Posts Tagged ‘Industrial Revolution’

Aug
20
2010

Charles Baudelaire, Author of Modernism

BAUDELAIRE AND MODERNITY

Every age needs its observer and every era requires an interpreter.  That individual has to be an odd cross between a poet and a reporter, to elevate the culture above mere description.  Charles Baudelaire (1821 – 1867) was a renegade poet, a syphilitic art critic, and above all a disaffected and alienated student of a society under the pressure of a transition.  That Baudelaire was a marginal character who lived on the fringes of a cynical consumer society was crucial to his ability to describe and define the new phenomenon, “modernité.”  Although the poet wrote extensively on a variety of topics, he is especially significant for essays, prose poems, poetry and art criticism that articulated a new way of life. In 1947, Jean-Paul Sartre accused Baudelaire of “bad faith” due to the many contradictions in his life and work.  However, a self-destructive poet and drug addicts, who lived in debt on the run from creditors, while, at the same time, taking part in the intellectual and artistic life of Paris, can hardly be expected to be consistent.  The very times of Baudelaire were paradoxical.

The art critic straddled the divide between waning Romanticism and emerging Realism, watching Eugène Delacroix after his creative peak and not living long enough to see Èdouard Manet reach his full artistic potential.   While there may never have been an artist who coincided with the poet’s desire to describe modernité, Baudelaire addressed the unfolding of a new way of life in a dense urban environment of the “crowd” and the impact of technology upon society and art.   By the 1840s, not only was Romanticism over but the art produced by the salon system was also becoming increasingly irrelevant.  The excuse for academic art was that it portrayed the “heroic” life of the ancient world, but, for Baudelaire, it was necessary for artists to be of their own time.  But what that “their time” mean?

The industrial revolution came slow and late to France, not in small part because many of the technological changes had been developed in the homeland of their hated enemy, England.  While England was already adjusting to industry, France, by mid-century, was just beginning to cope with the transition from an agricultural society to an urban and industrial one.  It is possible to see the process of artistic adjustment to these changes in the paintings of Jean-François Millet and Gustave Courbet.  Millet presented the countryside as frozen in time while Courbet showed the class tensions even in small villages.  Meanwhile, the mainstream salon artists chose to ignore the present in favor of the historical past. Few artists had to ability to see their age in all its uniqueness.  To be fair, the cultural changes caused by the Industrial Revolution were so extensive and far-reaching that it was easier to look away.  The problems for the artists during this transition period were, first, content of art—contemporary or traditional? and what new artistic techniques would be appropriate for the new age?

More than anyone, Baudelaire articulated both the new content and the new way of expressing the new content.  In doing so, he impacted many of his contemporaries and influenced later generations of writers and poets.  As an art critic who had to work the salon beat, it was his job to discern a trend or a concern with each annual exhibition.  One of his most important salon statements was penned in 1846.  In an essay published as a section of “The Salon of 1846″: “On the Heroism of Modern Life,” Baudelaire argued that modern life was as heroic as ancient life and that men in frock coats were as brave in their own time as the Roman gladiators were in the arena:

It is true that this great tradition has been lost, and that the new one is not yet established.  But what was this great tradition, if not a habitual everyday idealization of ancient life—a robust and material form of life, a state of readiness on the part of each individual…?  Before trying to distinguish the epic side of modern life, and before bringing examples to prove that our age is no less fertile in sublime themes than past ages, we may assert that since all centuries and all peoples have had their own form of beauty, so inevitably we have ours. That is the order of things…But to return to our principle and essential problem, which is to discover whether we possess a specific beauty, intrinsic to our new emotions…The pageant of fashionable life and the thousands of floating existences—-criminals and kept women—which drift about in the underworld of the great city; the Gazette des Tribunaux and the Moniteur all prove to us that we have only to open our eyes to recognize our heroism.  For the heroes of the Iliad are but pigmies compared to you—-who dared not publically declaim your sorrows in the funeral and tortured frock coat which we all wear today!—you the most heroic, the most extraordinary, the most romantic and the most poetic of all the characters that you have produced from your womb!

