How Did the Classical Period of Art Effect Todays Art

Nudes against a Red Groundwork
(1923) Kunstmuseum, Basel.
By Fernand Leger.

The Revival of Classicism

When war was declared on 2 Baronial 1914, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was staying in Avignon in the s of France. While he was at that place he painted two pictures - 1 abstruse (Portrait of a Young Girl, 1914, Musee National d'Fine art Moderne, Heart Georges Pompidou, Paris), the other naturalistic (The Painter and His Model, 1914, Musee Picasso, Paris) - which look so dissimilar that it is hard to believe they were painted past the aforementioned human being, let alone at the aforementioned time.

Perchance only Picasso could accept changed the direction of modern art with such casual ease. Three years afterwards, pretending to be the neoclassicist J.A.D. Ingres (1780-1867), he depicted his fiancee in a beautiful gown (Olga Picasso in an Armchair, 1917, Musee Picasso, Paris), and his render to classicism was confirmed. (See: Neoclassical Effigy Paintings by Picasso, for more details.) At nigh the same time Gino Severini (1883-1966), associated in the public heed with the provocative Futurists and pictures such as Suburban Railroad train Arriving in Paris (1915, Tate), suddenly produced Maternity (1916, Museo dell' Accademia Etrusca, Cortona), which looks like a Mantegna or a Ghirlandaio. Their 'defection' from the advanced movement aroused excited debate, and anticipated a general shift within the art world after the war. It is this shift that is the main theme of this article.

'The classical revival', 'the call to order', 'the return to order' - the names by which this motility is nigh often known - gathered momentum during the First World War in French republic and Italy, and spread rapidly after peace was declared. In other countries directly involved in the fighting - for instance, Frg and United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland - there were parallel movements. In this article still we focus exclusively on the render to classicism, rather than a more general return to the tradition of effigy painting, and thus to concentrate upon the Latin countries, where it was claimed, with a certain justification, that the classical tradition was the native tradition - the heritage and source by natural right.

NOTE: For details of styles, see: History of Art Timeline (from 800 BCE - Nowadays). For specific periods and trends, encounter: Art Movements.

This impulse to return to the constants of the Cracking Tradition has been seen as conservative and reactionary, considering advanced, individualistic styles of one kind or another were rejected or modified in the interests of greater clarity, gild and universality, and because the changes usually met with the blessing of the Institution - bourgeois patrons and their favourite dealers, critics who had been hostile to avant-garde styles, and political leaders on the right who championed racial purity in the arts. The fact that the Fascists embraced classicism for propaganda purposes (please encounter Nazi art and also also Socialist Realism), and that whenever artists were required to celebrate the aspirations or the power of their land they turned to classical models, as if there were no possible alternative, has led to mistrust of the language of classicism itself. In that location is the suspicion that it is at worst authoritarian and oppressive, at all-time rhetorical and sham. Indeed because of its presumed astern-looking nature, the post-state of war classical revival has received scant attention until quite recently, and the work produced has ofttimes been treated with contempt. All the same that work is ofttimes of the highest quality, and the allegation of conservatism (in the debasing sense of reaction against innovation and invention) does not stand up up.

The Starting time Globe State of war has, rightly, been seen as a catalyst in the post-war 'return to order', inducing a craving for the stability and proven value of tradition following disruption, carnage and vandalism on a scale unparalleled in living retentivity. In that location is no question that such a craving existed, and that it was articulated passionately by many of the lastingly important figures of the time, every bit well equally past the soap-box orators. Information technology had a wider context than the war itself, still, for it was the response of nations that had witnessed rapid, often devastating waves of industrialisation - given dramatic and horrific impetus past the war - and that had been engulfed by the materialist values of the nineteenth century which placed supreme emphasis on 'progress' and 'development'. In contrast, the classical tradition offered a haven of relative serenity.

Notation: Classicism in art involves the faux of forms and aesthetics associated with the art of Classical Antiquity - viz, Greek art and (later) Roman art. Although it is user-friendly to consider separately the state of affairs in France, Italia and Spain, for there were real local differences, it is in the very nature of classicism that in that location should have been shared concerns and shared solutions, for classicism claims to exist both universal and timeless. The reputation of Paris equally the capital of the fine art globe meant that in do about Italian and Spanish artists spent time at that place - some even making it their permanent dwelling - so that a network of contacts developed, encouraging a rapid exchange of ideas, equally well equally, paradoxically, a sense of national identity.

Classic Themes

At the simplest level at that place was uniformity in subject matter, for painters of all iii nationalities addressed the 'classic' themes and worked inside the established genres of female nudes, figure limerick and notwithstanding life. Maternity was, for example, a favourite subject. It might be treated naturalistically, as in Sunyer'southward painting of his wife and baby (Maternity, 1921, private collection), or in an explicitly Renaissance style, with overtones of the Madonna and infant Christ, equally in Severini'south picture (see to a higher place), or in a neoclassical style by Picasso (Maternity, 1921, Drove Bernard Picasso, Paris). Underpinning the shared subjects was their common cultural heritage. Greek sculpture (and to a lesser extent Roman sculpture) was a source for much painting and plastic fine art; while the Italian Renaissance inspired not only the Italians but also the French and the Catalans, many of whom travelled to Italy in quest of the Great Tradition equally generations of artists before them had done; Poussin, Ingres, Corot and Cezanne were important to painters equally diverse as, say, Fernand Leger and Salvador Dali. Above all, nosotros notice sure 'constants' in the approach to classicism, sure recurrent and dominant myths.

