(1) Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a small group of artists working in France and Germany began to re-evaluate the meaning and function of art. In the preceding century, art had lost many of its traditional functions. It had ceased to be an important method for recording the way things look because that job had been taken over by the camera. Artists now sought to isolate the special province of art, to define its own particular essence. Painters and sculptors joined other intellectuals in questioning classical standards based on rationalized patterns and generalized ideals. The world view of the 1890s had been so altered by the tumultuous changes of the nineteenth century that the cool. orderly classical figure style and static Renaissance compositions no longer seemed appropriate forms of expression.

(2) In 1886 the painter Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) came from Holland to France, where he produced a revolution in the use of color. He used purer, brighter colors than artists had used before, he also recognized that color, like other formal qualities, could act as a language in and of itself. He believed that the local or "real" color of an object does not necessarily express the artists;experience. Artists, according to van Gogh, should seek to paint things not as they are, but as the artists feel them. In Public Garden at Arles, the colors of the pathway, the trees, and the sky are all far more intense and pure than the garden's real colors. Thus, van Gogh captures the whole experience of walking alone in the stillness of a hot afternoon.

(3) Practically unknown in his lifetime, van Gogh's art became extremely influential soon after his death in 1890. One of the first artists to be affected by his style was a Norwegian artist named Edward Munch (1863-1944), who discovered van Gogh's use of color in Paris. In The Dance of Life, Munch used strong, simple line and intense color to explore the unexpressed sexual stresses and conflicts that Sigmund Freud's studies were bringing to light. (In Germany the tendency to use color for its power to express psychological forces continued in the work of artists known as the German Expressionists.)

(4) Alongside the revolution in color, another revolution was occurring in the use of space. (Ever since the Renaissance. European artists had treated the outside edges of paintings as window frames.) The four sides of a frame bounded an imaginary cube of space - -a three dimensional world- -in which figures and background were presented. From about 1880 on, Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) explored a new way of expressing the experience of seeing. He sought to create painting with perfectly designed compositions, true both to the subject matter and to his own perceptions. He also wanted to include and build upon tradition.

(5) Between 1909 and 1914, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963) worked together to develop a new style that is called cubism. Like Cezanne, they explored the interplay between the flat world of the art of painting and the three-dimensional world of visual perception. (The two worlds influence each other. so that in art as in life, one confuses symbols or painted representations with the objects in the real world for which they stand.) This observation about experience is explicit in a cubist work like The Violin. Illustrations of fruit cut from an actual book are pasted in the corner. These sheets are real objects introduced into a drawing, or symbol. But the illustrations are also printed reproductions of drawings that were based on real fruit.

(6)In a typical Renaissance or baroque painting, objects are set inside an imaginary block of space, and they are represented from a single stationary point of view. A cubist work is constructed on a different system, so that it re-creates the experience of seeing in a space of time. One can only know the nature of a volume by seeing it from many angles. Therefore, cubist art presents objects from multiple viewpoints. (Furthermore, vision is conditioned by context. memories. and events in time). In The Violin, some of the words cut from real newspapers refer ironically to an artist's life. The numerous fragmentary images of cubist art make one aware of the complex experience of seeing.

(7) The colors used in early cubist art are deliberately banal, and the subjects represented are ordinary objects from everyday life. Picasso and Braque wanted to eliminate eye-catching color and intriguing subject matter so that their audiences would focus on the process of seeing itself.

(8) Throughout the period from 1890 to 1914, avant-garde artists were de-emphasizing subject matter and stressing the expressive power of such formal qualities as line, color, and space. (It is not surprising that some artists finally began t0 create work that did not refer to anything seen in the real world). Piet Mondrian (1872- 1944), a Dutch artist, came to Paris shortly before World War I. There he saw the cubist art of Picasso and Braque. The cubists had compressed the imaginary depth in their paintings so that all the objects seemed to be contained within a space only a few inches deep. They had also reduced subject matter to insignificance. It seemed to Mondrian that the next step was to eliminate illusionistic space and subject matter entirely. His painting Composition 7, for example, seems entirely flat.

(9) Mondrian, like several other early masters of modern art, was a philosophical idealist. He held that the objects of perception are actually manifestations of another independent and changeless realm of essences. Art, he believed, should take its audience beyond the world of appearances into the other, more “real" reality. Logically, he eliminated from his paintings any references to the visible world.

(10)The revolution in art that took place near the turn of the twentieth century is reverberating still. After nearly a hundred years, these masters of modern art continue to inspire their audiences with their passion and vision.