1910: Human nature changed
1922: Year Zero was mostly about literature but December 1910 is all about art. "On or about December 1910 human nature changed," said Virginia Woolf. In fairness, she didn't say this until 1924, writing in Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown.
With this one I feel like I have to start a bit earlier. In 1905 when Fauvism was kicking off. There's some history and some pictures in the Vertigo of Color: Matisse, Derain, and the Origins of Fauvism exhibition at The Met in 2024.
I need to find a good history of the Paris exhibitions. And a timeline. As far as I can see: The original, just Salon, or Paris Salon, from 1667. In 1863, after some scandals, a whole bunch of newer artists were rejected, thus the Salon des Refusés. In 1874 the Impressionists broke off. In 1884 the Salon des Indépendants, independent as in not backed by the academy - held in the spring. In 1903 the Salon d'Automne, being more radical.
Fauvism got its name in 1905 at the Salon d'Automne. You can see the actual newspaper article at Bibliothèque nationale de France. I say 'see' because I cannot properly read that French. The famous quote is on the second page, first column, above the title. Donatello chez les Fauves.
That's enough fun with Fauvism.
The History of the Grand Palais in 7 Groundbreaking Exhibitions and An Autumn Revolution in Paris have a couple of fun photos and illustrations of the exhibitions themselves, not just the artwork. Including one in the latter of artwork being transported through Paris by cart.
In 1910 at Salon des Indépendants the 'first Cubist portrait', Metzinger's Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire, is shown. Over at Salon d'Automnes that year Cubism is fully launched and then solidified at Salon des Indépendants in 1911. Jean Metzinger wrote Note sur la Peinture in 1910, the first time documenting Cubist practices and artists. Then with Gleizes, in 1912, Du "Cubisme" the first major work on Cubism.
Back to Woolf.
Modernist Journals have a specific 1910 collection of twenty-four journals and magazines for this very reason, Woolf's quote, the advent of Modernism.
In June of 1910 an exhibition of 'Modern French Artists' was held in Brighton. You can see the catalogue on Internet Archive and the Brighton and Hove Museums site has a tiny bit more information: 'Featuring work by artists including Monet, Degas, Matisse and Cézanne, it is also thought to have been the first opportunity to see the work of post-impressionists such as Gauguin outside France.'
On 8th November 1910 the critic Roger Fry, encouraged and aided by Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell, brother-in-law Clive, and others of the Bloomsbury Group, held the exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists at the Grafton Galleries in London.
An excellent article, A Crisis of Brilliance: 1910 and the London Art Scene says:
Fry expected trouble: ‘I am preparing for a huge campaign of outraged British Philistinism’, he told a friend in October. The exhibition opened to the public on 8 November 1910 under the title Manet and the Post-Impressionists, a collective phrase Fry had coined especially for the show. It met with derision. The critic for the Pall Mall Gazette described the paintings as ‘the output of a lunatic asylum’, whilst Robert Ross, writing in the Morning Post, pointed out that Van Gogh had been ‘a lunatic’, and that the ‘emotions of these painters … are of no interest except to the student of pathology and the specialist in abnormality.’ The reviewer from The Times observed that such work ‘throws away all that the long-developed skills of past artists had acquired and bequeathed. It begins all over again – and stops where a child would stop.’
Just... imagine being that wrong. So confidently that wrong about a major milestone in art.
I'm interested how, in 2026, if people were asked to name some post-Impressionists, or artists at all, Manet is not topping that list. But in 1910 he was the headline. Manet and the Post-Impressionists: Roger Fry’s 1910 Exhibition includes a poster for the exhibition listing Manet, Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse, &tc. I feel like that list would read pretty much in the other direction now.
The shock of the old: 'Manet and the Post-Impressionists' points out how this new European art wasn't getting much of an audience and certainly not a consumer-base in Britain. Elizabeth Berkowitz, in The 1910 ‘Manet and the Post - Impressionists’ Exhibition: Importance and Critical Issues takes aim at some problems in the exhibition, not least the name 'post-Impressionists'.
I've got a collection of notes about scenes which will include more Bloomsbury in future. This forms something of a series with 1922: Year Zero for more Modernism. Next I'm going back to 1886, and a bit more nineteenth-century.