Underdog Art Movements Behind Art History’s Breakthroughs

Feature image: Giovanni Fattori, Bivacco (La lettera al campo), 1873, Public Domain. Titles originally in Italian, Russian, and French have been translated to English.

Histories of modern art tend to organize around a few decisive moments and the names attached to them. A closer reading of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries uncovers several smaller art movements that arrived at comparable ideas first, frequently in cities at some distance from Paris and with far less critical attention. For newcomers to art history, their stories offer a useful corrective, since they show how ideas circulate between art movements, lie dormant for a time, and reappear under new names.

The Macchiaioli emerged in Florence in the mid-1850s, when a circle of young painters began meeting at the Caffè Michelangiolo to debate art and the political future of a divided Italy. Many had served as volunteers in the wars of independence, and their break with the Florentine Academy's historical subjects carried the same reforming spirit. Serafino De Tivoli, whom Telemaco Signorini later called the father of the group's technique, returned from the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris with firsthand knowledge of the Barbizon landscape painters, and the circle soon turned to painting outdoors. 

Their method, the macchia, built an image from juxtaposed patches of color and tone that conveyed the immediate impression of light, often on small wooden panels the size of a cigar box. The parallel with Paris is striking, since a critic's derision of Monet's Impression, Sunrise (1872) named the Impressionists in precisely the same manner in 1874. Giovanni Fattori's The Lookout (The White Wall) (1872), in which mounted soldiers keep watch beside a sunlit wall, shows how fully the macchia had matured by the time the French group held its first exhibition.

The connections between the Macchiaioli and Impressionism were personal as well as stylistic. Both movements coined their names from critic insults. Edgar Degas frequented the Caffè Michelangiolo during his stay in Florence in 1858, and the critic Diego Martelli, the Macchiaioli's principal patron and theorist, befriended Degas and Camille Pissarro during an extended visit to Paris from 1878 to 1879. Federico Zandomeneghi, who had worked alongside the group in Florence before settling in Paris in 1874, exhibited at the fourth Impressionist exhibition in 1879. In Tuscany, Silvestro Lega introduced domestic scenes to the macchia. His The Pergola (1868), first exhibited at the Florentine Promotrice as After Lunch, depicts a household gathered beneath a vine-covered trellis in the heat of a summer afternoon, a subject of modern leisure the Impressionists were exploring in France during the same decade.

The Peredvizhniki began with a collective act of protest. On November 9, 1863, fourteen of the most accomplished students at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg withdrew from the competition for the Academy's Large Gold Medal after the faculty assigned every candidate the same subject from Scandinavian mythology. Led by Ivan Kramskoi, the students had petitioned for the freedom to choose their own themes, and when the Academy denied the request, they left. The episode became known as the Revolt of the Fourteen, and the rebels went on to organize the Artel of Artists, a cooperative in which members shared studios, commissions, and income. In 1870, Kramskoi and his colleagues founded the Society for Travelling Art Exhibitions, whose members became known as the Peredvizhniki, or Wanderers. The society's first exhibition opened in St. Petersburg in November 1871, then traveled to other cities, with the stated aim of bringing contemporary painting to audiences beyond the capitals. Vasily Perov's The Hunters at Rest (1871), a genre scene of three hunters exchanging exaggerated stories over the day's catch, made its debut in that first exhibition.

The chronology deserves emphasis. By 1871, the Peredvizhniki were operating an artist-run, self-financed exhibiting society independent of the state, three years before the Impressionists organized their first independent exhibition in Paris in 1874. A study published by Moscow's Higher School of Economics argues that the first truly independent artists' group in Europe was Russian, pointing both to the Artel of 1863 and to the Wanderers' commercial self-sufficiency. Kramskoi's Christ in the Desert (1872), which shows a solitary Christ seated on barren rock in a moment of private moral struggle, was exhibited by the society that year and acquired by the collector Pavel Tretyakov, whose patronage became central to the group's success. Between 1871 and 1923, the society organized forty-eight touring exhibitions, a record of commercial endurance unmatched by the other art movements discussed here. The Wanderers' later reputation in the West suffered from their adoption by the Soviet state as exemplars of officially approved realism, which led many Western scholars to favor the Russian avant-garde in their accounts of the period.

The Incohérents approached the art world through satire. In 1882, writer Jules Lévy organized an exhibition of drawings by people who could not draw, calling it Les Arts Incohérents, a play on the term les arts décoratifs. In October of that year, a reported two thousand visitors, among them Édouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Pissarro, crowded into Lévy's apartment to see it. 

