If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction and overview of the point of this blog. Older posts are in the archive on the right.
Other links: The Band on Gab; The Band on Oneway
Time to start pulling some threads together and see what Modernism is. The last few posts in the archive have the background so we can start with a contrast - two centuries of Progress in Italian carving...
Antonio Corradini, Bust of a Veiled Woman (Puritas), 1717-25, marble, Museo del Settecento Veneziano, Ca' Rezzonico, Venice
Amedeo Modigliani, Head of a Woman, 1910-11 limestone, National Gallery, Washington
Take a closer look.
Just to be clear what we're up against.
To really understand Modernism in any of the arts, you have to think beyond the way styles and movements are presented in general histories. The Band uses traditional periods like Renaissance and Medieval and styles like Classical for convenience of communication, but does so in full awareness of their limited, man-made nature. It's not that these classifications are untrue - stylistic changes do take place - but they are too limited to account for the complete transformation that happened around the turn of the 20th century. The definition of the old "Arts" as autonomous and an all-pervasive ideology of progress transformed the meaning of words like 'literature' and 'the fine arts' into very different things from what they had been. Architecture is no exception, but while we can avoid the music of Schoenberg and not read Pound, there is no escaping these monstrosities on our landscape.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Glasgow School of Art, 1896-1909.
The beloved Macintosh's "masterpiece" is a transitional from the historical revivals of the 19th-century and Modernism. It hints at Medieval and Classical forms but eliminates aesthetic appeal for a pile of rough materials.
Notice how the "heroes" of Modernism were destroyers of culture. This only happens when the arts are centralized - nodes of control. This is where new "artists" were changed.
The library is famous, but the appeal is all color. Without the dark wood and windows, there isn't much here. Macintosh deserves credit for the choices, but you can see the limits of "truth to materials" as a design scheme.
The qualities that defined the art as a cultural marker or means of expression are gone. It literally does not occupy the same conceptual space.
Modernism was ubiquitous across the arts because it was an expression of a much deeper set of changes that completely transformed the West. The last few posts have looked at how the false faith in human rationalism that was the Enlightenment legacy teamed up with the technological developments of the Industrial Revolution to give us the false god Progress. This idea - that we are evolving towards a better state, or telos, as a rule of human nature - is preposterous, but consider how ingrained it is in our societal perspective.
Set aside the globalist ideology for a moment and look around at the current culture. The pop music industry is totally centrally controlled, meaning that ability is no longer a consideration for success. Some still imagine a competitive performance scene exists as a talent incubator. It doesn't.
Progress.
Modernism was a society-wide phenomenon, but one thing that didn't change was the idea that the arts were distinct, autonomous zones. The abandonment of tradition meant having to rework the defining assumptions, but this occurred seamlessly enough that Modernism slots comfortably on the historical timeline. But losing the old justifications for distinct arts meant new ones were needed, which brings us to essences. Modern arts were defined tautologically - offering their existence as the definition of their existence - by selecting some aspect of their physical make-up and declaring it a fundamental principle. All other associations can be rejected.
Fernand Léger, 1912-13, Nude Model in the Studio (Le modèle nu dans l'atelier), oil on burlap, 128.6 x 95.9 cm, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
The Modern essence of painting is color on a canvas. Any representation is a reference to something else. Modern painting progressively clears out the idea of depicting something to focus on the nature of paint on canvas, whatever that is. Cubism is a step on the way - there is still a subject in the traditional sense, but the shapes are abstract and arbitrary and the background is treated the same way as the objects. Full abstraction came next.
An excerpt from James Joyce's Finnigans Wake, a totem of Modernist literature that has inspired generations of people who should know better to unlock its meaning. The real question is why.
Joyce's self-indulgent gibberish has been compared to post-Freudian dreams, as if perverse scientific fraud is legitimating. This is the consequence of centralized culture. Joyce has nothing of substance to offer beyond of a performative indictment of the stupidity of Modernist "thought". No one reads him outside of the institutions of culture. Academics and critics are the sole reason for his reputed greatness.
Consider the wisdom of giving cultural authority to the sort of sociopaths who find greatness in this.
Although the themes are consistent, Modernism plays out differently in different forms of expression. To understand how this works, it is necessary to think about what art forms and media are, not only in the theoretical terms of academics and critics, but in the reality of human experience.
