Since the 1960s art lovers have become accustomed to seeing shocking new works by contemporary artists, from Andy Warhol’s silkscreened soup cans, through Damien Hirst’s animals in formaldehyde and Tracey Emin’s soiled bed, to Maurizio Cattelan’s duct-taped banana.

Yet few in the art world understand that these radical works are only the most recent consequences of a fundamental change in the structure of art markets that occurred more than a century ago. And the artists who initiated this change are so established (and venerated) today that few people realize how revolutionary they were in their time.

George Heard Hamilton opened his magisterial history of modern art by identifying a turning point:

In the half-century between 1886 … and the beginning of the Second World War, a change took place in the theory and practice of art that was as radical and momentous as any that had occurred in human history. It was based on the belief that works of art need not imitate or represent natural objects and events.

Why did this transformation begin in the 1880s? Hamilton was silent on this, and he was not alone – few scholars have even posed this question. Yet basic economic analysis allows us to offer an answer. And the analysis is well worth the effort since the transformation was a result of economic forces that influenced advanced art throughout the 20th century and continue to shape it today.

Hamilton’s transition was a shift to conceptual approaches to art, made to express ideas and emotions. Thus he observed that, after the change,

artistic activity is not essentially concerned with representation but instead with the invention of objects variously expressive of human experience, objects whose structures as independent artistic entities cannot be evaluated in terms of their likeness, nor devalued because of their lack of likeness, to natural things.

Pablo Picasso, a key figure in the transition, made the same point more succinctly: “I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.”

Ironically, the conceptual revolution that lay at the heart of this transition was the result of a process set in motion by a small group of experimental painters who were deeply committed to recording the appearance of things they saw. The Impressionists’ innovations in painting are among the most intensively studied subjects in all art history. Less noticed: they also made far-reaching innovations in exhibition and marketing.

Art historians have exhaustively described the independent group exhibitions that the Impressionists held during 1874-86, along with their impact on the reputations of the artists involved in them. Yet these historians have almost all failed to see how the resulting changes in the structure of the market for advanced art changed the potential rewards for different kinds of innovators – and, in particular, how they created economic conditions that would favor radical conceptual approaches to art.

The Salon System

As young artists, the future Impressionists found a French art world that was highly centralized under the control of three interlocking organizations that together determined who could become a successful professional. Aspiring artists attended the government’s École des Beaux-Arts, where they advanced by passing annual examinations. After graduation, the goal of young artists was to have their work displayed at the Salon, the great annual or biennial exhibition that was the art world’s primary showcase for new work. Admission to the Salon was determined by a jury, a majority of whose members were usually associated with the government’s Academy of Fine Arts.

Every step of this process reinforced official control of the art world. Entrance into the École des Beaux-Arts and success in the annual examinations were predicated on the ability of students to master traditional techniques that would enable them to emulate the work of their teachers. Acceptance of artists’ work into the Salon exhibitions was based on their proficiency in these techniques, as was both preferential placement of their paintings in the exhibition halls and the award of medals. Artists who did not attend the École and did not have some degree of success in the Salon could not gain the attention of critics and could not have their work exhibited by important dealers or purchased by the government or wealthy private collectors.

The Salon thus effectively held a monopoly, controlling who would be allowed to become a successful professional painter. The historian John Rewald observed that under the Salon system “art was a career … comparable especially to a military one, so strictly was it governed by rules which provided a step-by-step advancement, offering as ultimate rewards fame and wealth, social standing and influence.” And the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu noted that under this system, “the artist is a high-level civil servant of art.”

Creating Impressionism

The Salon system must have appeared daunting to 19-year-old Claude Monet when he arrived in Paris in 1859, hoping to make his career as a painter. And for good reason. He did not come from a privileged background – his father was part-owner of a family grocery store in Le Havre. Moreover, Monet had not attended art school, but instead had studied informally with two landscape painters, Eugène Boudin and Johan Jongkind. Nor did Monet’s painting fit the Salon model: under Boudin and Jongkind’s tutelage, he had become committed to painting nature.