The most provocative work on view was a small canvas painted entirely black by the poet Paul Bilhaud, whose title rested on a racist joke about Black men fighting in a cellar at night. Historians regard it as the first documented monochrome painting. Bilhaud's friend Alphonse Allais extended the conceit with a white monochrome in 1883 and a red one in 1884, and in 1897 he gathered these jokes in his Album primo-avrilesque (April Fool's Album). Bilhaud's original canvas, long presumed lost, was rediscovered in a family trunk outside Paris in 2018. In 2015, researchers at Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery examining Malevich's Black Square (1915) with x-rays identified a handwritten inscription on its white border that appears to refer to the Bilhaud and Allais joke. If that reading holds, the founding image of Suprematism, one of the most earnest art movements of the twentieth century, began in part as a response to a Parisian punchline.

The group also anticipated Dada's treatment of the old masters. Eugène Bataille, a humorist who performed under the name Sapeck and was known to walk the streets of Paris with his head painted blue, gave the sitter of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa (c. 1503-19) a pipe and a curl of smoke, decades before Duchamp added a mustache to a reproduction of the same portrait in L.H.O.O.Q. (1919). Sources disagree on the date of Sapeck's image, with some placing it at the Incohérent exhibition of 1883 and others at 1887, when it appeared as an illustration in Coquelin Cadet's book Le Rire. The movement had faded by the mid-1890s, though its influence proved more durable than its exhibitions. 

Rayonism, developed in Moscow by Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova between 1912 and 1914, proposed that painting should depict light itself. In their manifesto, written in 1912 and published in 1913, the two artists argued that the eye perceives a sum of rays reflected from an object, and that a painting should therefore represent those rays. Goncharova had begun working toward the style as early as 1909, and the pair introduced it publicly at the Target exhibition in Moscow in 1913, a show Larionov named for the critical attacks he expected it to attract. Larionov described Rayonism as a synthesis of Cubism, Futurism, and Orphism, three contemporary art movements absorbed into a single method. The earliest Rayonist canvases retained recognizable subjects and fractured them into beams of color. Goncharova's The Forest (1913), exhibited at the Target show and now in the collection of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, breaks a stand of trees into intersecting shafts of light.

In July 1913, Larionov extended the theory into what he called Pneumo-Rayonism, in which the depicted object disappeared and only rays and color remained. He regarded his Glass as his first fully Rayonist painting, although its date remains disputed, with the Guggenheim, which owns the work, dating it to 1909 and other sources placing it in 1912. On either dating, Rayonism ranks among the earliest nonobjective painting in Russia, preceding Malevich's Suprematism of 1915 and arriving at nearly the same moment as Wassily Kandinsky's first abstractions in Munich. The art historian Anthony Parton, whose 1993 monograph Mikhail Larionov and the Russian Avant-Garde remains a key study in English, has done much to restore the movement's place in that chronology. Rayonism itself proved brief. In 1914, Larionov and Goncharova moved to Paris to design sets and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, and with their departure the movement came to an end, leaving Suprematism as the name most closely associated with the birth of Russian abstraction.

Pittura Metafisica, or Metaphysical Painting, grew out of work Giorgio de Chirico began around 1910, when he started painting Italian piazzas defined by long shadows, empty arcades, isolated statues, and distant trains. In February 1917, de Chirico and the former Futurist Carlo Carrà were both stationed in Ferrara during World War I, and the two painted side by side for several months at a military hospital in the city. Together with de Chirico's brother Alberto Savinio, they formalized the approach as a school, placing ordinary objects in improbable combinations under sharp, theatrical light. De Chirico's The Song of Love (1914) sets a rubber glove and a green ball beside the head of a classical statue. That summer, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire noted that de Chirico had just bought a pink rubber glove, which he expected would heighten the uncanny effect of the paintings, and the art historian Emily Braun has since traced the picture's motifs from Mediterranean antiquity to the shop windows de Chirico passed in prewar Paris.

The partnership dissolved around 1920 in a dispute over authorship. Critics began crediting Carrà as the inventor of Metaphysical Painting after his Milan exhibition in December 1917, and his 1919 book Pittura Metafisica did little to correct the impression. By that time, the paintings had already reached the artists who would carry their imagery forward. René Magritte later described his first encounter with The Song of Love as one of the most moving moments of his life, the moment he first saw thought in a painting, and accounts date the encounter between 1919 and the early 1920s. Yves Tanguy recalled stepping off a bus in 1923 after glimpsing a de Chirico canvas in a gallery window, an experience that led him to take up painting. When André Breton published the first Surrealist manifesto in 1924, he claimed de Chirico as a forerunner, and Pittura Metafisica became one of the art movements from which Surrealism most directly descended. Carrà's The Oval of Apparitions (1918), with its mannequin figures and its echo of de Chirico's fish motif, already anticipates the imagery the Surrealists would make famous.

Each of these art movements left an idea for later artists to complete, and the record continues to grow, from a black canvas recovered from a family trunk in 2018 to an inscription found on the border of Malevich's square in 2015. For readers new to art history, they are a reminder that the breakthroughs credited to famous names usually rest on earlier, quieter experiments.

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