David and Art - The Varieties of Modernist Experience

Last week we unpacked the idea of Modernism a little bit and saw how a French poet and critic named Charles Baudelaire sketched out some initial ideas about it back in the late 1850s. He’s often thought of as the first Modernist.

Also emerging right around then was the new technology of photography. That was a bombshell to the visual arts. If realism was the goal, painting could not compete with photography and painters knew this. If you ever hear someone looking at a canvas say something like “That doesn’t look much like a violin and a wine glass to me,” or, “I can’t see the figure of a person in here at all,” you’re hearing clues that someone believes realism is the primary consideration of art. But with the advent of photography, painters had to think of something they could do with their art that photography couldn’t.

And it wouldn’t do for painters just to become photographers. Baudelaire was convinced that “the photographic industry [had become] the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies....”Those who can’t paint, in other words, shouldn’t chase realism, take photographs, and disparage painting because of technological changes.

He also said something about technology that we should keep in mind even today. As he put it, “the ill-applied developments of photography, like all other purely material developments of progress, have contributed much to the impoverishment of the French artistic genius, which is already so scarce.” There’s a very big comment on AI in what he said, but we’ll come back to that later.

But some Modernists didn’t want to shun realism. Thomas Eakins, John Sloan, Jacob Riis and others thought a commitment to reality in the rapidly changing, industrializing world with its claims of progress, could be just as bold and defiant as the impressionists. They thought that holding up a mirror to society was not selling out to materialism, and refusing to look the other way in the face of trouble or poverty or evil was a betrayal of what a real artist had the power to do. It reminds me of what George Orwell said in 1946 in his essay Why I Write.“ I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts.”Realists were modernists who thought that their power of facing unpleasant facts made them as Modern as any other artist who embraced that term.

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