The “hero” is male but not just any male.  The poet’s hero is not the contented businessman who as prospered under the Citizen King, Louis Philippe, but the hero of la bohème, a cultivated and well-educated man who was also an outsider: the dandy.  “…a dandy can never be a vulgar man,” Baudelaire said.  The dandy wears the new uniform, the habit noir, the black suit with distinction, proclaiming middle class status.  And yet the dandy keeps himself apart from the bourgeoisie by moving with the “crowd,” without ever being part of the crowd.  Being a dandy, standing aside and watching, is a strategy of self-defense.  But a dandy, par excellence, is also a man who is able to walk the city, freely.   Baudelaire is the new man, the flâneur, the person who strolls the side streets, peruses the new arcades and watches the carriages pass down the wide boulevards.  At the same time the arcades were ushering in a new form of looking, the spectacle of window-shopping, a new nocturnal Paris sprang into being with the introduction of gaslight in the 1820s.   Here, in the darkness, is where we find the poet’s world of marginal people who live a “floating existence,” and it is here were we find the female counterpart to the dandy, the prostitute, the only kind of woman allowed to go abroad at night.  Modernism and its heroes is not for the respectable nor the faint-hearted.

Baudelaire, like many inhabitants of the changing city, felt the stresses of the transition.  The city he had been born in was vanishing before his very eyes.  According to one of Baudelaire’s greatest biographers, the German writer, Walter Benjamin, Baudelaire was part of Bohemia, la bohème. A Marxist writer, Benjamin linked Baudelaire to the territory of the dispossessed by quoting Marx on the precarious position of this social class:

…Their uncertain existence, which in specific cases depended more upon         chance than on their activities, their irregular life whose only fixed stations were the taverns of the wine dealers—the gathering places of the conspirators—and their inevitable acquaintanceship with all sorts of dubious people place them in that sphere of life which in Paris is called la bohème….the whole indeterminate, disintegrated, fluctuating mass which the French call la bohème….

By the time of the Second Empire, the chasm between rich and poor had stranded a number of middle class people on the wrong side of prosperity.   “It is bourgeois society that Baudelaire holds guilty of the suffering of the post-aristocratic period, and not the least that art has gone to rack and ruin, that poets and artists like himself now belong to the déclassés,” John E. Jackson remarked in 2005.  Thus Baudelaire wrote as an outsider, not an insider, taking advantage of an unprecedented expansion of the press.  Over the past two decades, new opportunities had emerged for writers such as Baudelaire who was able to find his unique voice and to carve out a position as an observer and witness.  The poet was a character composed of unabashed contractions who had no problem in proclaiming,  “Any newspaper, from the first to the last is nothing but a web of horrors….” As a writer (who wrote for newspapers) he tried to defend traditional art making against the onslaught of technology, mainly photography, while, at the same time, rushing out to be photographed many times.  In “The Salon of 1859,”  there was a section,  ”The Modern Public and Photography,” where Baudelaire complained about the clash between art and photography:

Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.  If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude, which is its natural ally.

These two essays, written over ten years apart, are indicative of the contradictions and confusions over the role of modern life in art.  On one hand, Baudelaire was convinced that the “heroism of modern life” was worth of depiction but on the other hand, that depiction had to be hand made, done in the old fashioned “art” way.   A machine can never replace art.  But more should be said of the difficulty of writing in a moment of social becoming, for Baudelaire, like Denis Diderot, was looking for the artist who could capture modernité or the pulse of his (or her) own time.  Courbet painted contemporary life, but this life was rural and, hence, not the “urban modern” condition that was the daily life of Baudelaire.  The poet was clearly looking for someone who expressed modern life in Paris, the city that Walter Benjamin called “the Capital of the Nineteenth Century.”

Baudelaire found his candidate, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in a fellow member of the fringes of society, an obscure illustrator named Constantin Guys.   The result of the relationship between the poet and the illustrator, both inhabitants of la bohème, was a long essay, almost book length, which described the condition that Baudelaire called modernité. That essay was the famous The Painter of Modern Life.  The poet states, “By ‘modernity,’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable…”  Guys, an illustrator and a quick sketch artist, was the outsider, who, because of his position on the fringes, was able to produce hundreds of quick studies of all that was fast-moving and fleeting in modern life.  Modernism, for both Baudelaire and for Guys, becomes defined by the concept of constant change, or what the art critic, Harold Rosenberg, would term, a hundred years later, “the tradition of the new.”

