The first Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1874 faced severe critics, but much has happened in the intervening years to modify our view of their work. Standing in front of a Monet painting today, we can understand why those first critics were shocked, but we cannot easily share their emotion. Dr Hans Rookmaaker’s book Modern Art and the Death of a Culture was first published in 1970. If we are to make sense of it today, we need to contextualise it. It contains no reference to now familiar works made after 1969 and an artist’s later works may modify our earlier opinions about them. The book was a 1970s’ call to action, rather than an academic treatise.

If you use the term “modern art” to refer to all contemporary 20th-century art and read Modern Art and the Death of a Culture in that light, you will find fault. Rookmaaker regarded modern art as one stream within contemporary 20th-century art. It was a kind of powerful subculture, supported by a group of artists, museum curators and art critics, who successfully presented modern art as THE art of the 20th century. He was not alone in suggesting this, but after his death in 1977 more writers began to agree that Modernism was such a subculture. By the 1980s this had become the prevailing opinion. In a 2018 Sunday Times review of America’s Cool Modernism, art critic Waldemar Januszczak wondered why some 20th-century artists represented in the exhibition had been previously overlooked by that Modernist agenda.

How did Rookmaaker distinguish modern art from contemporary 20th-century art? In modern art he identified certain common concerns, while not suggesting all are present in any particular work. Often there was a nihilistic attitude, which regarded humanity as absurd and alienated from the world. There may be a view of creativity and spirituality which is fed by neo-Platonic or neo-Gnostic roots. In Rookmaaker’s view, this devalues the created world, turning it into an alien place which obscures and hides “real” reality. There may be an interest in Eastern philosophies, theosophical movements, or a kind of secular mysticism. The older notion of “artist as prophet” still existed, but was modified to include the idea of artists as visionary figures with special insight to interpret their times. There was a desire for a revolutionary break with the past and its conventions.

Contemporary 20th-century art had different intentions. Arising out of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, there was a growing rediscovery that a painting is lines, shapes, forms and colours on a flat surface. Rookmaaker’s term for this is the “iconic element.” These visual language elements, as they are used together pictorially, depict an artist’s understanding of the structure of reality. They always give us more than the eye can see. A portrait by Rembrandt and a child’s drawing of a face, can both be structurally clear in their use of a pictorial language and enable us to recognise a face. For Rookmaaker this meant that we can reject 19th-century naturalism as the only way to depict appearances and explore more expressive ways of working with these renewed stylistic means. This 20th-century work, while it may be innovative and challenging, does not search for such a deep break with the European tradition. It still explores more normal human experiences and views of reality.