A word for feeling

A mocking review

On Wednesday, 15 April 1874, a show opened at 35 boulevard des Capucines in Paris, in rooms that had been the photographer Nadar’s studio. About thirty artists had hung about 165 works, and a ticket cost one franc. Roughly 3,500 people came in a month, a trickle beside the state’s yearly Salon.

The exhibitors were shareholders, not yet a school. In December 1873 Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Degas, Morisot, Cézanne, and others had formed a cooperative company, the Société anonyme coopérative des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, etc., to show and sell without the Salon’s jury. Nothing yet barred them from the Salon: Giuseppe De Nittis showed at both that spring, and only from 1877 did Degas press for a rule against showing in both. The company, in debt after the show, was wound up within months.

On 25 April the satirical paper Le Charivari printed “The Exhibition of the Impressionists,” a comic dialogue in which the critic Louis Leroy tours the show with an invented academic landscape painter. One target was a harbor scene by Claude Monet called Impression, Sunrise. Monet recalled years later that the catalog needed a title and that he said to put “Impression,” since the picture could not pass for a view of Le Havre. In the review the made-up painter reads the title and reasons that since he is impressed, there must be some impression in it; wallpaper in its first draft, he adds, is more finished than that seascape. “Impressionists” was meant as an insult. Four days later a friendly critic, Jules Castagnary, used the word as praise in Le Siècle: these painters, he wrote, render not the landscape but the sensation it produces.

The painters kept the name. In the reading this course follows, 1874 is where a different kind of art begins: art no longer mainly trying to make something beautiful, and trying instead to break out of the great tradition. That is an interpretation, and we will test it. First, the word at the top of the story, which is also about sensation: aesthetics.

A word that means perception

In Chinese the field is 美学 (měixué), “the study of the beautiful.” The word came from Japan. Translators there tried others, such as 佳趣論 and 審美学, but 美学 took hold through Nakae Chōmin (中江兆民, 1847–1901), who translated Eugène Véron’s French book L’Esthétique as 維氏美学, “Véron’s study of the beautiful” (two volumes, November 1883 and March 1884). From Japan it passed into Chinese.

The Greek word behind “aesthetics” says something else. Aisthēsis means perception, what comes in through the senses. Greek thinkers set things perceived (aisthēta) against things grasped by thought (noēta). A popular version says the Greeks opposed “logos,” reason or mathematics, to feeling; the contrast the field’s founder drew on was between the perceived and the thought. In 1735, in a thesis on poetry at Halle, the young German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762) proposed a science of the first kind and named it aesthetica. In 1750 he defined it as the science of sensory knowing, whose aim, he wrote, is beauty. Even Kant and Hegel grumbled about the name.

So the complaint that 美学 mistranslates “aesthetics” is an opinion, fair but incomplete; the historian Michael Marra reads the Japanese terms as adaptation, not blunder. The Chinese and Japanese word says beauty and the Greek says perception, yet Baumgarten himself tied the two together. What the root keeps is the idea that feeling, in the old sense of sensing, is a way of knowing, not noise to clear away before thinking begins. (Course 10, Thinking, fast and slow, looks at felt, fast judgment in daily life.)

Fine art, kept in a museum

In the mid-eighteenth century, European writers began to treat a handful of arts as one family. Charles Batteux named it in Les beaux arts réduits à un même principe (1746): music, poetry, painting, sculpture, and dance were the fine arts, all imitating beautiful nature, while architecture and eloquence, useful as well as pleasing, formed a mixed class. Paul Oskar Kristeller argued in “The Modern System of the Arts” (1951–52) that this grouping was new then, and Larry Shiner’s The Invention of Art (2001) built on that case. People had made art for tens of thousands of years; what was new was one word and one shelf for it.

Popular accounts, including the reading this course follows, say these arts were made “only to be enjoyed.” That simplifies: Batteux’s one principle was the imitation of nature, and what was new was the category, not the enjoying. A separate kingdom called “art” was a European habit, not a human universal.

