Beginnings of the Avant-Garde?
'Avant-garde' is a term that is still used today, but not as much in art circles. It has a specific history that is related to art, independence, and change. Synonymous with modernism, it is used to characterize art against the academy and sought to be ahead of the pack. It is thus notion in art that was associated with the need to fight for new values.
While ‘avant-garde’ is still in circulation today, usually in media circles to characterise risqué practices, there is little recognition of exactly how the notion came about toward the end of the eighteenth-century with the rise of the notion of the free individual, social mobility, and personal opportunity. Artists were free agents more than ever before, accountable to themselves as opposed to having to pander to patrons. Pushing boundaries and causing a stir were increasingly attractive strategies.
Meaning and Early Phases
It is appropriate to begin to tell the story of the avant-garde while still on a military note since the term, and its sister term, vanguard, are both of the same origin, used to designate the troops sent to scout before the main battalion.
The idea could not be more appropriate since the avant-garde artists are generally viewed as those who are not only ahead of their time, but those that meet the fray of criticism by critics and the public who are as yet unaccustomed to their stylistic innovations.
The avant-garde themselves had to be militant in defense of their cause and resourceful enough to weather the assaults that came their way.
What also needs stressing about the artistic avant-garde is their freedom as singular agents within an open political and economic market. In the shift that slowly begins to occur in the eighteenth-century due to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, artists act and think more as they please than at the behest of a patron.
Examples From the History of Music
Some of these changes are best seen in music, especially in the examples of Haydn (1732-1809), Mozart (1856-91), and Beethoven (1770-1827). Haydn spent most of his life under the cozy protection of the Esterhazy princes, while Mozart found himself peregrinating from city to city in search of adequate patronage.
Yet Mozart could not always easily compromise between what he wanted to do and what his public wanted to see. Several of the operas for which he is known are laced with overt social commentary such as The Marriage of Figaro (1786), which is an adaptation of the famous play by Beaumarchais (1732-99), a comedy directed at aristocratic privilege, or Beethoven’s Fidelio (1805-14) which is a plea against abuses of power.
Beethoven entered into a generation where many of the sources of patronage, which had kept Mozart barely afloat, had begun to dry up. For most of his career, Beethoven was reliant on music lessons and subscriptions to concerts. By the early nineteenth-century, there were fewer concerts given as a pageant at the expense of a single patron.
More common were concerts financed according to entrance fees and subscriptions, which meant that the performer's popularity played a critical role. As such, artists adopted curious traits and delivered enticements to attract the public; then, and only then, was the virtuoso artist born.
To be sure, virtuosity had always been alive, but the public flaunting of it, as found in the pyrotechnics of such legends as Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840) and Franz Liszt (1811-86), was a reflection of the need to get people in the door.
Even in late eighteenth-century Vienna, when the aristocracy still held sway, there was a noticeable change from the discernment of 'good taste' toward a loftier appreciation of ‘greatness’ in which the composer and his output were mutually exclusive.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Niccolò Paganini (1784–1840), ca. 1830, By Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres — https://bit.ly/2LT5iPA
The Power of the Individual
Raising the stakes of taste and the new power bestowed upon the individual—both the one who made the work of art and the one who participated in it—accounts for why styles, which included the emphasis on national, even local, vernacular traits, began to change more rapidly from this time, since a style is the lens by which the world is seen in a better or at least more novel way.
In answer to a more diverse, educated, and literate public, always hungry for alternatives to the status quo, it was up to the artist to assert his (and later also her) approach as the most relevant, most up-to-date, most fashionable—the best.
It is during this period in the early nineteenth-century that artists not just self-consciously adopt and cultivate a signature style that reflects their individual, irreplaceable personality (and therefore ‘not to be missed’), but that artists, acting as free agents in the world, begin to notice their capacity to change public opinion.
The French Revolution was decisive in this regard. It empowered artists, composers, poets, novelists, and philosophers all over Europe. The presence of it can be perceived in countless works, from Wordsworth's Prelude (publ. 1850) to Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony, the ‘Eroica’ (1803-4), dedicated to Napoleon, whom Beethoven saw as the bringer of the revolution to the rest of Europe (which he later retracted).
If artists could be alone to pursue their own interests, they could also assert beliefs that, they hoped, reflected society's better aims.
