Posts Tagged ‘Charles Baudelaire’

« Older Entries
Oct
21
2011

“The Origin of German Tragic Drama,” 1925 by Walter Benjamin

Trauerspielbuch

(The Origin of German Tragic Drama), 1925

by Walter Benjamin 

Walter Benjamin’s Ursprung des deutschenTrauerspiels utilized a thought floated by Marx, that all art would become “allegorical” as a result of commodification and of its transformation into a fetishistic object. In this notoriously difficult book, Benjamin foregrounded allegory as the structural underpinning of the Baroque épistemé.  Originally intended as his Habilitationsschrift, or an academic manuscript, submitted to the faculty of a German university as the necessary prelude for being accepted as a Privatdozent.  Once accepted into the university fold, the Privatdozent has the right to lecture on whatever topic s/he desires.  On the surface, the submission was exemplary.  Benjamin had made all the right moves: he found a long neglected area of culture to investigate—German Baroque tragic drama—-and analyzed this obscure topic with exemplary and labyrinthine thoroughness.

However, after being passed among departments, this complex tome was summarily rejected by the traditional academics at the university in Frankfurt.  The Ursprung was an uneasy but innovative work—ahead of its time in its willingness to combine exacting research with poetical interpretation.  The major complaint against this book from its main reader was that it is impossible to study the spirit of an age, but forty years later, Michel Foucault would do just that in his Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) when he studied the notion that each era had its own system or theory of knowledge.

But beyond the question of how or whether “knowledge” was a social construct, there were larger problems with the Ursprung.  In resurrecting an almost forgotten art form, Benjamin actually challenged the prevailing belief that the “Classical” was superior to the “Baroque.”  It seems clear that he had read or was familiar with the work of the art historian, Heinrich Wölfflin: Renaissance und Barock (Renaissance and Baroque) (1888), and Die klassische Kunst (Classic Art) (1898, and Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Principles of Art History) (1915). Wölfflin treated the Baroque as a co-equal of Classical, as simply another style and not as a “decline” from the Classical.  However, as the prompt rejection of Benjamin’s thought experiment on the Baroque would suggest, the ideas of Wölfflin were still not accepted among those favoring classicism as the epitome of any form of art.

For a century, Germans had preferred the “classical”, that which the poet Göethe had called “healthy” to the Baroque or the early version of the Romantic which was therefore “unhealthy.”  The Baroque had long been considered to be a decadent version of the pure Classical and its obscure manifestations in Germany were of little interest to anyone, but Benjamin, who revisited this manifestation for his Habilitationsschrift.  In a time when academics worked within disciplinary confines that were strictly limited and patrolled, Benjamin was writing an interdisciplinary work, crashing through the room divides between studies of German culture, art history and aesthetics. The writer looked through a prism that incorporated Jewish mysticism from the Kabbalah.

Of course art history is in many ways a Jewish discipline, a life-long Yeshiva school, where art is endlessly rewritten and debated.  However, art history, like any other religion or belief system, has its rules and its areas of conventional wisdom.  In his excellent introduction to the Ursprung, George Steiner noted that Benjamin’s manuscript found its way into the hands of Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968), author of Studies in Iconology in 1939. According to Steiner, Panofsky did not view Benjamin’s work favorably. Steiner posited that Benjamin could have found a home with the group of scholars in Hamburg, Panofsky and Ernst Cassirer, Neo-Kantians, and Aby Warburg, the cultural historian in what became the Warburg Institute.

But Benjamin was probably too eclectic in his methodology even for this group and the moment passed and Warburg was dead by 1929 and Panofsky in America by 1933.  Benjamin gave up on academics and spent the rest of his life as a free lance writer and radio broadcaster.  Here, in short articles and lectures on the radio, Benjamin could roam free, indulging his wide range of interests as a literary and cultural critic.  “Criticism,” he said, “should do nothing else than uncover the secret predisposition of the work itself, complete its hidden intentions…”

For Benjamin, the power of interpretation was the power of the idea and he sought a synthesis between philosophical abstraction and aesthetic concreteness.  Using the idea of the dialectic, he thought that the universal would be revealed through that which was particular or in comparing the overall structure to the insignificant detail.  Benjamin sought the detail, an element thought unworthy of intellectual effort.  In contrasting the Classical to the Baroque, Benjamin is able to isolate certain defining characteristics: the symbol is the characteristic property of the Classical mind and the allegory is the characteristic property of the Baroque way of thinking.

Allegory, like the Baroque, had been considered a decadent form of symbolism.  Symbolism, in its purity, idealized and subdues the material object, totalizes its meaning and signification. The allegory, in contrast, is a sheer hemorrhage of significations that disrupt meaning and coherence.  This surplus of signification called “écriture” by later French writers, contrasted the purity of speech (the Classical) to the impurity of writing (the Baroque).