Maybe the near strong myth of all is that of the Mediterranean world as Arcadia - an earthly paradise protected from the sordid materialism of the modern industrialised world, free from strife and tension, pagan not Christian, innocent not fallen, a place where a dreamed-of harmony is all the same attainable. The myth, nourished by the pastoral poetry of Theocritus and Virgil, and past innumerable pastoral mural paintings of earlier periods, generated sensual images of sweeping fertile landscapes bathed in sunlight, calm blueish seas, confident and handsome nudes, and peasants going about their daily lives as if nothing had inverse for centuries. At its heart there lurked the potential for profound melancholy - the sense of loss and the noesis that the ideal can never be attained. And just equally melancholy pervades the pastoral paintings of Claude and Poussin and Corot, so information technology pervades the work of some of the new classicists Derain, Picasso and Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) especially. Occasionally the myth causeless the onetime Ovidian guise. But even when the setting was apparently contemporary there was always an intentional ambiguity, and so that the nowadays was seen through the perspective of the past, and thus idealised and made more resonant.

The painters and sculptors who lived part at least of their lives on the Mediterranean coast were especially susceptible to this myth. It permeates the late paintings of Renoir (Seated Bather in a Landscape [Eurydice], 1895-1900, Musee Picasso) and his forays into sculpture (Venus Victorious, 1914, bronze, Tate), the paintings of Matisse (1869-1954) in his Nice menses (Plastic Torso, Boutonniere of Flowers, 1919, Museum of Fine art, Sao Paulo; The Three O'Clock Session, 1924, private drove), and the idylls of Bonnard (The Green Blouse, 1919, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC). All three used the richly coloured, painterly way derived from Venetian painting which was traditionally associated with sensuality. De Chirico employed the same mode in theatrically disposed scenes of Renaissance buildings, animated by classical statues and figures in modern apparel (The Uncertainty of the Poet [1913, Tate, London], Song of Love [1914, Museum of Modern Art, New York], Roman Piazza, Mercury and the Metaphysicians, 1920, private collection), and in club to evoke the almost oppressive voluptuousness of the fruits of the southward (Melon with Grapes and Apples, 1931, individual collection). For Picasso the summers spent at Biarritz, Saint-Raphael, Juan-les-Pins, Antibes and Cannes generated bully paintings like The Pipes of Pan (1923, Musee Picasso), in which the Mediterranean acts, nostalgically, as the site of the ideal. The myth permeates the bucolic imager) of the Catalans - Joaquim Sunyer (1874-1956), Enric Casanovas (1882-1948), Manolo (Manuel Hugue) (1872-1945), Joan Miro (1893-1983), Pablo Gargallo (1881-1934), Julio Gonzalez (1876-1942) and Josep de Togores (1893-1970); it ennobles the Poussinesque landscapes of Derain (View of St Paul-de-Vence, 1910, Ludwig Museum, Cologne); it receives a monumental statement in Woman in the Sunday (1930, Museum of Modern Art, Trento and Rovereto) by Arturo Martini (1889-1947) and The Three Nymphs (1930-38, Tate) by Aristide Maillol (1861-1944); it invests the sculpture of Henri Laurens (1885-1954) with a lyrical dimension; it motivates the series of still lifes before windows that open up out on to the bounding main past Juan Gris (The Bay, 1921, private collection).

It is a dream which also lies behind the contemporary architecture of Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret) (1887-1965), with its flat roofs, white walls, expanses of window, balconies, cool tiled floors and open-plan interiors.

The theme of the continuity of peasant life, inseparable from the wider Arcadian theme, generated certain recurrent images. At that place are, for example, many Italian Novecento paintings in which a generalised peasant costume is used to confer an air of universality on a scene which might otherwise be interpreted either as contemporary, or as located in a specific flow in the past, or as having a particular meaning. Thus Virgilio Guidi (1891-1984) rendered cryptic the meeting betwixt an old and a young woman in his trance-like The Visit (1922, Museum of Contemporary Art, Milan), and Achille Funi (1890-1972) suggested an indefinite span of time in his allegory of fruitfulness (Earth, 1921, private collection). Antonio Donghi (1897-1963) in Washerwoman (1922, private collection), Salvador Dali in Seated Girl Seen from the Back (1925, Reina Sofia, Madrid) and Josep de Togores in Catalan Girls (1921, Museum of Modern Art, Barcelona), used an unspecific rustic costume to give their models the nobility of types. And past the mere improver of a peasant chapeau, Martini was able to requite 2 generalised figure studies an earthy innocence (La Nena, 1928, terra cotta, Middleheim Sculpture Museum, Antwerp; and Woman in the Sun - see above). Folk costume was used, particularly in French republic, for poetic and nostalgic effect, and to evoke reminiscences of the Old Masters: thus, Derain (The Italian Model, 1921-22, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), Matisse (The Italian Woman, 1916, Guggenheim Museum, New York) and Braque (Adult female with a Mandolin, 1922-3, Musee National d'Fine art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris) allude not simply to folk traditions, simply to the Italian costume-pieces of Corot. And salvaged from the classical world was the ubiquitous white drapery which, bandage over the models of Sironi or Picasso, lent them a vaguely antique air, without, however, necessarily detaching them from the nowadays of the artist's studio. In all these cases costume alone lends that added dimension: chestnut is not involved.

The commedia dell'arte provided another fix of standardised types. Derain (Summer, 1917, Fondation M.A.M. St-P), Picasso (Harlequin, 1917, Museu Picasso, Barcelona), Andreu (Figures from the Commedia dell'Arte, 1926, Theatrical Establish, Barcelona), Gris (The Pierrot, 1922, Galerie Louise, Leiris, Paris) and Severini (The Two Pulchinellas, 1922, Haags Gemeente museum, The Hague) were amid those who plundered this resource. In office they were motivated by traditional images of the commedia, whether those by painters like Watteau and Cezanne or by 18th- and 19th-century print-makers and illustrators, for there was much interest in the 'call to order' period in the onetime, endangered traditions of popular theatre. In part the stimulus came from Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929), and his commissions to leading avant-garde artists for sets and costumes for his Ballets Russes (1909-29). (Parade in 1917, designed by Picasso, was an important event considering its drib-mantle suggested, in the context of a public spectacle, the rich potential of this kind of poetic imagery.) Simply about of import of all mayhap was the fact that the old Italian Comedy, with its stock characters, costumes and situations, suggested a viable alternative - still Latin in its roots - to classical mythology.

