The Cult of Progress

Examine the rise and fall of “progress” as an ideology, and see how the “civilizing” project that arose from Enlightenment ideas was fraught with contradictions that troubled European artists in different ways.

Thomas Cole regarded the American landscape as being what he called the undefiled work of Gods.

In what's considered his last great work, Edouard Manet created a masterpiece famed as a masterclass in visual subversion.

Catlin was by no means indifferent to the suffering of the people whose faces appear in these paintings. But he didn't produce them in order to take part in some campaign to save the native Americans, instead he said they must perish.

Otto Dix and his generation had borne witness to the horrors of World War I. They'd also been witness to the death of the nineteenth century faith in an inevitable, unstoppable progress.