"1900: Art at the Crossroads," Twilight or Dawn?

by James F. Cooper 

“1900: Art at the Crossroads,” a major exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, begins with a ground-floor display of nineteenth-century Salon art calculated to draw an emotional response from modern audiences. To the uninitiated eye, or rather to an eye programmed by modernist tastes, these paintings seem strange, even alien. They represent sensibilities and ideas, however, that were considered mainstream from the Renaissance to the Great War of 1914. Indeed, the Salon works that open the exhibition at the Guggenheim are among those proudly displayed at the Décennale des Beaux-Arts, at the Grand Palais, Paris, part of the 1900 Exposition Universelle.

Welcoming over forty countries from six continents in a celebration of national achievements, labor, and agriculture, the Exposition was installed in 220 pavilions, occupying almost five million square feet of space. Each nation created pavilions that reflected an indigenous architectural style. The incandescent glow of the first electric lights in the Palais de l’Électricité enhanced the Parisian skyline with permanent reminders of the period’s technological breakthroughs. The Exposition Décennale was the largest international contemporary art exhibition held to date. Encompassing art from twenty-nine countries, the exhibition featured several thousand paintings and sculptures that had been created since the previous Exposition Universelle in 1889.

France, as host nation, constructed some seventy pavilions and grabbed almost two-thirds of all gallery space allocated for fine arts. Many of the French buildings became permanent edifices, including the Grand Palais, Petit Palais, and the wonderful Gare d’Orsay, now a home for nineteenth-century French art. Several journalists groused that French artists believed that “they alone possess genius.”1 This view was part of the popular consensus. One group of prominent French artists and critics debating the question, “Who in a hundred years, will be thought to have been the greatest painter of the nineteenth century?” unanimously selected William-Adolphe Bouguereau.2

Bouguereau’s magnificent Regina Angelorum (1900) dominates the entrance to the Guggenheim exhibition, where paintings are hung “salon” style, stacked above one another on scarlet walls, complemented with a scarlet rug and sofa. How far we have come since our grandparents’ time: now a Madonna and Christ Child attended by adoring angels, painted by the “greatest” artist of the nineteenth century, is likely to be mocked by today’s critics and curators. This view is not shared by the curator of “1900: Art at the Crossroads,” art historian Robert Rosenblum (author of Transformations in Late Eighteenth-Century Art and Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: From Friedrich to Rothko). Indeed, Rosenblum, to give a more accurate picture of the cultural milieu a century ago, has created an installation of 240 paintings and sculptures that juxtaposes works by nineteenth-century academic masters such as Bouguereau with those by burgeoning avant-garde artists such as Picasso.

Working with colleagues from the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Rosenblum sorted through several thousand works from the Exposition Décennale. Eventually, he whittled the list down to just 78 paintings and sculptures from the original exhibition. To achieve a more pluralistic representation of the artistic crosscurrents of the year 1900, Rosenblum decided to add works that were unknown or unacceptable to the art world of a hundred years ago. In his introduction to the massive catalogue, Rosenblum claims that the additional 170 works not from the original Décennale provide “fresh evidence” that “redefines” the Salon of 1900 and the “rebellious isms” of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Symbolism, Dada, and Surrealism.

Subsequent research unearthed the remaining 170 works, some of them good and some motley, by the well-known and the obscure, created between 1897 and 1903. These Rosenblum has organized into eleven thematic groupings, which include “Bathers and Nudes,” “Woman-Man,” “Triptychs,” “The City,” “Religion,” “Interiors and Still-lifes.” “Twilight or Dawn?” Rosenblum asks in his provocative catalogue essay. Was this art representative of a cultural “twilight” or a new “dawn”? Rather than answer this question directly, Rosenblum introduces themes and sub-themes guaranteed to challenge any conclusion. He sidesteps criteria normally employed to evaluate progress and quality. It is a question, properly framed, which might challenge not only the idea of modern twentieth-century culture, as it has evolved from its roots in conservative nineteenth-century culture, but the historical overview of those Western democracies that created and shaped contemporary society.