The Return to Order in France

In France after the war the 'call to order' - the resonant phrase was used by the author Jean Cocteau, an influential vocalization at the time - took a number of feature forms, and the thought of the French tradition every bit the platonic model for the new generation was an article of faith with many critics, ranging from the advanced to the conservative. Picasso and Braque (1882-1963) were among those to adapt neoclassical imagery, while Picasso also worked in a slap-up multifariousness of traditional 'naturalistic' styles. His best classical revivalist works include: Two Nudes (1906, Museum of Modern Art, New York); Ii Women Running on the Beach (The Race) (1922, Musee Picasso, Paris); Large Bather (1921, Musee de 50'Orangerie, Paris); and Seated Woman (Picasso) (1920, Musee Picasso, Paris). Juan Gris (1887-1927) returned to figure subjects in the middle of the war and made free transcriptions of erstwhile main paintings, and in the early 1920s his flat, Synthetic Cubism gave way to an increasingly volumetric and descriptive style. Matisse's work afterwards he settled in Nice in 1917 became more naturalistic than it had been for many years, and all obvious indications of his previous interest in Cubism disappeared. Laurens's sculpture became gradually less geometric, and in the belatedly 1920s approached that of Maillol. Maillol himself was at the height of his reputation by the mid-1920s and produced a great sequence of life-sized classical statues, while Emile Antoine Bourdelle (1861-1929) and Charles Despiau (1874-1946) were admired for their ability to adapt Greco-Roman and Renaissance prototypes to their own expressive ends. Andre Derain (1880-1954), who maintained a constant dialogue with the fine art of the past, was widely seen as ane of the greatest modern artists of the menstruation. Fernand Leger (1881-1955) ceased to fragment his figures, made allusions to great paintings from the by, addressed himself to traditional subjects, and oft worked on a grand Salon scale. Run into, for example: The Mechanic (1920, National Gallery of Canada); Three Women (Le Grand Lunch) (1921, Museum of Modern Art, NYC); Nudes against a Cherry-red Background (1923, Kunstmuseum, Basel); and Two Sisters (1935, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin). The Purist painters, although they practised a radical, abstracted style, set near codifying and ordering pre-state of war Cubism according to aesthetic and philosophic principles derived from antiquity and the Renaissance. And it was typical of the period that drawing should be regarded as an important bailiwick, and given special status in monographs and exhibitions.

Novocento Neoclassicism in Italia

In Italy the war, and the short history of national unity, engendered fiercely patriotic sentiments. The contacts with France were close, for an of import group of Italian painters, which included Severini, de Chirico and Alberto Savinio (1891-1952), was resident in Paris. But the overriding concern was with the Italian tradition. The ideology of the 'call to order' was promoted after the state of war by, amid others, the painter and theorist Ardengo Soffici, and the critics and artists associated with Mario Broglio's art periodical Valori Plastici, published in Rome between 1918 and 1922. Hither the metaphysical painting of de Chirico, Carlo Carra (1881-1966) and Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) was illustrated, and the distinctive qualities of the Italian and the French tradition debated and analysed. The reaction against Cubism in French republic was paralleled past a reaction against the narrative subject affair and the fragmented, abstracted style of Futurism (fl.1909-fourteen). The writings as well as the paintings of de Chirico and Carra during these years reflect their close study of Renaissance traditions. De Chirico, who had received an intensive academic grooming, now demanded the most rigorous classical standards, made a number of close copies of Renaissance paintings (La Muta, after Raphael, 1920, individual collection), and like several of his compatriots, including Severini and Martini, became fascinated past largely disused historic techniques. For Carra, in one case he had turned his back on Futurism, the Trecento and the Quattrocento represented the ideal source - pure in form and mysterious and spiritual in content. Meet, for case, Carra'southward The Drunken Gentleman (1916). For Martini Pre-Renaissance painting was initially just as important. But he was presently fatigued to the recently excavated sculpture of the Etruscans, which he saw as the purest Italian expression of classicism. For Sironi, Funi, Guidi, Felice Casorati, Ubaldo Oppi and other painters associated with the Novecento movement, which was promoted from 1922 onwards in a serial of exhibitions and essays by the critic Margherita Sarfatti, the ideal was a union between the creative tradition of the Italian Renaissance and the 'pure' plastic concerns of avant-garde art of the early 20th century. Their pictures reflect their sense of the continuity between past and present in frank allusions to favourite artists including Raphael, Bellini, Piero della Francesca, Masaccio and Mantegna.

Some of the artists associated with the Novecento, in particular Sironi and Funi, were from an early date supporters of the Fascist Political party, to which Sarfatti herself was fully committed, and which deployed the imagery of classicism to foster nationalist sentiment and the dreamed-of revival of the glorious triumphs of the Roman Empire in Mussolini'due south modern country. But Mussolini himself, despite his personal relationship with Sarfatti, never officially endorsed whatsoever item style or group, and association with the Novecento group did not automatically imply any specific political allegiance on the part of the artist concerned. Indeed an overtly propagandist opinion was a significant feature only in the 1930s, when opportunities arose for big-scale public murals and sculptures jubilant Fascist ideals. For the longing to see modern art savor the genuinely social role and influence that it had had in the past - an aspiration shared by artists on the political left, such equally Leger - was a powerful motive behind the political activities of Sironi, who instigated the 'Manifesto della pittura murale' in 1933, and of Carra, Funi and Massimo Campigli (1895-1971), who were among those to sign information technology. (Come across Carra's cartoon-scale drawing: Study for 'Justinian Liberates the Slave', 1933, private collection.)

