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Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism (1850-1900)

From 1850-1890, Realism began to surge again. In reaction to Classicism's stress on ideal nature and Romanticism's pure idealism, Realism turned its back on the subjective fantasies of previous efforts, desiring to portray things exactly as they appeared. For this they drew on the power of the old Dutch masters. Realism saw objective reality as a valid theme in itself, even as Rembrandt had opposed the nominalism of the Middle Ages. It held that reality must be portrayed without embellishments and superficial emotions. Like the Dutch painters, Realism tried to portray contemporary life and humble social classes. These ideas can be seen in the painting titled The Penitent Magdalen by Caravaggio (Figure 37), for without this very title it would hardly be recognizable as a depiction of Mary Magdalen. This is certainly not the Mary Magdalen who is dressed in the pious garb of Byzantine art, but a humble, ordinary woman in the clothing of the day.

Although there were realistic paintings that followed the vision of the Dutch masters, there was another "realism" that these artists wanted to portray. Gone was the Renaissance vision of life. Man was no longer in control of his destiny. Gone was the Enlightenment idea that man lived in the best of all possible worlds. Gone was Romanticism's effort to escape to the glories of the past. With the disappointments left over from all the previous movements, life in the nineteenth century understood mankind as going through great hardships, and even the beginnings of despair. He could not romanticize with his emotions, or dream of eras long gone. He had to face life squarely. That he did, and he portrayed this struggle in his paintings. Thus the brutal truth was revealed. We see much of this in the early paintings of Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890). Figure 38, titled On the Threshold of Eternity, shows a despondent man holding his head in his hands. Van Gogh's figures are almost always ugly and somewhat distorted, for it was his task to show the banal side of life. The Potato Eaters also shows this very well (Figure 39). These pessimistic feelings were prompted by many things, particularly the ideas of Karl Marx and Charles Darwin, who held that life was little more than a mechanized struggle where only the strongest specimens survive. Thus, in the early painting by Paul Gauguin (1846-1903), titled Harvesting in Brittany (Figure 40), we see people struggling to make a living, two of them women who cannot afford the privilege of staying with their children.

But in reality, it was more than just a struggle to survive. Both Van Gogh and Gauguin had a much deeper and darker side to them. They, like da Vinci before them, were on a desperate search to depict the "universal" in their artwork - something to bring them back to reality, something more than struggling with the mundane. To Van Gogh, artists would become the bearers of a new religion in which sensitive and intuitive people like himself, and Gauguin, would open the doors. He opened an artistic community in Arles where he lived. Gauguin joined him. But soon the two began to quarrel violently. Shortly thereafter Van Gogh committed suicide. Gauguin attempted suicide, but was not successful. Before his attempt, he created the now famous Expressionist painting: Whence? What? Whither? (or, Whence we come? What are we? Whither go we?") (See Figure 41). Gauguin, in line with Van Gogh's desire, wanted to be the purveyor of a new religion. He comments: "I have finished a philosophical work on this theme, comparable to the gospel." The painting displays a Tahitian woman in the middle dividing the left and right sides of the scene. On the right is the beautiful symbolism in much of Gauguin's Tahitian art, but on the left is the despondent old woman next to a large bird, a symbol of his utter despair.

Prior to this dark turn in art, the Impressionists such as Pierre Auguste Renoir tried to hold off the onslaught. The Enlightenment made reality an unknown. Man could only discover its features by using his senses, while with his intellect he would try to categorize his sensations. After the philosopher Immanuael Kant virtually trapped man within his own mind, David Hume had added to the frustration by questioning all previous assumptions man had used to guide his life. For the artist the question became whether he should paint what he actually saw, or merely record the light sensations that reached the retina of his eye. The Impressionists chose the latter.

Renoir, for example, painted in a "hasty" style so as to mimic the blink of a camera's eye, and thus there is only an "impression" given in the painting. The eye of the observer was required to fill in anything that was missing. This can be seen in Renoir's painting Moss Roses (See Figure 42). Renoir tried to capture that "accidental" dimension, thereby showing that life was not the ordered one of the Renaissance, but one governed by chance and uncertainty. This idea can be seen in Renoir's Moulin de la Galette in which the edge of the canvas cuts abruptly across the characters of the painting, showing that life cannot be categorized in pre-ordained segments (See Figure 43).

