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Where did it begin? The idea of a cultural avant-garde was unimaginable before 1800. It was fostered by the rise of the European bourgeoisie and its liberal beliefs. In the 19th century, instead of seeing the work of one artist selected as an exemplary voice by king or pontiff, one could go to the salon and there find a veritable Babel of competing images, styles and manners. Within certain limits, the burden of aesthetic choice—what one preferred to look at and judge superior as art—was put more directly on the salon visitor than it had ever been on a churchgoer looking at the parish Last Judgment. The salon encouraged comparison; the commissioned work, belief. The bourgeois audience did not invent the salon (the first one was held under the auspices of the Académic Royale in 1667). But the middle class did create the permissions within which the salon's artistic variety could ferment and nourish an avantgarde. The bourgeoisie, butt and nominal enemy of the avantgarde, was also its main audience. Everyone knows of the cloud of scandal and abuse that burst on the impressionists in the 1870s. But who became the audience for Monet's and Renoir's work? None other than the children of its original bourgeois mockers, for whom those idyllic, light-soaked pastoral vistas became a landscape of the mind, a terrestrial paradise. Impressionism was created by the middle class for the middle class, as surely as rococo boiseries were made by craftsmen for aristocrats. In turn, collectors raised on impressionism might jeer at the fauve Matisses in 1905, but their children would not. And so it went, the audience usually a generation behind the art but rarely more, down the historical line to the point where, around 1970, the middle-class audience finally enfolded every aspect of "advanced" art in its embrace. The newness of a work of art thus became one of the conditions of its acceptability. Compared with the indignities art had to suffer under Marxist and Nazi governments, the incomprehensions of the various middle classes from the time of Napoleon III onward were the merest tickling. They were the withholding of favors, or at worst a witless, jeering philistinism, but not forced exile or the Gulag.
The first representative avant-garde painter, in the full sense of the word, who offered both newness and confrontation was Gustave Courbet (1819-77). In Courbet, the committed socialist and the determined materialist, the image of the artist-against-the system was, in every sense, rounded out. Aspects of his art that we glide over inattentively today seemed threatening to his audience. He was, accordingly, thought to be either a primitive or a revolutionary, or both.