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Jan
15
2010

The Definition of the Avant-Garde

The Definition of the Avant-Garde

In his book, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Burger stressed the historical basis of the avant-garde.  The rise of the avant-garde was directly linked to the rise of the middle class.  The main role of the avant-garde is the critique of the middle class by detaching it self from it.  Bourgeois totalizing institutions, such as the institutions that are the “art world” must also be critiqued and defied. The kind of critique Burger discussed was a Marxist style critique, which, because it was delivered from a detached perspective, was far more radical than conventional criticism. The Marxist approach was, of course Kantian in origin in its stance of disinterest, but Marxist in its focus on bourgeois practices.

The radicality of the avant-garde position rests upon its freedom from having to “take sides” or obligation to maintain a position.  The freedom to detach from an ideology is also the freedom to find an entirely unexpected stance.  The avant-garde critique of the capitalist mode of production and its impact upon cultural producers has many consequences.  First, the avant-garde artist is always alienated from the audience, outside the mainstream of traditional art and scornful of the middle class and its utilitarian preferences.  The bourgeois saw little use for pure art in the service of the intellect or beauty or aesthetics, and understood only that art could be useful to reinforce their own social and political power, a lesson learned from the once powerful church and state.  The middle class audience was unsympathetic with art, which lay outside what was familiar,   traditional and recognizable.  Thus, the artist, who felt constrained by bourgeois restrictions and by the low level of middle class taste, took on a defiant, rebellious stance, upholding the right of the artist to express him/herself artistically. Delighting in shocking the art public, the avant-garde artist is confrontational, refusing to meet the expectations of the middle class audience.

Instead of striving for acceptance, the avant-garde artist remains outside and alienated in order to critique middle class values, which placed money above love, status above mercy, work above play, and matter over mind.  Avant-garde art, in challenging middle class pragmatism, challenged middle class power.  Often this art directly or indirectly exposed middle class hypocrisy.  Sunny and beautiful on the surface, many Impressionist paintings actually depicted well-known meeting places of scandalous encounters between prostitutes and their clients.  Although today the meaning of these paintings may be lost on today’s viewers, the audience of the day was fully aware that the subjects of these artists were less than respectable. Starting with the proto-Romanticism of Jean-Antoine Gros and Théodore Géricault, the reality of current events were used to confront the public with the unpalatable truth, as shown by Gustave Courbet, or simply with ordinary every day life, as displayed by the Impressionists.  The public literally could not read the broken brushwork of the Impressionists and reacted with anger and derision.

The activity of critique places the avant-garde artist outside of conventional ways of thinking.  But this artist is also in front of the crowd and thus is making the future of art. The first separation within the art world can be seen during the Romantic period when certain artists began to represent current events.  This shift to reality was an important one.  Previously, the Neoclassical approach was an allegorical one, making statements about the present by using past events or using ancient examples to teach lessons for the present.  The split between the ancients and the moderns is not simply a stylistic one, from the linear to the painterly, but most significantly, from the past to the present.  The avant-garde artists refused to look back to a past that was increasingly irrelevant and insisted upon recording the present.  Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People (1830) was perceived, not so much as a heroic rendering of a major event in recent French history, but as a political statement valorizing rebellious uprisings.  Compared to Neoclassicism, which displaced politics to the past, Romanticism and Realism, were political simply in presenting the present.  By the middle of the Nineteenth Century, the avant-garde had become political and dangerous to the established powers.

By the beginning of the 20th century, avant-garde artists were totally separated from the mainstream art world.  The art world in France and England had become splintered into factions: the very conservative, the conservative or official art, the conservative avant-garde, and the radical avant-garde.  For example, the Salon des Indépendants was conservative compared to the Salon d’automne. Avant-garde artists were completely isolated from mainstream art audiences and these artists followed the lead of the Impressionists and relied more and more upon sympathetic art dealers and understanding collectors for survival. The audience for the avant-garde artists was very small, often consisting of art critics who were crucial in writing the first accounts of indecipherable art.

This so-called “difficult” art was made by an artist, who was   outside of official art and beyond public approval. Avant-garde art tended to engender yet another generation of art, even more difficult. For example, Monet was succeeded by his colleague, Cézanne, who was, in turn, was studied by the Cubists, Picasso and Braque.  Picasso and Braque were typical of the avant-garde artists of the Twentieth Century. Working alone and unrecognized, supported by their dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler.  Living in dire poverty, these two artists, like other avant-garde artists, were totally dedicated to their vision and to their belief in their art.  Art historians depicted these artists as “heroes,” struggling to maintain personal and artistic integrity in the face of a life without honor and success, understood only by those educated few.

The emergence of the avant-garde artists and the theory of “art-for-art’s sake” emerged at the same time in France.  Due to historical and economic forces, the avant-garde and aesthetics was dependent upon one another.  The public did not approve of either the style or the content of avant-garde art, and in order to defend and explain this new art, critics often put forward an appeal for a formalist reading.   When Emile Zola demanded that Edouard Manet’s work be understood in terms of its stylistic innovation, the writer was also insisting that the viewer look away from the subject matter and to the way in which the artist handled the formal elements.  Looking at art from a formal and/or disinterested perspective required a new kind of “eye.”  The purpose of avant-garde art was, by necessity an aesthetic one.  But as Bourdieu explained in The Rules of Art,

“Although it appears to itself like a gift of nature, the eye of the nineteenth-century art-lover is the product of history…the pure gaze capable of apprehending the work of art as it demands to be apprehended (in itself and for itself, as form and not as function) is inseparable from the appearance of producers motivated by a pure artistic intention, itself indissociable from the emergence of an autonomous artistic field capable of posing and imposing its own goals in the face of external demands  and it is also inseparable from the corresponding appearance of a population of ‘amateurs’ or ‘connoisseurs’ capable of applying to the works thus produced the ‘pure’ gaze which they call for.”

