One of the ways in which the modern artist defends his independence from academic norms is through realism, understood as an unidealised description of the world. The nude being the culmination of academic apprenticeship, it is hardly surprising that it is also where this move against idealisation shows most. The human body displayed in its most material reality, therefore, went against the abstract canons of beauty represented in the classic nude. The ineluctable objectivity of photography, a new competitor of art in its own terrain, was to have an enormous influence in this realistic vision of the body.

Whereas the landscape took second place under the old hierarchies, in the latter half of the 19th century it became the most important genre in painting. For one, as a byword for realism, and for another, as the image of the freedom of the artist who, having left the enclosed life of the academy, painted unfettered en plein air, ie in the open air. But this is also a terrain in which the competition from photography showed itself in the repetition of subject matter and formal resources... Pictorialism, a photographic movement that sought to ‘elevate’ photography to the category of art, found its chief subject matter in cloud-filled landscapes and backlighting.

The ‘Orient’ is present in the bourgeois art and culture of the second half of the 19th century for two reasons. First, its discovery coincided with the imperialist campaigns of the European powers, who violently reduced the countries of north Africa to the level of colonies; secondly, for the European imaginary, a fantastic ‘Orient’ that was very different from the real thing became the place where passion, now lost in the vulgarisation of the metropolis, was still possible. Orientalism, in short, filled with consoling dreams, became one of the most commercial subjects of the new art markets.

In the hierarchies of art, historical painting has occupied the highest position. These were large-format works with many characters, which earned the artist his greatest recognition. But in an artistic world that was no longer dominated by the symbolism of the ancien régime, so much as by the fickleness of the market and the fleeting present, there was no longer room for those great ‘moralising machines’. Driven by the advent of journalism and photography and the need to preserve his status in face of these new media, the modern artist replaced historical themes with current affairs issues: the colonial war, the class struggle, etc.

At the end of the 19th century, when Japan opened its doors to trade with the West, interest in its culture and art spread rapidly through European society. In particular, the popular prints of the type known as ukiyo-e became objects of admiration, both for the bourgeoisie and for artists themselves. Bourgeois interiors filled with Japanese ornaments –printed cloths, screens, sunshades, fans...–, but unlike what had happened with other superficially assimilated exoticisms, the style of these prints –the line, the flat colours, the framing and formats– was to be decisive in structuring the aesthetics of the avant-gardes.