DYNAMIC ANATOMY invention produced the pictorial reportage of immediate human events and advanced the movement toward modern realism and political cartooning.Goya,like the towering. brooding Colossus of his etching.turning to look backward at the past,was about to move into the future of a new age with the thunderous intensity of a new concept of theme. form,and style.At the apex of his powers,Goya crossed the bridge of a new century.a new age in society,and a new art.The link had been forged;the eighteenth century rushed int the nineteenth;and a conscious symbolism of subjective emotionality and distortion showed itself in the human figure. It was left to the Napoleonic era to fix irreversibly the lines of demarcation between the earlier leanings of the genre realist baroque and the aristocratic rococo baroque into two antagonistic movements;the academic respectability of Napoleonic-classicist art and the genre libertarianism of romantie-realist art The tendency to concentrate on subject mat ter and argument of viewpoint in thematic material gave both movements the characteristic of immediacy in the portrayal of events.As such,personalized adventure and melodrama became an important feature of art,and in this they were the forerunners of modern maga- zine illustration.The two movements were notably marked by the recurring thrusts and counterthrusts of their diverse positions throughout the Napoleonic era.Essentially,it was a contest for the opinions of men:the drive toward egalitarian nationalism against conserva- tive authoritarianism.On the one hand were Goya,Gericault,Delacroix,Daumier,Forain: on the other,Gros,David,Meissonier,Ingres. The principle of art and science as a dual relationship had been undergoing an estrangement.Now,a dislocation was evident.The fracture between art and science was the reflection of a deepening dichotomy within the general field of science itself. Scientific pursuits had become largely an activity of commercial enterprise,sanctioned and supported through the benevolent authority of the state (Leibniz's view realized):acade- mies of science,especially in the physical and normative sciences,were the proper official bodies through which the leading figures pursued their endeavors and received official recognition and commendation;refinement of observations,verification,and quantifica- tion in proof of earlier accepted theories were the dominant,recognized lines of inquir in the controlled academies.However,new scientific inquiries and discoveries in the humanist-Baconian tradition,as well as investigations leading to the emerging human and social sciences,had no official sanction or status,and were viewed with suspicion and hostility.Findings in the progress of the individual were frequently not considered science at all.They were bitterly fought in academic circles.Briefly.we may observe the acrimony directed against such familiar figuresas Darwin,Huxley,Pasteur,and Freud. 24
CHAPTER THE DUALISM OF ART AND SCIENC An almost identical correlation emerged in cultural and artistic circles.Toward the latter half of the nineteenth century,the academy of art.with its proud reliance on state sanction,arrogantly rejected those artists(in France especially)who did not adhere to the well-defined strictures of neoclassicist concepts in thematic material,technique, manner,form,and style.Critical romanticism,stringent realism,and commonplace impressionism were held up to ridicule and disfavor as extolling the crude,the vulgar,the rauche in art.The rebellion against the academy was precisely in those areas of greatest academic divergence from the humanist-Baconian traditions in art.in revealing the human condition of the times.Academic denial,lack of patronage,and public disaffection led to poverty,disorientation,and alienation among the artists of the period.Extremes of personal rebellion,bohemianism,escapism,and mental breakdown wracked their lives Toward the end of the century,the Prussian invasion of France,the downfall of the decadent monarchy of Louis Napoleon,and the crisis in the emergence of the Third Republic brought the artist and his art to a turning point in history. In the onrushing tempo of the industrial age and the weltering disorder in personal life,the artist seized upon two exponents of the importance of the individual as an answer to his social rejection and moral anguish.The late nineteenth century posed the riddle of man's existence in a historical frame of reference.Is man free or determined?In the eighteenth century,the artist believed man to be free to think,to reason,to determine his own existence in nature.Now.in the nineteenth century.this belief was challenged head-on in the confluence of shocks and crises.The alienated artist saw himself as a unit of life in a mechanistic,determined,materialistic world.His answer was to seize upon two conceps of the individual:Bergson's philosophy of vitalism,asserting the life force in the individual to be a positive,conscious act of will in governing his present existence;and Freud's psychological investigations into the character structure and personality behavior of the individual,revealed in conscious and subconscious states of being.He saw an answer to the dilemma in his personal existence and artistic creation.In assuming the principles of Bergson and Freud,he constructed a selfcontained,introverted,esoteric world.In the anguish of his soul and the torment of his psyche,he created a spiritual-psychological unity.an intuitional-emotional autonomy. Goya,the progenitor of the modern movement,had reaffirmed the humanist objective to the harsh realities of life in symbolic form,expressive line,and emotional power.But the impact of the intervening years had left their mark on the progeny of the protean Goya.Postimpressionism,fauvism,cubism,expressionism,seeking refuge from the responsibilities imposed by the technological complexities of the twentieth century
DYNAMIC ANATOMY withdrew into a subjective world of egostatic calm,intellectual repose.voluntaristic excite ment,and psychoneurotic release.The long road of achievement in art,of communication tomen.resolved through the unity of art and science,had come to the edge of a precipice The dualism was finally ruptured.The crevasse of despair opened up a gulf of conficting states of experience,of frustration and anxiety,introspection and empathy,conscious and unconscious strivings,disjunctive,halfrealized momentary appe arances and esoteri symbols of experiences.Anatomical form,the ground plane,principles of reason,spatial structure,control of depth-the world of art presented through empirical perception and objective criteria-were at a point of no retur.The primal form in art,the figure of man had become a prisoner of the ego,held incommunicado in a nongravitational space void.The artist had rejected science in art. 1e6