A family of arts needed a home. The Louvre, a royal palace, opened as a public museum on 10 August 1793, the first anniversary of the monarchy’s fall. Its treasures grew to include Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, begun about 1503 (the Louvre’s catalog says 1503 to 1519), and the Venus de Milo, a Hellenistic statue of the goddess Aphrodite (about 150 to 125 BCE), found on the island of Milos in 1820; the Louvre names no sculptor. That is the great tradition the story needs: skill, likeness, and harmony, kept safe in a museum for everyone.

Breaking away from the Salon

In 1874 a French painter’s career ran through the Salon, judged by a jury from the Académie des Beaux-Arts. In 1863 the jury turned away more than 2,000 of some 5,000 works. Napoleon III allowed a second show for the rejected, the Salon des Refusés, where Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass and Whistler’s Symphony in White, No. 1 hung. The company of 1873 skipped the jury altogether.

Popular accounts say the group called itself an “independent artists’ salon.” For 1874 that is not right. The word Indépendants came later: some of the group used it for their fourth show, in 1879, because Degas wished to avoid “impressionist,” and a true no-jury Salon des Indépendants was founded in 1884 by Seurat, Signac, and others. The group held eight shows in twelve years (the last in 1886), and by 1877 it was using the insult itself.

What replaced the Salon’s polished finish was the look of a passing moment, with brushstrokes left visible, which critics called unfinished. A familiar story says these painters locked the great tradition in a museum and walked out. The record is mixed. Degas registered as a copyist at the Louvre in 1853, and Cézanne copied there too, reportedly wanting to make Impressionism as solid and lasting as the art in museums. The loud attack came elsewhere: the Italian Futurists’ manifesto in Le Figaro on 20 February 1909 called museums “cemeteries” and promised to destroy them.

Modern, contemporary, and the museums

Two awkward words come next. In English, “modern art” usually means art from about the 1860s to about the 1970s and “contemporary art” what followed. Popular accounts, including the reading this course follows, call the two interchangeable. In speech they often are; in museums they are not. Tate notes that the Institute of Contemporary Art in London counts from 1947 and the New Museum in New York from 1977.

Paris keeps three chapters of the story under three roofs. The Louvre’s collection stops, in theory, at 1848, though the line leaks: Daumier, Millet, and Courbet, all born before 1820, hang across the river. The Musée d’Orsay, opened in December 1986 in a former railway station, holds French art from 1848 to 1914, the Impressionists included. The Centre Pompidou opened on 31 January 1977. It is often called the “national center of contemporary art,” but its full name is the Centre national d’art et de culture Georges-Pompidou. The museum inside it, the Musée national d’art moderne, collects from 1905 on and splits at 1960: “modern” before, “contemporary” after. (It has been closed for renovation since September 2025; reopening is expected around 2030.) In New York the Museum of Modern Art opened on 7 November 1929, nine days after the Wall Street crash, with Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Seurat.

Why did the break come where it did? This course’s answer is a bold thesis: the nations that modernized first were first to break with their own traditions, and that is why they led the world. It is an interpretation, not established history, and the critics below object. In China, on this reading, contemporary art begins with the reform era. On 27 September 1979 about two dozen artists of the 星星画会 (the Stars) hung well over a hundred works on the railings outside the National Art Gallery in Beijing. Police removed them on 29 September, and on 1 October, the People’s Republic’s thirtieth anniversary, the artists marched for political democracy and artistic freedom. “Only from 1979” is too neat, though. Shanghai had an art academy by 1912, co-founded by sixteen-year-old 刘海粟 (Liu Haisu), and the modernist Storm Society (决澜社) formed in 1931. What 1979 marks is a restart. The April Photography Society showed from 1 April, the No Name group (无名画会) in a Beijing park from 7 July, and in September the Stars took their work to the street.

