Modern Art: A Very Short Introduction by David Cottington

Author:David Cottington [Cottington, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 0192803646
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2005-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

With the consolidation of the market for modern art around the turn of the 20th century, and the emergence of the avant-garde as both a cultural formation and a collective identity for un- or anti-academic artists across the cities of the West, the notion of ‘genius’ gained a strategic role: from being an occasional accolade for supremely (imaginatively) gifted individual artists, it developed into the guarantor of the authority of that avant-garde. Just as it was impossible to imagine an academic artist of genius – so compromised by careerism, dulled by instruction, and limited by protocol would he (and occasionally she) be, by definition – so it was equally by definition that the term encapsulated, to the highest degree, the qualities of free-thinking independence and originality for which the avant-garde saw itself as standing. It was a faith in genius that underwrote the dealer Durand-Ruel’s gamble in buying the entire contents of painter Theodore Rousseau’s studio in 1866. It was a ‘nose’ for genius (and the self-esteem that came with the awareness of having one) that led the discerning collectors of the pre-First World War decade to put their money on young unknowns. And it was the recognition that genius was a quality ‘in the gift of’ the market – a constructed position and disposition – that governed the dealer Kahnweiler’s championing of Picasso’s cubist excesses.

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