Although, as Bourdieu contends, the avant-garde was created as much by material forces as by aesthetic ideals, the avant-garde would have been impossible without the theory of “art-for-art’s sake.”  This timely idea, borrowed from the German philosopher, Emmanuel Kant, took half a century to come to fruition in France.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to
Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.
info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

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Oct
30
2009

The Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution

For the artist of the modern period, the most essential problem was how to depict the modern: as a new style, as new content, as a new attitude?  Each generation would fine its own answer, only to have the next generation find this answer inadequate.  In the process of attempting to find the “modern,” the role of art would change, the role of the artist would change, the role of the public would change, and ironically, the artist and the public would become completely separate.  How did the artist become separated from the mass art audience? This estrangement was the result of significant social and economic changes that had changed the artist’s role in society.  The condition of the avant-garde—that is, artists being “ahead” of the public’s taste and expectations—is closely linked to the development of the Industrial Revolution.  This social and economic revolution in manufacturing was, perhaps, both the most sudden and swift and also the most complete and comprehensive revolution in history: it changed everything.  The trend away from small scale artisanal or intimate domestic manufacture towards mass production began around 1740, in England and a bit later in America with the industrialization of the textile industry and the development of mining to find the coal to run the machines to run the mills.  Textile mills sprang up near rivers, drawing thousands of workers from the surrounding countryside to new factory towns.

Thanks to the increasing importance of industry, the workplace moved from the home to an environment that was artificial, where there was no day and no night. This interior environment was based upon the relentless rhythms of the omnipresent machines that ruled those who worked for and with them, severing the workers from the outdoor world of nature and its eternal rhythms.  Beneath the earth, miners toiled in an equally artificial environment, in total darkness broken only by candles, in constant danger from escaping gases or cave-ins or flooding. Here, as in the factory, night and day had no meaning, time itself was unnatural, linked to the length of the “shift,” or the span of time one worked, not to the rising and setting of the sun or to the cycle of the seasons.  Far from home, severed from the land, people–men, women and children–now worked long days, measured by carefully segmented time, in dangerous places for low pay.  But their alternatives were few.  With the growth of population due to better hygiene and diet, farming communities could absorb only so many people and many hungry peasants joined the growing army of industrial workers.

“Labor” became a new kind of concept, referring to a new kind of  work regulated by the rhythm of the machine and timed to the ticking of the clock.  Time itself was sped up, cut into tiny pieces.  Work, too was sped up, and was equally divided into a segmented process.  In dusty, noisy factories, absorbed in repetitive tasks, working like machines, the workers were also alienated from the end product, an object produced in pieces, the result of a rational and an analytic process, which investigated and examined each aspect of manufacture.  Each worker was responsible for a segment, for a part of the process.  The factory resembled a vast machine, the workers mere cogs in the machine.  The process and pace of manufacture ruled their lives. With the social and financial shift from landed wealth to industrial wealth, money and power were no longer solely dependent upon inherited position and were increasingly based upon new opportunities provided by trade and commerce and manufacture.  The shift in social power also moved the site of culture from the aristocratic courts to urban centers, teaming with ambitious individuals, all determined to take advantage of the opportunities capitalism promised.  These individuals created prosperity for themselves and controlled the new sources of wealth as completely as the now-deposed aristocrats had once ruled their domains. Working conditions actually declined in quality for the workers who worked every day for well over ten hours a day under inhuman and unhealthy conditions.

Despite the unprecedented hardships on the workers, the Industrial Revolution allowed a new form of upward mobility. Any man with wit and foresight and a few good ideas could become wealthy and powerful. Two hundred years ago, vast fortunes were made by the newly formed middle class who had scrambled up the social ladder, eager to forget their humble origins. Coming from the lower classes, the peasants and the urban proletariat, the factory workers operated machines which fabricated products on a massive scale, making consumer goods available to the entire population, making the owners of the factories wealthy while raising the standard of living for everyone. Those who owned the manufacturing process—mining and making—enjoyed the fruits of what the Prussian philosopher, Karl Marx, called “surplus value,” meaning the difference what the worker was actually paid and what the object was actually sold for. During the Eighteenth Century, the middle class grew in social and political power.  The result was a changing of the guard from one ruling class—the aristocrats who had inherited wealth, which was based upon land holdings to the middle class who had created wealth based upon manufacture.  Land is limited; farming is dependent upon weather; manufacturing, on the other hand, is theoretically unlimited and independent of anything but the marketplace, as Karl Marx pointed out, was driven by desires for commodity.  Later Sigmund Freud would agree with Marx that a commodity was a mere symptom or a fetish, guaranteed to create, not to satisfy desire.

The ephemeral commodity would “melt into air,” as Marx put it, only to be replaced by the next fad and the next novelty.  Writing the Communist Manifesto in exile in England, the Prussian philosopher imagined an uprising of the proletariat once the veil of ideology was torn from its eyes.  The proletariat would seize the mode of production, and during this phase of the people’s ownership would be “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” Witnessing the degradation of the workers on the eve of the Revolution of 1848, Marx waited in vain for the success of the workers’ uprising. But it was not to be. Workers were seduced by the all-powerful commodity, which, as Marx noted, had the qualities of the fetish to arouse desire.

“Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labor, we behold starving and overworking it.  The newfangled sources of wealth, by some weird spell, are turned into sources of want.  The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character.  At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to have become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy.”