In Paris, Monet did not apply to the École des Beaux-Arts, but worked with other young painters in the studio of an older art teacher. He made his Salon debut in 1865 with two small seascapes that received favorable notices from several critics. However, the ambitious young artist realized that under the Salon system, marine paintings could never make him more than a minor figure in the art world. For the greatest acclaim was reserved for artists who made figure paintings. In addition, small paintings were easily overlooked among the thousands of canvases that covered the 30-foot-high walls of the Salon’s Palais de l’Industrie.

Thus Monet’s best friend, Frédéric Bazille, explained that “to be noticed at the exhibition, one has to paint rather large pictures that demand very conscientious preparatory studies.” And so Monet set out to create a large picture with a dozen figures titled Déjeuner sur L’herbe. Although the scene was set in a forest, the 15x20 foot painting was too large to be made outdoors – Monet did, however, make a series of preparatory sketches and compositional studies at the site.

He failed to finish the painting in time to submit it for the Salon of 1866 and ultimately abandoned it as “incomplete and mutilated.” Moderating his goal, he then set out to make a smaller but still substantial 8x7 foot painting with four figures, titled Women in the Garden. Painted in part outdoors without preparatory studies, this was rejected by the jury for the Salon of 1867.

Monet’s failed attempts to produce large paintings that would gain attention at the Salon are key to understanding why the Impressionists would decide to break away and present independent group exhibitions. Monet recognized that the Salon favored large, complex portrayals of groups of figures, but neither he nor his friends fully understood that they were not well suited to making paintings of this kind. For the Salon favored conceptual artists, who – as Bazille remarked – could carefully work out intricate visual relationships in preparatory drawings and compositional studies before executing their large masterworks. Experimental artists, who discovered their images in the course of producing their paintings, chafed under the constraint of preparatory studies and were consequently at a disadvantage in making large statements.

Monet’s two failed attempts prompted consideration of an alternative plan. Thus in 1867 Bazille wrote to his family that he had decided not to submit any more works to the Salon jury because he refused “to be exposed to these administrative whims.” He explained that he and “a dozen young people of talent” had instead “decided to rent each year a large studio where we’ll exhibit as many of our works as we wish.”

He named such older painters as Courbet and Corot as potential participants and confidently asserted that “with these people, and Monet, who is stronger than all of them, we are sure to succeed.” Soon thereafter, however, Bazille reported that these plans had been abandoned, since he and his friends had failed to raise the funds to rent a suitable venue.

Bazille would not live to persevere in the effort. He enlisted in the French army at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and was killed in action before the year was out. But in 1873 Monet joined with Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro to organize a company that presented an inaugural exhibition of 165 paintings by 30 artists that was independent of the government and the Salon the following year.

This new exhibition was tailored to fit a new art that Monet and a few friends – notably Pissarro, Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley – had pioneered in the late 1860s and early ’70s that would be given the name Impressionism. This new art rejected the historical and literary subjects preferred by the Academy in favor of contemporary motifs. It also rejected the extensive preparatory studies and painstaking resolution of Academic art in favor of direct painting in the open air, designed to capture the momentary, fugitive effects of light and atmosphere.

Instead of the smooth, finished surfaces of Academic paintings, the Impressionists used short brushstrokes and bright colors to evoke the appearance and feeling of nature. They rejected traditional perspective and the use of shadow to create the illusion of depth and solid shapes, instead creating form by contrasting pure colors with brushstrokes in shapes that mimicked natural textures within landscapes.

Eliminating the traditional emphasis of landscape painting on a central subject of interest – usually human figures – the Impressionists divided the focus of attention in their paintings and eliminated narrative content. Note, too, that the decorative subjects and modest sizes of their paintings made them attractive to collectors in the newly affluent middle class.

