The chronological framework of modernism is most often uncontroversial and varies slightly from study to study: some insist that irreversible changes began already with the realism of Gustave Courbet, others trace their origin to the Salon des Outcasts, held in 1863, where the painting “Breakfast on the Grass” by Edouard Manet appeared. Be that as it may, both agree that modernism began in France.

When one speaks of modernism or contemporary art, one is always referring to a multitude of artistic movements and styles, unions and movements that often existed simultaneously and in many ways were adversaries and opponents. At first glance, it is difficult to find common features in the art of surrealists and expressionists, cubists and constructivists. But starting with French Impressionism and ending with American Abstract Expressionism, the artists climbed into that frame of reference, that area of search, which sharply separated them from all previous generations. With the beginning of modernism, the era of the visual tradition of the Renaissance came to an end.

There is a debatable but fairly good reason to begin modernism specifically with the realism of Gustave Courbet. Until he started painting peasant women with dirty heels, the set of motifs and subjects worthy of high art has hardly expanded significantly since Raphael. Biblical events, ancient mythology, heroic battle scenes, pastoral or dramatic landscapes – all these subjects could certainly count on the Paris Salon vulture, and their creators – on a comfortable life of a salon artist. 350 years of methodical service to the ideals of Raphael led to the fact that the Venus and the Roman patricians on the salon walls was annually more than images of modern life. And for the audacity to paint a nude on a scandalously large canvas without endowing it with a divine name, Courbet is to be thanked.

But, of course, the most obvious and much more daring prophet of modern art was Édouard Manet. Not only did he involuntarily lead a whole group of artists who would later be called Impressionists, he laid the foundations of a new perception of painting. He shifted the focus from the content of the painting to the methods and process of representation: forms, lines, color, deliberately distorted perspective. Outraged critics were the first to reproach him for painting the food on the table side by side, not because they were combined for a particular meal, but because their colors harmonized perfectly.

Manet, moreover, made the viewer uneasy, who until now had felt perfectly comfortable as the center of interaction with the painting. It was he, the viewer, who used to be in charge, and from his confident gaze the artist built the right perspective without causing dizziness or laughter. Manet plays with the viewer: in “Olympia” the viewer feels like a client in front of a prostitute’s bed, in “Execution of Emperor Maximilian” – that indifferent observer, the shadow of whose figure lies in the foreground of the picture, in “Bar at the Folies Bergere” – a visitor before the bar. Cézanne would go even further and paint still lifes as if he were looking at them from several points of view. The Cubists would push this mode of representation to its limits – and the unconditional position of the always right-wing viewer would be shaken to its core.

Despite the sharp conflicts and the dissimilarity of the artistic movements that are commonly referred to as modernism, each of them has one thing in common: experiments and discoveries in the field of form, color and technique. Beginning with Manet and ending with the Abstract Expressionists, all Modernist artists focused on painting and material more than on subject. From the Impressionist split strokes and purple shadows and the divisionism of Seurat, to the pure abstraction of Kandinsky, the suprematic compositions of Malevich, the painting of the color field by Rothko. The picture has its own pictorial value, unrelated to the value of the depicted subject. Renoir said, “The most important thing in our movement, I believe, is that we have freed painting from subjects. I am free to paint flowers and call them simply ‘flowers’, without them having their own story.

And yet that part of the art movement which, for all its passion for experimentation, held on to figurative painting without going into abstraction legalized in art many subjects still forbidden and unworthy of the sacred walls of the galleries. These included the Impressionists, the Fauvists, the Nabids, the Expressionists, and the London School. In cityscapes, for example, railroad bridges, engineering structures, and even repair work began to appear. Moreover, the landscape has become quite a full-fledged genre – for some pond in a quiet corner of the garden, the artist now takes a huge canvas, previously allowed only historical or mythological painting. But one of the most important changes occurred in the depiction of the female nude. “In this respect, as in many others,” writes John Berger in The Art of Seeing, “Manet was the turning point. If you compare his Olympia with Titian’s original, you see a woman performing a traditional role, but performing it already with some challenge.” And then there are the bathing women of Degas, the endless images of the nude in the bathtub in Bonnard’s series, the prostitutes of Toulouse-Lautrec and Picasso. The woman ceased to be a seductive object of contemplation, whose gaze was always directed toward the male viewer.

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