During the Nineteenth Century, burgeoning technology was buttressed by an unfettered optimism.  It was an era when most people believed in Progress, that industrialization had ushered in a better way of life, which, like the human beings who benefited from it, would develop and evolve in a positive direction.  The world became defined by constant changes, some of which were good, but there was a dark side to the state of flux: upheaval and disequilibrium.  Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, human beings seemed to be in control of the environment, capable of acting as designers of Nature itself.  Although by the time the Industrial Revolution was fully in effect, the Enlightenment was a philosophical or social movement was long over, the new economic system of capitalism still echoed some of the Enlightenment’s most cherished concepts: optimism and progress.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to
Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.
info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

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Oct
23
2009

The Rise of Napoléon

France: The Rise of Napoléon

During the war with England, the French had obtained the island of Corsica, and, as a result, Nabuleone di Buonaparte was born in 1769 as a French citizen.  After translating his name into its French version, Napoléon Bonaparte, the young military officer was part of the army raised to repel the invasion. The initial reason for intervening in internal French affairs was the Queen herself.   Allies, Austria and Prussia, attempted to invade and end the Revolution before it was too late for Marie Antoinette.  However, the first nationwide draft, the levée en masse, in 1793, put large numbers of men in the field and, in an extraordinary feat, the new government managed to feed, clothe and arm the citizens’ army.   Even after the deaths of the King and Queen, the European powers still sought to restore the hereditary right to rule, or, to put it another way, to safeguard the legitimacy of aristocratic power.  Revolution had already infected America, to the great cost of Britain, and this rebellious fever must not be allowed to spread to the rest of Europe.

To counter the reactionary European alliance, a young Corsican coporal, Napoléon Bonaparte, rose from the ranks of the French Army by exhibiting his talents with artillery, a relatively modern weapon for modern war.  He was a common man, who, for many, personified the promise of the Revolution—success through merit. Napoléon understood artillery—it could be moved, it could be deployed strategically, and with its flexible firepower, artillery could be the decisive edge for victory.   Throughout Europe in the fired up imaginations of the commoners, Napoléon was not just a new kind of leader; he was a savior.  A man who was a “man of the people,” he was perceived as bringing the ideals of the Enlightenment to the rest of Europe.   For the French, the Corsican colonial brought order out of the chaos of a Revolution gone wrong.  Lucky to be stationed outside of France, Napoléon avoided the internal politics of the Revolution.  For example, many French people outside of Paris were anti-Republican and opposed to the reforms promised by the Revolution.  The result was decades of rebellion, collectively called “The Vendée,” also known as the “White Terror,” which carried on until 1813.

Those early years of post-monarchy government is referred to as the First Republic, established in 1792.  Far from being a “republic,” in the traditional sense, this Republic included the dictatorship of the Jacobins, the Directory, which employed Napoléon, and the Counsulate, which was dominated by him. Napoléon became the First Counsel in 1799, when he staged a coup d’état, after being soundly defeated by the British in Egypt.   This seizure of power is referred to as “The 18 Brumarie,” after the day and month of the coup.  The Republic ended and Napoléon was in total control by 1804, during a period of peace, following the Treaty of Amiens of 1802.  The French Revolution was over, the experiment in representative government was ended, and dictatorial power was restored. Napoléon invited the émigrés, who had fled for their aristocratic lives to England and America, to come back to France.  He reinstated the Catholic Church, but its property was not restored. Dashing the hopes for democracy of European intellectuals from Beethoven to Goya, Napoléon crowned himself Emperor of France and crowned his wife, Josephine, Empress, for good measure.  Then he embarked upon a campaign of conquest throughout Europe that would stall the benefits of modern life and the Enlightenment for France and for the rest of Europe. Under the guise of being a liberator and a bringer of the ideals of the Revolution, Napoléon conquered the Continent.  The longstanding problem of the French debt was solved simply: by looting Europe.  While many liberals welcomed the weakening of European monarchies, they were soon disillusioned by Napoléon’s iron grip on his “allies” and became restive.   Only England stood, alone, against the French.  The resistance of Great Britain only made the nation stronger, while the need to control his conquests eventually drained the French who eventually tasted defeat in 1814.  Napoléon brought the dark side of modern life—total war—to anyone in his path until his final downfall at Waterloo in 1815.

Napoléon  and his total war was an attempt to return to the glory days of the Carolingian Empire, and allowed England to become the dominant industrial and military power while he was consolidating his power.  The Code Napoléon turned back the reforms and the ideals of the Revolution, abolishing equality but acknowledged the power of the middle class and the principle of merit as a condition of advancement.  Most importantly, the Code spelled out the winners and losers, following the years of upheaval. Slavery was reinstated in the colonies. Women were disempowered and the lower classes were put back in their place and the revolutionary energies were drained by the total war that dominated the decade. Thus, the real losers of the French Revolution were the very class that had led the Revolution—the lower classes.

Unwittingly the proletariat had done the dirty business of eliminating the troublesome aristocrats for the bourgeoisie.  The sans-coulottes had demonstrated their lack of judgment in following unqualified rabble-rousers. The lower classes had never supported the Enlightenment ideals that had so inspired the upper classes, and, the proletariat and the peasants were responsible for the end of the Enlightenment itself.  The horrors of the Terror demonstrated the futility of relying upon the powers of human reason and rational thinking.  The American Revolution had been eminently rational; the French Revolution had been strikingly irrational.  The English Royalists in America were allowed to leave or adapt; the French aristocrats had been massacred in public spectacles in town squares all over the country. The lower classes had terrified their fellow French citizens by acting out centuries of rage, earning the sobriquet: The Dangerous Class.

Although leading the way to revolution, the lower classes disqualified themselves for power. The middle-class feared and loathed the undisciplined and unwashed mod and would view any move on the part of the lower classes to protest their status with suspicion and oppression.  By behaving less badly, the middle class inherited France and moved into the court of Napoléon, newly empowered under the Empire.  The proletariat would have to endure other Revolutions and wait for the century to end before they too would become fully enfranchised.   The lower classes, who were promised “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” but got little of the “natural rights” that had been promised.  At the end of the Napoléonic wars, one in three lower class men had died, sacrificed for the glory of the nation.   And yet, out of the strife and struggle, the modern French Citizen was constructed and the modern French identity came into being within a modern nation state.  But there was a cost.  An overseas empire had been lost and England was suddenly dominant in Europe, with France as a defeated and diminished power, destined to yearn for those years of patriotic glory under Napoléon.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to
Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.
info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