While Jacques-Louis David was living out his last days in exile in Belgium, painting rather unvigorous works, Théodore Géricault (1791-1824) was planning a work whose disruptive, frenetic energy sought to place himself at the centre of contemporary events.
The Raft of the Medusa, oil on canvas by Théodore Géricault, 1819; in the Louvre, Paris — https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Raft-of-the-Medusa
The Story of The Raft of the Medusa
His Raft of the Medusa, 1818, is a massive painting (491 x 716 cm) for any artist at the time and was an excessive investment in time and money without a commission. Sombre in colour and with a strikingly triangular composition, the painting represents the moment when wreck victims on a raft sight a ship on the horizon.
The background story goes as follows. In 1816, a flagship leading a convoy of French soldiers and settlers to the colony of Senegal ran aground in shallows near the West African coast, the fault of their captain, an inexperienced nobleman, Hugues Duroys de Chaumereys appointed by the restored monarchy of Louis XVIII.
While the captain and his officers took to the seaworthy boats, 150 of the 400 crew were left to fend for themselves on a raft made from wrecked timber. Reduced to cannibalism, fifteen remained when they were finally rescued.
The painting depicts bodies reduced to anthropomorphic larvae, haplessly dissipated by their exposure to salt and sun. One critic at the time admitted that ‘the sight of this large composition inspires terror’, while a less sympathetic respondent exclaimed that Géricault ‘could have made it horrible, and he is made it merely disgusting; this painting is a heap of cadavers from which one turns away’.
By avoiding classical narrative, the Raft of the Medusa Géricault broke with the decorum of over two centuries of painting, dispensing with a visual metaphor from the past to instate the presence of something present within the living minds of its audience.
Curiously enough, although it was a direct snub at the establishment, signalling the toll paid by favouring birthright over merit, the establishment, embodied in a tired and gout-ridden king, showed its tolerance to the extent that Louis XVIII himself paid it special attention and exclaimed to the artist, ‘Monsieur Géricault, you are about to cause a shipwreck that is not of your own!’ [qui n’en pas est pas un pour vous].
The story of the painting does not end there. In keeping with how the work's content had direct rapport with contemporary events, the artist entered the painting, both physically and topically, into the public market.
Géricualt found a temporary solution to the problems of storing his gargantuan canvas in his small lodging by exhibiting it in England, at the invitation of an English showman, William Bullock, who ran the Egyptian Hall in Picadilly where it was lodged for the latter half of 1820, receiving around 50,000 paying visitors. From there, the picture went to Dublin, where it was exhibited for two months to a less responsive audience.
The Beginning of Artists as Independent Agents
While pictures had been put on public show in this way, there had never been such a showing of such a large picture with such confronting, and what was to some, such vulgar content. If the subject was unappealing, it was because what drove Géricualt’s painting was not only aesthetic concerns but also political ones.
And it would soon become evident from this time that the aesthetic and the political were intricately intertwined. If the artist spoke for himself, he also spoke for his public, aiming to lend them a voice that salvaged their dignity or gave them cause to feel that there was the space for protest and thereby the possibility for change.
Indeed, even today, when the artist asks him or herself, What should I do? What should I make? The response that frequently looms is that to be responsible, the artist must seek some redress from injustice, conservatism, narrow-mindedness, bigotry, and everything else that represses or kills.
Géricault’s yet more renowned student Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) would go on to paint works such as Scenes from the Massacres at Chios (1824), about the Turkish invasion of Greece. Liberty Leading the People (1830), glorifying the French revolution of 1830 that ousted the last Bourbon king Charles X. However, such works are still laced with a flourish. This ennobling fantasy separates them from the real world. Liberty Leading the People, with the Liberty in the form of the woman, her breast bared, is a self-consciously manifesto work and one that the French Republic in the recent years was proud to put on postage stamps. Co-opting by the establishment is the common fate of political art, like political radicals themselves, who get absorbed by the institution in later life.
Liberty Leading the People, oil on canvas by Eugène Delacroix, 1830; in the Louvre, Paris — https://www.britannica.com/topic/Liberty-Leading-the-People
Realism
There is a definite continuity between Romanticism and Realism. However, whereas Romanticism still liked to escape in invention and fancy, Realism took a different license by attempting to cover over any suggestion that was doing so.
If Romanticism could be brash, then Realism could also be prosaic. It took pride in glorifying the down-at-heel, and it was the first artistic tendency to concentrate on work as a subject. It took a perceptive critic like Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) to locate this bias of Realism when he called to task its nostalgie de la boue, the hankering after muck, in some artists.
