How Old Is Modern?
Dan Clore
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
[I've always wondered if H.P. Lovecraft's "violet gas
S'ngac" doesn't owe his name to an ironic reference to Paul
Signac.--DC]
How old is modern?
by Jonathan Jones
Wednesday October 6, 2004
The Guardian [UK]
Paul Signac's painting Against the Enamel of a Background
Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones and Colours, Portrait
of M. Félix Fénéon in 1890 is a manifesto for a new art and
a new world. Its subject was a critic and anarchist who said
that one day art will be part of the life of the working
class, but first "the revolution must get up steam and we
must build a completely anarchist civilisation". It is this
terror suspect -- Fénéon was arrested in 1894 after a wave
of bomb attacks -- who will greet visitors at the beginning
of the displays at the new Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Where do you begin the story of modernism? MoMA used to
start with Cézanne, credited as cubist godfather by Picasso.
But Cézanne lived a quiet life away from Paris. In starting
their displays with Signac, MoMA make the origins of modern
art more sociable -- and political.
It's a bold choice. But what about the date? 1890: it's
neat, but perhaps a little late. In fact, it is very
difficult to say when modernism "began". The convenience of
Cézanne is that his formal innovations -- so profoundly
shaping cubism -- are different in nature from the avant
gardism that flourished in France from at least the mid-19th
century. Is the radical manifesto of Signac's painting
really that different from the one in Henri Fantin-Latour's
Homage to Delacroix (1864) starring Whistler, Baudelaire and
Manet? I think the first image of Parisian bohemia and the
avant garde is by Delacroix: Liberty Leading the People
(1830) has a raffish intellectual in a raked top hat joining
the people on the barricades.
Even Jacques-Louis David's Marat Assassinated has been
proposed as the first modern painting, and convincingly,
because the avant-garde values epitomised by Fénéon
originate with the first, great French Revolution in 1789.
But you can't have everything. MoMA's collection begins in
the 1880s, not the 1780s. So Fénéon it is then.
--
Dan Clore
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"It's a political statement -- or, rather, an
*anti*-political statement. The symbol for *anarchy*!"
-- Batman, explaining the circle-A graffiti, in
_Detective Comics_ #608
Lorenzo the Magnificent
"BIG ONE" <telav...@fuckyou.co.uk> wrote in message
news:tdicm0toic86h81i2...@4ax.com...
> On 07 Oct 2004 22:33:32 GMT, biljowhit...@yahoo.com(Biljo White)
> wrote:
>
>..[blah,blah,...].. I am sure few would view
> anything pre baroque as modern, especially when contrasted with the
> empiricism and reproducibility of neoclassical forms.
Pure Bullshit
Ten
A lot of art would be considerd modern, if it had been produced
recently, instead of twenty to thirty thousand years ago.
See : http://ten_ten.tripod.com/index-71.html
Enjoy Life and Love
Ten