Modernism: Painting as Art Historical Practice

Pablo Picasso, Le Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)

Oil on canvas, 243.9 cm × 233.7 cm

Museum of Modern Art, New York City

In modern times the most direct relation is not between painter and nature, or the painter and the Holy Spirit, but the painter and other painters.  Manet learned much from Velázquez both stylistically and in terms of content, which offers us a key to why he painted as he did.  Cezanne closely followed Poussin’s rules for composition, both as an aesthetic and stylistic discipline and as a kind of patriotic gesture that would establish his place in the tradition of French painting.  Picasso combined the most advanced stylistic elements available at the time, primitivism and cubism, and used them to depict the charged theme of prostitution in Le Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), perhaps in order to attain an optimal level of notoriety and secure the patronage of the Steins.  In each case, a painter’s self-understanding and interpretation of his milieu enters into his choice of subject and technique.  The painter’s explicit or implicit theorizing always has effects on the overall trajectory of his or her career, as well as effecting individual works.  All of these examples show painters exercising art historical knowledge in their pursuit of a career and an identity as an artist, and all of them illustrate the need to distinguish between internal (or emic) and external (etic) modes of art historical explanation.  Art history therefore has to be reflexive and historically sensitive with regard to epistemic questions, cross-disciplinary with regard to method, and pragmatic with regard to the relationship between theory and practice.  Particularly in the modern period, when artists very deliberately and self-consciously interact with and react against each other and their traditions (Manet with Velázquez, Picasso with Matisse, Van Gogh with Gauguin), no reduction to causes and general laws is available.  Painters and sculptors explain what they do, like other human beings, with reasons in form of the letters, journals, articles, lectures, and interviews they leave behind.  Artists both cause and are caused by the styles and schools with which they are associated and according to which they are categorized, and their interrelations with the tradition and their contemporaries forms the background within which they struggle to produce art that is powerfully expressive, unique yet immediately communicative.  Such reflexive causality may come to light in the biological sciences, but it’s far from Newtonian causation in the sense of an instance of a law.  There simply is no causal account of the paintings and sculptures they create in the sense that there is a causal account of a planet’s course in its orbit.