First, people make things for reasons.
Gold Buddha statuette from the Unified Silla Kingdom (668-918 CE), before 706, 12.5 cm, National Museum of Korea, Seoul
Many people like old Buddhist statues for aesthetic reasons, but this doesn't change the fact that they were made as objects of religious devotion. The symbolism expresses theological ideas present in the local form of the religion, while the appearance is an expression of cultural identity. Even the expensive golden substance is a sign of religious respect. All that said, purchasing this because it looks good in your room or makes you feel good when you look at it is still a purpose.
Jacques-Louis David, The Oath of the Horatii, 1784-85, oil on canvas, 329.8 x 424.8 cm, Paris, Louvre Museum
In theory, academic art was intended to educate and inspire.
Louis Gauffier, Ulysses and Nausicaa, 1798, oil on canvas, 121 x 162 cm, Musée Sainte-Croix, Poitiers
In reality it was more emotionally manipulative entertainment...
Alexandre Cabanel, The Birth of Venus, 1863, oil on canvas, 130 cm × 225 cm, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
... or even erotica, with a fig leaf of respectability and a high degree of skill.
Still purposeful though.
Standing female worshiper, 2600-2500 BC, Sumerian, limestone with shell and lapis lazuli inlay, 24.9 cm high, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
An ancient temple offering like this one was a sign of perpetual devotion to a god, and possibly a thank-you (votive offering) for a perceived favor...
Funerary stele of Thrasea and Euandria, ca. 375-350 BC, marble, Pergamon Museum, Berlin
... while a grave marker memorializes the deceased in the way he or she would like to be remembered.
Male figurine from Brno II, c. 23,700 BC, mammoth ivory, body 13.5 cm, head 6.7 cm, Anthropos Pavilon, Brno, Czech Republic
We could continue but the point is clear: humans have made art for a very long time, but always with a purpose, whether religious, commemorative, identificatory, entertainment, or something else.
Now think for a moment on the Modern notion of art for art's sake. The idea of an autonomous art that exists without purpose for its own sake, consuming human capital and resources without returning anything of benefit, is historically ignorant to the point of being retarded. How far down the path of decay must a society already be to turn control of culture over to misanthropic freaks, many foreign, driven by the goal of destroying the societies and traditions that employed them.
Egon Schiele, Self-Portrait with Physalis, 1912, oil on canvas, 32.2 x 39.8 cm, Leopold Museum
It's like a Rorschach test for psychic health.
Healthy societies produce culture that reflects and reinforces their actual values and desires, and therefore appeals to its people. This is what makes centralization so toxic - it places power over the direction of a culture in the hands of those most driven to seize control, whether the avant-garde circles of European Modernism or the academic monoculture of today's universities. All the sociopaths and perverts needed to do was occupy a few key positions in media and academia and, over time, transform the highest aspirations of peoples into vehicles to replace their identity with dyscivic globalist lies. Academic art was often little more than veiled erotica, but it is the Modern avant-garde that carries the Marxist revolution into culture with an unending firehose of filth and depravity.
Félicien Rops, The Temptation of St. Anthony, pastel, 1878, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Brussels
Had to think about sharing this, but it is worth giving a glimpse of the level of cultural toxin that is being referred to here. On what grounds is this worth keeping in the Royal Library? Technically it isn't distinguished, it more offensive than clever, and the only "social" development it reflects is malevolent anti-Christianity. It may belong in a history of ham-fisted "edginess" by the cognitively limited, but treasuring it in a Royal Collection is exhibit infinity of the hatred that the aristocratic elites have for "their people".
It is also significant that the globalist left's obsession with perverse carnality is nothing new. They seem spiritually retarded, in that they are incapable of aspirational thoughts beyond sticking things in orifices.
Almost a different species.
It is important to remember that the modern art world is international in orientation. The assault on culture that began in France quickly spread, making national identity and tradition part of the past that needed to be erased in the name of Progress. This one world utopianism is what aligned Modernism in the arts so closely to Marxism and made it so hostile to organic development in human nature. Marxism also brought the centralization and institutionalized theft needed to support spewers of cultural poison who couldn't give pictures away on the market. At least the avant-garde struggled. In the sick world of today's "funding for the arts", it's possible to live quite well off money stolen from the people you attack by their so-called "representatives". Globalism all the way down.