Nothing was certain - not even the presentation of art. This idea was later developed by Claude Monet. He burst through the limitations Renoir had imposed. Whereas Renoir tried to hold on to reality, Monet claimed that no one knew the reality behind the sensation. In fact, there is no reality, only sensations. Thus light and air became the real essence of his paintings, regardless of the subject matter. This can be seen in Monet's Parliament (Figure 44). It can also be seen in Alfred Sisley's Detail from Landscape (Figure 45), as well as the Post-Impressionist work of Georges Seurat in Le Crotoy (Figure 46). Many of these artists tried to convey the idea of change and impermanence, using the shifting shades of sunlight to symbolize the shifting ideas and fortunes of life. Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), although known for trying to regain a little more reality in painting, was famous for showing these shifting patterns of light by putting the same objects in different positions in the same painting (Figure 47). In addition to the philosophical problems, industrialized society crowded in on mankind. Along with the pressures of a fast-changing world, this produced feelings of anxiety and hopelessness. The famous Scream painting of Edvard Munch best depicts this (Figure 48).

The Modern Period: Cubism and Beyond (1900-Present)

Although the art of Realism was appealing to the populace, by this time, the crisis caused by the Enlightenment had reached its peak. By the 1900's, philosophy had turned the world upside down. In successive philosophies, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) had taken objective reality away from man; Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) relativized truth into a synthesis of competing ideas; and Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) told man to escape by the existential experience, which ultimately suggested suicide. Artists such as Van Gogh, Gauguin, Dali, Picasso and a host of many others, followed the pessimistic existentialism of the French and German philosophers. Art became a series of physical distortions portraying human despair. This can readily be seen in Van Gogh's Portrait of a Peasant (Figure 49), or his many self-portraits (Figure 50), or his many landscapes (See Figure 51).

Still, with its unique form and novelty, modern art gripped the world stage, but at the same time, both artist and viewer were drawn into the vortex of hopelessness dripping from its paintings and sculptures. Everything da Vinci worked so hard to attain in seeking an answer to the deepest philosophical problems of man had been utterly rejected by Modern Art.

That this movement is a direct answer to the work of da Vinci and the Renaissance can be seen in the painting by Salvador Dali in which he places himself as the Mona Lisa, complete with handle-bar mustache, bulging eyes and masculine-looking hands (See Figure 52). Dali was making a statement that da Vinci had failed. The result of this failure was that man was caught without an answer to life. By putting himself in place of Mona Lisa, Dali exudes the very meaning of the term existentialism, that is, "I exist for myself," and this is characteristic of the whole period of Modern Art.

Dali was part of the surrealist group of painters going by the name "dada." These artists rejected any absolutes, but soon found themselves in that strange world between determinism and chance. The word "dada" was chosen specifically to portray the idea of chance. During a meeting at the Café Voltaire in Zurich, a group of these artists thumbed through a French dictionary and let one of their group randomly chose a word. His finger rested on "dada" (which, for what its worth, means "rocking horse" in French) and so the movement was born.

Although he was an ardent surrealists in his early years, Dali, like many of the modern artists, was unable to live in the world he created for himself. To escape, he became somewhat of a mystical painter. The beginnings of this occurred when he painted a portrait of his wife, Galarina, in 1945, which he called "my basket of bread." Previous to this, Dali gained famed for his 1926 work Basket of Bread (Figure 53), which was an oil painting of actual bread. But now there is meaning to his life because of his love for Galarina. In his own words he describes his transition: "Today, now that Gala has risen in the heraldic hierarchy of my nobility, she has become my basket of bread" (See Figure 54). Dali went so far as to describe his wife's arms and chest as parts of a loaf of bread.(Sc)

One of the most provocative artists of this period was Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), particularly in his development of Cubism - a highly abstract form of art combining Gauguin's noble savage image, Cezanne's geometric forms, and the faces of African masks. Although in Picasso's early years he was not ashamed to display his Catholic upbringing (as can be seen in the 1895 painting, First Communion in Figure 55), soon thereafter, perhaps by some tragic experiences in his life, he accelerated the pessimism begun by earlier existentialist philosophers, imposing severe and grotesque distortions in his paintings. This was his way of saying that not only did da Vinci fail, but he plunged mankind into the abyss, never to return again. Mankind became a pariah, trapped in a world in which there was no escape, except death - the so-called "final and authenticating experience" of existentialism.

