With the land enclosures came a greater interest in land itself. It became an important subject for Realism, it became an important subject for desire, leading to colonisation and eventually empire. Gainsborough's Mr. and Mrs. Andrews (above) is a fine example. Not only are the Andrews showing us their new found finery and possessions but their fertile land is displayed in great and realistic detail.

 

The de Paris, the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, and later the Royal Academy in London, introduced the idea of a formal grading in the quality of art, i.e. its acceptability, a process of control which aided the politicising of art, its fascination with land and power, and a feeling of cultural and morally superior status and therefore duty to the rest of the world.(1)

 

Concurrent with the emergence of photography, which could cheaply and accurately show realistic images of the world, we see the birth of Impressionism which can be seen as an attempt to recreate the perception of light informing the eye and brain, rather than just an attempt to recreate the image itself.

A clear example of this is available through comparing the two paintings of bathers, firstly The Bathers by William-Adolphe Bouguereau and then The Three Bathers by Paul Cézanne.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is clear that the first of the two paintings, The Bathers, carries a strong narrative. The lower of the two women has a distant look in her eyes and strokes her leg, quite unaware that she is under the surveillance of either her companion or the viewer. The woman above her, in a double position of power, being both behind and elevated, takes a moment to steal a glance at her naked form. The viewer, individually, can decide whether this is a glance of concern or desire. This work has been produced in a Romantic / Realistic style, unlike the work of Cézanne's The Three Bathers, which does not speak of realism and carries no discernible narrative. Instead  Cézanne shows us a perfectly flat picture, emphasising the brush strokes that created it and challenges us to comment on the painting itself and not the story within.

 

Photography went hand in hand with education and modernist thinking and; ‘By 1870 all those living in a modern city anywhere in the world had been affected by the newly developed image world made possible by the industrialization of the reproductive media.’(2)

 

This, of course, is a process that has an ever growing impact upon us, albeit a process we have largely become inured to and one which, while it still affects us, largely passes unnoticed but which is not always beneficial to our individual good.

 

The belief that enlightenment, logic and reason would lead Mankind unswerving to a better, brighter, more humane future was utterly crushed by the advent of the Great War in 1914. The horrific slaughter was greatly enabled by the efforts of science and logic and there were those in art who felt a need to disassociate themselves from the political messages that had for so long hitched a ride upon the artist’s output.

 

Conceived in 1915, during the Great War (the war to end all wars), the Dada movement conceived itself to be the art to end all art – the art to irrevocably break with the past. Sickened by more than a year of awful slaughter and especially the frightful carnage of the Somme (1916), which resulted in over one million casualties, the Dadaists proclaimed that art should carry no message, that it should mean nothing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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