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Oct
16
2009

Revolution and Terror in France

The  Revolution and Terror  in France

When the American Revolutionary War was waged, it was unpopular both in England and America.  The war was won—astonishingly—by the upstart colonists; and suddenly America was on its own, as the “United States,” embarking on one of the most revolutionary governments of all time, a democracy.  It cannot be exaggerated how experimental this new nation seemed to the Europeans.  America was an unprecedented ideal and many observers predicted failure and chaos.  It also cannot be exaggerated how much Europeans distrusted the very concept of “democracy,” or rule of the “mob.”  “Government by the people, for the people,” as Lincoln said later, was a horrifying concept in Europe.  And with good reason, from the perspective of the sober middle class, the “dangerous” classes were to be feared.   In France, only a few years after the formation of the United States of America, another Revolution occurred in 1789.   This one was bloody and violent. The French Revolution was a civil war, a war between the classes, as much as it was a revolution against a King.  The American Revolution was one aspiring nation against an oppressive parent nation, but the French went war with themselves. The reasons for the French Revolution were quite different from the causes of the American Revolution.  Although inspired by Enlightenment philosophy, the French Revolution began, not with the middle classes, but with the lower classes.  The sans coulottes, or the proletariat, had suffered under the heel of the aristocracy.  The lower classes, the peasants, were tired, overworked, and hungry and spontaneously rose up to protest their hardships.  The proletariat was not inspired by ideas of their “natural rights;” they were hungry.  When the ideas of the Enlightenment philosophers filtered down to them, these modern ideas were rejected by the lower classes, who felt threatened by modernity and its attack on a traditional way of life.

Although it may seem counter-intuitive, it was the well-educated aristocrats who supported the Revolution, acting from a moral and philosophical point of view.  Those of the upper class who were wealthy and prospering from new economic opportunities had everything to gain from establishing a constitutional monarchy on the lines of England.  Although the heroes of the American Revolution,  Washington and Lafayette, were greatly admired in France, the ultimate model for the French Revolutionaries was Britain, which had a constitutional monarchy and an established aristocracy.  America was too democratic for French needs.  By 1788, France was in a crisis of confidence in the rulers, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette who seemed incompetent, indifferent, and positively incontinent when it came to spending money.  But it was not the extravagant Marie Antoinette and her famous diamond necklace, which bankrupted France.  The French monarch actually cost the French people half of what the British monarchy cost the English.  Ironically, the nation’s financial troubles stemmed from its alliance with the American colonies in the War of Independence.  The saying “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” could have been applied to the unhappy French royal family after America became independent. Not that the French were supporting democracy, the French were fighting England for continental and international dominance. All the French wanted to do was to slow the dominance of the British Empire but the law of unintended consequences came into effect: the nation was bankrupt and there were severe food shortages.

The French had gone into debt to finance the Seven Years’ War with England and the desire for revenge had propelled them into another war, using America as their pawn.  The war fought for American independence, told from the French perspective, is unrecognizable to an American.  The competent French won the war for the incompetent Americans, but great cost.  The difficulty of recovering financially after a costly war is still with us today.   For example, it took America some twenty years to recover from the expense of the Vietnam War, hence the prosperity of the 1990s.  France was a largely feudal nation faced with the coming of modern capitalism but still lacking the modern financial instruments to solve their problems.  Then, as now, no one wanted to be taxed to pay for the war, even a war that was so full of celebrated and adored heroes, such as Benjamin Franklin.  The war had to be paid for and the King was persuaded to call representatives of the people together to work out a workable tax system to pay for the war.  The philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau had taken such a hold on the imagination of the ruling class that the King was forced to bend to the logic of “natural law” and “natural rights.” Louis XVI genuinely wanted to be the kind of good ruler demanded by the Enlightenment and called together the Estates General, a representative body with a medieval ancestry.   The Estates General, which had not been called since 1616, consisted of the First Estate, the nobles, the Second Estate, the clergy, and the Third Estate, the middle class.  The representatives were supposed to solve the problems of France by raising taxes but the men who gathered together began to imagine a new system of government entirely.  Rather than helping the King, they eventually deposed the monarchy.

The word of the hour was “citizen,” which also meant patriot or someone who served the patrie or nation, not the King.  Originally intended to be an inclusive term, it would later be an excluding term.  While the aristocrats limited their revolutionary gestures to divesting themselves of their titles (not their lands or wealth) and privileges, the sans coulottes (who did not wear breeches and hose) desperately needed help.  It is one thing to be unhappy with your rulers; it is another thing entirely to be hungry with no prospects for change. The French Revolution began in 1789, the same year the Americans were writing a Constitution, opening dramatically on July 14 with the storming of the Bastille, an infamous but largely empty prison.  The Revolution was an unstable entity, driven by mob anger, which led to the Terror of 1793-95.  The transfer of power ended with the execution of the King and Queen and a large portion of the aristocratic class.  Indeed, many of those titled men who had so passionately supported the Revolution lost their heads to a new invention, the guillotine, because, as aristocrats, they could never be “citizens.”

The French were unfortunate in their leaders, or rather, their lack of real leadership.  This revolution thrust up rabble-rousers and demagogues, ambitious and unscrupulous men, all determined to ride the wave of revolution into greater power.  In the end, they all wound up victims of the very rage they had stirred up.  Although the notorious Committee of Safety was in charge, no one was in control. There were only those who aroused the mod, like Maximilien Robespierre, Jean-Paul Marat, Georges Jacques Danton, and Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Juste. The result was that the Revolution ran wild as the lower classes vented their anger on the aristocrats, during the years known as the Terror from 1793 to 1795.  The instrument of Terror was the Committee of Safety, where the major leaders of the Revolution, Robespierre, Danton, and Sainte-Juste, took away all of the rights won by the early years of the Revolution and reinstalled all of the oppressive practices of the monarchy.  Added to surveillance, spying and denunciation were massacres, mass executions and near genocide of a single class.  In the end the leaders of the mob all went to that instrument of a human and “democratic” death, the guillotine.   The power vacuum left behind was to be filled by a new leader, who brought order out of chaos by protecting the French from the European armies, which were advancing towards the country to put an end to the savage rebellion.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to
Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.
info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

