Fourteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

New art-related, organizational forms coincide with the search for resources from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries. As state patronage is withdrawn, avant-garde artists search for new community. In this essay, I link the avant-garde artists’ search for resources with the creation of new, art-related organizational forms. The trajectory of this search runs begins with state-run salons and academies in the mid-nineteenth century; the rise of dealer-critic system and anti-salon alternative organizations and exhibitions of Impressionism; through the new institutional forms of Modernism. The state-run organization of the arts in the nineteenth century provide the backdrop to the organizational innovations of the Impressionist painters, such as the Salon des Refusés (1863), Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs (1874), and Groupe des Artistes Indèpendants (1884). New institutional forms continued to proliferate within Modernism before and in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, such as Bauhaus (established in 1919 in Weimar, Germany); formal artist groups such as Der Blaue Reiter (1910-16) and Die Brücke (1905-1914); and epic, alternative exhibitions such as the Armory Show (1913). Further, artistic movements like Futurism, Cubism, Russian Futurism and Suprematism, and Constructivism all included to conceptions of space and organization. Yet, it is not simply the search for resources and new organizational that defines this period. It is also a search for community, transforming the function of art in society.