Don't like this poison that's being pumped into your society? We'll just forcibly appropriate your money and give it to them anyhow.
Meet Tom Katzenmeyer, president of the Greater Columbus Arts Council and an authoritarian POS pushing for more theft to support "the arts". In fact, stealing from you to fund filth is his most important work. "What if we could increase the number of artists who receive funding from 300 to 600 each year?" the extortionist asks, without clarifying what those artists will be producing. Though if physiognomy actually were reality, it would explain his interest in opportunities for "the children".
It is hard to imagine an "art world" without the encrustation of psychopathy and exploitation, so it is reasonable to wonder what it would look like had it been disinfected of pathogens like Shieles and creepy thieves like Tom. The problem isn't the individual freaks, it's the centralized control system that gives the freaks a platform in the first place. Simply cutting public funding would end much of the globalist culture by removing the major control network of the gatekeepers and forcing artists to actually find audiences to support them. The logic is simple:
Little in known about the prehistoric origins of the arts but the surviving evidence suggests commonalities across wide distances. The problem is that it is impossible to recreate the chains of contact and exchange over tens of thousands of years of hunter-gatherer movement, so we don't know how ideas spread. It appears that art forms developed organically, from the interaction of human physiology and psychology with whatever materials were available. The basic categories of painting/2D pictures, sculpture/3D figures, music (sonic arrangements), dance (expressive movement) and literature (storytelling in prehistory), developed alongside human society. Once established, these rough categories become collective knowledge to be refined over time through the development of new techniques and media.
Paleolithic fertility figures from around Europe
often mischaracterized as "Venuses".
The popularity of this figure type indicates that it was an effective expression of a common idea. Once a representation has been established, people will visualize the subject in terms of the representation. This is especially true when the subject is abstract, like health or fertility.
It is very difficult to conceptualize a category that doesn't exist. If there were no artificial images, people won't have developed ideas about painting. Once Paleolithic man started making pictorial representations, it is natural for pictorial representation in general to be conceived in terms of these first pioneers.
Charles R. Knight, Cro-Magnon artists painting woolly mammoths in Font-de-Gaume, published 1920
These basic artistic categories become more complex as the civilizations around them develop. Over time, familiarity enables qualitative judgments on technical skill or aesthetic quality, while new inventions increase the range of expressive possibilities.
The Achilles Painter, Amphora depicting Oedipus and the Sphinx of Thebes, Classical Period, 450–440 BC, Attic Greek red-figure pottery, 33.2 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
More flexible languages allow for greater variety of literary expression and the development of canons. It isn't a coincidence that the Greeks developed a state of the art language before basically inventing literature and philosophy as arts. This is a scene from Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, often considered to be a perfect realization of Greek tragedy.
Princess Redji (2592-2543 BC), Egyptian Old Kingdom, 3rd Dynasty, granodiorite, Museo Egizio, Turin
Metal tools allowed sculptors to become more ambitious.
Because the development and expansion is cumulative, knowledge of the past is essential, but this weight is more traditional than ontological. A musician trained in the mode of his master will replicate the master's assumptions about instrument and musical type without necessarily realizing it - the formative experience of learning is sufficient to make what are really arbitrary decisions seem like natural laws. Should that musician have the talent to create something of lasting appeal, the innovation will be an extension or reaction to what was taught.
It goes without saying that forms of expression that are effective and compelling are developed, while cultural dead ends like Joyce are allowed to die out without fanfare. Unless they have globalist sugar daddies and money extorted from the public...
The "Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Gallery at the Royal Academy" exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum was predictably "controversial" when then-mayor Guilliani tried to block funding to the museum over the show. It turned out that if you fund the arts, you can't censor. The question remains, if this is what passes for a sensation in "the arts", why are they being funded at all?
Oh look! Orifices and genitalia! There must be leftists about...
Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Gallery at the Royal Academy, London
Same potential for money laundering, different degraded institution.
Cultural decay? What do you call a collective willingness to pay for your own degredation and abasement?
Thinking historically, what we think of as art forms are codifications and customs developed over long histories of organic evolution and problem-solving within cultural traditions. Consider two landscapes painted within a decade of each other, but thousands of miles apart.