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Oct
09
2009

The Political Revolution in America

The Political Revolution: America

Made by “new men,” new money created new forms of power for the newly educated and newly educated professionals and businessmen who began to chafe under the old-fashioned notion of “the divine right of kings.” Looking back, it is clear that the aristocratic class—an anachronistic class that produced nothing—was doomed to extinction.  In some nations, the dinosaur elite faded gently into the good night, but, in other countries, a revolution was necessary to dislodge the ancien régime. The social revolution would inevitably be followed by a political revolution.  It is worth noting, however, that these so-called “revolutions” did not include women, people of color, or the poor.  Only white men with a certain amount of property and income were eligible for the enormous cultural changes that marked the beginning of the Nineteenth Century.  The first of these political revolutions was in America and had a limited effect, at first, perhaps because America was such a great distance from Europe.  The French Revolution, which was inspired by the War of Independence in America, was far more impactful upon European politics and society.

Even before the revolution in industrialized production, several important political revolutions cemented the middle class into power.  In 1776, the American Declaration of Independence from England had resulted in a successful Revolutionary War in which the American Colonies freed themselves of the hereditary monarchy of Great Britain.  The American politicians, from George Washington to Thomas Jefferson to Alexander Hamilton, were well born, well educated, and well bred, but they were not European aristocrats.  As “colonists,” they, like all Americans, were subjects of a King and, as such, could never be the nobility.  Colonists could be only two classes, middle or lower, regardless of social prominence or income.  Like the philosophers of England and France, American leaders were socially ambitious middle class men who were sensitive to the winds of change.  Influenced by the British Philosopher, John Locke, and the French philosophers, (François-Marie Arouet) Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Americans began to question their subservient roles and to challenge the British right to rule them. Britain was the strongest maritime power in the world, well on its way to becoming a huge colonial empire, but England was far away, and the Americans had become accustomed to taking care of themselves and ran their affairs.  The resulting revolution was predictable and inevitable.

In comparison to the horrors of the French Revolution, the American Revolution was a civilized affair.  Based upon philosophical ideals that, by the end of the Eighteenth Century, were widely accepted, the Americans fought for their “natural right” to freely determine their own social contract.  The role of the state was to ensure the happiness of the inhabitants, and, according to Rousseau, had a rather limited role as protector.  The concept of “natural rights,” put forward since the Seventeenth Century, clashed with the imperial and mercantile desires of the British Empire.  The clash between natural rights and economic imperatives was a bellwether of things to come.  Writing in 1776, while Thomas Jefferson was penning the Declaration of Independence, Adam Smith wrote An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations and saw capitalism as a juggernaut that cared much for economic imperatives and little for “natural law.”  The British, naturally, felt that the American colonies must play their proscribed role in the mechanism of imperialism.  The Americans had other ideas: freedom, independence and the pursuit of happiness.  The conflict was between competing philosophies—Rousseau against Smith.  Inspired less by the noble ideas put forward by the beleaguered colonists and more by the opportunity to avenge their failure in the Seven Year’s War, the French lept to the defense of their American ally.  Baffled by the unreasonable demands of their subjects, the British found themselves in a new kind of war, an unequal war, that any occupying power must confront: insurgency and guerilla (“little war”), complicated by long supply lines.  That said, the Revolutionary War itself was fought according to the traditional rules of warfare and the British were outflanked and outsmarted by the combination of a stubborn native army and its determined French partner.  The defeated British withdrew to establish their Empire elsewhere but invaded once more in 1812, attacking America, now an ally of Napoléon, but the young nation held firm, even when the White House burned.

To the astonishment of Europeans, many of whom shuddered at the though of “democracy,” the upstart American colonies had not only won their freedom but had also written a very serviceable Constitution by 1789.  To the amazement of Europeans who dreamed of equality but seemed unable to achieve it, the “American Experiment” worked. Because the American Revolution was so unique, it was difficult to appreciate how remarkable the victory of the Thirteen Colonies was.  The Thirteen Colonies were fortunate in their leaders and their philosophy.  The men who composed the Declaration of Independence (re-writing Thomas Jefferson’s original draft) and the Constitution wanted to create an entirely new Social Contract, based upon principles of equality, democracy, and a balance of powers.  In contrast to the democratic system devised by the Americans, most revolutions are fought to replace one power source with another, for a revolution is essentially a “revolving” of power, not a change in the way power is distributed.  Americans accepted self-governance with equanimity.   Although about one third of the population did not care who ruled America and one third were loyal to the English, there was no civil war and no social disorder, only a need to establish a firm legal foundation for the new nation.

Using the rational thinking of the Enlightenment, people like John Adams and Benjamin Franklin guided the nation to the concept of a government by consensus and based that agreement upon enduring documents, from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution to the Bill of Rights. Only when the American Revolution is contrasted to other upheavals in power can one appreciate the value of a George Washington, who refused to be King and agreed to be President reluctantly and only temporarily.  Power was to be handed off after an election of a successor.   Rarely in history does a group of good people come together with good intentions and create a good thing.  A far-flung colony somehow managed to produce a large number of astute political thinkers guided by Enlightenment philosophy, Christian religion, and something the expatriate Englishman and revolutionary upstart, Thomas Paine, called “Common Sense.”  The American democracy was far from perfect and was, indeed, incomplete.  The rights of democracy—government by the people and for the people—were extended only to white men with property.  The contradictions of Eighteenth Century America are obvious today, but the conflict between demanding democracy for the few while limiting democracy for the many were not unknown to the Founders.  The rights of women and slaves were debated in Europe and America, and yet, despite the existence of the discourse on human rights, the writers of the Constitution decided, deliberately, to leave women out and to postpone the problem of slavery for the next generation to solve.  The result was a delayed democracy for women and people of color.  But even this limited democracy was a source of wonder for all outsiders who observed the United States with amazement.  A social revolution had become a political revolution.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to
Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.
info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