See also: “Baudelaire as Art Critic” and “Baudelaire and The Painter of Modern Life”

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

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Apr
30
2010

Early Nineteeth Century Utopian Philosophy

Early Nineteenth Century Utopian Philosophy

The largest issue of the second half of the Nineteenth Century was the containment of people.  The problem of how to control a growing population in  Europe and an alien population in colonized lands occupied the century’s philosophical minds.  In contrast to the Enlightenment philosophers who wrote in abstract absolutes, the mid-century philosophers were more concerned with the particular and the pragmatic. The materialist philosophers and socialist writers had been farsighted in their discussions of the impact of the Industrial Revolution. These early Nineteenth Century thinkers were more utopian than practical but they were moved by the plight of the workers who were being dehumanized and alienated in an industrial system based upon the demands of the machine.

Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon and his follower, Charles Fourier, in France and Jeremy Bentham and Robert Owen in England (and later in America) were products of the Eighteenth Century and disciples of the Enlightenment.  They envisioned a better way of life, based upon shared responsibility and rewarding and fulfilling labor.  These utopians were not revolutionaries but reformers.  From a practical point of view, they were ineffectual, but from a philosophical and social perspective, their ideas of equality and open-mindedness, especially towards the equality of women and tolerance of sex, are still advanced to this day.  However, there is a dark side to this early socialism.  In comparison to today’s socialists and socialism as practiced in Europe, the Nineteenth Century utopian socialists were closer to Twentieth Century totalitarian rulers than their benign-sounding classification would suggest.

According to Paul Taylor in The Birth of the Modern, Saint-Simon was a witness to the French Revolution but he felt that the Industrial Revolution was the most important.  It was he who coined the terms “industrialization” and “industrialist” as terms of admiration. Saint-Simon saw these “new” men as those who would improve society and thus elevate the standard of living by all people and raise the lower classes to a higher level.  It was Saint-Simon, not Marx, who coined the phrase, “To each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”   Like Marx, Saint-Simon saw society in a fundamentally new way: people were not  “citizens” or individuals but as part of a class.  His remarks about needs and abilities can be construed as benefiting the “industrial class,” which had the ability but then would have to assist the lower class which had needs that should be met.  Certainly Saint-Simon’s reputation as the “first socialist” is probably justified, due to his idea of social responsibility, for his favored industrialists were expected to repay the less fortunate and to spread the benefits of their wealth.

Obviously, Saint-Simon’s theories would have been an effective way to free the creative hands of the “new men” and to control the teeming masses of the poor, and his follower Charles Fourier was quite explicit in how people should behave in modern society.  He was gifted with a vivid imagination and saw a future when the Mediterranean Sea would turn to lemonade and women would have four men in her life at the same time.  While the world is still waiting for the lemonade stage, many of Fourier’s ideas have been attempted by people who wished to experiment with a communal way of life.  Fourier’s idea of a garden city became one of the long lasting dreams of city planners, such as Frank Lloyd Wright.

The English utopian socialist, Robert Owen, also attempted to build actual communal settlements, which were inspired by the idea of improving the living conditions industrial society.  However, like many of the socialists of the early part of the Nineteenth Century, Owen’s ideas were centered upon control of the very people who had a history of being unruly demanders for their basic rights.  His communal villages, from New Lanark in Scotland and New Harmony in Indiana, were marred by his authoritarian rule over his “human machines.”   Although it was in Owen’s new organization, All Classes of All Nations, that the term “socialism” was first used, like all the so-called radical socialists, Robert Owen created systems of dominance and subordination.

Perhaps the best-known practitioner of control over those who needed to be controlled, Jeremy Bentham imagined the most famous building never built, the Panopticon, a model prison that allowed for maximum surveillance with minimum staffing.  As a social architect, Bentham, who witnessed the worst of the British Industrial Revolution, recommended rounding up the poor and the criminal and incarcerating them.   His ideas sound positively Twenty-first Century in his demands that people be taken care of before they committed a crime and that these social undesirables should be part of a universal registry of names, a sort of national ID. Writing in Discipline and Punish, The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault used Bentham’s unbuilt Utopian prison as the starting place for what turned into a society of surveillance or a “carceral” society.

