At the end of its insatiable and impossible
quest, realism burned itself out in the first decade of the 19th
century. It's last phase, Impressionism, by discarding
material data, weakened the ties with the object; and a
nonrepresentational realism is a contradiction in terms. Now it was
borne back onto the flood of multiplicity, always in motion, always
transforming itself; it was cast adrift from the moorings of
certainty on which the senses allied with reason had depended. The
new school, by removing visual data from the realm of common
consent, by offering it up to the implacable and personal analysis
of the individual artist, opened the door to subjective variations,
for each organism perceives the same external datum in a different
way. Who then could decide where sensory diversity ends and
emotional diversity begins? How could the painter respect the
uncertain boundary separating the two?
Picasso and Braque sent art off on another tack,
that of the free interpretation of reality—an interpretation
determined by the artist's temperament, and soon by his whim.
Furthermore, by severing contour from form, form from colour, and
colour from light. This paved the way for the opposite
tendency and led to non-representational art which led to the
making of objects, shapes and patterns according to various
manifestos based on different interpretations of the purposes and
meanings of art.