Modern Masters, 1870 to 1945

Critics laughed at the 1874 group show in Paris, and one canvas drew more scorn than the rest. Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise gave the hostile reviewers a word to throw back at the artists, and the artists kept it. The exhibition also included work by Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas and Paul Cezanne. Seven more shows followed at intervals until 1886. By then the insult had become the name of a movement, and the idea that a painting could record a passing effect of light rather than a finished studio scene had taken hold well beyond France.

This section follows the seventy-five years that began with those shows. It is a period usually told as a chain of “isms,” each one overturning the last. The chain is real, but it was made by individual painters working in specific studios, cafés and exhibition halls, and the articles below keep those people in view.

Painting in the open air

The impressionists worked outdoors and fast, in front of their subjects, trying to catch sunlight before it moved. Their brushwork broke into separate dabs. Monet led the way from the early 1860s, with Camille Pissarro and Berthe Morisot at the core of the group and Degas and Edouard Manet often associated with it. Tate points out that John Constable had been painting on the spot in Britain around 1813 to 1817, and that Walter Richard Sickert and Wilson Steer carried the approach into British painting.

After 1886

Post-impressionism is a looser label for what came after the last group show, and it was coined in London rather than Paris: the critic Roger Fry used it in 1910 for the exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists. It usually means four very different painters. Cezanne kept painting from nature but with new rigour, and is quoted as wanting “to re-do Poussin from nature.” Georges Seurat put colour on a scientific footing. Paul Gauguin kept the intense colour but turned to imagined subjects. Vincent van Gogh painted from nature with colour and brushwork that carried his own emotional response.

Breaking the single viewpoint

Cezanne’s habit of painting objects from slightly different positions fed directly into Cubism, which Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque developed around 1907 to 1908. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907 is usually named as the starting point. The critic Louis Vauxcelles, seeing Braque’s paintings in Paris in 1908, said they reduced everything to geometric outlines, to cubes. The first, analytical phase, from 1908 to 1912, used interlocking planes in blacks, greys and ochres. The synthetic phase, from about 1912 to 1914, brought brighter colour and real materials such as newspaper glued onto the canvas. That small act of pasting the everyday world into a picture opened a door that artists have walked through ever since.

Cubism broke with a convention that had governed European painting since the Renaissance: the illusion of space seen from one fixed point. From it came constructivism in Russia and the neo-plasticism of Piet Mondrian.

The mind as subject

Surrealism took the next step inward. Guillaume Apollinaire coined the word in 1917, but André Breton defined the movement in his Surrealist Manifesto of 1924 as a kind of pure psychic automatism, thought dictated without the control of reason. Artists including Salvador Dalí, René Magritte and Max Ernst used automatic drawing, chance techniques and dream imagery. Tate stresses that the movement was political as well as poetic, and that it spread through international networks far from Paris.

Reading the period now

The neat sequence from Impressionism to Surrealism leaves a great deal out. The articles collected here treat the famous names seriously and also look sideways, at the dealers, critics, exhibitions and overlooked painters who made the story possible.