Utopian socialists, then, were visionary but their visions were at odds with “liberty, equality, and fraternity” and more in line with totalitarian social engineering that included, not freeing individuals for self-actualization, but in cataloguing them for future reference.  The distance between Saint-Simon and Bentham can be measured by their projections for a future society.  Saint-Simon sounds almost conservative today in his dream of the shrinking state.  In the future, there would be no poverty and ignorance, and, therefore, no need for government.  On the other hand, the vision of Bentham necessitated greater government, the kind of government that would patrol the streets, actively seeking the poor and future criminals.

What makes the arguments of the early socialists interesting is that they were taking place against a backdrop of monarchies, constitutional and otherwise. Reading between the lines, it is possible to hear the voices of men of privilege, suspicious of the lower classes, called, by Marx, the Roman name, the “proletariat” and trusting of the power of the ruling class. True communal equality was hard to imagine.  Communism had been a concept ever since the French Revolution and by the middle of the Nineteenth Century, and ideas of communal equality and the redistribution of wealth throughout society were well established. Those in charge who were being enriched by the capitalist system liked it the way it was saw and no reason to be kinder or gentler to their workers.  The assembly line might result in alienation, the repetitive motions required by factory labor might be boring, and the safety and health conditions under industrialization might be dangerous, but the industrialists saw only profit, which trumped the needs of the workers.  At Mid-Century, Karl Marx would take the dialectical method of Hegel and turn it into Dialectical Materialism, taking Hegel’s idealism into the realm of materialism.  The ideas of utopian and positivist thinkers filtered down to the Realist artists who began to look carefully and critically at what the “modern” had wrought.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com


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Mar
19
2010

Podcast 16 Romanticism in England, Part One

THE WRITING OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM

Like Neo-Classicism, Romanticism was an international movement, but, unlike the earlier movement, Romanticism differed from country to country. In England, Romanticism established an aesthetic that was reflective of national conditions. The British Romantic artists were closely aligned to the Romantic poets and a new group of philosophers and art writers emerged to explain this new national form of English Romanticism.

 

 

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Nov
06
2009

The Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution

For the artist of the modern period, the most essential problem was how to depict the modern: as a new style, as new content, as a new attitude?  Each generation would fine its own answer, only to have the next generation find this answer inadequate.  In the process of attempting to find the “modern,” the role of art would change, the role of the artist would change, the role of the public would change, and ironically, the artist and the public would become completely separate.  How did the artist become separated from the mass art audience? This estrangement was the result of significant social and economic changes that had changed the artist’s role in society.  The condition of the avant-garde—that is, artists being “ahead” of the public’s taste and expectations—is closely linked to the development of the Industrial Revolution.  This social and economic revolution in manufacturing was, perhaps, both the most sudden and swift and also the most complete and comprehensive revolution in history: it changed everything.  The trend away from small scale artisanal or intimate domestic manufacture towards mass production began around 1740, in England and a bit later in America with the industrialization of the textile industry and the development of mining to find the coal to run the machines to run the mills.  Textile mills sprang up near rivers, drawing thousands of workers from the surrounding countryside to new factory towns.

Thanks to the increasing importance of industry, the workplace moved from the home to an environment that was artificial, where there was no day and no night. This interior environment was based upon the relentless rhythms of the omnipresent machines that ruled those who worked for and with them, severing the workers from the outdoor world of nature and its eternal rhythms.  Beneath the earth, miners toiled in an equally artificial environment, in total darkness broken only by candles, in constant danger from escaping gases or cave-ins or flooding. Here, as in the factory, night and day had no meaning, time itself was unnatural, linked to the length of the “shift,” or the span of time one worked, not to the rising and setting of the sun or to the cycle of the seasons.  Far from home, severed from the land, people–men, women and children–now worked long days, measured by carefully segmented time, in dangerous places for low pay.  But their alternatives were few.  With the growth of population due to better hygiene and diet, farming communities could absorb only so many people and many hungry peasants joined the growing army of industrial workers.