Noucentista Move in Spain

In Catalonia the state of affairs was somewhat unlike, non least because Espana was not involved in the Outset World War. The Noucentista movement, masterminded initially by the writer and art critic Eugeni d'Ors (1881-1954), was established every bit the leading movement in Barcelona between 1906, when d'Ors first began publishing his 'Glosari' in La Veu de Catalunya, and 1911, when the Almanack des Noucentistes came out. The movement was defended to the promotion of a modern form of classicism, which in painting was largely dependent on the example of Cezanne (and to a lesser extent on Renoir and Puvis de Chavannes), and in sculpture took Maillol as the ideal model. Noucentisme was thus intimately involved with developments in France, and much was made of the shared cultural history of southern French republic and Spanish Catalonia, as well as of the broader links with Latin culture in general.

This said, Noucentisme had a strong local identity, and as a move closely continued with Catalan nationalism was committed to the revival of Catalan folk art and the great native traditions of the by, such as the Romanesque. It was also committed to the overthrow of Modernisme, which had prevailed in Barcelona in the late nineteenth century and in the 1900s. Modernisme, the equivalent of Art Nouveau, was seen as 'decadent' because of the strong influence from northern countries, particularly Federal republic of germany, Austria and Great britain - influences which had diverted the 'pure' Mediterranean grade of Catalan art and because of its emphasis on the experience of contemporary urban life. For Noucentisme saw itself as a movement of reclamation and restoration, and the recent successful excavations at the Greco-Roman site of Ampurias generated a sense of continuity between antiquity and modern times.

A neoclassical strain in Noucentisme was evident from the showtime in the paintings of Joaquin Torres-Garcia, a close associate of d'Ors and an influential theorist in his ain right. His landscape paintings for public buildings in Barcelona were directly inspired by the work of Puvis de Chavannes (1824-98), and were intended both equally an culling to anecdotal painting, whether naturalist or symbolist in style, and equally proof of the continuing viability, and indeed necessity, of modern art on a public scale. The neoclassical Noucentista fashion was given more convincing expression in sculpture than in painting, however, particularly in the work of the hugely successful Jose Clara (1878-1958), and of Enric Casanovas (1882-1948), in whose stone carvings information technology took a distinctive primitivist orientation.

Puvis-style neoclassical painting found few adherents of issue besides Torres-Garcia. Just the lessons of Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), and especially of Cezanne (1839-1906), had long-lasting impact through the new work of Sunyer. Pastoral (1910, private drove) was hailed as a masterpiece of modern classicism and above all every bit the sign of a Catalan renaissance in painting. Sunyer's influence was considerable, and among those affected was Picasso, who spent several months in Barcelona in 1917 and was encouraged by the example of onetime Catalan friends to pursue his own 'return to order' in Harlequin (1917, Museu Picasso, Barcelona). The identification with Catalan folk-traditions and rural life remained a key motive behind the work of Joan Miro (1893-1983) long subsequently he had ceased to exist influenced by Sunyer or d'Ors's form of Noucentisme, and was key to most of the work of Manolo. Indeed for all those touched by the movement, the sense of their Catalan heritage was of prime importance, expressed non merely in loving depictions of the landscape, simply in the symbolic epitome of the statuesque country women of Catalonia, taken as the keepsake of the survival of the truthful Mediterranean spirit into the present - the very incarnation of living classicism.

The Classical Response to Impressionism

Even so schematic an account of Noucentisme draws attention to the fact that the 'return to lodge' motion significantly predates the outbreak of the First World State of war. Maurice Denis (1870-1943), formerly a fellow member of Les Nabis group, and a mural painter who worked in a way developed from that of Puvis de Chavannes, was a vocal champion of classicism in his critical writings in the decade preceding the outbreak of the war. These were gathered in 1912 in his treatise Theories (1890-1910): Du symbolisme et de Gauguin vers un nouvel ordre classique - a book whose very title is a manifesto in miniature. Denis locates the roots of the new classicism of the 1900s in Post-Impressionist painting, and information technology is there that we must await for the origins of the 'call to guild' of the wartime and postal service-war menses. In France, Italia and Spain in that location was almost universal agreement on the immense importance of Cezanne'due south accomplishment. He is seen as the dandy hero by Denis himself, by Soffici, and by d'Ors. Renoir's status was never quite as loftier, but he also was widely admired in all three countries. Impressionism, on the other mitt, was condemned past writer subsequently writer, with a caste of consistency which shows only how dangerous a threat information technology was felt to exist once it had become an officially accepted manner. It was, went the general argument, likewise naturalistic, too preoccupied with simply ephemeral furnishings, likewise anarchic, too individualistic - incapable, in short, of universality of meaning, or of beauty of a m dimension. The post-obit passage from a slice by Guillaume Apollinaire is fairly typical:

"Ignorance and frenzy - these are the characteristics of Impressionism. When I say ignorance, I mean a full lack of civilisation in nearly cases; every bit for science, there was plenty of information technology, applied without much rhyme or reason; they claimed to be scientific. Epicurus himself was at the footing of the system, and the theories of the physicists of the time justified the virtually wretched improvisations."

The Purists agreed. The showtime effect of their magazine, L'Esprit Nouveau, published in 1920, carried six photographs of works designated as 'proficient' and 'bad'. On the good side were an archaic Greek statue, an African mask, Seurat'due south 'Chahut', and a yet life by Gris, and on the bad, a sculpture by Rodin and a water-lily painting by Monet.

