Art: The Age of Experiment

Oswald Spengler. that grand and gloomy chronicler of The Decline of the West, once remarked that Edouard Manet (1832-83) was the last gasp of great Western painting. What Spengler failed to see was that Manet was not an end but a beginning. With a single picture, displayed at the Paris Salon of 1865, Manet fueled an artistic revolution that has shaped the course of modern art, for better or for worse, for nearly a century. At the core of the whole hurly-burly that rages through the art world today is the artistic proposition raised by Manet's saucy nude Olympia.

Naked Paint. When Manet sent his picture to the Salon, the model's nakedness was what seemed to shock the public. But the nakedness of the painting itself was what shocked Manet's fellow artists. Instead of presenting a suitably posed, blurred and idealized nude to the public gaze, Manet presented something like truth in the form of a naked French girl, nakedly translated into so many square inches of paint on canvas. As a straight representation of a scene. Olympia is obvious and commonplace. But as a composition in form and color, it is a masterpiece. With Manet, contemporary artists regained an all but forgotten viewpoint: that a picture can mean more than it represents, that a picture is an object to be judged by itself and not as a reference to something else.

This viewpoint holds for all the great French masters from Manet to Picasso, and still carries dynamite. It gives the artist the prerogative of subordinating the subject of his picture to the painting itself. It also opens the door to distortion and abstraction—the twin angels, or demons, of modern painting.

The Big Parade. In the U.S. the parade included the eight artists shown on this and the following pages. The U.S. pioneers all employed varying degrees of distortion and/or abstraction. But their similarity stops right there. Seeing the contrasts in their art, few would take them for countrymen, let alone contemporaries. Tobey's Transit, for example, relates to no objective visual experience at all, unless it be that of images swimming in the tight-shut eye. Hartley's German Officer deals with a mood, not a visual image. Davis' Eggbeater beats the eggbeater into unrecognizable shape. Hofmann's Red Trickle celebrates an activity rather than a perception. Dove's Abstraction is a generalization of nature, flat yet elusive. Feininger's Gelmeroda multiplies and rearranges what he saw to create an altogether new equation. O'Keeffe's From the Plains is emotion reduced to pattern, and Sheeler's Golden Gate distills design from objective reality.