire, in "The Painter of Modern Life," called the essence of modernity. At this formative time in their careers, the impressionists successfully followed up previous challenges to the art world with a series of eight independent exhibitions from 1874 to 1886. Following on the heels of the collapse the Second Empire under Prussian boots and the brief civil war of the Paris Commune (1871), these challenges linked the

impressionists to radical politics. Yet as they were discovered by Charles Durand-Ruel, a visionary art dealer willing to support them, and by notable collectors particularly from the business class, they were quickly assimilated to the mainstream, as so many avant-garde movements would be in the future.

Like Manet, the impressionists Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) and Edgar Degas (1834–1917) were more interested in figure painting than landscape, but their subjects were taken from modern urban or suburban modernity, as well. Degas's more traditional technique eschewed the affectation of spontaneity, but he highlighted his own creative processes through arresting vantage points and orchestrated compositions, to which he found parallels in other art spectacles, most famously, the ballet. To emphasize the idea that even naturalism in art is a deliberate production rather than mechanical copying, Degas's Musicians in the Orchestra (c. 1870, reworked c. 1874–1876) shows the ballerinas taking bows before very broadly brushed theater flats, after the players in the foreground have completed their accompaniment. Renoir's own gregarious personality and his affection for women is reflected in his many superb portraits as well as in scenes of social gatherings, such as his Le Moulin de la Galette (1876). The location is an indoor-outdoor café-cabaret in the working-class Montmartre neighborhood where Renoir had his studio and from which he and his friends, some of whom are shown in the painting, recruited models. Here it appears transformed into an updated and urban rococo fête-galante.

modernism

Postimpressionism is not a style but a term used to group a number of artists who responded critically to impressionism and thus constitute its aftermath. It led directly to the abstraction we associate with the founding of modern art. As impressionism's success turned it more toward bourgeois subjects, brightly decorative colors, and private dealers, the next generation looked toward a less ephemeral and what they considered a more democratic image of modernity. Georges Seurat's (1859–1891) A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1886) became the touchstone for neoimpressionism, which sought greater permanence by appearing to synthesize methodically a whole series of moments instead of catching a single moment candidly, as in the work of the previous generation. What is more, Seurat's mechanistic and impersonal pointillist recipe for style aimed at making art accessible to the widest number of practitioners whose quality of vision would not be affected by their varied skills at hand-work. Finally, Seurat and his followers attempted to use color scientifically, again favoring objective method over impressionist intuition.

Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) and Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) had very different responses to impressionism, but both emphasized personal expression over the kind of naturalism they associated with the latter. Van Gogh worked from nature, but insisted on going beyond surface appearances to deeper truths. Gauguin disparaged

direct observation in favor of recollections and mental images. Both used bold colors that often departed from observed reality, but van Gogh painted with powerful workman-like brushstrokes, as if to emphasize simultaneously the personal emotional content of his work and the physical effort of productivity underlying it. Gauguin, on the other hand, developed a style based on flat areas of color through which he emphasized the artifice of his process and a creative transformation of reality he hoped would conjure up heightened states of consciousness. He called the style synthetism for its combination of reality and imagination, the material and the spiritual. He traveled widely, first to Brittany, then to the Caribbean, finally to Tahiti, in search of a cultural purity and simplicity he associated with "primitive" peoples, whose artistic monuments and aesthetic creations often inspired him.