This hostile judgement recapitulates quite closely that of the early critics of Impressionism, who, even if they were prepared to admit that information technology had amuse and that it was remarkably truthful in its rendering of fleeting visual sensations, were shocked by its sketchiness and by, in their view, the absence of structure or seriousness. Emile Zola, an unremitting opponent of the empty pretensions of academic Salon painting, had been an early on supporter of first Manet, and and so Monet, Pissarro and the other members of the Impressionist group because he approved of their realistic subject affair. But past 1880 he had come regretfully to the conclusion that the emphasis on ephemeral effects and a correspondingly rapid technique precluded the cosmos of not bad fine art: "Nowhere, not in the work of any one of them, is the formula applied with truthful mastery. In that location are besides many holes in their work; they fail their facture as well often; they are too hands satisfied; they are incomplete, illogical, extreme, impotent."

The leading Impressionist painters privately expressed similar anxiety, and by the early on 1880s a 'crisis' had adult, with widespread revolt from the group shows, and private efforts to strike out in new directions. For Cezanne and Renoir this took the immediate form of a classicist orientation. Renoir went to Italy to study Raphael and the Old Masters, and for a time practised a tight, draughtsmanlike mode combined with Impressionist prismatic color; this experiment was short-lived, but his subjects and compositions were contradistinct ever later on as he embarked on a process of idealizing and mythologizing the women and landscapes that remained his favourite motifs. Cezanne retreated to Provence to forge a mode bridging the visual truth and colourism of Impressionist plein-air painting and the grand compositional structures of Poussin and Chardin (Bathers, 1899, Baltimore Museum of Fine art). Even Monet began to rely increasingly on synthesising his 'impressions' in the studio away from the motif, and, omitting all specifically contemporary references, used a series method to dignify and universalise his called subjects. Pissarro (1830-1903), temporarily converted to the rigorous technique of Pointillism developed by Georges Seurat (1859-91), focused increasingly on generalised rural themes in which the figure played a much more important role than hitherto. Meanwhile the new paintings of Seurat and Gauguin were conceived in direct opposition to the fundamental characteristics of Impressionism. Seurat's huge figure paintings were created from drawings and oil sketches in a painstaking procedure based on the bookish method of composition, and drew on sources from the classical tradition. Gauguin addressed himself to the creation of a mythic, primitive Arcadia, depending on a wide range of artistic references to requite his figure paintings an iconic depth and ability. Both were straight influenced by the neoclassical murals of Puvis de Chavannes.

Avant-Garde Classicism

The 'avant-garde classicism' of post-Impressionist painters reached a climax of visibility around 1904-vii. A serial of exhibitions was mounted in the Salon des Independants and the Salon d'Automne: retrospectives for Cezanne, Puvis and Renoir were held in the Salon d'Automne of 1904, a Seurat retrospective at the Salon des Independants in 1905, an enormous Gauguin exhibition in the autumn of 1906, and a memorial Cezanne show in the autumn in 1907. A barrage of critical analysis accompanied these events.

The term 'avant-garde classicism' has been used to describe attention to the vital distinction between the kind of classicism practised by the post-Impressionists and the classicism of the academic arriere-garde. Politics aside, if classicism is now generally assumed to exist conservative and reactionary, so that nosotros are almost reluctant to acknowledge its centrality to the work of the 'progressive' 19th- and 20th-century artists we adore, it is considering of our lurking fear that academicism is a footling too close for condolement. For, whether or not we place the start of the modern motion with the Romantics, with Courbet, with Manet, or with the Impressionists, we invariably identify it with a rejection of academicism. These artists are our heroes precisely considering they refused to conform to the rigid and stifling standards set in the art academies. Our notion of an avant-garde battling confronting the dead weight of the academic classicism of meretricious, super-successful 'pompiers' similar Jean-Leon Gerome (1824-1904), Alexandre Cabanel (1823-89) and William Bouguereau (1823-1905) - run across, for instance, Bouguereau's Nativity of Venus, 1879, Musee d'Orsay) - has made us deeply suspicious of later classical revivals: might they non also be rearguard bookish revivals? Because past the middle of the 19th century the classical tradition no longer had the weight of accented authorisation it once enjoyed, nosotros tend to assume that innovative artists were bound to refuse its principles, abandoning it in favour of alternative traditions that were fresh and new (such as, say, Asian art). Only this assumption does not stand up nether scrutiny. For all the bear witness suggests that the avant-garde in the 19th century made an absolute stardom between 'true' and 'fake" classicism, and actually used feel of alternative traditions as a ways of looking anew at the classical tradition, thus providing the model for the twentieth-century avant-garde. (Notation: the French word "pompier" [fireman] was a derogatory term applied to pretentious academic history painting of the 19th century. It derives from the wearing of firemen's helmets past artist models, equally a substitute for Roman military headgear.)

The training of all European painters and sculptors effectually 1900 was still a training in classicism. The curriculum was more or less standardised, and whether or not the student intended to exist a painter or a sculptor, he or she had to 'imitate' the antique by making accurate drawings from plaster casts of historic Greco-Roman sculptures, and past figure drawing from the live model posed in the manner of a statue. Familiarity with the antiquarian was augmented past the study of Renaissance and Neoclassical fine art, since these traditions were causeless to reinforce the same values, and copying from the great masters was routine. Of form, different teachers applied these standards more or less rigidly. But even in the costless academies, drawing from plaster casts and from the nude model, and the study of museum art, were regarded every bit cardinal disciplines: when Matisse opened a schoolhouse in 1908, he required his students to draw from the antiquarian. Meanwhile in the secondary schools a bones cognition of classical literature and history was regarded as synonymous with didactics. This is the key difference between the situation in the second one-half of the twentieth century and that in the kickoff: today 1 cannot assume a full general knowledge of the achievements of antiquity - whereas, then ane could.

