Four revolutions

A room of wild beasts

The Salon d’Automne of 1905 ran from 18 October to 25 November at the Grand Palais in Paris. Room VII held canvases by Henri Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Albert Marquet and others, painted in broad strokes of pure, unmixed color. Among them stood two small sculptures of a child by Albert Marque, in the manner of the Italian Renaissance. The critic Louis Vauxcelles noticed them and wrote in the newspaper Gil Blas on 17 October that the innocence of “these busts” was a surprise “in the midst of the orgy of pure tones”: Donatello chez les fauves, Donatello among the wild beasts.

The joke was aimed at the paintings, and it stuck to the painters rather than the sculptor. They became les fauves.

The best known of the group was Matisse, and that year he painted his wife, Amélie, in two pictures people remembered. Woman with a Hat was shown at the Salon, and the Americans Leo and Gertrude Stein bought it, by the usual account for 500 francs; it hangs now in San Francisco. The second, Portrait of Madame Matisse, called The Green Stripe or The Green Line (Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen), is about 16 by 13 inches. A narrow stripe of green runs from her hairline down her forehead and nose to her upper lip, with broad flat fields of color behind her. Sources differ on where in 1905 he painted it.

Whatever one thinks of it, a stripe like that is a choice, and the better question is what a picture is for once it stops copying what the eye sees. This course tells the story of modern art in four turns, each an answer to that question. In this reading, which is this course’s own thesis (Lesson 3 states it in full and tests it), each turn takes one element out of the old, balanced picture and pushes it as far as it will go. The first pushes feeling and the self, with Van Gogh and Matisse. The second pushes structure until the subject begins to disappear, with Braque and Picasso. The third pushes the idea alone, with Duchamp: anything can be chosen. The fourth pushes the artist’s responsibility to society, with Beuys. It is one way to tell the story, not the only way.

From a window to a box of one’s own

For most of the centuries since the Renaissance a painting worked like a window. The frame opened onto a scene beyond it, and skill meant getting that view right. Lesson 1 followed the window to 1839, when photography began to take over its job. One picture of what came next, and it is this course’s own image, is that the window turns into a box: the painter hands you something to open, and inside is a piece of himself.

Vincent van Gogh is the usual first witness. In August 1888, living at Arles in the south of France, he wrote to his brother Theo (letter 663 in the Van Gogh Letters Project, dated 18 August; older editions number it 520 and date it 11 August) that he no longer tried to copy exactly what was in front of him; he chose his colors freely, to say something forcefully about himself.

One of his Arles pictures, Bedroom in Arles, exists in three versions: October 1888 (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam) and two copies of September 1889. Of the first, Van Gogh told Theo on 16 October that here color had to do the job, suggesting rest or sleep. The walls lean and the bed seems to tilt, but part of that was real: the room was a trapezoid, with an obtuse corner at the left. Flattened perspective, learned partly from Japanese prints, did the rest. The tilt is part observation and part choice.

The popular line that Van Gogh sold only one painting is stated more firmly than the evidence allows. The only painting known by name to have been sold in his lifetime is The Red Vineyard, shown in Brussels in 1890 and bought by Anna Boch for 400 francs. No one can prove he sold no others. He was shot on 27 July 1890 at Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris, and died two days later. The standard account is that he shot himself; Another view, below, gives a recent challenge to it.

By 1905 the younger painters had taken Van Gogh in. Matisse first saw his work in 1896 and 1897 on the island of Belle-Île, where the painter John Peter Russell, a friend of Van Gogh, introduced him to Impressionism and to color theory and gave him a Van Gogh drawing. In March 1901, at a Van Gogh show at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris, Derain introduced Maurice de Vlaminck to Matisse. In this course’s reading, Matisse simply pushed Van Gogh further. His real road was wider: through Divisionism, the dotted color of Paul Signac, as in his Luxe, calme et volupté (1904); through a summer at Collioure beside Derain; through Gauguin; and above all through Cézanne, whose Three Bathers he bought in 1899 and named as the painter who sustained him. What he shares with Van Gogh is narrower and, for this course, more important: color freed from description. The green stripe does not say that Madame Matisse’s face was green. It is a patch of color put where the picture needs it, and, as the museum notes, it splits her face into a warm half and a cool half. In this reading the first turn pushes feeling and color until they outrank what the eye reports.

Little cubes

In 1907 Pablo Picasso finished Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York): five nude women in a brothel in Barcelona, their faces and bodies cut into hard planes. The dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler later called it the beginning of Cubism. Matisse disliked it.

Cubism, though, took its name from someone else’s pictures. In 1908 Georges Braque offered six landscapes painted at l’Estaque, near Marseille, to the Salon d’Automne, and the jury, which included Matisse, refused them. Kahnweiler then showed 27 of Braque’s works at his own gallery, 9 to 28 November. On 14 November, in Gil Blas, Vauxcelles, the critic of the wild beasts, wrote that Braque despised form and reduced everything, landscapes and figures and houses, to geometric patterns, to cubes.

