Modern Frustrations
Tutto brutto
I have two big problems with modern art. The first is that I have no idea what it actually is.
Part of this is surely linked to the name itself – or, more generally, the problem with naming genres. It might have been fairly straightforward to appreciate what “modern art” was in 1929 (doubtful, in fact, but remotely plausible) when New York’s Museum of Modern Art was launched with the explicit intent to create “the greatest museum of modern art in the world by helping people understand and enjoy the visual arts of our time”,1 but it’s awfully hard to objectively conclude that the visual arts of the 1920s are reflections of our own modern world a century later.
Trivially, tautologically, and seemingly ever faster, time marches on; and there’s a natural limit to the number of posts you can successively preface any given adjective with (post-modern, post-post-modern) before things begin to look downright silly and you lose all descriptive power whatsoever.
Recognizing this, the art world has largely switched to the tag “modern and contemporary art” to categorize works created since (more or less) the dawn of the 20th century, thereby somehow encompassing Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, Dada, Bauhaus, Fluxus, Pop Art, Installation Art, Performance Art, Video Art and hundreds of other labels and movements under one enormous, increasingly opaque tent.
Some go even further back. Wikipedia’s page on Modern art, for example, defines “the modern period” as being from the 1860s to the 1970s (with everything since dubbed “contemporary” or “Postmodern”), originating with Manet’s 1863 Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, while mentioning Francisco Goya (1746–1828) as “considered by many as the Father of Modern Painting without being a Modernist himself” – which strikes me as roughly equivalent, and just as unhelpful, as regarding Aristotle as the Father of the Industrial Revolution.
Well, you might say, Wikipedia should hardly be the arbiter of such a subtle topic. Maybe not. But where better to turn to? As it happens, that same Wikipedia page leads off with declaring that modern art “is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of experimentation”, justifying the claim with an explicit reference to Ernst Gombrich’s now canonical The Story of Art.2
But what can such a heavy-handed phrase actually mean? After all, didn’t a “spirit of experimentation” also permeate the works of Giotto, or his 14th-century Sienese contemporaries, or Massaccio’s pioneering frescoes, or Paolo Uccello’s fixation with linear perspective, or Parmigianino’s mannerism or Caravaggio’s naturalism or Velázquez’s realism or Delacroix’s orientalism or Renoir’s impressionism, or pretty well everything notable ever done in the entire history of art (along with a huge number of not so notable things)?
Well, definitions are notoriously problematic. But my biggest problem with the vast majority of such modern/contemporary artworks is simply their profound indifference – and often downright hostility – to beauty. It’s hard to avoid concluding that, for the better part of the last 100 years or so, artists haven’t felt the slightest obligation or desire to produce something beautiful.3
Beauty, however problematic it is to adequately define in its own right, is clearly no longer part and parcel of the artistic experience. These days we turn to art to shock, to provoke, to make political statements, to depict our seemingly limitless capacity for avarice, cruelty, superficiality and hypocrisy. But beauty? The art world has decidedly moved past such a quaint, old-fashioned, pre-modern notion – a development that surely would have driven one of the greatest American painters in history absolutely crazy.
James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) was not only a remarkably innovative and wide-ranging artist across many different styles and media, he was also an eloquent theorist, emphatically announcing his unique aesthetic philosophy in his famous Ten O’ Clock Lecture of February, 1885.
For Whistler – an artist whose works spanned a wide range of genres, from a Courbet-inspired realism to Anglo-Japanese interior design to his compellingly meditative nocturnes – art was not a vehicle for social justice, or moral elevation or personal development. The goal of art, all art, was simply to create beauty.
Whistler scholar Linda Merrill has recently written a wonderfully detailed book rigorously analyzing the Ten O’ Clock Lecture and placing it in its full sociohistorical context,4 and I had the great pleasure of chatting with her about it on our Exploring Art History podcast.
Linda, professor of art history at Emory University, admitted that for years she’d avoided a detailed plunge into Whistler’s Ten O’ Clock, which had long struck her as over-written, before recognizing its potential for illuminating fundamental aspects of the unique cultural world of late Victorian England.
Which is a completely reasonable reaction for a specialist in 19th-century Anglo-American art and literature like Linda. But I was transfixed by something else: to what extent might Whistler have been right in his diagnosis? Maybe there was a link between his finely crafted message and the wholesale upending of the prevailing aesthetic landscape that would shortly follow.
“What do you think Whistler would say,” I asked her, “if he came back and looked at the world of art today?”
“He would say, ‘Nobody cares about beauty’”, she responded immediately, “That’s just no longer the most important thing in art.”
Exactly.
As I write these words, a comprehensive Whistler exhibition is being held in London, his home for over 40 years. It’s at the Tate Britain – not, it goes without saying, the Tate Modern, a place he surely would have avoided like the plague.
Shame, that.
Howard Burton
Below you can watch Mr Whistler’s Beautiful World: A conversation with Linda Merrill. As always the video is illustrated with many visuals to illuminate the artworks under discussion. You can also watch the conversation on our Exploring Art History Spotify channel HERE.
Chapter 27 on “Experimental Art: The first half of the twentieth century”.
Modern architecture, significantly (and happily), seems a decided exception to this general rule – a topic for another day, I suspect.
The Performance of Art: Whistler, Wilde, & the “Ten O Clock” Lecture, Paul Holberton Publishing, 2026.
It seems that some modern artists aim to "pose questions to the viewers" or "evoke strong emotional reactions" e.g. shock, rather than create beauty. Sometimes I like it, sometimes not so much, but to each their own I suppose.