The tepid subject matter of 19th-century French salon artists paled before the masterworks of the 16th and 17th centuries. Heroic visions of ancient myths and biblical events were supplanted by polished renderings of everyday life in antique suburbs, or insipid images such as youthful innocence awakening to Cupid’s whisper.
The counter-culture artists of 19th century France — the Realists and Impressionists — blamed academic training for this decline, and refused its dictates. As we all know, those newer artists were hammered by critics, a persecution inseparable from how they’ve been perceived ever since. Young artists of the early twentieth century could imagine no higher ambition than such heroic martyrdom.
Before Picasso ever went to Paris, he’d belonged to a Barcelona group that promised “to translate eternal verities into wild paradox; to extract life from the abnormal, the extraordinary, the outrageous. ... We prefer to be ... crazy and decadent rather than fallen and meek.” Rebellion had become a contagion, inspiring scorn for the uninfected.
But Picasso had a problem: His blue and rose periods — the finest work he ever did — were not rebellious. His first try at outrageousness was the 1907 “Demoiselles D’Avignon,” which he showed to some friends, then put away for sixteen years. In 1908, a simplified, Cézannesque landscape by Braque may have provided the germ for the invention of Cubism, Picasso’s and Braque’s attempt to carry off the “Most Radical” prize.
It needs to be said: Cubism was a very stupid idea. Almost as stupid were the claims made for it. The Wikipedia entry summarizes the standard propaganda: “In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed.” (How, exactly? Placed on a couch to free-associate?) “Instead of depicting objects from a single viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints.” But the Cubists never represented objects from any viewpoint, let alone a “multitude”; instead, they made angular notations vaguely suggesting objects, or produced collage-like arrangements of odds and ends referring to but never depicting people or objects. Cubism flirted with reality without ever coming to grips with it, instead offering a game of subject-spotting: “Look, it’s a woman — with a guitar!” Lost were the nuances of individual character of the woman, or the guitar.
With rebel-hood pursued so intensely, traditional visual values became ducks in a shooting gallery, picked off by successive “isms.” Intellectuals formed an admiring chorus for each disruption, laying the groundwork for an eventual worldwide support system for Modernist Art, an establishment by now of such power and influence that artists catering to it are in no way rebellious, no matter how bizarre and unconventional their work. During its first fifty years, Modernism inspired some color, excitement, and original ideas, but its overall trajectory was a flame-out, a century-long trashing of artistic conventions, leaving a wasteland of artists foraging for material obnoxious enough to sustain a rebel self-image, with curators and critics encouraging further deconstruction.
Even though their artistic movement has been pretty well picked clean, and lost its power to disturb, Modernists persist in quirky, obscure attempts to satisfy notions of self-expression, newness, and confounding the “establishment.” But all artists, good or bad, have always expressed themselves — they don’t have to try. To be “new” is equally inescapable, which is why forgery is so difficult. And acceptance or rejection by the powers-that-be is irrelevant, because either can happen to good or bad artists.
Quality can never be defined, but it’s the only thing that counts. Hatred from the rich does not guarantee it; love from the rich does not invalidate it.
The purpose of rebellion has historically been to right great wrongs. Applying this term to 19th-century artists already exaggerates, because academic standards, which had produced great masters for centuries, were not “wrong”; they were just not agreeable to artists who rejected them. Calling more recent artists rebels exaggerates even more, because academies no longer forbid Modernism; they teach it. With no artistic wrongs to correct, Modernist rebellion has become a pose, a fashion statement, like ripped jeans.
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