A second version of the story says Matisse, on the jury, remarked that Braque had sent in a painting made of “little cubes” (petits cubes). The poet Guillaume Apollinaire printed that in Le Temps on 14 October 1912, saying Matisse had been struck by the cube-like look of some painted houses, and Vauxcelles told it too. Both accounts are second-hand, and no record from the jury survives. The word “Cubism” for a group came in 1911, when the Salon des Indépendants hung Room 41 with Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay and Henri Le Fauconnier. Picasso and Braque were not among them. An insult became a name, and the name was handed to a movement. (Chinese calls it 立体主义 or 立体派, the “solid-form” movement. Some call that a mistranslation of the French cube, but Cubism rethought solid volume rather than abolishing it, so the name keeps something real.)

From the winter of 1908 Picasso and Braque worked side by side, and Cubism was their joint work, not one man’s invention. What did the pictures do? In the phase called Analytic Cubism (about 1910 to 1912) an object is taken apart into small facets seen from several sides at once. In the summer of 1910, in the seaside village of Cadaqués, Picasso painted Le Guitariste (The Guitar Player, Centre Pompidou, Paris). You have to hunt for him among facets of beige and silvery gray: the museum points out a half-circle on a cylinder for his head, the rounded forms of the instrument and its strings. In Braque’s Man with a Guitar (Céret, 1911–12, Museum of Modern Art) the player is just as hard to find, while at the left a nail and a length of rope are painted in a plain, lifelike way, so that two kinds of painting sit side by side. Picasso’s Ma Jolie (winter 1911–12, same museum) takes apart a woman holding a guitar, with “Ma Jolie,” “my pretty one,” written across it.

A popular way to explain the result is a box of toy bricks. The painter breaks a guitar player into small pieces, then builds a picture from them, putting each piece where he likes. The picture stops being a window onto something and becomes an object in its own right. The image needs two fixes: it suits Synthetic Cubism (1912 to 1914), when pictures were put together from flat pieces, better than the pictures of 1910 and 1911, which still take a visible subject apart; and the pieces are not placed at will, since each facet still analyzes something real. This course reads the second turn as structure pushed until the subject nearly vanishes.

Did Cubism lead to abstraction?

If a picture is an object someone builds, why must it show anything at all? In this course’s reading that question points toward abstraction, painting with no subject. It is half right. Fauvism and Cubism helped open the door, but Picasso and Braque themselves held back from going through it. In a conversation printed in Cahiers d’Art in 1935, Picasso said, “There is no abstract art. You must always start with something.” The Centre Pompidou’s label for Le Guitariste puts it this way: Picasso and Braque stopped at the threshold of abstraction, and Malevich and then Mondrian went further.

So who painted the first abstract picture? Four people have claims, and the answer depends on what “first” means. Hilma af Klint, a Swedish painter, began an abstract series in 1906 but asked that her work stay unseen for twenty years after her death in 1944. Wassily Kandinsky made a watercolor that the Centre Pompidou dates between 1910 and 1913, a date still disputed. František Kupka showed Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colors at the Salon d’Automne of 1912. Kazimir Malevich painted Black Square in 1915, and Lesson 4 returns to it. A fair summary is that there is no single first: af Klint’s works are earliest by date but were not seen then, and Kandinsky, Kupka, and Malevich made abstraction public between about 1911 and 1915.

The tidy picture of a road from Cubism to abstraction has a famous source. In 1936 Alfred H. Barr Jr., the first director of the Museum of Modern Art, drew a flow chart for the catalog of his show Cubism and Abstract Art: arrows run from Japanese prints and the Post-Impressionists of the 1890s into Cubism, Futurism, and other movements, and end in two branches, “non-geometrical abstract art” and “geometrical abstract art.” It shaped how many people picture modern art as one road, though Barr himself kept revising it, and it has serious critics (see Another view).

A urinal signed R. Mutt

Marcel Duchamp, a French painter, reached New York in June 1915. There he bought a snow shovel and titled it In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915), and in 1915 or 1916 (sources differ) he began to use the word readymade for an ordinary, factory-made object that an artist chooses and names. He later counted his Bicycle Wheel, put together in Paris in 1913, as the first. His rule was to choose by “visual indifference”: neither good taste nor bad.

In April 1917 the new Society of Independent Artists held its first exhibition at the Grand Central Palace in Manhattan, from 10 April to 6 May. It had no jury and gave no prizes. Anyone who paid six dollars could show, and more than two thousand works were hung in alphabetical order. The United States had entered the First World War four days earlier. Duchamp sat on the Society’s board. Among the entries was a mass-produced porcelain urinal, bought new rather than found as junk, turned on its back, titled Fountain and signed “R. Mutt 1917.”

