Ahead of the Battalion: Beginnings of the Avant-Garde
Géricault's raft on tour at a London spectacle hall, a gout-ridden king's pun, and the moment art stopped serving patrons and started answering to a public.
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Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1818–1819. Oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Around fifty thousand people paid to see it at William Bullock's Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, in the latter half of 1820, after it had failed to find a buyer at the previous year's Paris Salon.
In the latter half of 1820, the most notorious painting in London was a French one, hung in the showman William Bullock's Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, a building put up to display curiosities and spectacle, where some fifty thousand people paid to file past it. It was the size of a wall, nearly five metres by seven, and its painter, Théodore Géricault, not yet thirty, had made it without a commission and at his own considerable expense. What it showed was a raft at sea, crowded with the dead and the barely living, survivors of a shipwreck who, before they were taken off, had eaten the bodies of those who died first. Unable to fit the canvas in his rooms, Géricault had sent it abroad to be shown for money. From London it went on to Dublin, to a cooler reception.
None of this would have been thinkable a century earlier. A painter working without a patron, on a subject of his own choosing, addressing himself directly to a paying public and to the politics of the day, is a singular agent within an open political and economic market, and it is with him that the story of the avant-garde begins.
The name we have given such artists is itself military. Avant-garde, and its sister term vanguard, designated the troops sent to scout before the main battalion, and the idea could not be more apposite, since the avant-garde artists are generally viewed as those who are not only ahead of their time, but who meet the fray of criticism by critics and a public as yet unaccustomed to their stylistic innovations. The avant-garde had to be militant in defence of their cause and resourceful enough to weather the assaults that came their way.
This freedom was won slowly. In the shift that begins in the eighteenth century, as a result of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, artists came to act and think more as they pleased than at the behest of a patron. Some of these changes are best seen in music, especially in the examples of Haydn (1732-1809), Mozart (1756-91), and Beethoven (1770-1827). Haydn spent most of his life under the cosy aegis of the Esterházy princes, while Mozart found himself peregrinating from city to city in search of adequate patronage. Yet Mozart could not always easily compromise between what he wanted to do and what his public wanted to see. Several of the operas for which he is known are laced with overt social commentary, such as The Marriage of Figaro (1786), an adaptation of the famous play by Beaumarchais (1732-99), a comedy directed at aristocratic privilege, or Beethoven's Fidelio (1805-14), a plea against abuses of power. Beethoven entered into a generation in which many of the sources of patronage, which had kept Mozart barely afloat, had begun to dry up. For most of his career Beethoven was reliant on music lessons and subscriptions to concerts. By the early nineteenth century there were fewer concerts given as a pageant at the expense of a single patron. More common were concerts financed according to entrance fees and subscriptions, which meant that the popularity of the performer played a critical role. Artists adopted curious traits and delivered enticements to attract the public; then, and only then, was the virtuoso artist born. Virtuosity had always been alive, but the public flaunting of it, as found in the pyrotechnics of such legends as Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840) and Franz Liszt (1811-86), was a reflection of the need to get people in the door. Even in late eighteenth-century Vienna, when the aristocracy still held sway, there was a noticeable change from the discernment of 'good taste' toward a loftier appreciation of 'greatness', in which the composer and his output had become inseparable.
Raising the stakes of taste, and the new power bestowed upon the individual, both the one who made the work of art and the one who participated in it, accounts for why styles, which now included an emphasis on national, even vernacular traits, began to change more rapidly from this time, since the style is the lens by which the world can be seen in a better, or at least more novel, way. In answer to a more diverse, educated, and literate public, always hungry for alternatives to the status quo, it was up to the artist to assert his (and later also her) approach as the most relevant, most up-to-date, most fashionable, the best.
It is during this period in the early nineteenth century that artists not only self-consciously adopt and cultivate a signature style that reflects their individual, irreplaceable personality (and is therefore 'not to be missed'), but that artists, acting as free agents in the world, begin to notice their capacity to change public opinion. The French Revolution was decisive in this regard. It empowered artists, composers, poets, novelists, and philosophers all over Europe. Its presence can be felt in countless works, from Wordsworth's Prelude (publ. 1850) to Beethoven's Third Symphony, the 'Eroica' (1803-4), dedicated to Napoleon, whom Beethoven saw as the bringer of the revolution to the rest of Europe, a dedication he later retracted. If artists could be left alone to pursue their own interests, then they could also assert beliefs that, they hoped, reflected the better aims of society.