Picasso depicted this decrepit state of mankind in his many paintings of nudes in distorted figures. At times, he portrayed humankind as so insignificant that the viewer couldn't tell the human figure apart from inanimate objects. All was one mass of confusion. From another prespective, it could be said that in his attempt to create the universal concept, Picasso's art became so abstract that he simply was not able to communicate with his viewer any longer.

This was no better portrayed than in his 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, (Young Ladies of Avignon, Figure 56). As he showed his eight-foot-square canvas to a group of painters and art critics at his studio, Picasso met with shock and outrage. The artist Matisse was enraged and considered it a hoax. The artist Derain stated: "One day we shall find Pablo has hanged himself behind his great canvas." The art critic Salmon wrote: "It was the ugliness of the faces that froze with horror the half-converted." Apparently, Picasso had the same sentiments, since stated that it was "my first exorcism painting...if we give spirits a form, we become independent."

Perhaps along the same lines of thinking, in a sharp contrast to the beautiful 1895 First Communion painting, years later Picasso took a giant swipe at Christianity with his grotesquely distorted and satirical painting titled Crucifixion, in which a blend of human body parts and modern imagery is superimposed on the crucifixion scene of Christ (See Figure 57).

One of Picasso's favorite objects of derision is the human female. This is seen, for example, in the painting A Woman Seated from 1908 (See Figure 58). One cannot tell where the woman ends and the chair begins. The woman, a nude, is severely distorted, undefined, ugly, and in despair, as she holds her malformed face in her handless arms. This grotesque distortion and despair continued in Picasso's painting, resulting in his 1935 work Nude in an Armchair. This time, however, it is hardly recognizable as a human figure, while the chair itself is more defined (See Figure 59). The same attempts were made by other artists, as noted in Marcel Duchamp's (1887-1968) painting titled The Bride (See Figure 60). This is not the typical bride, of course, but a conglomeration of mechanized parts haphazardly put together.

Although women became Picasso's symbolic message of existential despair, similar to the experience of Salvador Dali, there was also a tension, almost a revulsion, in Picasso's mind over the art he was producing. Picasso showed that, as much as he wanted to react against mankind's plunge into hopelessness, there was still a part of him that could not let go. This tension is seen in his painting titled Nude: I Love Eva (See Figure 61). On the one hand, Picasso shows no break from the severely distorted female figures of his past works; on the other hand, he admits he cannot live in the world he created for himself, and thus writes across his painting, almost in spite of it all, "J'aime Eva" ("I Love Eva"). Prior to the above painting, two works with Eva's name written on them were exhibited in the "Picasso and Man Exhibition" at the Toronto Art Gallery in 1964.

These incidents show that no matter how distorted Picasso made his paintings, the better half of him could not live in the absurd and hopeless world his other half depicted. He could not hide his strong passions and search for meaning in life, yet he understood that, according to his existential philosophy, these passions have no basis in reality, and there should be no love of Eva. In existentialist philosophy, loving Eva is no different than hating Eva, since it is all one grand self-authenticating experience.

Such contrasts can also be seen in Picasso's painting of his first wife, Olga, in 1917 (See Figure 62). Continuing the same "armchair" theme he depicted in so many of his paintings, Picasso has Olga seated very stately. The armchair is attractive and defined and she is beautiful, serene, composed and in control of her world. Whenever Picasso had a choice between absurdity and hope, he often gave signs that he could not resist the latter.

Picasso led the way for even more bizarre paintings and sculptures. Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) took Picasso's vision to the next level. Mondrian tried to react against the confusion of life by returning everything to simplicity, but it was a grotesque simplicity, for there was nothing left of the former days. One example of this is seen in his painting titled Broadway Boogie Woogie (See Figure 63), or the painting by Kenneth Noland titled April Tune (See Figure 64). As one can see, although these works are certainly simple, neither of them can be identified as that which is described by the title. Although we could list many more works of modern art, it would be redundant. For them, everything has been destroyed.

So it is with art. Each picture tells a story, but a story much deeper than what most people who travel through the world's art museums usually grasp. The same story can be seen in architecture, music, movies, books, and just about any medium of popular interest that man uses to express his ideas. The men and women who create them are making a comment about mankind, not merely entertaining us with interesting images. Unfortunately, we can see from the images and meaning of modern art that modern society has indeed lost its way, and it may never get it back.

Robert Sungenis
Catholic Apologetics International
January 2004

Note: This essay is copyrighted. Reproduction, by any means, is strictly prohibited without written consent from the author.

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