Tang Yin, Landscape, 1523, ink and colors on silk, 29.4 × 351 cm, National Palace Museum, Taipai
The first is a section of a hand scroll from Ming Dynasty China
Joachim Patinir, Martyrdom of Saint Catherine, before 1515, 27 x 44 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
The second is a small German oil painting with a religious legend and an extensive landscape.
Both use colors on a surface to depict scenes and communicate ideas, but the finished works, like the ideologies behind them, are quite different from each other. Which is theoretically "correct"? The answer is both, since each represents the cultural expectations and refinements in the use materials and that define picture making in each tradition. There are no absolute rules of art - just degrees of optimization of the available techniques within the larger values of the parent culture.
So that's the "essence" of art from a historically empirical perspective. We can see how intellectually bankrupt Modernist thinkers were when we consider even pretending that something as culturally determined as academic painting could carry water as an ontological thing in itself. The inputs are complicated, but the basic problem is not - centralized cultural networks under the control of atavists and sociopaths shrieking lies about Progress have imposed toxic swill on a reluctant public for dyscivic ends.
Elspeth Young, Growing Light, 2018
There are plenty of good artist out there, like this contemporary painter and her mastery of Caravaggio's chiaroscuro. However, it is doubtful there is anything in the institutional world of contemporary art worth saving.
Modernism is a perversion of the Western artistic tradition - a demonic impostor in a once-noble skinsuit, so to speak - but the Western tradition is comprised of multiple art forms. Each has its own means of communication and comes with different expectations and associations. Remember, not being an absolute in the theoretical sense has no bearing on the reality of artistic traditions within a culture.
Virgin and Child with angels and Sts. George and Theodore, c. 600, encaustic icon on panel, Saint Catherine's Monastery, Egypt
Early Christian hostility to pagan statues meant that religious sculpture was largely abandoned for some time while icon painting flourished. Each art form invites its own kind of meaningful experience based on its physical properties.
Here are two examples of 19th-century Egyptomania - one poetic, one painted. Each creates a completely different experience.
1819 printing of Percy Bysshe Shelly's Ozymandias (1818)
Jean-Leon Gerome. The Colossus of Memnon, circa 1857, oil on canvas, 65 x 81 cm, Private Collection
The medium may not be the entire message, but it is a huge part of how the arts make meaning. When Modernism transforms the role of the arts in culture, the change is expressed differently for each art form.
Art works of any sort can be thought of on three levels, so long as we remember that these are intertwined in real life:
Substance is what it is made of.
Form is how it put together or composed.
Content is what it communicates.
Remember, these are rough distinctions - both substance and form can be communicative. A golden (substance) figurine conveys wealth, while a eulogy (form) is associated with sadness. But Modernist theory is based on unsustainable distinctions - hence the vulnerability to deconstruction - so we will follow suit for the sake of discussion. Let's set aside substance for the moment, since its workings are fairly obvious, and think about form and content.
Form
Think of form as a blend of genre, style, structure - all the things that go into the composition of a work of art. Where do they come from? Ignore post-Renaissance art theory as the philosophical embarrassment that we have found it to be and consider reality. Literature may be words on a page, but Anglo-Saxon verse has a distinct meter and rhyme scheme that is instantly recognizable - two-part lines tied together by alliteration and a pattern of emphases.
Excerpt from J. R. R. Tolkien's poem "King Sheave".
Tolkien, a professor of English and philologist, wrote this poem in the correct Old English metre, but in modern English. This lets us see the alliteration (in blue) and the rhythm of the words. The ancient Greeks also wrote poetry, but their forms are very different. Where do these come from?
Mask, 20th century Dan, wood, 21.3 × 11.9 × 6.6 cm
How about a visual example? This carving from the modern Ivory Coast is an example of the Dan people's practice of representing spirits as stylized masks. It is clearly based on a human face, but is exaggerated and distorted in in ways that are typical of its context. Sculpture may be shaped matter in space, but why carve forms that looked like these?
Some of this can be personal style, but consistent defining approaches to an art form visualizes cultural identity.
There is no formal rule book dictating the craft to the Anglo-Saxon poets or Dan sculptors, only a partly unconscious way of conceptualizing the world that develops over time among a people. This is arbitrary, in that it is the product of a people rather than an extension of metaphysical absolutes, but that makes it no less real to the expression and dissemination of that culture. Critics and historians are completely different. They set up from "outside" these cultural frameworks and try to describe what is happening in a systematic way.