This cycle of self-conscious critical responses to previous art, responses that focus more on matters of aesthetic process and creative method than on the implications of subject matter or contemporary history, marks the advent of modernism. Although it of course has roots in previous generations, the latter's motivations were most often social and political, as well as artistic, whereas the avant-garde now became increasingly removed from mainstream culture, focusing more on its own artistic concerns. Cézanne's withdrawal from Paris to Aix-en-Provence in 1886 is characteristic of this move. Having at first essayed crude expressionistic paintings meant to shock his contemporaries, Cézanne had spent the decade of the 1870s assimilating impressionist attitudes regarding plein-air painting. Yet with Pissarro in the late 1870s and early 1880s, he became more concerned with the structure and unity of his pictures, realizing that impressionist spontaneity and focus on the specific moment must be tempered by the prior knowledge of objects and experience of space one brings to any empirical moment. Cézanne claimed to be seeking an art more permanent than impressionism, more "like the art of the museums," while nonetheless deploying impressionism's tactic of working from direct observation. Cézanne's mature paintings sum up the efforts of impressionism as well as those of the other postimpressionists. For example, his Mont Sainte-Victoire, Seen from Bellevue (c. 1882–1885) conveys both duration in time and the specifics of a directly observed scenery through its rigorous geometry and patchwork of color dabs. A construction derived from methodical observation of reality, the painting reveals a deeply contemplative consciousness at the same time as it displays the means through which that consciousness is given a physical presence on the canvas. That presence, combining its evidence of the exercise of human intellect with its reflection of the natural world, seems to clarify that world epistemologically. In this, it has often been discussed by philosophers of phenomenology, especially in the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961).

All through the realist and impressionist revolutions, academic painting continued to flourish, with great society portraitists such as Jacques-Émile Blanche (1861–1942) and Giovanni Boldini (1845–1931) or figure painters like Adolphe-William Bougereau (1825–1905) and Pierre-Auguste Cot (1837–1883), as in the latter's The Storm (1880, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). As avant-garde artists gained publicity and a serious critical audience, however, academic art lost its historical relevance and the avant-garde became international. Postimpressionism directly inspired the two dominant trends of the pre–World War I period, expressionism and cubism. The Catalàn native Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), combined Gauguin's "primitivism" with the faceted reconstructions of form he saw as a potential in Cézanne's late paintings. His revolutionary, though experimental and somewhat awkward early masterpiece, Les demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) showed the way toward the highly fragmented and abstracted forms of cubism he and his cohort Georges Braque (1882–1963) were practicing just prior to the outbreak of World War I. Collage, with its inclusion of everyday materials such as newspaper, in cubist compositions led to synthetic cubism, in which the image was not derived from observing a motif, as in analytic cubism, but rather appeared to be assembled out of parts, painted or otherwise, producing the artwork as a completely novel object. This concept emerged as Picasso experimented with sculpture, largely moribund during the nineteenth century, and gave it a new impetus based on this process of fusing pieces together into images that suggest or even parody real objects rather than describe them.

Whereas cubism was developed within the artistic hothouse of Paris, expressionism took various guises and was more or less pan-European. Gauguin and Van Gogh's use of bright colors and bold shapes led Henri Matisse (1869–1954) and his followers to paint so broadly and in such flat and simplified forms that critics called them fauves (wild beasts). In fact, Matisse's Luxe, calme et volupté (1904) combines both the classicizing and neoimpressionist strains of utopian landscape representation, revealing its roots both in impressionism's discovery of the French Riviera and in Gauguin's synthetist style perfected in Tahiti. The Norwegian Edvard Munch (1863–1944), used the stylistic simplifications he saw in French art, focusing on the core of human emotion in scenes of death, yearning, or anxiety. Wassily Kandinsky's (1866–1944) early work seems related to fauvism, but its visionary imagery suggests memory and dreams layered over nostalgic yearnings for his native Russia. He founded a movement he called Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), referring to a figure on horseback who appeared in many of his expressionist works. A parallel movement based in Germany called Die Brücke (The Bridge) can be represented by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938), who used cubist fragmentation and angularity in The Street, Berlin (1913) as well as lurid color to suggest the inner psyche, oppressed by the urban culture of his times. Quite to the contrary, the Italian futurists, led by Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916), used cubistinspired faceting but with expressionist colors and dynamism to herald the new age of the city and the machine. Truly, the first decade of the twentieth century was filled with experimentation that would have extraordinary consequences for the future of art. Yet its challenges to tradition would be readily assimilated by a market now eager to consume work associated with new ideas and progressive thinking.