Art

E

The 19th Century: Self-Expression

The French Academy of Fine Arts enjoyed special favors from the French government, and because of this connection it became part of the establishment (dominant institutions). During the 19th century artists in France fought against these institutions. In the early 19th century artists of the romantic movement (Romanticism), such as Eugène Delacroix, emphasized passionate expression. They often chose subjects that criticized the government, although their method of painting generally followed academic principles of composition and technique.

At mid-century Gustave Courbet and other French artists promoted their individuality: They not only chose subjects that the government might see as offensive, but also used techniques and compositions that went against academic teaching. Starting in the 1860s Édouard Manet and the painters who became known as impressionists (see Impressionism) broke away from the Academy and established alternatives to government-sponsored exhibitions and competitions. These alternatives eventually evolved into the modern commercial gallery system in which artists provide works to dealers who exhibit and sell the works to any buyer who can afford them.

The idea that artists should express their own subjective experience—what they personally feel about a theme or subject—became firmly established in the 19th century. Already in the 18th century some artists had reacted against the lack of feeling in most of the art of their time. The romantic movement continued this antiestablishment trend through its emphasis on passion, imagination, and escape from reality. Around the middle of the 19th century artists of the realist tradition (see Realism) reacted against the subjective expression of romanticism and demanded a return to depicting the actual appearance of things. This response led in the 1860s and 1870s to efforts by the impressionists to record light and color as we see them. Their interest in light and color provided a way for artists of the next generation to express what they felt—not what they saw—through even purer (unmixed), bolder colors (see Postimpressionism). The idea that art should be a form of self-expression has remained an important part of our definition of art to this day.

F

The 20th and 21st Centuries: New Media, New Art Forms

In the 20th and 21st centuries many trends have developed, including some that seek to destroy our definitions of art. Artists of the dada movement, which flourished in the early 20th century, created works and sponsored events that pointed out the absurdity of all definitions. One of the most famous dada works was exhibited in 1917 by French-born artist Marcel Duchamp: a urinal turned on its back, titled “Fountain,” and signed with a fictitious name (R. Mutt) that plays on the urinal manufacturer’s name (J. R. Mott) rather than Duchamp’s own name. Pop artists revived the dada spirit during the 1960s, with Jasper Johns’s painted flags and Andy Warhol’s painted soup can labels.

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Contemporary artists, aware of earlier traditions, can choose to work in traditional media (including painting, sculpture, printmaking, and now photography), combine media (collage and assemblage), or avoid the traditional categories entirely. For example, some artists create so-called environments that we can walk around or through. Others, such as Bulgarian-born Christo and American Robert Smithson, have rearranged the natural landscape in ways that cannot really be called architecture, landscape architecture, or sculpture. Art critics have coined the terms land art and earthworks for such endeavors. Still other artists have focused attention on the monetary value we give to what we call art, by creating works that cannot be sold, as some conceptual artists did in the last decades of the 20th century (see Conceptual Art). Artists today can ignore the line that the academies drew to separate fine art from craft, or they can affirm essential differences between one art form and another according to their beliefs.

IV

Art in Non-Western Societies

The definitions and developments in the Historical Views of Art section of this article apply to the Western tradition—the visual arts of western Europe and the Americas after European settlement. Yet every human culture has its own tradition of art, as rich and complex as the Western tradition. At many times in the past, non-Western art has influenced European artists, and at times this influence has changed the course of Western art. Pablo Picasso’s fascination with African sculpture in the early 20th century, for example, contributed to a simplification of form in 20th-century art. Only since the 1970s, however, have textbooks presented non-Western traditions to beginning art history students while mainstream museum exhibitions have exposed the general public to these works.

A

Other Purposes

While the study of world art can broaden our way of thinking about art in general, it can also present difficulties to those trained in the Western tradition. First, Westerners tend to impose Western categories and Western values on the art of other cultures. African masks, for example, have been admired for at least a century by Western collectors, who see them as forms of sculpture to be hung on walls and admired for their powerful abstract qualities. But in an African society, masks are only one part of a ritual dance, which involves elaborately costumed performers who take on specific roles that dramatize important social interactions. For these societies the mask has value and symbolic meaning only while it is used in the dance. The mask has no special distinction as a sculpture, while the ritual dance does not distinguish between the visual arts, dance, music, and theater within it.

B

Other Values

Even when the art of a non-Western culture seems quite similar to Western art, aspects of it may be valued quite differently. For example, during the Northern Song period in China (960-1126), respected artists with individual styles made brush paintings of landscapes and other subjects comparable to those found in Western art. Western viewers might note differences in brushwork or in the illusion of three-dimensional space in the Chinese works but would tend to overlook other differences that have no counterpart in the Western tradition. Yet in Chinese art, individual strokes of ink themselves conveyed meaning and were not simply a way to represent the subject, as in Western art.

Artists in China were carefully trained to form a variety of strokes, a skill very close to the art of calligraphy. This skill points to another fundamental difference between Chinese art and Western art: Chinese writings about art set calligraphy above all other art forms, rather than painting (as Westerners think of it), sculpture, and architecture. Chinese artists even thought of the inkstone on which they prepared their inks as an art object in itself, whereas Western painters give little thought to how their tubes of paint or palettes look.

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