Another Dan mask, this one from an exhibition that is typical of the way African art is classified and displayed.
Notice that these objects were not dated or classified by the people that made them. That's because they didn't see them as "art" in the way it was defined in the modern West. The level of craftsmanship had no bearing on the fact that these were made for practical religious purposes. Qualitative differences might add to their value, but this was secondary to the reason for making them.
"Art" as a concept is a cultural projection, not an external reality in itself.
Pablo Picasso, 1907, Head of a Sleeping Woman (Study for Nude with Drapery), oil on canvas, 61.4 x 47.6 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
When Modernist artists drew inspiration from African masks, they were using them as a formal alternative to Western aesthetics. This is also very different from how how their makers saw them. It also open the door to endless accusations of cultural appropriation and Western oppression.
As a cultural virus, Modernism has wide-reaching symptoms.
Our anonymous Dan sculptor or Anglo-Saxon poet simply expressed the world as he knew it in the ways that he was trained to. There was no defining their work as "our" form of art as apposed to some other sets of traditions. Theoretical structures are post-facto abstractions that are based on actual works, not preceding rules that determine what future works must look like. Shifting the definition of art from the artists and their consumers to the critics and theoreticians was one of Modernism's greatest cultural crimes.
But this was only possible with centralizing control Let's look more closely.
The Greeks were the first ancients that we are aware of who classified and theorized the arts in terms of formal definitions. Aristotle can be seen as the father of literary criticism for his systematic classification of the poetic arts of his day. Although this remained authoritative into the 18th century, it is clear that Aristotle himself was working descriptively because actual Greek plays doesn't actually follow his classification that carefully.
Flight of Medea, circa 400 BC, Lucanian Red Figure Krater attributed to the Policoro Painter, Cleveland Museum of Art
Theater was a hybrid art form that developed out of Greek religious festivals in the 5th century BC. The plays tell stories in highly structured ways that were refined and standardized by writers like Sophocles and Euripides. When Aristotle laid down his theory of tragedy, it was these works that he was looking at.
This vase shows a scene from the play Medea, by Euripides, from 431 BC.
Theorizing begins with individual examples, but looks for underlying principles, which brings us into the familiar world of universal values. From the Greek perspective, tragedy offered a purified account of human nature. The formal structure may not have risen to absolute rules, but was consistent enough to create an stylized order that distinguishes the from unlettered narration. The emotional power of the performance is what attracts viewers and provides the cleansing catharsis, but the logic and unity of the form is what elevates it to an artistic ideal.
Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Sappho and Alcaeus, 1881, oil on canvas, 66 x 122 cm, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore
Sappho and Alcaeus were celebrated lyric poets, meaning that they wrote personalized love poetry to be accompanied by the lyre. It's where the word lyrics comes from in music today.
There have been several cultural movements since the Renaissance called "Classical" that share emphasis on tradition in both form and content. The French theater of the 17th and 18th centuries is a great example of this, with Racine's Phèdre often seen as the crowning achievement of the movement. The subject matter of this poem is from Greek mythology and was already treated by Epicurus and the Roman Seneca - the product of an earlier literary Classicism - but Racine's version was heralded as a model of tragic perfection.
Alexandre Cabanel, Phèdre, 1880, oil on canvas, 194 x 286 cm. Musée Fabre, Montpellier
The "rules" of tragedy laid down by the Greeks were developed through practice. They were inventing the Classics. The rules followed by a Classicist come first, and the practice follows. They were looking back at already-invented Classics.
This is not to take anything away from Racine - he was an author of surprising skill and sensitivity - but why place such emphasis on millennia-old subjects and rules? The answer can be found in the legacy of the Renaissance, an idolization of ancient culture that was to become the backbone of Louis XIV's centralized cultural policy.
Jules Hardouin Mansart, Saint-Louis-des-Invalides, 1671-77, Paris
What Hardouin-Mansard was to French classicism in architecture, Racine was to literature.
Remember, the prestige of the "Arts" had been elevated by Italian Renaissance humanists, but that this needed first principles to justify the new status. For architecture and the other visual arts, this meant a blend of geometric metaphysics and classical authority. Literature is experienced differently and is less amenable to Neoplatonic proportions and visually balanced forms, so Classical authority becomes paramount.