Some art critics who reviewed “1900: Art at the Crossroads” are outraged because the exhibition places modern and traditional art on an equal playing field, and leaves it up to the viewer to decide which is best. New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman writes: the “weak-hearted…may never get past the shock of confronting so much of the [bad] art that the abstractionists were rebelling against in a great museum created as a shrine to 20^th-century abstraction. Heathens have taken over the temple again,” he warns. “Could there be any further blasphemy?”3

The organizers of the original Décennale were very conscious of the cultural and political conflicts in their own time. One French pavilion offered a chronological overview of French nineteenth-century art from the pompier Neoclassicists to the moderne Impressionists. The exhibition began with Jacques-Louis David, J.A.D. Ingres, Théodore Géricault, Alexandre Cabanel, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, and Bouguereau; it concluded with Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Henri Fantin-Latour, Camille Pissarro, Paul Gauguin and Claude Monet.

The Impressionists and Post-Impressionists were not so much on the fringes of official art at the Salon as against the historical, moral and religious stance of official art. Or, to be more precise, they were against the criteria and standards of official art sanctioned by the government of the Third Republic. Academy artists studied draftsmanship, history, religion, mythology and traditional iconology before they learned how to paint. To know what to paint, they must first be schooled in the hierarchical priorities of society and the arts that serve society. These official ateliers were guided in principle by the founder of French Neoclassicism, Jacques-Louis David, who wrote: “We seek to imitate the ancient artists of the past …the purity of their design, and the grace of their forms…[so that] we might help to bring the arts nearer to their true destination which is to serve morality and to elevate the soul.” 4

As late as 1900 the French government still controlled cultural standards, writes Patricia Mainardi in The End of the Salon. Government-sponsored Décennales were conceived as “major schools of visual information demonstrating the most serious influence on public taste and on the development of a national art.” Gustave Ollendorrff, Director of Museum Administration, wrote: “Art is a religion…. It should remain the patrimony of a small elite.” 5

The Ministry of Public Instruction believed that modernists were decadent and blamed them for instigating the riots of the Paris Commune in 1870─71 and for France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. The modernists believed that the Academy and pompier art were out of step with the times. They advocated personal freedom and the supremacy of “art for art’s sake.” The French government’s heavy-handed sponsorship of the Exposition Universelle of 1900 was propelled by the fear that a newly unified Germany had overtaken France not only economically and militarily but culturally. Through the arts France determined to prevail by supporting a strong conservative element in French culture.

Rosenblum, in an unusual stance for a major contemporary curator, argues neither for conservative nor for avant-garde. Instead, he deliberately softens and blurs their differences. The effect is disquieting for today’s modernists. Rosenblum’s sly but thorough scholarship has lowered aesthetic standards for academic and modernist alike, to the point that Salon kitsch and Fauve excess are presented on an equal playing field. In this exhibition, quality is not the criterion, an observation barely acknowledged by some art critics.

Rosenblum selects a “proto-Dadaist” advertisement of a spectacled dog painted by the arch-academician Jean-Léon Gérôme, while ignoring Gérôme’s popular Orientalist and history paintings. He includes Léon Frédéric’s incredibly tasteless triptych of hundreds of small children cavorting nude in The Stream (1890─99), surrounded by swans. Brennus and his Loot (1893) by Paul Joseph Jamin is a licentious aberration likely to embarrass those who claim academic painting has merit. The “loot” are helplessly bound, voluptuous nude women at the mercy of a Viking-horned conquerer. The composition lacks the draftsmanship or credibility of a Marvel comic book.

The modernists fare slightly better, although Rosenblum dumbs down their accomplishments. Edvard Munch, the Norwegian expressionist, is represented by a series of flawed paintings preceding his nervous breakdown. Inheritance (1905), a crude depiction of a mother nursing a sick baby covered with red blotches, possibly a venereal disease, is an ugly work that reflects little of the quality of Munch’s visionary woodcuts and lithographs. Matisse’s dour Studio Interior (1902) is so gloomy as to be unrecognizable, while Toulouse-Lautrec is represented by an uncharacteristically awkward sketch of an opera singer. Eighteen-year-old Pablo Picasso’s attempt to copy Lautrec’s style in a derivative Moulin de la Galette (1900) gives little hint of his genius. With few exceptions, the modern masters rarely appear fully formed. Even Henri Rousseau’s Happy Quartet (1902) is mediocre.

