The kind of anti-Romantic realism in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary found expression in the art of the school of Realist painters. Gustave Courbet’s unadorned representation of Nature and of village life stands as his attempt to show us the world without elaboration. His statement “show me an angel and I will paint one” is the sentiment which led to the creation of his monumental Burial at Ornans, a carefully composed work that he and critics of the time convinced themselves was little more than raw réalité. More traditional, but also based on close observation of nature, were the paintings of Jean-François Millet and the Barbizon School painters, led by Theodore Rousseau. Among the other Realists were Honoré Daumier, who concerned his efforts with contemporary urban life and in depicting the folly of civic officials and lawyers, the natural goodness of labourers, and the weariness of the poor. Contemporary in time with the French Realists were the English Pre-Raphaelite painters, who turned their backs on the artful idealism they associated with the Academy; they found inspiration instead in the detailed particularism and ‘honesty’ of painting in Italy before Raphael and the High Renaissance. Dante, Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones found solace in exotic stories of the Middle Ages, in accounts of early British history, and in all manner of moralising tales and parables. They painted with oils, but with the care of tempera paints, without the broad treatment of the brush, the scumbling of the colours across the canvas, and the rapid glazing technique that the oil medium makes possible. They would not be the last painters in the West to reject the pictorial possibilities of oil paint, or to defy the conventions of the academies of art from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.
As urbanism and industrialism advanced in nineteenth-century Europe, a new and unexpected development occurred in painting with the rise of Impressionism. Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro and others in their circle painted with rapid strokes and with an insubstantiality never before seen in painting. Sometimes capturing the idylls of the countryside and at other times capturing the light, smoke, colour, and movement of urban scenes, they turned their backs on the historical and concentrated instead on conveying the evanescence of present appearances. Rejected at first by critics and the public because of their insouciance with academic rules, the Impressionists had a lasting impact on art. As their styles developed, the modernity of their art became even more apparent. Monet’s canvases became extremely abstract, and he came to finish his pictures, not in front of the visual source, but in his studio, sometimes long after contact with the natural model. Renoir eventually sought to represent the firm linearity he had discovered in Italian art, and his works became ever more planned in design, firmly based on figural models, and sugary sweet in colouring. The traditionalist painters Jean-Léon Gérôme and William Bouguereau in France and Ilya Repin in Russia achieved worldly success and acclaim with their more academic and conservative approaches, but the Impressionists had the greatest impact on the development of modernism, and their artistry soon inspired new branches of painting.
The Post-Impressionists were a group of artists who understood the potentialities of the way the Impressionists used the brush. Paul Cézanne was determined to make “something permanent” of the art of the Impressionists, endowing his pictures with the compositional solidity he found in classicism. He was intent on “redoing Poussin after Nature,” and he developed a rough kind of classicism that, at the same time, broke down barriers by obscuring the edges of things and by making the paint surface an end in itself, with its own lighting, texture, and colouring. Vincent van Gogh built on Impressionism and imbued it with his mystical spirit. Paul Gauguin sought subject matter in the primitive areas of France and the South Pacific and painted with patches of sometimes barely mediated colours. Georges Seurat’s art theory returned to some of the rhetoric of early Impressionism, as he set out to give an impression of reality through his novel technique. In his case, it was based on points of colour and optical mixing of colours to create the sense of reality, except that, like Cézanne, he gave his figures an almost neoclassical calm, presence, and moral gravitas.
The explosion of styles that had set in during the later nineteenth century continued in the twentieth century. The freedom and individualism of modernism found expression in a riot of painting styles. Thinkers in a number of fields in the early-twentieth century discovered the essential instability of form and existence: atonalism in music, the theory of relativity in physics, and the destabilising tendencies of psychoanalysis all pointed to a world of subjectivity and shifting viewpoints. For their part, the Cubists, led by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, systematically broke down (“analysed”) reality in their Analytic Cubism, almost eliminating colour, direction of light, texture, and even the singularity of viewpoint and, for a while, they turned completely away from narrative in favour of immobile subjects of still-life and portraiture. In the history of styles, it can be said that the Cubists demolished the Renaissance project – a project accepted by the Academic painters of the nineteenth century – of constructing a spatial box in which meaningful events unfold with convincing space, colour and light. Never painting in a pure, non-representational abstraction, the Cubists relied for artistic success on the tension between what one sees and what one expected to see. Picasso, who had earlier painted in an academic narrative manner as a youth and in poetic and rather representational Blue and Pink periods, later experimented almost endlessly, at times dabbling with Primitivism, Neoclassicism, and Surrealism. Not since Giotto had a single painter done more to change the field of his art. The works of the French painter Fernand Léger and the Nude Descending a Staircase by Marcel Duchamp were by-products of the styles of Picasso and Braque, an expansion of an idea into more dynamic settings of figures in an architectural environment.
Picasso’s art was often witty and clever. A good deal of twentieth-century painting was more serious, and works like Picasso’s Guernica, portraying the tragedy of war, were his own advance away from the playfulness of his early Cubist styles. Surrealist art, such as the dream paintings of Salvador Dalí, or the forbidding settings of the works of Giorgio de Chirico, capture some of the alienation and psychological intensity of modern life. The Futurists, Italian painters beholden to the Cubists, turned to dynamic, even violent movement in their paintings, and their art presaged the unpleasant mixture of modernism, urbanism, and aggression that, not by coincidence, fuelled the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini. Quite unlike the outwardly intense Futurists, some modernists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries included a group of painters set on exploring inner subjectivity, and the period of civilisation that gave us Freud and Jung was bound to include a group of painters willing to explore the psychological states of the human race. Edvard Munch’s psychological insight and expressionism were matched in their intensity perhaps only by those of the German painters Ludwig