“Labor” became a new kind of concept, referring to a new kind of  work regulated by the rhythm of the machine and timed to the ticking of the clock.  Time itself was sped up, cut into tiny pieces.  Work, too was sped up, and was equally divided into a segmented process.  In dusty, noisy factories, absorbed in repetitive tasks, working like machines, the workers were also alienated from the end product, an object produced in pieces, the result of a rational and an analytic process, which investigated and examined each aspect of manufacture.  Each worker was responsible for a segment, for a part of the process.  The factory resembled a vast machine, the workers mere cogs in the machine.  The process and pace of manufacture ruled their lives. With the social and financial shift from landed wealth to industrial wealth, money and power were no longer solely dependent upon inherited position and were increasingly based upon new opportunities provided by trade and commerce and manufacture.  The shift in social power also moved the site of culture from the aristocratic courts to urban centers, teaming with ambitious individuals, all determined to take advantage of the opportunities capitalism promised.  These individuals created prosperity for themselves and controlled the new sources of wealth as completely as the now-deposed aristocrats had once ruled their domains. Working conditions actually declined in quality for the workers who worked every day for well over ten hours a day under inhuman and unhealthy conditions.

Despite the unprecedented hardships on the workers, the Industrial Revolution allowed a new form of upward mobility. Any man with wit and foresight and a few good ideas could become wealthy and powerful. Two hundred years ago, vast fortunes were made by the newly formed middle class who had scrambled up the social ladder, eager to forget their humble origins. Coming from the lower classes, the peasants and the urban proletariat, the factory workers operated machines which fabricated products on a massive scale, making consumer goods available to the entire population, making the owners of the factories wealthy while raising the standard of living for everyone. Those who owned the manufacturing process—mining and making—enjoyed the fruits of what the Prussian philosopher, Karl Marx, called “surplus value,” meaning the difference what the worker was actually paid and what the object was actually sold for. During the Eighteenth Century, the middle class grew in social and political power.  The result was a changing of the guard from one ruling class—the aristocrats who had inherited wealth, which was based upon land holdings to the middle class who had created wealth based upon manufacture.  Land is limited; farming is dependent upon weather; manufacturing, on the other hand, is theoretically unlimited and independent of anything but the marketplace, as Karl Marx pointed out, was driven by desires for commodity.  Later Sigmund Freud would agree with Marx that a commodity was a mere symptom or a fetish, guaranteed to create, not to satisfy desire.

The ephemeral commodity would “melt into air,” as Marx put it, only to be replaced by the next fad and the next novelty.  Writing the Communist Manifesto in exile in England, the Prussian philosopher imagined an uprising of the proletariat once the veil of ideology was torn from its eyes.  The proletariat would seize the mode of production, and during this phase of the people’s ownership would be “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” Witnessing the degradation of the workers on the eve of the Revolution of 1848, Marx waited in vain for the success of the workers’ uprising. But it was not to be. Workers were seduced by the all-powerful commodity, which, as Marx noted, had the qualities of the fetish to arouse desire.

“Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labor, we behold starving and overworking it.  The newfangled sources of wealth, by some weird spell, are turned into sources of want.  The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character.  At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to have become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy.”

During the Nineteenth Century, burgeoning technology was buttressed by an unfettered optimism.  It was an era when most people believed in Progress, that industrialization had ushered in a better way of life, which, like the human beings who benefited from it, would develop and evolve in a positive direction.  The world became defined by constant changes, some of which were good, but there was a dark side to the state of flux: upheaval and disequilibrium.  Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, human beings seemed to be in control of the environment, capable of acting as designers of Nature itself.  Although by the time the Industrial Revolution was fully in effect, the Enlightenment was a philosophical or social movement was long over, the new economic system of capitalism still echoed some of the Enlightenment’s most cherished concepts: optimism and progress.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to
Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.
info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

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Sep
04
2009

What is “Modern?”

What is “Modern?”

