Home Go West, Young Art, Go West American Painting 1865-1934 American Painters - The Older Generation The Meaning of Modernism Isms and Wasms American Art in 1900 American Modernism The Whitney Museum of American Art Modern Art's First Museum The twentieth-century principle of form in art The Beginning of American Modernism American Modern Movements Cubism in England and America Activity in Art with American Subjects Backgrounds in European Art The importance of Gauguin and Van Gogh The importance of Picasso and Braque Munch, The Bridge, Kandinsky, Moreau American Backgrounds The establishment of a professional art Contemporary appreciation tends Early Twentieth Century New Directions since 1913 Max Weber, Maurice Sterne, Abraham Walkowitz, Ben Benn Arthur Dove, Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth Dada and Despair Early 1900s American Artists The Spirit of Research and Significant Form Joseph De Martini, Louis Schanker, De Hirsh Margules Pinoeers of Abstract Art American Abstract Pinoeers American Abstract Artists Art in a Skyscraper Significant Vision The term "significant vision" The Influence of the Oriental Scroll Painters Traditionalists and Modernists American Modern Art - Fantasy American Artists More Artists The Painters Discover America The Painters of America American Modern Artists Regionalism in a Broadening View Regional American Artists Pop Art - Modern American Art Stage Design Sculpture Sculptors More Sculptors Definitions Art and Beauty Modern Painting History of Art   Abstract Art Architecture History Painting Process Picasso	Backgrounds in European Art The clue to a comprehension of all that is implied in American modernism is to be found in the conception of form, as divined by Cézanne and furthered variously by his followers and successors. Cézanne begins to appear as a focal point at which the survival values from the revolts and experiments of the preceding half century of European art were gathered up and projected towards the twentieth century and its broadened and reilluminated technical synthesis. Official art and popular taste, meantime, prolonging conventional and stereotyped practices out of the more creative centuries that had produced them, sank together to the nadir; and it is against this background that the successive pioneers of a new European tradition must be seen. Nineteenth-century artists of the greatest repute, as a brilliant historian reminds us, were of two kinds, "respectably futile conservatives and vulgar but highly successful would-be-chromophotographers"; and together they presented solid opposition to new men and new movements (and together survived conspicuously as the producers of a superficial subject art which was still a strong influence in America at the coming of the Armory Show). Compilations of nineteenth-century critical writing contain Ruskin's analysis of one of the popular English masterpieces of the sixties and seventies, Landseer The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner. Both the picture and the criticism illustrate the extent to which lifelikeness, literary fancy, and sentiment were glorified at the expense of a painting's intrinsic values in Victorian England (and in other European countries and America). Calling this one of the most perfect poems or pictures the modern world has seen, Ruskin said: "The exquisite execution of the glossy and crisp hair of the dog, the bright, sharp touching of the green bough beside it, the clear painting of the wood of the coffin and the folds of the blanket, are language--language clear and expressive in the highest degree. But the close pressure of the dog's breast against the wood, the convulsive clinging of the paw, which has dragged the blanket off the trestle, the total powerfulness of the head laid, close and motionless, upon its folds, the fixed and tearful fall of the eye in its utter hopelessness, the rigidity of repose which marks that there has been no motion nor change in the trance of agony since the last blow was struck on the coffin lid, the quietness and gloom of the chamber, the spectacles marking the place where the Bible was last closed, indicating how lonely has been the life--how unwatched the departure of him who is now laid solitary in sleep;--these are all thoughts, thoughts by which the picture is separated at once from hundreds of equal merit, as far as mere painting is concerned, by which it ranks as a work of high art, and stamps the author, not as the mere imitator of the texture of a skin or the fold of a drapery, but as the Man of Mind." Meantime, Paul Cézanne ( 1839-1906) had already begun his painful way. An episode in his historic friendship with the novelist, Zola, illustrates the difficulty of every step when a man of original genius must make his way even against the leaders of an intellectual era. When Ary Scheffer, the popular sentimental painter, had but recently died, in 1860, and Zola wanted his young friend to strive for the vacant place, he cautioned him to "get the literary matter well in hand before descending to rummage with stinking paint and coarse canvas." These methods were all right, Zola admitted, for commercial art, but "the pure diaphanous beauty, the heartrending poetry" of a Scheffer belonged to a realm of rarer values. Zola typified the intellectual criticism of his time, which did not distinguish between the absurd candy boxes Cézanne at one time decorated for a manufacturer and the now immortal green apples which have demonstrated to later generations the extent to which commonplace objects may be transubstantiated by the power of an artist's imagination and given an independent, three-dimensional plastic existence in the world of art. Cézanne began his mature work as an Impressionist, but the basic, constructional design disappeared more and more from Impressionist painting as scientific experiments with color and changing light progressed. He wanted to make Impressionism something solid, like the work of the Old Masters, and suitable for the museums; but instead he gradually arrived at a new conception, the conception which has become basic to all twentieth-century art as distinguished from the deteriorated Renaissance practice. Nature's forms are not art's forms was the slowly evolved epigram which his life's work illustrates. By a process which he called "concentric vision" he gradually learned to pierce through the superficial aspects of a scene to the "cubes, cones, and cylinders" comprising the constituent elements of the underlying, constructional form. He sought to reorder these indispensable, abstract elements in a painted construction which would appeal more vividly to the experience of the observer than would any mere transcript of surface appearances. He sought to establish a technique for transmitting his experience of a scene in its reality. Among the results are a new mode of still-life painting, a new order of portraiture, and a new conception of landscape painting. Cézanne's landscapes, notably the water-color views of Mount Sainte-Victoire and L'Éstaque, have the power to convey with minimum means the majestic simplicity of the earth's permanent contours. He adds distortion to his stylistic equipment, and by this device gives rocks, glimpsed plaster constructions, and low hills, all together, an atmosphere of monumental repose in deep space. Cézanne's form is not the sum of the shapes of the nudes and the cows or the little green apples in a painting. It is not compositional design in the old art-school sense. It is the architectonic whole of the painting or the sculpture. "As in a drama or a symphony, so here, our perception enables us to realize a unity of form lacking in objects themselves as they appear in Nature," says Adolf Hildebrand, the German sculptor and author of The Problem of Form, which first appeared in 1893. "The problems of form rising from this architectural structure, though they are not given us immediately and selfevidently by Nature, are yet the true problems of art. Material acquired by a direct study of Nature, is by the architectonic process transformed into an artistic unity." It is through architectonic development, Hildebrand adds, that painting and sculpture emerge from the sphere of naturalism into the realm of true art; and he reminds us that everywhere in the long history of art it is the architectonic structure that stands out as the paramount factor, while mere imitation of nature is a thing which has only gradually and recently developed. Cézanne arrived independently at a scientific use of color. His characteristic mature landscape consists of a few rigidly simplified and geometrized natural forms delineated in small planes of fluctuating color that interact vigorously upon each other across empty or almost empty spaces. This method of using color for its dynamic effect --based upon the fact that warm colors advance and cool colors recede--and a unique way of distorting natural forms for greater vividness are among Cézanne's outstanding technical contributions. With Van Gogh and Gauguin (and possibly Seurat, whose progress in the direction of twentieth-century Cubism was left indeterminate by his early death), Cézanne foreshadowed twentiethcentury art in all of its meaningful, creative aspects. These men with Picasso and Matisse were the pioneers of the post-Impressionism that came to America in 1913.