The Impressionist Exhibitions

A remarkable consequence of the Impressionist exhibitions was effectively to end the official Salon’s monopoly on certification of artists as qualified professionals and to make perhaps the greatest contribution to ending the importance of the Salon altogether. There had been earlier challenges to the Salon. But the Impressionist exhibitions, which were held six times during 1874-86, were the first sustained challenge that succeeded in attracting substantial critical attention – and in the process persuading the most innovative young artists to leave the Salon.

The format of the Impressionist exhibitions allowed leading members of the group to display many more of their works than would ever have been possible at the Salon. Monet, Degas, Pissarro, Renoir and Sisley each showed more than 20 paintings in single exhibitions, and three of them did so more than once. This suited these experimental artists whose methods naturally produced groups of small works rather than large individual paintings.

When Monet and a few friends first developed their project for a group exhibition, their sole concern was to create an alternative to the Salon for publicizing their innovative art. But the consequences of their undertaking proved much more far-reaching. An ironic result of the success of their exhibitions was to provide a showcase for younger artists who were not Impressionists – and who became prominent figures in a reaction against Impressionism.

One of these was Paul Gauguin, who exhibited with the Impressionists five times beginning in 1879. Another was Georges Seurat, whose presentation of Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte in 1886 almost instantly placed him among the leaders of Paris’s advanced art world.

The Salons System

The success of the Impressionist exhibitions led to a new era of competition in Paris’s art world. And “in many ways,” explained the art critic Arthus Danto, “the Paris art world of the 1880s was like the New York art world of the 1980s – competitive, aggressive, swept by the demand that artists come up with something new or perish.”

With the devaluation of the official Salon, the Academy of Fine Arts lost its control of the art market, as aspiring artists no longer had to satisfy a conservative jury in order to have their work exhibited for prospective collectors. The void left by the decline of the Salon was filled not only by the Impressionist exhibitions, but by other independent group shows. All the new salons shared a common basis, for all were independent of the government and its agencies, and all were operated directly by artists.

The demise of the power of the Salon produced a new era of artistic freedom. “When they want to exhibit their work,” Paul Gauguin exclaimed, “the painters choose the day, the hour, the hall that suits them. They are free. There are no juries.” And with this freedom, Gauguin could declare that “today, boldness is no longer blackballed.”

The Paris art world of the 1880s thus became a battleground in which new styles proliferated, competing for critical prestige and public attention. The Impressionists, who had fought to create the new regime and were still struggling to gain financial success, came under the most severe attack as ambitious young artists contended to unseat them as the leaders of advanced art. And in a foretaste of the future, the innovations of these younger artists would have a source very different from those of the Impressionists. For their breakthroughs would not be based on visual experimental approaches but on conceptual foundations, as they used their newfound freedom to express ideas and emotions.

The Demand for Originality

In 1863, the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire predicted that the ambitious artist of the future would have to find a means of representing modernity – “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.” This would require not only treatment of new contemporary subjects, but formulation of new techniques. For in the accelerated pace of modern life, Baudelaire perceived “a rapidity of movement which calls for an equal speed of execution from the artist.”

He warned that artists would have to reject academic imitation of traditional art: “It is no doubt an excellent thing to study the old masters in order to learn how to paint. But it can be no more than a waste of labor if your aim is to understand the special nature of present-day beauty.”

Baudelaire’s emphasis on innovation as a necessary condition for artistic importance echoed through later criticism – as, for example, in the journalist Théodore Duret’s praise of Édouard Manet as “an innovator, one of the rare beings who has his own view of nature.” During the 1880s the challenges to Impressionism further heightened the art world’s demand for novelty, as not only critics but artists were drawn into disputes over intellectual property rights.

