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F or his 1980 BBC television series and subsequent book, the great art critic Robert Hughes chose the title The Shock of the New. Hughes used the phrase to capture the radical, often disorienting impact of Modern art, the sense that artists working from the late 19th century onward were repeatedly breaking with tradition. From a contemporary vantage point, the innovations that shook the Modernist world—Matisse’s uninhibited color, Picasso’s fractured body—can be easy to take for granted. But as Hughes described the gravity of the period, “From now on the rules would quaver, the fixed canons of knowledge fail, under the pressure of new experience and the demand for new forms to contain it.” As each new movement delivered its own shock, it forced viewers to reevaluate how they might see and experience reality.
Eleven artworks come to auction during The New York Sales as part of Shaping Modernity: Property from a Private American Collection. Spanning Impressionism to post-war figuration, each embodies a distinct shock of the new—moments of rupture or reinvention that together chart the defining turns of the Modernist century.
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The first Impressionist exhibition, in 1874, centered the pleasures of the senses and, importantly, contemporary life, as it now unfolded through the joys of middle-class leisure: open-air dance halls, cafés, riverbanks and theater balconies in a newly modernized Paris and its suburbs. Working outdoors, the Impressionists sought to capture the fleeting effects of light and atmosphere in rapid, broken brushwork. But by the mid-1880s, this painterly immediacy of vision and spontaneity of execution was being challenged. A group of young artists sought a more systematic approach that engaged the intellect as much as the senses.
Nineteenth-century scientific advancements had presented a host of new theories on color and visual perception. Among them, Eugène Chevreul’s The Law of Simultaneous Colour Contrast, from 1839, showed that adjacent colors alter and intensify one another in the eye. From this understanding, Georges Seurat and Paul Signac developed their system of Divisionism, often called Pointillism, where near-infinitesimal dots of unmixed, individual colors were arranged side by side to achieve a greater vibrancy through mélange optique, or optical mixture.
Popular sentiment has too often treated Signac as Seurat’s deputy. In reality, the painter was an instrumental co-founder of the nascent movement and its chief theorist following Seurat’s early death in 1891. In his seminal treatise on Neo-Impressionism, Signac situates the movement in a lineage going back through Eugène Delacroix, the “triumphant” colorist: “His passion for color would bring him to acknowledge, inevitably, the benefits of optical mixture,” Signac imagines of the Romantic painter.
Collioure. Les Balancelles (Opus 167), 1887, is among the most deft displays of Signac’s treatment of light—so luminous it carries the “Opus” distinction, a label he reserved for the works he considered the most successful. Opus 167 is one of four paintings Signac completed in the summer of 1887, while visiting the small Mediterranean fishing village of Collioure. The light radiates not only through the piercing expanses of sky and sea, which stretch from harbor to horizon, but also from the peach sand and white sails that reflect the intensity of the midday sun. The effect is heightened by the gentle paleness of the colors, as if bleached and by the strength of the sun—a decision that shocked his contemporaries, used to treating the Mediterranean with vibrant, saturated colors. Another departure came in response to the rigidity of Seurat’s style of application. Signac here infuses touches of looseness that lend kinetic energy to the inflated sails and evoke the enveloping thickness of the humid seaside atmosphere.
Signac was gregarious and self-confident, and he maintained many close friendships with other artists. Matisse, who had read Signac’s treatise upon publication in La Revue blanche in 1898, was reportedly so “fired with enthusiasm by the luminous exhibition” of Signac’s work at Galerie Druet in spring 1904 that he asked Signac if they could spend the summer together. Their time in Saint-Tropez had an undeniable effect on Matisse, who experimented with the stippled style in works that culminated in Luxe, calme et volupté, which he painted back in Paris (and which Signac promptly purchased following its display at the Salon des Indépendants in 1905). It employs greater freedom than both Seurat and Signac, with larger, more simplified strokes laid down at wider intervals.
For Matisse, this would prove only a passing phase. “Fauvism overthrew the tyranny of Divisionism,” he later recalled. Fauvism’s own “shock of the new” came in 1905 during an exhibition at the Salon d’Automne, in which the critic Louis Vauxcelles sniped that the works looked like “Donatello among the wild beasts.” The movement is among the shortest-lived, lasting only through 1907, and while it held to no singular underlying theory, unlike Signac’s Divisionism, it liberated color and form resolutely. No longer confined to representation, vibrant hues instead served individual expression. The figures in Matisse’s breakthrough bacchanal Le Bonheur de Vivre— which abandons his dalliance with Neo-Impressionism—attest to this. Their bodies, in blush pinks, pale yellows and absinthe-tinged greens, dance, make music and pick flowers. The colors’ flat contours recalled earlier Nabis style and thick, nonnatural outlines angered Signac, who wrote to a friend: “Matisse seems to have gone to the dogs.”