“Modern” is essentially a Western concept, based upon cultural forces, specific to European countries and transplanted to their colonies.  As a small and compact continent, Europe was a site of circulation for new ideas and new ways of living in the world.  Other continents, such as Asia and Africa, were isolated and self-sufficient and would not be touched by European ideas and values until the age of imperialism.  The Middle East, equally self-sufficient, chose, according the Princeton professor, specializing in the Middle East, Bernard Lewis, to sidestep, not so much modern life, but the implications of modernism.

The characteristics or events usually associated with the “modern” were invented in Europe, developed in Europe, and played out to their logical (and often tragic ends) in Europe.  Both as a British colony and as an independent nation, America played a significant role in developing the modern way of life, but the American “modern” would be significantly different from the European “modern.”  When did “modern life” begin? The answer depends upon one’s historical perspective.  Some would argue that modern life, the life we in the West have inherited, can be traced back to the Renaissance period in Europe. For the purposes of this website, it is more efficient to move beyond the nascent beginnings of the middle class and capitalism and international trade to the outcome of these tendencies, the most significant of which, it might be argued, being humanism. For the modern age, the human being is firmly situated at the center of the universe.

Most discussions of the Modern can be divided into distinct parts, all of which are interlocked. There is no “first,” there is no “beginning,” in absolute terms.  For convenience sake, it can be stated that the Seventeenth Century saw a significant shift away from God and towards scientific discovery and experimentation. The trend to empirical observation and material research not only expanded the discourse of knowledge based upon observable facts but also threatened the role of religion in society.   By the Eighteenth Century, the culture was more secular than spiritual and a new breed of people, called “new men” were able to build upon the scientific bases to develop a more rational means of production that evolved into industrialization and mass production.

These “new men” were an ever-growing group of professionals, doctors, lawyers, financiers, and business owners who were middle class and ambitious.  They financed, built and serviced the Industrial Revolution, supported on the backs of the lower classes. Women formed a support system, either at home or in the fields or in the factory and were denied the benefits of the modern. Human labor was needed for industrialized modes of productions and people, both proletariat and peasant, began to drift away from traditional artisan occupations and rural employments and towards factory work.  Mass manufacture and trade encouraged the increase in the size of cities, and by the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, London was the largest city in Europe.

Urbanism and industrialism and the trend away from an agrarian society, which was ruled by the landed gentry, began in England and America.  The combination of a concentration of people in urban areas and alternatives to traditional life styles that brought pressure on the political system to grant “natural rights” to the people. The concept of a “natural” right to freedom and happiness was essentially a middle class and secular concept.  As opposed to pleasure being the sole pursuit of the upper classes, human beings had the “natural” right to be happy.  As opposed to the Divine Right of Kings, as sanctioned by God, people began to think of themselves as the “natural” rulers of their own society.  Monarchs ruled with the consent of the governed and had the obligation and responsibility to preside over their subjects wisely and benevolently.  The Seventeenth Century Benevolent Despot gave way to the Citizen King or Enlightened Monarch, answerable to the people.

The emerging “Modern” way of life would have major consequences upon Western culture.   The “modern” that was emerging was unprecedented and needed to be articulated.  Explaining the social and cultural and economic changes was the task of the philosophers who referred to their period as the “Enlightenment.”  Enlightenment philosophy articulated a social reaction to scientific achievements, was the achievement of several societies.  French and English and German philosophers all made major contributions to Enlightenment thought, the cornerstone of which was Reason. The center of philosophy was human reason, not God’s ideals.

Human reason was capable of establishing a new kind of society, based upon what Jean-Jacques Rousseau called “the Social Contract,” established by the free will of humans who agreed to come together and live in democratic harmony, without Kings and without God dictating the terms.  The philosophy of the Enlightenment inspired two political revolutions, one in America and one in France, and was the impetus for political change in other parts of Europe.  Thus the “Modern” can be characterized by a number of “revolutions:” 1. A philosophical revolution,  2. A social revolution, 3. A political revolution,  and 4.  An economic revolution.  The task of artists, poets, novelists, musicians, and the visual artists was to give subjective expression of the new age in new languages, which would produce new forms.  The artist is the product of all of the “revolutions” of the Modern, which are discussed in the next chapters.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com


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