What happened next is told in two ways. The Philadelphia Museum of Art says the hanging committee rejected the work. Duchamp said it was simply placed behind a partition, that he did not know where it was, and that he resigned from the board. In May 1917 a small magazine of his circle, The Blind Man, printed a photograph of the urinal by Alfred Stieglitz and an unsigned editorial, “The Richard Mutt Case.” Whether Mr. Mutt made the fountain with his own hands, it said, “has no importance. He CHOSE it.”

Who had the idea is itself disputed. On 11 April 1917, the day after the show opened, Duchamp wrote to his sister Suzanne that “one of my female friends,” using the masculine pseudonym Richard Mutt, had sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture. Candidates are Louise Norton, whose address appears on the entry tag in Stieglitz’s photograph, and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. The mainstream view still gives the idea to Duchamp.

The 1917 urinal was lost, and Stieglitz’s photograph is the only record. Museums show replicas: the first authorized one, made in 1950 for the Sidney Janis Gallery, is in Philadelphia, and the Tate in London owns one of an edition of eight made in 1964 with the Milan dealer Arturo Schwarz. In 2004 a poll of 500 art-world professionals in Britain ranked Fountain the most influential work of modern art, ahead of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

In this reading, Fountain is the third turn. The idea is pushed so far that everything else drops out: it is an ordinary object, made by someone else, with no craft or beauty of the artist’s in it. What remains is the act of choosing and naming, and the response of the viewer; Duchamp said in a 1957 talk, “The Creative Act,” that the viewer completes the work by interpreting it. A common story says 1917 shows people losing faith in every truth once the war began. That is true as a mood and loose as history. America had entered the war only days before, but the war had begun in 1914, Dada began in Zurich in 1916 when the Cabaret Voltaire opened on 5 February, and Fountain came out of a New York circle of artists and collectors around Walter and Louise Arensberg.

A broom in the forest

After the Second World War, art made of actions spread: Happenings from 1959, Fluxus from 1962. (Live art was older; Dada had staged evenings in Zurich since 1916.) Joseph Beuys, born in Krefeld on 12 May 1921 and died in Düsseldorf on 23 January 1986, called his works Aktionen, actions. In his first solo gallery show, on 26 November 1965 at the Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf, with his face covered in honey and gold leaf, he explained pictures to a dead hare. In this reading the fourth turn is not the gesture but the claim behind it.

Beuys taught at the Düsseldorf academy from 1961 and was dismissed in October 1972, after he occupied the offices to force the admission of applicants who had been turned down. In 1971 he founded an Organization for Direct Democracy through Referendum.

A photograph of Beuys with a broom is often shown to make the point, with the story that he swept a forest to protect it. The story is right; only the date usually given, the late 1960s, is too early. On 14 December 1971 Beuys and about fifty students swept the paths of the Grafenberger Wald, a forest in Düsseldorf, and marked the trees due to be felled for tennis courts. An offset print of 1972, Save the Woods, records it; whether the trees were finally spared is not clear. Five months later, on 1 May 1972, he swept again: with two students he swept Karl-Marx-Platz in West Berlin after the May Day march, in an action called Ausfegen, “Sweeping Up.” Museums read that one as sweeping away ideologies.

The forest action did not found a party. Beuys stood as a Green candidate for the European Parliament in June 1979, and in January 1980 he took part in the founding congress of the German Greens in Karlsruhe, one founding member among many. His largest environmental work came a decade after the forest. 7000 Oaks, subtitled “city forestation instead of city administration,” began at documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982, with 7,000 basalt stones heaped in front of the Fridericianum museum, one to be taken away for every oak planted. Each tree was paired with a basalt column. The last tree went in at the opening of documenta 8 in June 1987, a year after his death, planted by his family.

Beuys’s best known American action took place at the René Block Gallery in SoHo in May 1974. For three days, eight hours a day, he shared a room with a live coyote. The work is called I Like America and America Likes Me. In this reading, Beuys turns art from a private act, or a game of ideas for the few, into a way of taking responsibility for society.

Four turns, four extremes

Side by side, the four turns look like this, and the picture below puts them on one line. Van Gogh and Matisse push feeling and color until the eye’s report matters less than the painter’s response. Braque and Picasso push structure until the subject nearly disappears. Duchamp pushes the idea until the making drops out and only the choice is left. Beuys pushes responsibility until the art object dissolves into action. In this reading, each road ends where going further would only repeat it, and the next artist has to turn. That claim is not established art history, and the next lesson tests it on a case where the steps can be followed one by one.

Try placing eight works and acts yourself. The answer for each says what was pushed furthest and gives the date.