Jean Mariette after Jean-Baptiste Corneille, The Members of the Académie française Present their Dictionary to Louis XIV, 1694, 8.7 x 16.5 cm, Collections du château de Versailles
As does centralization. Someone has to enforce the rules, and the France of Racine is also that of the Sun King. We saw in an earlier post that domination of the arts with Royal Academies was part of his political strategy, and the literary Académie française was the first of these.
The Académie française was founded by royal advisor Cardinal Richelieu, and when it judged Pierre Corneille's popular Le Cid negatively for failing to follow the classical unity of dramatic action, we see both the centralizing authority and the rigidity of the classical revivalist. The ancient Greek playwrights didn't follow the unities strictly either. But Louis' model was highly influential, and the Classical approach favored in these academies further solidified the notion of distinct, traditionally-based, theoretical arts.
Martin Ferdinand Quadal, Life Class in the Vienna Academy, 1787, oil on canvas, 144 x 207 cm, Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna
Formalized, centralized, politically controlled cultural institutions where logical absurdities are presented as absolute reality with numbing repetition? This root of globalism is pretty clear. The difference is that for all their faults, the Academies did emphasize an element of technical skill that weeded out those denizens of contemporary art schools, whose only talent seems to be being crazed. But the idea of culture as a sphere of authoritarian control under sycophantic climbers is a far deeper problem.
For example:
Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, Museum of Modern Art, opened 1939, renovated 1997 by Yoshio Taniguchi, New York
Consider the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
1944 photograph showing Paul J. Sachs (left of center) teaching “The Museum Course”
The MOMA was the brainchild of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (wife of John D Jr.) and a venue for various globalists to inject European Modernism into an unsuspecting America. This included Paul Sachs, son of the founder of Goldman Sachs and a big shot in museology and art history at Harvard.
Seriously.
The official leftist story is that John D. "hated" the idea of a modern art museum, leaving Abby and her socialite friends to soldier on against patriarchal indifference. But this is ridiculous, considering that he ultimately did back it, and his kids essentially built into what it became. Guess the arch-globalist saw the value.
Bilderberger David and his CIA connections certainly did.
The grand opening of the Rockefeller funded International style building was accompanied by a radio address from President Franklin Roosevelt.
Ask why the president would be pushing Modernism? Perhaps for the same reason the CIA was a few decades later?
Philip Johnson hangs around like a bad smell, designing the sculpture court in 1953.
Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White on White, 1918, oil on canvas, 79.4 x 79.4 cm, Museum of Modern Art
Cherry picking for sure, but this is considered one of the picks of the MOMA collection.
Alfred Barr, diagram for his "landmark" exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art, 1936.
Barr was Sach's pick for first MOMA director, and his diagram of Modern art. Every self-indulgent Modernist idiocy is raised to a legitimate category. They aren't atavists they're "movements", worthy of the "museum course".
One other thing - the fake categories also open new avenues for attacks on the West. Modernism is "racist" and "Eurocentric." Set aside the merits of the argument and think wider - the target isn't "the West". It's the dyscivic "theory" of a chosen mouthpiece.
There is no world where this is "the Western Tradition"
Barr's progeny is a who's who's of the art world elite. This is from a puff piece that is illuminating when you read it with eyes open.
So let's consider the reality of the legend of Modernism.
None of this was organic, spontaneous, or expressive of any people in any way.
When Modernism hit in the 19th century, it came in on two levels - first content, then form. Neoclassical solemnity and Romantic fantasy were both challenged by Realism, or the belief that art must reflect the contemporary world. This is an expression of Progress because fantastic, aspirational, beautiful, or wonderous subjects were "out of touch" with the marvelous new world of today. In short, industrial modernity is so epochal that no other subject is worthy of serious attention.
Gustave Courbet, Peasants from Flagey back from the Fair, 1850, oil on canvas, 208.5 x 275.5 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d'Archéologie de Besançon, France
Realist icon Courbet was a skillful painter, but applied those skills to "everyday" scenes of mundane drabness.
