Six Paintings That Invented Modern Painting (1863-1907)
Between 1863 and 1907 — forty-four years across three French political regimes (Second Empire, Third Republic) and one global European-imperial network — six paintings produced the formal vocabulary that the twentieth century would call modernism. Édouard Manet's 1863 Olympia, Claude Monet's 1872 Impression, Sunrise, Paul Cézanne's 1880s-90s Aix still lifes, Vincent van Gogh's 1889 Saint-Rémy Cypresses, Paul Gauguin's 1898 Tahiti canvases, and Pablo Picasso's 1907 Les Demoiselles d'Avignon form the load-bearing six-painting sequence in which European canvas painting moved from academic-Salon convention to abstract formal modernism. Each canvas inherits something specific from the painting before it and breaks from it in a specific way; the cumulative effect of the forty-four-year sequence is the formal foundation of every twentieth-century Western painting from Wassily Kandinsky to Jackson Pollock to contemporary 2020s abstract practice. The sequence is one of the most-cited art-historical narratives in twentieth-century European art-history writing — every introductory European modernism course returns to it.
1. Manet, Olympia (1863) — naming the modern figure
Manet's 1863 Olympia — exhibited at the 1865 Paris Salon — broke three Salon conventions simultaneously. First: the SPECIFIC NAMED FIGURE — Olympia is the identifiable Paris model and sex-worker Victorine Meurent, not a mythological Venus. Second: the CONFRONTATIONAL EYE-CONTACT — the depicted figure returns the male gaze rather than inviting it. Third: the CONTEMPORARY-PARIS CLASS-MARKING — the painting depicts a specifically 1860s Paris social transaction (the sex-worker receiving flowers from an off-canvas male client via her Black servant Laure) rather than an idealised classical scene. The painting was the inaugural French Realist break from academic-Salon mythological-nudity convention and is the canvas that the rest of the modern-painting sequence will respond to.
2. Monet, Impression, Sunrise (1872) — naming the movement
Monet's 1872 Impression, Sunrise was painted in a single morning at Le Havre harbour and was exhibited at the first Impressionist Exhibition of April 1874, where the critic Louis Leroy mocked it as showing nothing but "mere impression" — and the insult became the movement's name. The painting inherits Manet's break from academic Salon convention and extends it by foregrounding the artist's brushwork as the painting's primary visual content. Where Manet had still rendered figures with academically-clean edges, Monet rendered the Le Havre sun and harbour with visible loose brushstrokes that read as gestural rather than descriptive. The compositional decision opens the path the next four canvases will all extend further.
3. Cézanne, Still Lifes (c. 1880s-90s) — anticipating Cubism
Cézanne's 1880s-90s Aix-en-Provence still lifes — the ~270-canvas corpus including the c.1893 Still Life with Apples now in Paris — moved the formal investigation from brushwork to compositional structure itself. The specific moves: TILTED TABLETOP (perspectival impossibility), VIEWPOINT INSTABILITY (different apples seen from different viewpoints within the same composition), COLOURED-PATCH FORM-MODELLING (form built from adjacent patches of related but distinct colours rather than smooth tonal gradation). The three decisions anticipated Cubism by approximately 14 years. Picasso's 1907 statement "He is the father of us all" refers specifically to these moves.
4. Van Gogh, Cypresses (1889) — emotion as formal element
Van Gogh's 1889 Saint-Rémy Cypresses series moved the formal investigation from compositional structure to emotional expression. The fifteen-canvas Cypresses corpus (June 1889 - May 1890, painted from the second-floor bedroom window of the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum) renders the cypress tree as a swirling-twisting-flame vertical element using heavily-loaded impasto brushstrokes that carry the painting's emotional content directly in the painted surface. Van Gogh's 25 June 1889 letter to Theo — "It is a black note in a sunlit landscape, but it is one of the most interesting black notes, the hardest to hit exactly that I can think of" — is the canonical contemporary description of what later 20th-century writing would call "emotional formalism."
5. Gauguin, Tahiti canvases (c. 1898) — primitivism and the non-European visual source
Paul Gauguin's 1898 Tahiti canvases — particularly the canonical Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? — moved the formal investigation from European internal lineage to non-European visual sources. Gauguin had moved to Tahiti in 1891, returned briefly to France 1893-95, and then permanently settled in French Polynesia until his 1903 death in the Marquesas Islands. The 1898 canvases combine the flat-coloured-surface decisions of Cézanne with Tahitian-Polynesian iconographic sources (the carved wooden figures, the local floral subjects, the South Pacific landscape colour palette). The compositional move opened the path the next 20th-century European painters (Picasso's 1907 Demoiselles, Matisse's 1908-12 Fauve canvases, the German Expressionists of the Brücke and Blaue Reiter groups) would all extend further. The Gauguin canvases are also the canonical exhibit for the ethical critique of European modernism's appropriation from non-European cultures.
6. Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) — closing the sequence into Cubism
Picasso's 1907 Les Demoiselles d'Avignon — painted between approximately June and August 1907 in his Paris studio at the Bateau-Lavoir building — closes the 1863-1907 sequence by combining all the previous canvases' moves into a single coordinated formal statement. The painting inherits Manet's confrontational figure (the five Demoiselles are 1907 Paris sex-workers from the rue d'Avignon brothel district), Monet's visible brushwork, Cézanne's multi-viewpoint compositional structure, Van Gogh's emotional-formal surface, and Gauguin's non-European visual sources (the right two Demoiselles' faces are derived from African masks Picasso had seen in the Trocadéro ethnographic museum in May 1907). The cumulative effect is the inaugural Cubist canvas and the painting that the next four years would extend into the full Analytic Cubism of 1908-12 with Georges Braque. The Demoiselles is the closing document of the 1863-1907 modern-painting sequence and the opening document of the 20th-century formal-modernist tradition that descends from it.
What the forty-four-year sequence produced
The six paintings together produced four lasting changes that defined 20th-century Western painting. First: the SUBJECT EXPANDED beyond academic-Salon mythology + biblical narrative + idealised portrait into specific contemporary social class + emotional state + non-European visual source. Second: the SURFACE BECAME the painting's primary content — brushwork + impasto + coloured-patch construction became the load-bearing elements rather than the underlying narrative. Third: the SINGLE FIXED VIEWPOINT was abandoned for multi-viewpoint composition. Fourth: the SCALE of permitted subject matter shrank — major paintings could now depict apples, single trees, harbour fog rather than requiring history-painting subjects. The four changes together are the foundation of every subsequent Western painting from 1907 to the present. Kandinsky's 1910s abstract-expressionism, Mondrian's 1920s neoplasticism, the German Expressionists, the Surrealists, the Abstract Expressionists, the Color Field painters, the Pop Artists, the contemporary 2020s figurative-and-abstract practice — all operate inside the formal vocabulary the six paintings established. The forty-four-year sequence is one of the load-bearing narratives of 20th-century art-history writing for a reason.
Key takeaways
Six paintings, 44 years, three French regimes: Manet Olympia (1863) → Monet Impression Sunrise (1872) → Cézanne 1880s-90s Aix still lifes → Van Gogh 1889 Saint-Rémy Cypresses → Gauguin 1898 Tahiti canvases → Picasso 1907 Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.
Each canvas inherits + extends the previous: Manet broke Salon convention (named figure + confrontational gaze + class-marked subject). Monet foregrounded brushwork as primary content. Cézanne anticipated Cubism via tilted-tabletop + viewpoint-instability + coloured-patch form-modelling. Van Gogh added emotional-formal surface via impasto. Gauguin added non-European visual sources via Tahiti subjects. Picasso closed the sequence by combining all five previous moves into the inaugural Cubist canvas.
Four lasting changes the sequence produced: (1) SUBJECT EXPANDED — beyond mythology/bible/idealised portrait into contemporary social class + emotional state + non-European source. (2) SURFACE BECAME the painting's primary content — brushwork/impasto/coloured-patch construction load-bearing rather than underlying narrative. (3) SINGLE FIXED VIEWPOINT abandoned for multi-viewpoint composition. (4) SUBJECT SCALE SHRANK — major paintings could now depict apples / single trees / harbour fog rather than requiring history-painting subjects.
20th-century descent from the sequence: Kandinsky 1910s abstract-expressionism + Mondrian 1920s neoplasticism + German Expressionists + Surrealists + Abstract Expressionists + Color Field painters + Pop Artists + contemporary 2020s figurative-and-abstract practice all operate inside the formal vocabulary the six paintings established. The sequence is one of the load-bearing narratives of 20th-century art-history writing.
Geographic concentration: 4 of 6 canvases painted in France (Manet Paris, Monet Le Havre, Cézanne Aix-en-Provence, Picasso Paris); 1 in French-administered Tahiti (Gauguin); 1 in the south-of-France Saint-Rémy asylum (Van Gogh, Dutch-born but working in France). The sequence is therefore the canonical exhibit for late-19th + early-20th-century France's specific role as the geographic centre of the modernism transition.
Ethical caveat: Gauguin's 1898 Tahiti canvases (and the broader European modernist primitivism the canvases enabled) have been the subject of continuous late-20th + 21st-century critique for appropriating non-European visual sources without acknowledgement and operating inside the European colonial-imperial extraction framework. The critique does not invalidate the canvases' formal contribution but does require any contemporary writing about the sequence to acknowledge the ethical dimension.
Browse 19th-century European + early-20th-century modern art prints in the archive at zocineartdesign.etsy.com.
Comments