A window, and the job it did

For centuries one of painting’s central jobs was to make a flat surface look like the world. In De pictura (“On Painting,” Latin, 1435) Leon Battista Alberti says to begin by drawing a rectangle on the surface, as large as you like, and treating it as an open window through which the subject is seen. Popular accounts say he told painters to cut a window in a wall. He did not: his window is a rectangle on the painting, standing for a view through a frame.

Making likenesses is far older than Alberti. A warty pig painted in an Indonesian cave is at least 45,500 years old, and a scene of human-like figures with a pig, at least 51,200 years old, is the oldest known narrative image (2024). The often-quoted 35,000 years is no longer “the oldest”: France’s Chauvet cave is about 37,000 to 28,000 years old.

The day painting lost a job

On 7 January 1839 the scientist François Arago told the Académie des sciences in Paris that Louis Daguerre had found a way to fix the image made by light in a camera on a silvered plate. The details stayed secret, and France bought them. A bill of 15 June 1839 granted lifetime pensions of 6,000 francs a year to Daguerre and 4,000 to Isidore Niépce, son of Daguerre’s late partner Nicéphore, on condition that the method be made public. On 19 August Arago explained it in public, at a joint meeting of the Academies, and France offered it to the world.

Popular accounts say 19 August was the day the government bought the patent and gave it to everyone. That is half right: there was no French patent to buy, the purchase of the secret came earlier, 19 August was the disclosure, and “the world” excluded England, where Daguerre’s agent had patented the process on about 14 August. And what France gave away was one process among rivals. (In England Talbot announced “photogenic drawing” in January 1839; his calotype of 1841 made negatives for many prints, while a daguerreotype was a one-off on metal.)

People sat for the camera within months. In October or November 1839 in Philadelphia, Robert Cornelius held still for several minutes outside his family’s shop to make a portrait of himself, among the earliest of a person in the United States. In New York the chemist John William Draper photographed his sister Dorothy Catherine (1839 or 1840), reportedly in about 65 seconds with her face dusted with flour.

In this reading, that was the shock. Leonardo worked on the Mona Lisa for years and, the Louvre says, was still working on it when he died; today a phone catches a face in a blink. The skill that had absorbed the best painters became a machine’s job. A famous line has the painter Paul Delaroche crying “From today painting is dead.” No source from the time has turned up, it first appears in print decades later, and he kept painting until his death in 1856.

The real story is less tidy. Painters gained a rival and a tool at once. The ones who really lost work were the makers of tiny portrait miniatures, whom Walter Benjamin called photography’s first victims among painters. Delacroix worked with the photographer Eugène Durieu on studies of the nude in 1853–54, and Degas, who cut figures off at the edge of the frame, later took up the camera himself. Photography was not Impressionism’s only cause: the collapsible paint tube (1841, the American painter John Goffe Rand) let painters work outdoors, and Japanese prints, railways, and color theory played parts. Try sorting what the camera could and could not do.

In this reading, what was left for painting was what the camera of the day could not do: it saw no color, needed minutes of stillness, and recorded only what stood before it. Painters could still catch a felt moment and invent what never existed. The French word avant-garde, “advance guard,” names that move. It began as a military term for the troops that march ahead. In 1825 a dialogue from Saint-Simon’s circle, credited to Olinde Rodrigues or to Saint-Simon himself, has an artist say that artists will serve society as its avant-garde, since the arts act most quickly: new ideas are written “on marble or on canvas.” That job is social. The idea of a pure creativity, going ahead with no job, is a later meaning; Clement Greenberg gave the twentieth century its standard definition in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939).

This course proposes one way to read what came next, the law of extremes. With the old job gone and the tradition in the museum, an artist, in this reading, lifts one element out of the old harmonious whole (line, color, likeness, feeling, structure) and pushes it as far as it will go, until it can go no further and the next artist has to turn. It is this course’s own interpretive thesis, not established art history. Later lessons test it against the paintings, and each “Another view” says where it strains.