Jules Breton, The End of the Working Day, 1886-87, oil on canvas, 84 x 120 cm, Brooklyn Museum
The academies adapt, applying traditional techniques to mundanity and "ennobling" the toil of the common man. Think about that. The purpose of art was always to inspire and/or teach - if backbreaking labor is the subject of the the most prestigious artistic institution, what is inspired?
Realism is pitched as a reaction to Progress, but the rejection quickly metastasized. Technique soon becomes another anachronism to be purged. Manet is positioned as one of the most important painters of the 19th century for his rejection of academic polish for a rougher, more "real" technique, whatever that means.
Édouard Manet, The Plum, circa 1877, oil on canvas, 73.6 x 50.2 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington
Iconic Modernist poet Charles Baudelaire considered Manet the ideal modern painter and an embodiment of the flanneur - the voyeuristic consumer of the Modern streetscape. Manet's subject, a sad alcoholic prostitute, epitomized Modernist Realism - the alienation and superficiality of modern urban life.
The rejection of his rough technique by the Academy is herelded as a seminal moment in the emergence of Modernism. It also brings us to the false dichotomies of centralized culture: why does legitimate criticism of the creative exhaustion and silly pornography of the late Academy mean this has the be the alternative?
Can we choose none of the above?
Alexandre Cabanel, The Birth of Venus, 1863, oil on canvas, 130 cm × 225 cm, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Seminal Manet comparison.
Cabanel exemplifies Academic beauty with his technique and the erotica with a come hither gaze intended to arouse the viewer.
Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, oil on canvas, 130.5 cm ×190 cm, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Manet's scandalous picture reveals the reality of a brazen whore with a rough style intended to interrupt aesthetic pleasure.
There is a legitimate critique there, but that does not mandate that this is the Progress it's been made out to be.
Here's how it works:
Étienne Carjat, Charles Baudelaire, circa 1862, Woodburytype , British Library
William Bouguereau, Virgin and Child with Angels, 1900, oil on canvas, 185 x 285 cm, Petit Palais, Paris
John J. Enneking, Tranquility at Sunset, 1879
Jean-Léon Gérôme, Dante (He Hath Seen Hell), 1864, oil on panel, 37.8 x 55.9 cm, Private collection
John William Waterhouse, Ophelia, 1889, oil on canvas
Edmund Blair Leighton, In Time of Peril, 1897, oil on canvas, Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand
Manet's not actually a terrible painter, but individual ability is not the point. We now have an official narrative that fits the larger myth of Progress - we have a movement. The replacement of traditional art subjects and techniques with crude depictions of modern alienation and banality is an expression of the destruction of organic cultural structures after the Industrial Revolution. But the same question applies: where are you going?
There is a similar trend in the literary arts, but this plays out differently as we would expect from the differences in medium and market. 19th century European Realist authors wrote for a highly literate audience that was a product of the elevated standards of living that came with the Industrial Revolution. We have focused on the dyscivic consequences of that civilizational shift, but the dehumanizing poverty came with the first ever middle class of significance. Leisure time became a reality for a huge swath of the population, and the novel was the popular entertainment of choice.
Realism in literature is what its name suggests - narrated mundanity. Austen is typical of this myopic focus on the social minutia of the various classes of Industrial Revolution Europe.
The novel was the literary art form of the 19th century, and at its best, it delivered the masterful psychological portraits and social insights of the likes of Tolstoy, and Hugo. But the downside proved considerable.
The first problem with Realism was that it imprisoned the literary imagination in navel-gazing disenchantment. It isn't retreating into escapism to seek uplifting stories of the marvelous. Authoritarians have to crush the human spirit in order to force everyone into an demented egalitarian dystopia. One step is to destroy Christianity, since it upholds a spiritual ideal that empowers the individual and calls us to rise above the materialist superficiality of this world. Inspiring wondrous stories represent a similar obstacle.
Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson, Ossian Receiving the Ghosts of French Heroes, 1802, oil on canvas, 192 x 184 cm, Musée National du Château de Malmaison, Rueil
Emil Brack, Planning the Grand Tour, late 19th century, oil on canvas, 88 x 71 cm, Private collection
Which offers more to raise the human spirit?
The Ghost of Christmas Present, print from Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, John Leech, 1843
There is a reason why Dicken's most beloved story, A Christmas Carol, has elements of fantasy, magical realism, and fable without being formulaic. But pay attention to the absence of an overt Christian message in this canonical Christmas story. This foreshadows the globalist creation of fake cultural "myths" based on materialism and the occult.