Nowhere does Rosenblum introduce the idea that the seemingly irreconcilable schools of the Academy and modernism embraced beauty or aesthetics in their formal and contextual criteria. Degas and Picasso, for instance, both collected works by the most conservative artist of the nineteenth-century Academy, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Degas’s estate listed over fifty works by Ingres, and Picasso was still painting variations on Ingres’s exquisite linear style well into the twentieth century. It would be safe to say, after viewing this exhibition, that many of these works deserved to be excluded from the Décennale because they lack quality. Other paintings culled by Rosenblum from the original exposition are not representative of the high standards expected one hundred years ago.

Peter Schjeldahl, art critic of The New Yorker, argues that having a “judgmental attitiude” about the low quality of artworks in this exhibition “is absurd.” “It is the greatest-hits fallacy,” he reasons. “An unaesthetic, educational spirit [properly] rules” the art world of today .6 Michael Duncan, writing for Art in America, is half-correct when he observes that “1900: Art at the Crossroads” is an “evenhanded presentation of avant-garde rebels, salon bigwigs and mainstream favorites [that]…recaptures the breadth and variety of visual expression at the dawn of the last century.”7 Missing is an objective, critical eye that can discriminate between good and bad art, avant-garde or Salon.

Duncan, like many critics today, is overly concerned with politically correct “strategies of socially conscious artists.” Thus Cézanne’s Les Grandes Baigneuses (1898) is held superior to the “coy Beaux-Arts splashers of Paul Chabas’s Joyous Frolics (1899).” The “prescient protofeminism” of Gustav Klimt’s Pallas Athene (1898) is held superior to “Bougeuereau’s syrupy Madonnas and Alma-Tadema’s white-bread virgins.”8 Times critic Michael Kimmelman leaves no doubt that the term “kitsch” is reserved for Salon painters, not the avant-garde. “This (‘wacky’) show no doubt will be popular in New York as it was in London. There is no underestimating the public’s taste for kitsch.”9 It is “laughably easy,” he writes, to decide who are the better painters, the avant-garde or the modernists. Rosenblum’s crowning achievement in this exhibit is to reopen this question.

One thing this show does suggest, to some extent, is that the nineteenth century was a golden age for conservatism. There were great accomplishments by English Victorian, German Romantic, French Beaux-Arts and American landscape artists. English artists of the Victorian era created a unique fusion of Christianity and pagan mythology in works such as Lancelot at the Chapel of the Holy Grail (1896) by Sir Edward Burne-Jones. Lord Leighton’s Clytie (1895) portrays the unrequited love of the nymph for Apollo, who watches his daily ride across the sky until her limbs metamorphose into the stems of a sunflower that forever follows the movement of the sun. Two bronzes, The Virgin (1899) by Sir Alfred Gilbert and The Joy of Life (1896) by Sir Hamo Thornycroft, evidence the strong connections between spirituality and English civic virtue.

Still, these are far from the best works available. Instead of Thornycroft’s sculpture The Joy of Life, I would have preferred his magnificent Courage. I think Frederic, Lord Leighton’s painting Clytie pales next to Flaming June, painted the same year. Why Bouguereau’s cloying Admiration (1897), rather than a powerful Pieta? While many consider Sir Alfred Gilbert’s overly worked The Virgin (1899) an Art Nouveau masterpiece, I think Perseus Arming is a greater work.

Rosenblum stretches credulity by focusing attention on Noonday Heat (1903), Henry Scott Tuke’s academic treatment of an overtly erotic encounter between two male youths on a beach. This is just bad painting. The suggestion that Thomas Eakins’s straightforward depiction of The Wrestlers (1899) is similarly oriented can be justified only by using today’s fractured scholarship. If Rosenblum really wanted to properly address the issue of homoeroticism on the highest artistic level, he would have included those paintings and sculptures by Lord Leighton which clearly do evidence a subtle androgynous quality.

