People use the term “modern” in a variety of ways, often very loosely, with a lot of implied associations relating to the new, contemporary, up-to-date, and technological. In 19th-century Europe, however, modernity and its connection with art had certain specific associations that people began recognizing and using as barometers to distinguish themselves and their culture from earlier moments in history.
Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882, oil on canvas, 96 x 130 cm (Courtauld Gallery, London; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Chronologically, the modern era is often defined as the period from roughly 1848 to 1960. In Europe and North America, it can be said to begin with the Realist movement and end with Abstract Expressionism (though some scholars date the modern era back to the late 18th century). That’s just a little over 100 years. During that period, Europe experienced significant changes that transformed it from an agriculturally-based society into a modern one with cities and factories and mass transportation.
Here are some important features that characterize 19th-century Europe.
Capitalism
In the 19th century, wealth produced by mass-manufacturing and the exchange of goods (capitalism) competed with aristocratic wealth based on large land holdings. Capitalism became the economic system of the modern era in which people exchanged their labor for a fixed wage. This economic change dramatically affected class relations because it offered opportunities for the accumulation of great wealth through individual initiative, industrialization, and technology (somewhat like the technological and dot.com explosion of the late 20th and early 21st centuries). The Industrial Revolution, which began in England in the late 18th century and rapidly swept across Europe, radically transformed economic and social relationships, putting many artisans out of work, and offered an ever-increasing number of cheap consumer goods. These consumer goods were largely produced by factory workers (including children) at a time when there were few protections for workers. The Industrial Revolution also fostered a sense of competition and a sense of progress (some real, some illusory) that continues to influence us today.
Claude Monet, Le Boulevard des Capucines, 1873–74, oil on canvas, 80.3 x 60.3 cm (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City)
Urban culture
Urban culture replaced agrarian culture as industrialization and cities grew. Cities were the sites of new wealth and opportunity with their factories and manufacturing potential. People moving from small farm towns to large cities helped to breakdown traditional culture and values. There were also new complications such as growing urban crime, sex work, alienation, and depersonalization.
In a small town you probably knew the cobbler who made your shoes, and such a personal relationship often expanded into everyday economics—you might be able to barter food or labor for a new pair of shoes or delay payments. These kinds of accommodations that formed a substructure to agrarian life were swept away with urbanization. City dwellers bought shoes that were manufactured to standardized sizes, transported by railroads, displayed in shop windows, and purchased for cash. Assembly lines, anonymous labor, and advertising created more consumer items but also a growing sense of depersonalization. The gap between the “haves” and the “have nots” was more visible in the city, in England, an often used phrase referred to these groups as “the two nations.”
“The omnibus—a horse-drawn carriage that picked up and deposited people along an established route—was introduced into London on 4 July 1829 and quickly became a popular mode of transport” (Tate, London). William Maw Egley, Omnibus Life in London, 1859, oil on canvas, 44.8 x 41.9 cm (Tate, London)
Technology
Technological advances such as steam-powered factories, railroads, gas lighting, streetcars as well as the availability of indoor plumbing, kitchen appliances, and scientific advances dramatically affected the way people lived and thought about themselves. One consequence was that some people in industrialized areas thought of themselves as advanced and modern and considered others as comparatively primitive and backward.
Secularism and politics
Modernity is characterized by increasing secularism and diminished religious authority. People did not abandon religion but they paid less attention to it. Organized religions were increasingly less able to dictate standards, values, and subject matter. Art moved from representing human experience and its relationship to God’s creation, to a focus on personal emotions and individual spiritual experiences that were not based in any organized and institutionalized religion. In the same way, political power once held by a hereditary aristocratic elite, slowly broadened to enfranchise the wider populace. In both these ways, the concentration of authority was lessened as the Church and royal families ceded power to the people.