Where the academics and the avant-garde parted company was over the complex event of 'imitation'. The academics, believing that the apex of civilisation had been reached in Periclean Athens and Augustan Rome (and attained in one case over again in Italy at the time of Raphael), required a high degree of conformity to the outward forms of the past, and were consequently suspicious of innovation. The avant-garde, assertive that it was the essential principles of classicism that were lastingly valuable, took a much more than liberal view of formal invention. The academic attitude to classicism owed a bang-up bargain to the 18th-century author and archeologist Johann Winckelmann, whose purpose was to gainsay the 'decadence' of the prevailing Rococo style. From his written report of Greek fine art Winckelmann had come up to the conclusion that:

"its most eminent characteristic is a noble simplicity and sedate grandeur in Gesture and Expression."

Considering of the accented supremacy of Greek fine art, Winckelmann was convinced that "At that place is but ane way for the moderns to become great, and perhaps incomparable: I hateful by imitating the ancients." Although for him 'imitation' was non the same as 'copying', that subtle distinction was all too easily eroded, and past the beginning of the 20th century Winckelmann was existence seen by the avant-garde as the apostle of 'fake', not 'true' classicism - the classicism of the pompiers who dominated the official Salon and appealed to a pretentious but ignorant public. This was the view of Apollinaire:

"Information technology was the German language aestheticians and painters who invented academicism, that false classicism which true fine art has been struggling against always since Winckelmann, whose pernicious influence can never be exaggerated. It is to the credit of the French school that it has always reacted confronting his influence; the daring innovations of French painters throughout the 19th century were to a higher place all efforts to rediscover the authentic tradition of art."

Futurist Opposition to the Art of Classical Antiquity

The astute moral pressure practical by the academic tradition was felt perhaps most painfully by young artists in Italy, for nowhere else is the classical tradition so much a part of the consciousness of the present. Not isolated within abased celebrated sites or immured inside the Vatican museums, it lives on in every town or city of consequence in the thousands of still operation buildings that bear the visible imprint of Roman architecture and statues of every kind. The sense of desperate frustration induced by this obsession with the past constitute one kind of outlet in iconoclasm - the iconoclasm of the 1909 Futurist Manifesto, written past Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944):

Practise you, so, wish to waste all your best powers in this eternal and futile worship of the by, from which y'all emerge fatally wearied, shrunken, beaten down? When the future is barred to them, the admirable past may be a solace for the ills of the moribund, the sickly, the prisoner. But we want no part of it, the by, nosotros the immature and stiff Futurists!

The name for the new motility, "Futurism" (fl.1909-14), was, of class, pointed - intended to rally all those Italians who felt fettered by the past. The same reaction marked much Dada activity during and afterward the war. Their plan of phase-managed events, conducted in Paris with the maximum publicity, was intended to rally the endangered forces of anarchy and protest within the avant-garde. Especially in the pages of Francis Picabia'southward "391", the 'call to guild' movement was repeatedly and brilliantly satirised. Picabia's contempt was expressed in typically terse style in his 'Homage to Rembrandt, Renoir and Cezanne' of 1920, where the iii 'smashing masters' were lampooned as 'however lifes' and represented collectively past a stuffed and moth-eaten monkey. Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) not only elevated his "set-mades" (bottle-rack, urinal) to the status of masterpieces, but also indulged in schoolboy graffiti with his reproduction of Leonardo's 'Mona Lisa' - entitled Fifty.H.O.O.Q. (1919, private collection).

But iconoclasm could non offer a long-term solution, however useful information technology might be in the short term as a means of achieving a tabula rasa. The long-term solution involved detaching the Bang-up Tradition from all association with the academic concept of 'fake', and in insisting on its potential as a source for innovation and invention. This is precisely what Apollinaire had done, in the passage quoted higher up, when he differentiated between 'fake classicism' and 'the authentic tradition of art'. Here Apollinaire was highly-seasoned to the concept of the abstract essence rather than the outward forms of classicism. When this crucial distinction was made, then the classical tradition could be claimed as the source for radical modernism. Subsequently his set on on Winckelmann, Apollinaire had immediately invoked 'the daring innovations of French painters throughout the nineteenth century'. He was thinking, among others, of the post-Impressionists who had invented new styles, merely from the basis of a search for 'the authentic tradition of fine art'; and he went on to argue that Derain was the ideal instance of a mod artist who 'studied the smashing masters passionately', whose new piece of work was 'at present imbued with that expressive grandeur that stamps the fine art of artifact', but who had known how to avoid all 'factitious archaism'.

Bear upon of the 1905 Salon d'Automne: Maillol and Ingres

In the history of the new classicism of the 20th century the Salon d'Automne of 1905 was a climactic moment. Information technology was, of class, the Salon in which the 'cage of the wild beasts' was the succes de scandale. Just it was besides the Salon in which Aristide Maillol (1861-1944) exhibited The Mediterranean (1905, statuary, Musee Maillol, Paris), and emerged as a major new sculptor who offered a radical alternative to the romantic expressionism of the and so all-powerful Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). The importance of this piece was that although it was classical, information technology was non so in the pompier sense. For it was abstracted in form, and totally devoid of anecdote. Exhibited nether the neutral title 'Femme' (Woman), information technology made not even a glancing reference to mythology, and offered instead a generalised type. For Andre Gide it was both cute and without meaning.

The fall Salon of 1905 was as well the Salon of a slap-up retrospective for J.A.D. Ingres (1780-1867). We have been accustomed to see the contribution of the Fauves as the major event, but the Ingres retrospective was, arguably, more of import in the sense that it had a wider influence. It is worth pausing to consider why. Partly because of his famous rivalry with Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863), partly because in later life he had become a leading primary of bookish art with a post-obit of undistinguished imitators, Ingres had come to be regarded after his decease as a reactionary strength in French painting of the mid-19th century. Yet, after a brilliant commencement - he won the Prix de Rome in 1801 - Ingres's career had been far from straightforwardly successful. His submissions to the Salon were oftentimes greeted with hostility and rejection - see: The Valpincon Bather (1808, Louvre) and La Grande Odalisque (1814, Louvre) - and he did not win the neat public commissions he craved. Much of the contemporary criticism turned on Ingres's subversive estimation of classicism - the eccentric distortions of the beefcake of his figures, the attention to surface detail rather than illusionistic depth, the 'Chinese' play of line, the references to 'primitive' art. But when Ingres was rediscovered by the 1905 generation it was these subversive aspects that were establish exciting.