There are wonderful works of art in this exhibition, of course, among them Matisse’s brut pre-Cubist bronze The Serf (1903), Winslow Homer’s Eastern Point, Prout’s Neck (1900) and John Singer Sargent’s Mrs. Carl Meyer and Her Children (1895), seemingly effortless in its bravura brushwork. Thomas Moran’s last journey to Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon produced the extraterrestrial landscape of prehistoric Cliff Dwellers (1899). A surprising number, eighty percent, of all Americans featured in the original 1900 Exposition received their art training in conservative French ateliers.

Many of the works in the exhibition’s Religion section reflect the short-lived spiritual revival at the turn of the century, which sparked major contributions by Christian artists reacting against the growing secularism of Darwinism. Some adopted a contemporary approach to traditional religious motifs, recasting Biblical subjects in a more accessible fashion. Scenes from Christ’s life are located in modern rural settings. In their quest to invest modern-life subjects with the authority derived from traditional religious values, artists turned to the medieval format of the triptych, as in Constantin Meunier’s epic The Mine: Descent, Calvary, Return (1900). In addition to Bougeureau’s Regina Angelorum, the exhibition includes another genuine religious masterpiece. Sad Inheritance (1899), by the Spanish genre painter Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, depicts a group of crippled boys being shepherded into the ocean by an attentive priest. The artist was justly awarded a first-class medal at the 1900 Exposition.

Rosenblum’s essay “Art in 1900: Twilight or Dawn?” asks the right question. By the year 1900 many of the great works of modernism had already been created. Many of the seminal artists were already dead: Manet, van Gogh, Courbet, and Corot. Bouguereau, the last genius produced by the 400-year-old school of Raphael, died in 1905 at the age of eighty. It remained only for the last seminal modernist, Picasso, in one Nietzschian blow to split asunder Western culture into Cubist rubble and let the abstractionists play with the chips and splinters.

Much of this exhibition’s “new evidence” turns out to be just bad art. As presented, “1900” is neither “twilight” or “dawn,” but a grey haze that obscures distinguishing marks. Conservative artists, such as Bougeureau, Gérôme and Gilbert, can hold their own with avant-garde artists such as Degas, Manet and Monet. Moreover, there is the intriguing question of “crossover” artists in this exhibition, such as Klimt, Sargent, Rodin and Leighton, whose work incorporates both modern and conservative elements. Indeed, Klimt, a very successful classical painter in the 1880s, became the revolutionary leader of mythological and allegorical Art Nouveau of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Pallas Athene is a modernist invocation of the archetypal goddess. Ferdinand Keller’s The Tomb of Böcklin (1902) serves as a pallid reminder of the powerful, haunting Nordic mythology created by nineteenth-century German artists Arnold Böcklin, Caspar David Friedrich and Anselm Feuerbach. This potential dawning of a new spiritual age was brutally ground under the wheels of the military-industrial buildup in the decades preceding the Great War. The Great War remains the singular de-embarkation point when artists and poets broke away from what they perceived as a hypocritical manipulation of traditional values in the service of empirical Western ambitions.

A single museum exhibition is not the place or time to proselytize how to heal the fracture between art and society, between traditional and postmodern values. By eliminating the differences between traditional art forms and modernism, by focusing primarily on content and context, by eschewing aesthetics, Rosenblum undercuts the original argument of “art for art’s sake” and the raison d’être of nineteenth-century modernism. For a more objective overview of high-quality modernism, visit The Thannhauser Collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, located in the Guggenheim galleries in the adjoining tower building. Almost every one of these paintings by Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Pissarro and Vincent van Gogh is a masterpiece. I would gladly exchange half of the works in Rosenblum’s clever melange for Pissarro’s beautiful landscape The Hermitage at Pontoise (1867).

The role of critic─to separate the good from the bad and to explain why─has been abandoned today. Rosenblum has created a clever exhibition that reflects our own skewered standards, rather than the standards of 1900. What is the biggest difference between 1900 and 2000? A hundred years ago Western artists were straining to break free of “stale” traditional values; today we yearn to renew them. “1900” offers a tantalizing glimpse of the passionate beauty and spirituality of the conservative tradition, which mirrors our own longings today for cultural renewal in the twenty-first century.