John Singer Sargent,Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, and the Condition of Modernism in England, 1887

Abstract

The modernist paradigm in the history of art has been typically formulated through French art, and within this rubric British art is often positioned as the counterbalance to the modern. For example, in Investigating Modern Art (1996), an undergraduate textbook written for the Open University curriculum, the authors pair British artist William Frith’s painting The Railway Station (1862) with French Impressionist Claude Monet’s Interior of the Gare Saint-Lazare (1877) to demonstrate that Monet more successfully completes the modernist task of representing modern subjects and overthrowing conventions of painting than Fr ith (Dawtrey, Jackson, and Masterson 11–12). Such juxtaposition, while instructive to the undergraduate student, ignores the ways in which, in its own historical moment, Frith’s painting challenged visual conventions. 1 AMICO, an online digital image database, utilizes a similar pairing in a comparative exercise about the rise of the avantgarde, juxtaposing Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Promise of Spring (1890) with Paul Gauguin’s Soyez Amoureuses vous serez heureuses (1889). This comparison precludes—as Elizabeth Prettejohn has recently demonstrated—consideration of the ways in which Alma-Tadema, in his representations of ancient Rome, engaged issues of modernity (Prettejohn, “Lawrence Alma-Tadema”). British art, in these examples, is cast out of the modern tradition. Investigating Modern Art defines modernism as “a period designation, a style and a theoretical stance. Broadly speaking, Modernism [. . .] describes the efforts of artists [. . .] to break the codes and conventions of visual production—especially those preserved by Academies” (Dawtrey, Jackson, and Masterson 177). According to this paradigm, the academy occupies a reactionary, conservative position—one well suited to serve as a foil for the claims and ambitions of the avant-garde.