Dennis Raverty

David was the most powerful artist in the history of Western art. Winning the Prix de Rome from the French academy under King Louis XVI, he was later a signatory to that monarch's execution during the period known as "The Terror."  Although briefly imprisoned, he later rose to become the first painter to Napoleon and reorganized the academy, placing his own students in prominent positions within that powerful state organization. It is no exaggeration to say that David was truly the "dictator" of art during these years. After Napoleon's defeat, David was exiled to Belgium, where he continued to have an strong and lasting influnce on French art of the nineteenth century. 

Despite the unexpected triumph of formalist abstraction in the postwar world, these three artists addressed themes of the "timeless and tragic" in their highly romantic quest for a non-objective sublime in an existential universe that seems devoid of intrinsic meaning, yet paradoxically, where each of us is, as Jean-Paul Sartre said, "condemned" to be free.

Reacting to the Expressionism of the prewar years, many artists in Germany returned to realism during the 1920s, a tendency labeled Neue Sachlichkeit, or the "New Objectivity." These artists explored the harsh realities of contemporary life during the unstable period between the wars and are the subject of an exhibition at the Neue Gallerie in New York City from February through May 2025.

    The socially conscious realism of these artists was the target of the Nazi's cultural policy against Modern art, brought to a climax in the "Degenerate Art Exhibition" staged by the Nazis in 1936 to ridicule Modernism, whether abstract or realistic, as decadant "cultural bolshevism."

A showcase for the influence of modernist machine aesthetic in architecture and design, the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes was held in Paris from April to October 1925. Organized by the French government to promote the new architecture, interior design, furniture and industrial design, this decorative visual style was influenced by recent avant-garde Cubism, Expressionism and other movements throughout Europe in a fashionable synthesis that was vehemently modern and unhistoricizing.

"We were like two mountain-climbers roped together." This is how Georges Braque described his collaboration with Pablo Picasso during the years before the First World War. The art they developed was called "Cubism" by a baffled critic (although it has nothing whatsoever to do with cubes). The movement they started had profound influences not only on subsequent painting, but also graphic art, industrial design, sculpture and modernist architecture of Corbusier, the Bauhaus and the International Style.