The cracking value of Ingres to the post-1900 generation was that he showed that the classical tradition could still accept meaning and life if it was regarded equally a stimulus to innovation, non as a pattern book. Only his paintings might have fabricated less impact had they been experienced in isolation. Equally information technology was they were not. They were seen in the context of the piece of work of Cezanne, Renoir, Seurat, Gauguin and Rousseau, and the connections betwixt his innovations and theirs were thrown into relief. For Apollinaire, writing a few years later, the stylisations of Ingres were a source for Cubism. His very eccentricities focused attending on the whole question of the key nature of classicism. And here in that location was a wide measure of agreement within and without the avant-garde.

Concerned primarily with the ideal in content as well as in grade, classical fine art, it was agreed, was conceptual rather than perceptual, contemplative rather than anecdotal. Governed past rationally adamant rules, which were dependent on systems of harmonious proportions and precise measurement, its ultimate goal was 'universal' and 'timeless' dazzler, accomplished through a lucid, economical and impersonal style. Information technology was serene and calm, and its effect was supposed to be ennobling, since the aim was to send the spectator across the vagaries and trivialities of the hither and now to the contemplation of a higher, purer and more than perfect reality.

Classicism in avant-garde art in French republic was consolidated in the years that followed the 1905 Salon d'Automne. After his success with Mediterranean, Maillol went on to create a steady menstruation of awe-inspiring works before the war. Bourdelle's break with the expressionist style of Rodin belongs to the same fourth dimension. In 1904-five Picasso, anticipating d'Ors's rejection of Modernisme, abandoned the symbolist manner of the Blue menstruation, and within a twelvemonth was working in an archaising classical style which culminated in the not bad series of paintings and drawings executed in the autumn of 1906 following his return from a trip to Catalonia (Two Nudes, 1906, MOMA, New York). Past 1907-eight Matisse and Derain were already moving away from the spontaneous, individualistic, 'wild' style typical of Fauvism, in favour of a more than synthetic, restrained and volumetric arroyo indebted to Cezanne and the onetime masters. That Matisse thought of works such as Bathers with a Turtle [come across above] as classical in essence, is evident from his 'Notes d'united nations peintre', published in December 1908. For this much quoted passage from the essay uses the familiar terminology of the classical aesthetic: "What I dream of is an fine art of remainder, of purity and serenity, devoid of depressing subject matter, an fine art which could be a soothing influence on the mind, something like a practiced armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue." The climax of this development in his art was reached in 1916 with Bathers by a River (1916, Art Insitute of Chicago), a painting which rivals the monumental series of bathing groups past Cezanne, known as The Large Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses) (1894-1906) in the National Gallery, London, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Barnes Foundation, PA.

Cubism - A Form of Classical Art

Cubism, despite its unprecedented outward appearance, was a manifestation of the same classicist impulse. For its typical subjects are traditional and stereotyped, and treated in a suggestive, non-anecdotal and emotionally neutral way; the accent (especially in Analytical Cubism) is on structure and form, both being determined by rationally conceived systems based on geometry; colour is subordinated to line and to limerick; handling is impersonal, even anonymous; the effect sought is more often than not harmonious and contemplative. In the hands of the Salon Cubists, such as Robert Delaunay (1885-1941) and Henri Le Fauconnier (1881-1946), the connections with the classical tradition of effigy painting were more immediately credible than in the more hermetic analytical works of Picasso and Braque, and references to antiquarian sculpture or to Renaissance masterpieces were not uncommon.

The early defenders of Cubism stressed its opposition to Impressionism, its dependence on Cezanne, and its classical foundations, even while insisting upon its innovative character. In an essay entitled 'Cubisme et Tradition' published in 1911, Jean Metzinger (1883-1956) emphasised the 'exemplary field of study' of the Cubist painters, who, he claimed, used the simplest, nigh consummate and most logical forms. The conceptual nature of Cubism led not infrequently to direct comparisons with the art of the by that was felt to possess a similar basis. Thus in 1913 Maurice Raynal (subsequently associated with the Purist movement) contrasted Cubist painting with the 'cunning' illusionism of High Renaissance art, but compared it to the plastic 'logic' of Giotto and the Primitives, and concluded by citing Phidias whom, he said, did not wait for his models among men simply in his mind.

20th Century Classical Aesthetics

The language of classical aesthetics was hands appropriated by avant-garde critics and artists who supported brainchild and 'purity' in art. And the magic words 'structured', 'ordered', 'harmonious', 'constant', 'ideal', 'invariable', 'synthetic', 'calm', 'serene', and the like, ring out again and once again in essays published later on the state of war, whether written by art critics in Paris for an avant-garde periodical such every bit L'Esprit Nouveau, or the less radical pro-'call to guild' review L'Art d'Aujourd'hui. In Italy similar sentiments were expressed in the pages of Valori Plastici, past Carra in his essays for L'Ambrosiano, and by Soffici in such important publications as Periplo dell'arte. The sheer generality of the principles involved meant that an immense range of styles from the figurative to the purely geometric could exist accommodated and understood as representing essentially the aforementioned trend.