While Jacques-Louis David was living out his last days in exile in Belgium, painting rather unvigorous works, Théodore Géricault was planning the work whose disruptive, frenetic energy sought to place him at the centre of contemporary events. The Raft of the Medusa, 1818, is a massive painting (491 x 716 cm), an inordinate investment of time and money for any artist of the time. Sombre in colour and with a strikingly triangular composition, it represents the moment when wreck victims on a raft sight a ship on the horizon. In 1816 a flagship leading a convoy of French soldiers and settlers to the colony of Senegal ran aground in shallows near the West African coast, the fault of its captain, an inexperienced nobleman, Hugues Duroys de Chaumereys, appointed by the restored monarchy of Louis XVIII. While the captain and his officers took to the seaworthy boats, 150 of the 400 crew were left to fend for themselves on a raft made from wrecked timber. Reduced to cannibalism, fifteen remained to be rescued. The painting depicts bodies reduced to anthropomorphic larvae, haplessly dissipated by their exposure to salt and sun. One critic at the time admitted that 'the sight of this large composition inspires terror', while a less sympathetic respondent exclaimed that Géricault 'could have made it horrible, and he has made it merely disgusting; this painting is a heap of cadavers from which one turns away'.
By the time Géricault took up the subject, the wreck was already a public scandal. Two of the survivors, Savigny and Corréard, had published an account of their ordeal. The negligence it laid bare reached into the legitimacy of the monarchy that had made the appointment: a captain who owed his command to his title rather than his seamanship, the officers who took to the boats and left the raft to drift.
By eschewing classical narrative in the Raft of the Medusa, Géricault broke with the decorum of over two centuries of painting, dispensing with the visual metaphor of the past to instate something present within the living minds of its audience. Although it was a direct snub at the establishment, the establishment, embodied in a tired and gout-ridden king, showed its tolerance to the extent that Louis XVIII himself paid it special attention and is said to have remarked to the artist, 'Monsieur Géricault, you have just made a shipwreck that is not one for you' (qui n'en est pas un pour vous).
The artist entered the painting, both physically and topically, into the public market: a history painting of the grandest scale, the sort of thing made for a Salon wall or a state commission, here given over to the drowned and the abandoned and put before a paying public for the price of admission. While pictures had been put on public show before, there had never been such a showing of so large a picture with such confronting and, to some, such vulgar content. If the subject was unappealing, it was because what impelled Géricault's painting were not only aesthetic concerns but political ones as well. It would soon become evident that from this time on the aesthetic and the political were intricately intertwined. If the artist spoke for himself, he also spoke for his public, aiming to lend them a voice that salvaged their dignity, or gave them cause to feel that there was space for protest and thereby the possibility of change. Even today, when the artist asks him or herself, what should I do, what should I make, the response that frequently looms is that to be responsible the artist must seek some redress from injustice, conservatism, narrow-mindedness, bigotry, and everything else that represses or kills.
Géricault's yet more renowned student Delacroix would go on to paint works such as Scenes from the Massacres at Chios (1824), about the Turkish invasion of Greece, and Liberty Leading the People (1830), glorifying the French revolution of 1830 that ousted the last Bourbon king, Charles X. But such works are still laced with a flourish, an ennobling fantasy that separates them from the real world. Liberty Leading the People, with Liberty in the form of a woman, her breast bared, is a self-consciously manifesto work, and one that the French Republic in recent years was proud to put on postage stamps. Co-opting by the establishment is the common fate of political art, like political radicals themselves, who get absorbed by the institution in later life.
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Speaking for the unheard, the artist now turned to the poor. There is a definite continuity between Romanticism and Realism, but whereas Romanticism still liked to escape into invention and fancy, Realism took a different licence, attempting to cover over any suggestion that it was taking a licence at all. If Romanticism could be brash, Realism could also be prosaic. It took pride in glorifying the down-at-heel, and it was the first artistic tendency to concentrate on work as a subject. It took a perceptive critic like Baudelaire to locate this bias in Realism when he called to task its nostalgie de la boue, the hankering after muck, in some artists. Until the end of the nineteenth century Realism would remain enormously challenging to lay audiences whose concept of beauty was jarringly affronted. (A contemporary analogy is the extremes that performance artists put themselves through, bodily mutilation, privation and the like, which leave them open to the charge, voiced by specialists as much as by the public, of making a gratuitous spectacle of unpleasantness.) This was also the period when Dickens wrote the industrial novel Hard Times (1854) and Zola Germinal (1885), both dealing with the exploitation of the poorest working classes. It was the responsibility of the artist, the Realists believed, to bring the condition of the needy to the attention of others in better circumstances, communicating on behalf of those who were muted by lack of education and by the crushing onus of survival. Novelists and painters could wallow in their own aestheticisation of tragedy; the work nonetheless had something of the effect of investigative and tabloid journalism today, in changing the face of public opinion. Realist art is part of a much larger drive behind democracy, which believes, at least in theory, that the most unattractive truth should be brought into the public arena for public judgement, whose reactions are unfortunately not always that liberal, nor always in its own best interests.