In 1890, Vincent van Gogh was embarrassed when the critic Albert Aurier called him “the only painter who perceives the coloration of things with such intensity.” Aurier described him as a Symbolist who treated paint “only as a kind of marvelous language destined to express the Idea.” Van Gogh responded to Aurier, avowing his debt to other painters and protesting at what he considered exaggerated claims for individual artists: “You see, it seems to me difficult to make a distinction between Impressionism and other things. I do not see the necessity for so much sectarian spirit as we have seen in these last years; in fact, I fear its absurdity.”

Yet van Gogh sent the critic a painting in appreciation. And he reflected that Aurier’s real intention was “to guide, not only me, but the other Impressionists as well,” confiding to his brother that “I do not paint like that, but I do see in it how I ought to paint.”

The highly charged atmosphere of the art world in the late 19th century also prompted novel forms of written expression. Thus in 1890 Seurat published a statement of his aesthetic principles that the art historian John Rewald described as “worded not like a painter but with the precise and factual style of a scientist.” The next year Aurier wrote an article anointing Gauguin as “the initiator of a new art,” that Rewald considered “above all a manifesto of symbolist art, just as Seurat’s statement … had been a manifesto of divisionism.”

Repelled by this dive into theory, Pissarro wrote acidly to his son that it was no longer “necessary to draw or paint in order to produce a work of art. Only ideas are required, and these can be indicated by a few signs.” But these published proclamations anticipated an era only two decades in the future, when a proliferation of contending conceptual movements would produce an Age of Manifestos in which written texts became almost required accompaniments to innovative visual art.

Dealers

Under the Salon system, few private galleries sold contemporary art. A small number of wealthy dealers signed exclusive contracts with important Salon artists, who would provide a specified number of works each year in return for a guaranteed income. Smaller galleries, lacking sufficient capital to acquire any one artist’s work in volume, sold paintings by less celebrated artists for low prices.

This began to change in the late 19th century. Notably, Paul Durand-Ruel became the first dealer to buy large numbers of the Impressionists’ paintings. Durand-Ruel presented a series of one-artist exhibitions in 1883 for Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and Sisley, anticipating a practice that would become common in the 20th century. But these shows received little attention from critics and sold few works. The demand for the new advanced art remained weak.

Thus as late as 1890, when Theo van Gogh (Vincent’s brother) resigned as director of a branch of Boussod & Valadon, a major gallery, the owner complained that Theo had “accumulated things by modern painters which had brought the firm to discredit.” Theo’s inventory included works by Degas, Gauguin, Pissarro, Redon, Lautrec and Monet, among others. But Boussod claimed that, of these, only Monet’s were saleable.

Monet may have been the first leadingedge artist of his time to gain significant benefit from competition for his work, selling numerous paintings to at least three dealers in the late 1880s and becoming wealthy by the turn of the century. Pissarro’s circumstances were more typical. In 1891 he wrote bitterly to his son “what I need is a good exhibition, but where?”

Pissarro had tried both Boussod & Valadon and Durand-Ruel, but “neither will buy my work. If anyone else were available, I would unhesitatingly turn to him, but there is nobody.” Pissarro recognized that the real problem was the scarcity of collectors who appreciated his work. While frustrated by the lack of support from dealers, he acknowledged that “my work is not understood.”

Pissarro’s experience underscores the fact that the role of dealers had not changed greatly during the 19th century: as was true earlier in the century, dealers overwhelmingly continued to exhibit paintings by academic artists with established Salon reputations. Indeed, in the 19th century private galleries would never promote the art of a young or unknown artist who would later become canonical. But this would change in the 20th.

Pissarro got a glimpse of this future, as he wrote hopefully to his son in 1894 of a new dealer who showed only the work of young artists: “I believe this little dealer is the one we have been seeking; he likes only our school of painting or works by artists whose talents have developed along similar lines.”