Withal, in all the writing of the menses the question of the closeness of an artist's relationship to the traditions on which he drew - the consequence of beingness neo-this or neo-that - was an acutely controversial i, every bit it was bound to be at a fourth dimension when proximity to the erstwhile enemy of academicism induced anxiety and mistrust. For instance, it was in gild to resist the electric current tendency to imitate past styles that Sironi and Funi launched the manifesto 'Contro tutti i ritorni in pittura' in 1920. The 'copies' that were made reverberate these tensions. De Chirico, defiant in his claim to exist a 'pictor classicus', made copies that were as close as possible to the originals (La Muta, after Raphael, 1920, individual collection), and earned the antipathy of the Surrealists every bit a result. Braque and Gris preferred the less controversial solution of the 'homage' - a complimentary transcription in their own stylistic terms (run across, for instance: Bathers after Cezanne, 1916, pencil cartoon, private drove - by Gris). The debate is summarised in the simplest terms in an editorial published in 1926 in the middle-of-the-road English review Drawing and Design, in which the modern movement is defined every bit a search "to found order and to make the canons of fine art much more than severe." The author continues: "Its guiding principle may exist suggested past the adjective 'classical' - which has nothing to do with the classicism of Jacques-Louis David or with the resuscitation of the art and history of the Greeks. We should not nowadays attempt heroic canvases of Thermopylae or carve the straight nose and crimper lip of Phidias; we aim at beingness classical in the far deeper sense. The modern platonic is assuming the formal, the exquisite, and passionless quality, which is the true classicism. An artist of the past who was classical in this definition is Raphael. The modern exemplar, nosotros suppose, is Picasso."

The reference to Picasso is pregnant, because the course he steered and then adroitly, fifty-fifty in his about overtly neoclassical paintings, betwixt outright imitation and a freely personal interpretation of the past, seemed to many an platonic solution. So much so, indeed, that his new classical paintings speedily became 'classics' in their own correct, and an inspiration to many other artists, such as Campigli (Adult female with Folded Arms, 1924, Museo Civico di Torino), Laurens (2 Women, 1926, terracotta, Galerie Louise, Leiris, Paris), and even de Chirico (Roman Women, 1926, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow). Merely for certain groups of artists the outward apparel of classicism was not hands acceptable in mail service-Cubist art, and a high degree of formal abstraction was the only valid ways of reconciling the advanced with the classical. Had not Plato himself offered the perfect justification for an fine art based on relationships between pure geometric forms? Appropriately Plato was oft cited past the Purists when they wished to find unimpeachable back up for the rigorous 'purity' of the art they promoted. And information technology was only by claiming that there was no deviation in the degree of plastic purity betwixt Picasso'south Cubist and his neoclassical works that Maurice Raynal could defend the new orientation in the work of the artist he admired above all others.

For sculptors the consequence was perchance especially sensitive, considering the say-so of the Greco-Roman tradition equally the surest antidote to nineteenth-century naturalism and anecdotalism was even greater. Thus Christian Zervos was very careful to emphasise the formal brainchild of Maillol'due south piece of work, rather than whatever debt to the outward forms of the antique: "To a higher place all Maillol sees the continuity of course. There is non i work by him which is not marked by his patient search for architectural construction and geometry. All his statues give the impression of mass, of the search for the beauty of volume. They are inscribed within powerful geometric forms, the square or the pyramid, and their foundations are grand and uncomplicated planes."

A solution to this frail problem was provided by the art of the past which, though belonging to the classical tradition, was recognised as archaic. It was a solution with immense appeal because e'er since the Romantic period primitivism had been associated with an advanced position - with the idea of purity and authenticity and the escape from the supposed decadence and over-sophistication of the present. The myth of the purity of the primitive has been the swell myth of modernistic times, and indeed all the classical revivals that have occurred from the time of Winckelmann onwards have been intimately bound up with this ideal, for the render to the classical by is conceived as a render to origins. Still, as each generation, through repetition, creates its ain fixed norms, so that what was once new comes to stand for the oppressive Establishment, the succeeding generation becomes dissatisfied, enervating a renewal and a greater purity, a return to yet more 'original' forms. Thus David's followers, dubbed 'les Primitifs', demanded a severer, more than archaic style. For Winckelmann, who had seen relatively few examples of classical art, Hellenistic art was the platonic, only soon Hellenistic fine art came to be perceived every bit decadent and over-sophisticated, and the earlier periods of Greek fine art seemed infinitely preferable. Past the beginning of the 20th century it was the relative anonymity and abstraction of archaic or early Classical Greek sculpture that seemed purest of all to the advanced: by and so the 4th century BC (let lone the Hellenistic) seemed likewise sweet, too naturalistic, likewise individualised. Maillol'southward stiff dislike of Praxiteles, merely dearest for the sculpture of Olympia, was a characteristic position.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries witnessed intense archeological activity, and the boundaries of 'classical fine art' were stretched in every direction, permitting these major shifts in taste. There was much interest in provincial forms of classical art because they, like the primitive, were not the hackneyed exemplars of the academics. Picasso's excitement at the exhibition of Iberian prehistoric art held in Paris in the spring of 1906 was the excitement of someone who had discovered a native classical tradition hitherto unknown and untapped, and therefore uncontaminated by official academic sanction. For Italian artists, such equally Martini and Marini, the discovery of Etruscan fine art provided the same guarantee of authenticity, of inviolate naivete. In a similar way, there was intense interest in the Trecento and Quattrocento, periods felt to possess a quality of sacred innocence, and a serial of disquisitional studies appeared on such artists as Giotto, Uccello and Piero della Francesca. For de Chirico, Casorati and Severini the research into the 'lost' methods of the old masters was a search for a 'true' technique. For Bernard and Casanovas the straight etching of intractable local rock was synonymous with authenticity. To be a 'primitif classique' had become the ultimate ideal.

Works reflecting the fashion of this art movement tin can be seen in some of the all-time art museums in the world.

• For more than most the revival of classical forms in early 20th century art, come across: Homepage.

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