La Jetée à Collioure, 1907, came from Matisse’s own visit to the port of Collioure—his fourth since 1905—and serves as a record of the artist’s transformation in these formative years. Drawing on the expressive styles of van Gogh and pictorial organization of Paul Cézanne, Matisse delivers a placid view of Roca-Alta d’en Beille, High Rock in Catalan, a picturesque lookout a few minutes’ walk from the house Matisse rented. The painting, with its terracotta rooftops, iconic Église Notre-Dame-des-Anges and verdant interstices, still maintains some connection to reality, but already the non-naturalistic colors and spontaneous brushwork signal Matisse’s subjective experience. The trees framing the scene appear to warp outward as the grassy hills overlap, creating a perceptual curvature, as if the viewer were standing atop the lookout and taking in the wide expanse of surroundings. Soon Matisse would take a journey to Italy, and on his return, pursue his exploration of the figure. La Jetée à Collioure and other landscapes were the site of the artistic breakthroughs in color that would define his long career. Landscape would serve as the primary site of invention for the Fauves.
Derain was the first to tire of their experiments in Divisionism. “He goes on, but I’ve had my fill of it completely,” Derain wrote of Matisse to Maurice Vlaminck. Londres: La Tamise au pont de Westminster, 1906, is a lucid scene of ebullient color that shows none of the Neo-Impressionist restraint; instead it embraces the expressive force of his palette, with interlocking planes of color that echo Cézanne’s own perceptual armature.
His London scene is part of a larger suite of his celebrated London paintings, commissioned by his first dealer Ambroise Vollard, who had the commercial success of Claude Monet’s own views of London in mind. While visiting England, Derain could study the work of Turner and Rembrandt in the National Gallery and the vast collections of the British Museum, and it is Turner’s influence especially that can be felt in the picture. Blaring yellows, electric blues and salmon pinks in planes of contrasting arrangement attest to Derain’s effort to infuse the emotive potential of color with an underlying structure.
Derain formed a close friendship with the self-taught Maurice de Vlaminck, whom he met by chance in 1901 and later shared a studio. They worked together en plein air painting images of their local Seine valley countryside, often using unmixed paint directly from the tube to achieve pure color. La Route, from the summer of 1906, is a scene of the rustling wheatfield, rolling clouds and sentinel-like telegraph poles. Vlaminck, who once said he loved van Gogh more than his own father, here handles the paint with characteristic verve—the vigorous brushstrokes, rich impasto and high-key color echo the intuitive style of the Dutch Post-Impressionist and attests to Guillaume Apollinaire’s famous assertion that Vlaminck was the “wildest of the Fauves.”
The spark of Fauvism was extinguished shortly after ignition, as the Cézanne retrospective at the 1907 Salon d’Automne provided a new model, with its revelatory reconstruction of visual reality that concretized the process of seeing. Young painters flocked to the exhibition, each taking something unique, and its impact on the course of Western art cannot be overstated. Both Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were among the attendees. Inhabiting a bohemian world in Montmartre, overlooking Paris, the pair would soon invent Cubism, fusing multiple viewpoints of an object into a single image. Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon is often hailed as the beginning of Cubism: a great violent canvas filled with unstable nude figures with mask-like faces. The critic John Berger wrote: “We probably tend to underestimate the brutality of the Demoiselles d’Avignon…it was meant to shock….The dislocations in this picture are the result of aggression not aesthetics: it is the nearest you can get in a painting to an outrage.”
Unlike Cubism, which wasn’t conceived as a movement, Futurism announced itself through manifesto: “We declare that the splendour of the world has been enriched by a new form of beauty, the beauty of speed.” Conceived in 1908 by the Italian Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Futurism predicated itself on action, and on showing the world as it was actually experienced. Gino Severini, who lived in Paris, persuaded his fellow Futurists to visit in 1911 and introduced them to the works of the Cubists. Embedded in the artistic avant-garde, he had already tried his hand at the Divisionist technique, and he worked to assimilate the advancements of both movements. The drawing Étude pour Autoportrait au canotier, from 1912–13, shows his formal debt to Cubism. A self-portrait of the artist in a boater hat and bowtie, the balance of overlapping faceted planes proved that the Futurist aim of speed need not be confined to forms of the machine age, as the dynamism of the work shows.
Cubism inspired many artists to experiment in the style from its inception until the First World War. Russian-born Marc Chagall moved to Paris in 1911, where he encountered modern painting in a way that had not been possible through the limited reproductions available back home in Vitebsk. He absorbed the modernists’ innovations, from Renoir, Seurat and van Gogh to Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso and Delaunay, borrowing what he needed and applying it to a more dreamlike world drawn from his Jewish and Russian background. His 1911 painting I and the Village illustrates his assimilation of the various styles in a powerful depiction of a young peasant staring at an image of a cow, with a magical village in the background—a joyful, jewel-toned recreation of the poor village he missed back home. Paysans russes ou Mes parents, created in 1912–14, melds aspects of Cubism and Fauvism in a poignant depiction of his parents. Instead of the faceted simultaneity of perception, Chagall’s drawing presents the atemporal subjectivity of his own memory—using fiery patches of yellow and red to animate his father, while a dark void behind his mother suggests the sense of loss or forgetting waiting to consume the beloved memories of his family. Later in life, he recalled detesting the “mere geometry” of Cubist depictions, seeking instead “a true liberation…a logic of the illogical” to give form to his inner world.