Although Pissarro’s own interactions with that dealer, Ambroise Vollard, were ultimately disappointing, Vollard would later play an important role in the art world. He not only presented Cézanne’s first solo Paris exhibition in 1895, but his purchase of 20 paintings from Pablo Picasso in early 1906 may have helped give the young artist the self-confidence to produce the revolutionary Demoiselles d’Avignon later that year. Other dealers followed Vollard’s lead, and the role of galleries in fostering competition would grow in the 20th century, contributing to consolidating the conceptual revolution that had begun in the 1880s.

The Impressionists' Legacy

The Impressionist exhibitions that began in 1874 were originally intended simply as a means of marketing the new art of Monet and a few of his friends. But they had the unanticipated effect of ending the monopoly of the official Salon as an arbiter of legitimate art and transforming Paris’s advanced art world into a competitive marketplace. Never again would it be necessary for an aspiring artist to satisfy the jury of the Salon – or any other exhibitor – in order to gain the attention of critics and collectors.

The Impressionists were the first painters to become leaders in Paris’s advanced art world without having distinguished themselves as students in the École des Beaux-Arts or having received honors from the Salon. Yet after 1874 this became the rule, as no later artist who would gain an important place in art history would make a reputation through the Salon.

Few scholars of art history have emphasized how thoroughly the Impressionists revolutionized not only fine art but also its markets. One exception was Robert Herbert, who wrote of Monet’s group:

Impressionism really was born of adversity and miscomprehension; its new brushwork, color, and spatial organization were subversive; its devotion to the immediate present was profoundly shocking; its subjects and attitudes undermined the whole concept of what art was, what art schools should teach, and how art exhibitions should be organized.

The 19th century witnessed a seismic shift in the functions of fine art. For centuries, the purchase of art had been dominated by powerful patrons and institutions. Royals and aristocrats commissioned art to demonstrate their authority and wealth, while popes and bishops commissioned works to witness their piety and power. In all these cases, the purpose of art was to impress and inspire.

But during the 19th century, rapid, sustained economic growth began to create a new category of consumers of fine art who had very different concerns: entrepreneurs and businessmen bought paintings to decorate their houses and apartments. And though these collectors remained modest in number during the 19th century, they were the forerunners of the numerous private collectors who would bid up the prices of the work of rule-breaking artists in the next century.

The sociologist Raymonde Moulin observed that “artists since the Impressionists have been in the business of challenging established values and perpetually renovating the house of art.” The critic Clement Greenberg similarly noted in 1968 that “until the middle of the last century innovation had not had to be startling or upsetting; since then, it has had to be that.” That there has been an increase in the rate of change of Western art in the modern era is widely accepted. But why this has occurred has never been convincingly explained. The reason for this, I’m convinced, is the almost universal failure of art scholars to recognize and understand the role of markets.

At risk of repeating myself, the underlying cause of the perpetual revolution in advanced art is the change in the structure of the market for art that was set in motion by the Impressionist exhibitions of 1874-86. The monopoly of the official Salon was replaced by a new regime in which independent group exhibitions competed for attention. And over time these exhibitions were increasingly joined by private galleries willing to exhibit the work of artists who had not already achieved success in the Salon.

These changes in the market altered the very nature of advanced art. For in this newly competitive regime, disproportionate critical attention would be devoted to conceptual innovators who could make conspicuous departures quickly and decisively.

A few prescient contemporary observers recognized this effect. In 1885 Paul Gauguin, one of the key conceptual innovators of this new era, predicted to a colleague that “the young people who come after us will be more radical, and you’ll see that in ten years we will appear to have been extreme only for our own period.” In 1902, shortly before his death, Gauguin described essential characteristics of the conceptual innovators who would dominate later generations: “to throw oneself heart and soul into the struggle, to fight against all schools … to overcome all fears, no matter what ridicule might be the result.”

Gauguin’s predictions proved accurate, indeed. Young artists would become progressively more radical in the new competitive marketplace, and the advanced art of the 20th century and beyond would be dominated by conceptual innovators who would boldly create novelty without fear of ridicule.

Markets matter.