Early Twentieth Century

Responses to ‘Modernism’
 The Modern and the Contemporary
• Alois Reigl and Paul Frankl bridges the two ages.
• Reigl’s stress on decadent period as also intrinsic to the
development of the arts.
• Frankl’s stress on “styles” as born of spiritual human activity –
there is no such thing as genius.
• Since Vasari, art historians would consider a great artist as the
only true representative the time. They will be the only ones
to study. Their contemporaries will have little import.
• Art historians in the early twentieth century are finding the
sources of their elements of historicizing within their study
of the contemporary art scene.
 Expressionism and abstraction
• Renaissance had its own representation of the visible world
constituted by ‘underlying principles of painting and sculpture.’
• Abstraction breaks away from the ‘naturalistic standard’ of
Renaissance.
Roger Fry
• Vision and Design (Lectures between 1901-20)
• Cezanne as representative to the tradition of Poussin. – Art is
timeless – Seurat, Gogh, and the cubists belong to the tradition.
• Art as essentially abstract – naturalism is incidental. There is no
formal factor that decides the relevance of an artwork. The
informal, the abstract is intrinsic. Non-representational is also
art.
 Modernism has no pedigree!
• The concept of cyclical History abandoned.
Rococo – Baroque
Neoclassicism – Classical
• Different artists of the same decade are being inspired by
artists and artworks of different ages and periods of time.
Cezanne – Poussin
Seurat – Renaissance
Gauguin – Middle Ages
• There is no next stage in the cycle.
 Few old old models discarded from the art
history methods’ tool-kit!
• The past is still in a continuum with
modernism – despite major differences.
• The study of the past is still relevant
• Respectability of the great art and public
hostility – paradoxical symptoms.
Naturalistic standard vs abstraction
The cycles of styles didn’t fit the contemporaries
Cultural context vs the autonomy of art (Fry).
 Some art historians are still relevant!
• Vasari’s technique of individual biographies:
Biographies proliferated, individual works’ styles, development of an
individual artist
• Wolflin’s techniques of pairs of different categories:
Classical vs Romantic in Cubism vs Surrealism
Drawing vs Colors in Braque vs Matisse
But they do not define a historical period of art.
• Iconographical analysis finds ‘psychoanalysis’.
• Morillean conoisseurship to establish stylistic relationships.
• Reigl’s acceptance of all periods worthy of study is useful. The art of
decadent late antiquity also gives alternative to ideals of classicism
and naturalism.
 A new art historical method appears!

Alfred H. Barr