Personal exhibitions arose from the art-market shifting from a commission-based economy, to one in which self-motivated artists produced speculative bodies of work for unknown buyers. The art gallery as such did not exist prior to the 19th century. Its emergence as a business-model for selling art in a primary market coincided with the rise of international expositions, such as London’s Crystal Palace in 1854, and theatrical presentations by showman-artists such as George Catlin, whose Indian Gallery toured Europe and the United States in the 1830s and ‘40s. Frederic Edwin Church toured monumental show-pieces such as Heart of the Andes, to be viewed by ticketholders, in America and abroad. Gustave Courbet’s monumental painting The Painter’s Studio: A real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life, completed in 1855, embodies the Bohemian beau-ideal of the artist as a defiant, egocentric, solitary genius that arose from the revolutionary fervor of the 1830s and ‘40s. the artist portrays himself as a roughneck Napoleon, attended by the admiring cognoscenti of the Parisian demimonde.
From its very beginnings, the nascent avant-garde cultivated performative dimensions. Artists staged tableaux-vivants. Clad in 16th-century attire, Worthington Whittredge posed for a portrait by Emmanuel Leutze. Marcel Duchamp vamped for the camera as Rrose Sélavy, and Jackson Pollock dribbled paint for filmmaker Hans Namuth, and photographer Rudy Burkhardt. When Bob Rauschenberg erased a drawing given to him by Bill de Kooning, the act was intellectualized as a meditation on presence and absence; one process reversing another; hastening the entropy to which all materials succumb. Whatever it was, it was definitely an act—just not the kind Ed Sullivan might book for his Sunday night variety show. (Excerpt) James L. McElhinney (c) 2024