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Oct
02
2009

The Enlightenment and the Art Public

The Enlightenment and the Art Public

Spanning the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, the Enlightenment produced greater philosophical thinking than it did fine arts.  That said, the Enlightenment was crucial for a new way of thinking about art and art making.  In the beginning, the production of visual art was under the protection and sponsorship of the State, since the establishment the Royal Academy in 1648.  This Academy was a model followed by other major nations, which were aware of the need to monopolize the arts and to harness them to the needs of the government.  Because the people of France paid for the education of artists, the French government, the major sponsor of art, held Salons, or public exhibitions of state-sponsored art, outside on the grounds of the Palais Royale the new home of the Duc d’Orleans, who had an appetite for beauty and pleasure.  But after the first show in 1704, this site of balls and fêtes proved unsuitable for large exhibitions and the later salons were held at the palace of the Louvre.  Here in the palace the works of art could be protected from the weather and displayed to their best advantage.  The Salons were held after 1737 every year or every other year on August 25th in the Salon carré of the Louvre and ran ten days to four weeks, attracting the art public and the art critic, both new social entities.

The concept of a “public” for art was a new one as was the idea of publicaly exhibiting art, and inevitably, someone from the “public” would emerge with an opinion. This opinionated member of the public who dared to speak and write an to publish his views, much to the dismay of the artists, was the “art critic.”  By exposing the artists to the public, these salons opened the artists to public scrutiny and public criticism and the new species, the art critic, demanded that the artist be accountable to the public.  Artists, previously answerable only to elite groups of collectors and fellow artists, now needed public approval to succeed.  The public, then as now, encompassed all levels of social and economic classes and all levels of education and constituted a community of interest, breaking social hierarchies down into the new notion of a “public,” explored in 1985 by Thomas Crow in Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth Century Paris.  The creation and existence of this public brought with it new problems for the artist: what to represent in terms of subject matter; how to represent in terms of style; and who should be allowed to represent and who was allowed to speak to and for the public?

Also new were the private art collectors who became the chief patrons of modern artists.  Patronage was split between the aristocrats such as Madame de Pompadour and the newly rich middle class who preferred genre painting, that is scenes of everyday life, over the more prestigious history painting, depicting noble heroes of the distant past. Art collecting became a sign of wealth and taste, and during this period, several important large collections came on the market, such as the works owned by Queen Christina of Sweden, acquired by the French banker and art connoisseur, Pierre Crozet. French artists were exposed to a historical spectrum of Western art and had a wide range of artistic possibilities to choose from.  Despite the presence in France of the classical Baroque styles, the Baroque was systematically toned down in its dramas and was softened for the civilized and essentially domestic style of Rococo. Although much of Rococo art was produced for the aristocrats and rulers of Europe, the style was paradoxically involved with the concept of the “natural,” a reaction against the formality of society and its artificial and unnatural mores.  The pastel colors and gentle brushwork of the Rococo artists and the romantic themes made the paintings ideal for the domestic interiors of those who could afford them.  But during the same period, the public taste for middle class scenes made genre artists, such as Jean-Baptiste Chardin and Jean-Baptiste Greuze, famous for their depictions of everyday life.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to
Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.
info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

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Sep
25
2009

The Enlightenment and Society

The Enlightenment and Society

The question was how to create new world without God?  What would be the basis of this new life?  Spirituality was replaced with technology; religious laws were replaced by rational virtues, ethics, and morality.  “Bon sens”, extolled by René Descartes, could be determined by logical deduction, based upon observation of human psychology and conduct.  The Enlightenment sought empirical and pragmatic foundations for society for the material era.  The expectation was that peace and harmony would come into being through the minimum use of laws, instead of the heavy-handed tyranny of kings. In the past, the law was the will of the sovereign, in an Age of Reason, law was based upon the will of he people who voluntarily came together under the light hand of the state. The Enlightenment was characterized by this strong sense of humanity and by a belief that all humans are basically good and are deserving of basic rights and freedoms.  Humans could come together and rule themselves according to rational principles that all can come to know and live by.

The challenges to the authority of religion as a form of governance were directly related to the rise of nationhood. As early as 1534, Henry VII broke the power of the Catholic Church in England by the Act of Supremacy and made himself the head of the Church of England.  Without refuting religion, the King asserted the primacy of a nation in its own affairs.  The rising tide of the Protestant Reformation allowed European princes to likewise breakaway from the interference of the Vatican.  The Protestant idea that each person has a direct line to God and therefore could worship as s/he pleased led to not only a split between the Catholics and the Protestants but also among the Protestants themselves.  The result was the Thirty Years’ War, which ended in 1648.  After three decades of conflict, it was clear that religious ideology could never be allowed to disrupt the order of society and the power of religion as a dominant force was at an end. It is perhaps no coincidence that René Descartes who died in 1650 decided that the only point of certainty was the self: “I think, therefore I am.”  But Descartes was concerned as to the ground of his thinking—how did he know he wasn’t hallucinating or deluded?   He reverted to his faith in God, that God would be the guarantor of the validity of his thinking.  In his appeal to God, Decartes would be the last of his kind.  Indeed, one hundred years later, Diderot would assert that “…the philosopher teaches the priest what the gods are.”

The philosophers substituted “natural religion,” called Deism, a kind of watered-down theism and reconstructed religion in line with modern science for the mysticism of traditional “superstition.”  The abolition of God was also the abolition of hierarchies and the social theory of the Enlightenment stressed the discussion of social problems from the standpoint of the individual–the “true person,” not from the perspective of the state, which was only an artificial machine. The philosophes were the intellectual (and spiritual) leaders of Europe.  Natural Law was at the center of Enlightenment thinking and would be the instrument that severed morality from religion and would establish new bases for morality and ethics. If God was to be found anywhere, it was in “natural law.” Philosophers thought deductively about the origins of human society.  In Two Treatises on Government, 1680-90, John Locke projected his mind back in time and imagined a race of humans who were free and equal, their “natural” state” or State of Nature.”  The question that bothered Locke was why people had given up their freedom to come together into society, which so clearly curtailed their natural freedoms. He reasoned that the state was the entity that gave surety to these rights and used the words “social compact” or agreement that people made with their government to come together under “natural law.”  What made Locke so attractive to the budding American revolutionaries was his stress on the individual making a free decision to live within a state that, in turn, had the obligation to protect “natural rights.”

