PAGE
46
HISTORY
Artists in
REVOLT
The minor art movements behind two major art movements
BY TOM QUINN
Can this happen today ? A group of angry young artists , fed up with the stale contemporary art scene , get together and conspire to overthrow the establishment with a revolutionary new kind of painting . They expect , and even welcome , hostility from critics at first , but they know they will triumph in the end . It happened several times in the 19th and early 20th century , but it ’ s less likely today , when the art world is a lot harder to shock .
The most successful radical artists of the 19th century were the English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood , which began in 1848 and had dissipated by 1854 , and the French Impressionists , who exhibited together from around 1874 to 1886 . To the critics , the public , and the artists themselves , their work was unprecedented in the modern world . Only a few were aware that both movements had been anticipated years earlier — the first in Germany , and the second in Italy .
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood , led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti , William Holman Hunt , and John Everett Millais , revolted against the drab colors and dogmatic techniques taught by the Royal Academy . They wanted a return to the fresh colors , casual perspective , and lively imagination they saw in early Renaissance painting . They didn ’ t know that nearly 40 years earlier , two young German painters , Franz Pforr ( 1788-1812 ) and Johann Friedrich Overbeck ( 1789-1869 ) were disgusted with their own status quo , and sought to vanquish it by emulating those same early Renaissance models .
Philipp Veit
“ Italia ,” 1834
Pforr and Overbeck met at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna , where they both chafed at the pious Neoclassicism taught there . Inspired by other young Viennese intellectuals , they and four like-minded cohorts founded the Lukasbund , or Brotherhood of St . Luke , the patron saint of painters , in 1809 . The next year , Pforr , Overbeck , Ludwig
46 ART CHOWDER MAGAZINE