He meant that to be 'real', you had to see the dirtier, grittier side of life. It is the underbelly. We still tend to this view today.
Until the end of the nineteenth-century, Realism would continue to be enormously challenging to lay audiences whose concept of beauty was jarringly challenged. (A contemporary analogy is extremes that performance artists put themselves through—bodily mutilation, privation, and the like—leaving them open to charges, also voiced even by specialists, of making a gratuitous spectacle of unpleasantness.)
This was also when Charles Dickens wrote the industrial novel Hard Times (1854) and Émile Zola Germinal (1885), both dealing with the exploitation of the poorest working classes. It was the artist's responsibility, the Realists believed, to bring the condition of the needy to the attention of others in better circumstances, communicating on behalf of those who were muted by lack of education and by the crushing onus of survival.
It might be true that novelists and painters could wallow in their own aestheticization of tragedy, it is also fair to claim that such work had similar effects as investigative and tabloid journalism today in changing the face of public opinion.
Realist art is part of a much larger drive behind democracy that believes, at least in theory, that the most uglier truths be brought to the public milieu for public judgment whose reactions are unfortunately not always that liberal and in their own best interests.
Realism as a Visual Tool
Realism became a useful visual tool for countries at the end of the nineteenth century who, due to the gradual shift from monarchic autocracy to democracy, were undertaking a reassessment of national identity as seen through their own eyes as opposed solely to that of their sovereign.
Realism's 'hankering for muck' was only too appropriate when we consider that a sizeable component of identity, be it personal or national, are the hardships that go to shaping it: war, famine, and labour.
This was the case for artists in Australia at the end of the nineteenth century as much as for artists in Finland, countries which, although on opposite sides of the globe, were beginning to receive national independence, a turn that brings in tow ownership over specific images.
It was a subconscious instinct of artists of this period to sense this need and locate and dream up—since national identity is both factual and imaginary— a visual lexicon, a series of visual scenarios, and a particular style to the stories underpinning the histories of place. As such, the other component to the Realist point of view comes into direct view: the land.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, while still a subject state under the power of Russia, fired by the need for national independence, Finnish artists and intellectuals began agitating for a style and subject matter that they could claim belonged to them.
Case Study: Realism in Finland
Albert Edelfelt (1854-1905), Eero Järnefelt (1863-1937), Axel Gallen (1865-1931) and Pekka Halonen (1865-1933), together with the composer Jan Sibelius (1865-1957) are associated with what in Finland is called the ‘National Romantic’ school.
In rallying for a national school, they inevitably chose from national folklore and areas which they perceived the spirit of Finland lingered more than others—much the same way as the Émile Bernard and Paul Gauguin in this period saw in Pont-Aven in Brittany the reigning vestiges of the untouched and ‘primitive’ France. One of their favourite areas was Karelia in the north-east, and township of Koli, one of the few raised regions of a flat landscape where one could view the countless islands flecking lake Piellinen, one the larger of Finland's thousands of lakes.
Many of their works are haunting evocations of genius loci, the spirit of the place, with shades of styles like Art Nouveau, or Jugendstil, and Symbolism. If they do not seem overtly political, they aim to locate the inner source of a Finnish essence.
Under the Yoke (Burning the Brushwood) Eero Järnefelt, 1893 — https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/under-the-yoke-burning-the-brushwood/TgE5-s2gPkOE6Q?hl=en-GB
Järnefelt’s Wage Slaves (Raatajat rahanalaiset (Kaski)), 1893, is an image that is instantly recognizable to any Finn, as it relates the plight of peasants engaged in slash-and-burn agriculture, clearing the dense forest to make remote areas habitable.
Pausing from her work, the girl stares out with an expression of despair and imprecation. All the other figures are thin and strained in positions of labour. Järnefelt has purposely chosen the snapshot idiom of documentary photography—the girl posing to register her complaint to the camera—to amplify the image’s claim to truth. But the overall sensory texture of the painting, its stark colouration, along with its size (131 x 167.5 cm), lends it a pathos, resonance, and amplitude that is hard to find in photography.
Here the girl stands for the people and for the land itself, neither of which have the power to escape their unpleasant fate. This and works like these occupy a special place in the Finnish national character and speak strongly for a nation that wore the subjugation of other countries for over eight hundred years.