In his book, The Social Contract, 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau also went back to nature and considered the question of why humans would give up their natural freedoms.  His philosophical deductions led him to also consider the consequences of their decision to create a “Social Contract.”  Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind, 1754, asserted that the original human equality had ended due to the creation of private property.  The first person, who asserted “this is mine” ended the natural paradise of equality, according to Rousseau.  This idea that private property was to the root of the Fall of Humanity would be taken up by Friedrich Engels in 1884, and, indeed, Rousseau made a suggestion that the problem of inequality of wealth could be remedied by redistribution.  But beyond equalizing wealth, there is a general will of the people, which ultimately overrules private interests. Equality is natural law and natural law is based upon reason.  Rousseau understood the state as a function of the will of the people who look to the state to preserve and respect their “inalienable rights.” Even as Rousseau was writing, Adam Smith was rethinking the role of government, recasting the activities of society, not in terms of “natural rights,” but in terms of the new economic realities of mercantile society.

In 1776, Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, proposed that the sole purpose of a state was not to protect the rights of citizens but to safeguard the protect economic activities and property.   Like Locke and Rousseau, Smith was being perfectly rational.  Starting with a founding assumption that wealth was served the greater good, he gave priority to commerce, assuming that the wealthier the population, the wealthier the nation.  In separating the state from the economy and giving the economy free rein so that the “invisible hand” could enrich everyone, Smith also released the state from its moral obligation to protect people and gave voice to a new kind of political economy based upon the interest of capitalism.  Smith’s ideas are eminently reasonable and rational but they also give pride of place to impersonal forces—science, technology, and industry—that will change the face of Western society and reorder how people would interact with one another.  Smith himself was sympathetic to the plight of the poor and concerned over how the factory system dehumanized people but the logic of the “invisible hand” of capitalism gave rise to a ruthless exploitation of human capital in the name of economic prosperity of the nation.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to
Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.
info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

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Sep
18
2009

The Enlightenment and Reason

The Enlightenment and Reason

The Enlightenment is also referred to as The Age of Reason, a time period that stems from the awakening of European interest in science in the Seventeenth Century and ends with the unreason of the French Revolution at the end of the Eighteenth Century.  The importance of individual scientists, such as Copernicus and Galileo and Newton, and the significance of the voyages of world explorers, such as Captain Cook, indicate a cultural shift away from spiritual interests and toward worldly interests.  The need for worldly answers to cosmic questions overtook the spiritual dogmas, and the desire to explore the real world for commercial purposes proved to be more compelling than religious revelation.  Over time, it became impossible for educated persons to accept theological limitations of Church dogma and more difficult to explain the world as “God’s will.”  Philosophy would take the place of established religion as a way to explain the world, and, by the Eighteenth Century, philosophy was tasked with the problem of establishing a new system of ontology (a theory of being) and epistemology (the ground of knowledge) to replace God’s plan for the world.  Faced with the apparently irrefutable findings of scientific discoveries, philosophers developed contempt for religion and welcomed the new light into a world long shrouded in the darkness of misguided belief in a Deity.

If God, Voltaire declared, did not exist, we, the people, would have found it necessary to invent a supreme being.  Voltaire’s cynical statement comes very close to the Modernist concept that all aspects of culture are constructed. Most of the Enlightenment philosophers and political thinkers were Deists.  They believed in a God but rejected organized religion as superstition. Severing themselves from the comforts of certainty that religion brings caused pain.  “I grieve,” Denis Diderot mourned, “that I can no longer believe in God.” The philosophers were at the beginning of a process that moved Western civilizations away from the received wisdom of religion to the relativism of philosophical systems.  Because the Enlightenment was based upon the scientific model, there were earthly answers for everything. One conceived of a hypothesis and then tested the theory by employing empirical methods. The universe was conceived of as, not a heavenly realm, but a simple clock, a logical and rational mechanism.  Human beings were mere cogs, and insignificant ones at that, in this vast impersonal, soulless, uncaring machine.

The notion of the universe as a gigantic machine reflected the new concern with new technologies that were connected to the Industrial Revolution.  Human beings, not God, were in the center of this new universe.  The philosophers were confident that God’s mercy, capricious as it was, could be replaced by human reason and rationality.  The Enlightenment, in its own way, was based upon a belief system, every bit as powerful as the Christian system that was being phased out. The “faith” of the philosophers was based in Reason.  “Dare to reason…Have the courage to use your own minds…is the motto of the Enlightenment,” Kant declared. Reason was the basis of science: one made logical deductions and accepted the inevitable conclusion.  If the universe was rational, a machine, then society could also be rational and human beings could come to logical and orderly decisions on their own by reasoning like scientists.  Philosophers assumed that there was a rational order of eternal truths and philosophy in the Age of Reason would seek to ground their deductions in universality and transcendence.  They also assumed that human beings were perfectly able of recognizing the validity of these truths and that people would act accordingly. Reason was a certain kind of thinking based upon a logical progression from hypothesis to conclusion.   It was “self-evident,” a favorite term of the philosophers, that humans would not only accept truths derived from the mechanism of Reason but would also act according to these truths in their everyday lives.  The idea that people might act irrationally or counter to their best interests or that they might oppose “self-evident” truths was not an option.