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The same voice could be lent to a whole people. Realism became a useful visual tool for countries that, at the end of the nineteenth century, as a result of the gradual shift from monarchic autocracy toward democracy, were undertaking a reassessment of national identity as seen through their own eyes rather than solely through that of their sovereign. Its hankering after muck was only too appropriate, since a sizeable component of any identity, personal or national, is the hardship that goes into shaping it: war, famine, and labour. This was as much the case for artists in Australia at the end of the nineteenth century as for artists in Finland, countries on opposite sides of the globe that were beginning to come into national independence, a turn that brings in tow ownership over certain images. National identity is both factual and imaginary, and it fell to the artists of this period to locate and dream up a visual lexicon, a set of scenarios, and a style particular to the stories underpinning the history of a place. The other component of the Realist outlook now comes into view: the land.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, while still a subject state under the power of Russia, and after some six centuries under Sweden before that, Finnish artists and intellectuals, fired by the need for national independence, began agitating for a style and subject matter that they could claim belonged to them. Albert Edelfelt (1854-1905), Eero Järnefelt (1863-1937), Axel Gallén (1865-1931, later Akseli Gallen-Kallela), and Pekka Halonen (1865-1933), together with the composer Jean Sibelius (1865-1957), are associated with what in Finland is called the National Romantic school. In rallying for a national art they chose from national folklore and from the regions where they felt the spirit of Finland lingered more than elsewhere, much as Émile Bernard and Paul Gauguin in this same period saw in Pont-Aven in Brittany the surviving vestiges of an untouched and 'primitive' France. One of their favoured areas was Karelia in the north-east, and the township of Koli, one of the few raised points in a flat country, from which one could stand and look out over the countless islands flecking Lake Pielinen, one of the larger of Finland's thousands of lakes. Many of their works are haunting evocations of genius loci, the spirit of the place, with shades of Art Nouveau, or Jugendstil, and Symbolism, and if they do not seem overtly political they are aimed at locating the inner source of a Finnish essence: the kind of inward search for a national soul that the following century would corrupt.
Järnefelt's Wage Slaves (Raatajat rahanalaiset (Kaski)), 1893, is an image instantly recognisable to any Finn, since it relates the plight of peasants engaged in slash-and-burn agriculture, clearing the dense forest to make remote areas habitable. Pausing from her work, a girl stares out with an expression of despair and imprecation. The other figures are thin and strained in their positions of work. Järnefelt has purposely chosen the snapshot idiom of documentary photography, the girl posing to register her complaint to the camera, in order to amplify the image's claim to truth. But the overall sensory texture of the painting, its stark colouration together with its size (131 x 167.5 cm), lends it a pathos, resonance, and amplitude that is hard to find in photography. The girl stands for the people and for the land itself, neither of which has the power to escape its fate. This and works like these occupy a special place in the Finnish national character, and speak strongly for a nation that wore subjugation by other countries for over seven hundred years..
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References
Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa (Le Radeau de la Méduse), 1818-1819. Oil on canvas, 491 × 716 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Eero Järnefelt, Wage Slaves (Raatajat rahanalaiset (Kaski)), 1893. Oil on canvas, 131 × 167.5 cm. Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki.
Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People (La Liberté guidant le peuple), 1830. Oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Eugène Delacroix, Scenes from the Massacres at Chios (Scènes des massacres de Scio), 1824. Oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Op. 55, 'Eroica' (1803-1804).
Ludwig van Beethoven, Fidelio, Op. 72 (composed 1805, revised through 1814).
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, The Marriage of Figaro, K. 492 (1786). Libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte after Beaumarchais.
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, La Folle Journée, ou Le Mariage de Figaro (1784).
Charles Dickens, Hard Times (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1854).
Émile Zola, Germinal (Paris: Charpentier, 1885).
Charles Baudelaire, Curiosités esthétiques (Paris, 1868).
William Wordsworth, The Prelude, or, Growth of a Poet's Mind (composed 1798-1850; published posthumously, 1850).