Robert Delaunay, Hommage à Blériot, 1914, glue tempera on canvas, 250 x 251 cm (Kunstmuseum Basel)
Optimism
Many people saw these changes as positive, and many did not. Some welcomed innovation and championed progress. Change became a signifier of modernity. Anything that was traditional and static signaled outmoded, old-fashioned, conservative and was to be avoided by the new modern public. Much of Europe internalized these positions and used modernity as a way of determining and validating feelings of superiority. The 19th century was also a period of tremendous, often violent, colonial growth and expansion. Many people recognized and sought to ameliorate the impact on the working class by supporting legislation that limited the hours of the working day, the age of workers, and extension of the franchise, among other things. It’s important to remember that universal suffrage in most countries in Europe was not achieved until the early 20th century.
Many artists closely identified with modernity and embraced the new techniques and innovations, the spirit of progress, invention, discovery, creativity, and change. They wanted to participate in creating the modern world and they were anxious to try out new ideas rather than following the more conservative guidelines of Academic art. This is not to say that these mid-19th-century artists were the first to challenge an older generation or set of ideas. Many academic artists had argued over formal issues, styles, and subject matter, but this was much like a good natured agreement within a club; everyone in the group agreed to disagree.
Ford Madox Brown, Work, 1852–65, oil on canvas, 137 x 198 cm (Manchester Art Gallery; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Many artists were also sympathetic to the plight of the working classes, who seemed to those in power to be increasingly dangerous. Revolutions in 1789, 1830, and 1848 in France, and the Chartist movement in England are just two examples of the form that resistance to the changes of modernity took. It was in 1848 that Karl Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto, “Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.” [1]
Honoré Daumier, Le Bourgeois au Salon (The Bourgeois at the Salon), 1842, hand-colored lithograph, 20.3 x 17.8 cm (La Salle University Art Museum, Philadelphia)
A middle-class audience
By the mid-1850s, polite academic disagreements moved from the Academy and onto the street. Artists were looking increasingly to the private sector for patronage, tapping into that growing group of bourgeois or middle-class collectors with money to spend and houses to fill with paintings. This new middle-class audience that made its money through industrialization and manufacturing had significant disposable income, and they wanted pictures that they could understand, that were easy to look at, fit into their homes, and addressed subjects they liked. The historical cycles of gods, saints, and heroes—with their complex intellectual associations and references—was not for them; instead, they wanted landscapes, genre scenes, and still lifes. They were not less educated than earlier buyers, but educated with a different focus and set of priorities. Reality was here and now, progress was inevitable, and the new hero of modern life was the modern man.
Modernity is then a composite of contexts: a time, a space, and an attitude. What makes a place or an object “modern” depends on these conditions.
The avant-garde
Throughout the 19th century there were artists who produced pictures that we do not label “modern art” generally because the techniques or subjects were associated with the conservative academic styles, techniques, and approaches (that often look back to ancient Greece and Rome). On the other hand, modern artists were often called the “avant-garde.” This was originally a military term that described the point man (the first soldier out)—the one to take the most risk. The French socialist Henri de Saint-Simon first used the term in the early 1820s to describe an artist whose work would serve the needs of the people, of a socialist society rather than the ruling classes.
Kazimir Malevich “viewed the Russian Revolution as having paved the way for a new society in which materialism would eventually lead to spiritual freedom.” (The Museum of Modern Art, New York) Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White on White, 1918, oil on canvas, 79.4 x 79.4 cm (The Museum of Modern Art, New York; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The avant-garde is also used to identify artists whose painting subjects and techniques were radical, marking them off from the more traditional or academic styles, but not with any particular political ideology in mind. Avant-garde became a kind of generic term for a number of art movements centered on the idea of artistic autonomy and independence. In some cases the avant-garde was closely associated with political activism, especially socialist or communist movements; in other cases, the avant-garde was pointedly removed from politics and focused primarily on aesthetics. The avant-garde was never a cohesive group of artists and what was avant-garde in one nation was not necessarily the same in others.