The problem isn't realism in literature - the problem is Realism, as defined in post-Enlightenment terms, as the sole genre of "acceptable" storytelling. It is literally disenchanting.
Another problem arises from a key aspect of 19th century realism - superficial yet poignant portrayals of the plight did much to introduce "social justice" to the "polite" classes.
Frontispiece from the first edition pf Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, 1838
Of course, the underlying socio-economic causes of the problems are never raised - no substantive consideration of the disgusting upheaval of organic cultures or the dehumanizing consequences industrialization that created such perverse environments. It's just endless beating of the we need to do better as a society drum so the affluent to throw money at problems until the government gets involved.
Any wonder the "solutions" have failed miserably? Please sir, may we not have any more fake Enlightenment Utopian solutions for real Enlightenment Utopian consequences?
Honoré Daumier, The Third-Class Carriage, 1862-64, oil on canvas, 65.4 x 90.2 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Realism in painting brings the same voyeuristic display of poverty and alienation without consideration of their actual causes. The solution must be more theft and social dysfunction and spiritual hollowness.
There is an insight here into contemporary
But Realism was just a warm-up.
Now things get dumber. At the very moment that base, disenchanted, Modern materialism is dictating artistic subject matter, Modern Progress is undermining the traditional foundations that those arts are resting on. Without classics or metaphysics, it isn't just content or subject matter that is "freed. What source is there to justify any rules? To simplify:
For the arts to accept Modernist materialism, they have to keep "progressing". The very idea of an "artist" is switched, from a learned intellectual or poet who mastered tradition to the "avant-garde", the cutting edge of perpetual revolution against civilization itself. After subject matter, the modernists progressively attack representation itself as oppressive. Remember, art is autonomous. But the very existence of art as a privileged cultural space means that is needs some sort of defining principle. We're back to essences.
The media must become ends in themselves.
Ezra Pound, The Bellaires, 1914
Pound's "contribution" was to get rid of structure for solipsistic wordplay that crept towards nonsense. It isn't hard to see how this redefinition of poetry could wrong in the hands of a leftest-converged centralized culture.
If art is to exist, but cannot be based in tradition or metaphysics, the brute materiality of the media is all that's left. This is tautological because it defined the first principles of the arts on the basis of their present reality. Painting is painting because it's painting - the essence is recursive. So what IS painting? Colors on a surface. Literature? Words on a page.
Wassily Kandinski, Color Study, Squares with Concentric Circles, 1913, watercolor, gouache, crayon on paper, 23.9 x 31.6 cm, Stadtische Galerie in Lenbach, Munich
If art is what it is, there is no room for what it is not. Progress manifests as the drive to eliminate all reference - anything that undermines this perfect tautological self-containment of the arts as an autonomous cultural space worthy of the halls of high culture.
Then even these rules collapsed, when Postmodernists showed them to be self-evidently arbitrary. Really, what's stopping you from representing something if you want to.
Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962, synthetic polymer paint on thirty-two canvases, each 50.8 x 40.6 cm, MoMA, New York
That brings us to the current day, where people muddle along in the ruins of what were the arts with no sense of meaning or significance other than the institutions that were founded to study them. In a way we are back to the pre-Renaissance era where the arts are defined more through custom than anything else, but filtered through this massive, virulent, anti-Western centralized culture "industry" that determines success and greatness.
That's enough for now. We'll save the buildings, and the War, for next time. But think about the progressive destruction of structure in the arts as a metaphor for Western society.
Antoni Gaudí, Park Güell, designed 1900-14, opened 1926, Barcelona
Civilization was build by sublimating behavioral extremes within a shared set of cultural assumptions. This isn't Gaudi, or Sullivan, or the Art Nouveau looking for a new style in keeping with the times- if it was, it wouldn't be strange at all. We started this post by looking at styles and art forms as natural expression of culture. Gaudí's fantastic forms are modern in that they lack Academic order, but they are still decorated, visually interesting, and conceived with local Catalan viewers in mind.
Modernism is the opposite. It is the erasure of all expectations within the Arts other than the destruction of the social order, and when it reaches it's endpoint it self erases in Postmodernism. There are no more styles, no more identities, no rules...
No wonder the "essence" stinks like that...