Secular intellectuals believed that the time of Christianity had come and gone and that religion would be replaced by scientific, social and economic Progress. Progress was the logical outcome of the forces of Reason.  Progress, the philosophers and scientists assumed, had been impossible when timeless spiritual values dominated society.  From the Seventeenth Century, progress was the inevitable product of unstoppable technological advance fueled by scientific discoveries and inventions.  The Age of Reason was grounded in an optimism that Progress would improve humanity, now cleansed of superstition.  Rational thinking could create a regularized system for living, a system that was logical and produced social order. Rather than explained as a sudden strike from an angry God, natural events were understood as having a scientific explanation.  Order came from laws that arose from Nature, not God.  These laws were inevitable and irrefutable, or “self-evident” because they were, a priori, logical. French philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau based his ideas about the human condition upon a Natural Law could be utilized to resolve conflicts so that humans could come together and freely negotiate a Social Contract.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to
Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.
info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

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Sep
11
2009

The Enlightenment: Introduction

The Enlightenment: Introduction

Like any great cultural change, the Enlightenment was long in gestation.  By the Eighteenth Century, a critical mass of philosophical thinking and social custom had emerged, and, with it, certain famous intellectual heroes.  The Enlightenment can be understood precisely in terms of its entomology–that which sheds light: light into the darkness of religious “superstition”.  The principal conflict of the Enlightenment was the contest between established religious beliefs and a growing body of scientific knowledge that grounded knowledge, not in the will of God, but in an exercise of empirical evidence.  Upon this dialectic, struggles for social, political, and economic parity would be launched and would last to this very day. It is important to remember that the Enlightenment way of thinking is very Western and is a singular result in a particular place due to the impact of science and technology, resulting in the “death of God.”  Other areas of the world, such as Africa, were left out of technological progress and its benefits, and other areas, such as the Mid-East chose to not follow the secular path of the Europeans.  The result, two centuries later, would be a world split between those who took part in “Modernism” and those who did not.  The Enlightenment was a Western phenomenon, which established not only new philosophical ideas concerning the grounds of knowledge but also new ideals, such as “liberty, equality and fraternity,” “all men are created equal,” and the “inalienable right” of the “pursuit of happiness.”  These ideals would not be forgotten, but it would take time for the Enlightenment to become more than the ideals of speculative philosophers and to become a gradually unfolding reality.

A complex phenomenon, the Enlightenment was defined by one central question: how can life be lived and understood without God?  If God was “dead,” as Friedrich Nietzsche proposed, then the Deity was certainly an animated corpse, going to its demise, kicking and screaming, and becoming reanimated at unpredictable intervals.  The Enlightenment was confronted with Counter-Enlightenments, such as Romanticism and Catholic revivals, but politics, society and economics continued their inexorable march down the secular path.  Over time, Christianity came to occupy a smaller place in Western culture and ceased to be the basis for society’s belief system.   Once religious faith had permeated Western life and the answer to all questions was “God’s will.”  Unquestioning belief in God was challenged by two forces that proved to be critical to Enlightenment thinking.  First, was the idea  of “natural rights,” that is, the notion that people were created free and equal and had, as human beings, certain rights that could not be violated.  The concept of “natural rights” would be articulated by Enlightenment philosophers, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Thomas Jefferson but it dated back to the Twelfth Century and was present in a nascent from during the Medieval era.  The second was the explosion of scientific experimentation and hypothesis that shattered doctrines supported by the Church. Although there were certain scientific discoveries that particularly irked the religious authorities, such as the findings of Copernicus and Galileo, the combined weight of empiricism and the scientific method undermined the ability of religion to insist upon unquestioning belief.  Doubt entered into society.  Western culture shifted decisively towards secular questions and secular answers.

The result of secularism was a ripple effect that questioned the validity of the “divine right to rule,” creating a question of how could society be governed without God.  It was not just a question of government in the sense of whether or not to continue with Kings and Emperors but government in the sense of self-governance.  Without religious edicts telling people what to do, what kind of system would take the place of God’s law?  Just as scientists rewrote the knowledge of the universe, philosophers sought a new epistemology or ground for social relations. But even more urgent was the problem of knowledge.  Without God, what was knowable and how?  A new epistemology of knowledge also had to be established.  The new philosophical system proposed a new society and a new form of knowledge that would have profound impact upon art and artists, creating new ways of defining both art and artist and developing an entirely new branch of philosophy called “aesthetics.” The idea of “artistic freedom” is an outgrowth of the Enlightenment introduction of the concept of the “individual.”  The idea of the defiant artist, challenging the establishment and shocking the conservative public is an Enlightenment concept of rethinking received wisdom.

The profound secularization that is the Enlightenment has installed suspicion of authority, tradition, and divine right to rule…at least in the West.  Using the deductive and logical practices of science, rational thinking, and the powers of human reason discovered universal laws, which appear to have taken the place of God, the Enlightenment ended eighteen hundred years of spiritualized thinking.  As Thomas Carlyle said, “Philosophers strove to sink the supernatural to the natural”.  The concepts of “Nature” and “Natural Law” and “Natural Rights” and “Progress” could be used as powerful weapons against traditional powers that once ruled by “divine right.”  The Enlightenment also had a dark side.  The proponents of this unsettling upheaval in society were able to go only so far in their thinking.  The concept of “nature” or the “natural” could be used as powerful weapons to deny participation and power to those declared to be outside the confines of progress, such as women and people of color who were tied to Nature and therefore were beyond the forces of History and thus, the democratic fruits of the new social system.  Emmanuel Kant once stated, “If someone asks are we living in an Enlightened Age today?  The answer would be, ‘No,’ but we are living in an age of Enlightenment.”  The Enlightenment could not guarantee fully enlightened thinking, but the alternative to the Enlightenment, with all of its a prorias was, as David Hume, remarked, “..stupidity, Christianity, and ignorance”.  The men who made the new laws were bold, brave and even arrogant, quite capable of using enlightened modes of thinking to justify slavery and imperialism, all in the name of European superiority.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to
Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.
info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

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Sep
04
2009

Podcast Episode 1: What is “Modern?”

 

This podcast defines the meaning of “modern” for art and culture.

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