For the modern reader The Origin of German Tragic Drama is a difficult slog and the best advice one can give to skip over the obscure theatrical productions that languish (deservedly) in obscurity and to seek the fragments of insight from Benjamin.  The writer contrasted the Classical Hero in Greek tragedy who is silent in his suffering, in his tragic and unspeakable fate.  In his inability of speak, this hero become superior to the gods and thus transcends not just the deities but also history itself.  But the Baroque hero is mired in history that is natural and not timeless.  This hero must be noble so that his fall will be from a high place, suggesting that his suffering is more of a social humiliation than a preordained tragedy from a fatal flaw.  The Classical tragic hero wrestles with the inextricable workings of Fate but the Baroque hero is but one character amid a larger cast who—not gods—are his fellow actors.

Therefore, according to Benjamin, “tragic drama” is not “tragedy.” Tragedy is about mourning.  Tragic drama is about melancholy.  as Like Sigmund Freud in a paper, On Mourning and Melancholia, which had been delivered in 1917,  Benjamin separated “mourning”—classical tragedy form “melancholia”—tragic drama.  Indeed, Benjamin identified Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, as melancholy.  If the Classical is that which is timeless and transcendent, then its eternal life must be contrasted to the historicism and decay of the Baroque. If the Classical is that which is whole, complete, and self-sufficient, the Baroque is a mere collection of those  left-behind details, fragments of a melancholy cult of decay.  Benjamin forces the reader to examine these fragments, these “found objects” of the Baroque allegory.

Although Benjamin used the Hegelian notion of the dialectic to study an obscure and devalued topic, Baroque theater in Germany, Benjamin’s thinking was greatly influenced by Surrealist strategies for discovering the “marvelous.”  The marvelous was a mental state that resulted from the isolation of the object, resulting in defamiliarization and the shock of defamiliarity on the part of the now-dazzled viewer.  The frozen object is estranged from context and is freed to take on new meanings.  Like the Marvelous, the allegorical discourse is characterized by doubleness; the object is expressionless and yet possesses unbridled expression.  The object is purged of mystified immanence and is capable of multiple uses.  In its plurality, the frozen object can contain and radiate a bricoulage of elements, and because the allegory lays bare its devices (demystifies), the visual figure defeats symbolism.  Symbolism, by its very nature, “disguises,” as Erwin Panofsky would say, but Allegory ostentatiously displays its construction.  But its meaning is de-centered and refuses to submit to the totality of structure.

Benjamin connected allegory to the death of symbol and to the decline of aura in commodity production.  He linked the atomizing of the objects to Baudelaire’s observation of commodity culture where objects become abstracted and acquire an arbitrary status.  The commodity exists as fragment, ambiguous and ephemeral, and becomes fetish.  The object become overwritten, a palimpsest bearing unconscious traces of its aura and authenticity, neither of which exist, except as trace.  The object is reinvented as an emblem by Renaissance scholars and became the stylistic principle of Baroque art.  Rather than symbol, the emblem is code, pictorial codes or “thing pictures” (dingbilder) or a rebus, as Freud would have expressed it.  The allegorical form, however, is capable of capturing historical experience, which is why Postmodern Critical Theory would be so interested in Allegory.

Art, for the Critical Theorist, must be grounded in history.  Aesthetics attempts to turn an object into radiance and to transform exaltation into transcendence.  This process of aestheticizing the object idealizes the work but in a negative fashion, for the memory or history of the object is transfigured into a “sentimental glow”.  Allegory, in contrast, is not radiant and extinguishes, along with light, the false glow of totality.  Allegory admits that history is ruins and acknowledges the transitory nature of things.  The allegory, lodged in history, is beyond (idealized) beauty.  The allegorical form is petrified and frozen in the landscape of history, destroying aesthetics.  The governing law of aesthetics is not totality but antinomy and the dialectic is used as a mechanism of reversal of extremes.

Allegory depends upon conventions, which may be cheapened and degraded.  Allegory is a gathering, a collection of things, a combination of references that are assembled through a law that combines scatteredness and collectedness.  The arrangement of these collections is slack.  The most important allegorical figure is the fragment, which is imaged by an architectural ruin, ravaged by time.  For Benjamin, it was important to acknowledge that history was a ruin, in a state of decay, for history could be appropriated and idealized or aestheticized.

The Origin of German Tragic Drama brings together a number of tendencies in Germany at the early stages of the Twentieth Century.  Benjamin noted that Göethe, the Classicist, rejected allegory.  In his epic essay, On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, German poet, Friedrich Schiller was correct in understanding his friend, Göethe, as being “naïve” in that the older poet was immune from history and created art from an internal force.  The “sentimental” artist, however, is more akin to Benjamin’s allegorical maker, who makes it very clear that an allegorical object is being put together through an act of bricolage.

It is important to note that the mechanics of the allegory are not concealed or, as Brecht would have it, “naturalized”.  The assemblage that is allegory is always grounded in the truth.  Schiller’s sentimental artist may have mourned the loss of innocence and may have suffered from alienation but this artist is deeply connected to the history of his/her period.  Karl Marx pointed out that in an era of commodification, it would be the fate of art to become allegory.  That is, art, in becoming commodified would loose its “halo” and in its unsacred condition could be appropriated and turned into a fetish.

Art as allegory is alienated art.  The allegorist is thus both elegiac and satirical, but Benjamin foregrounds the condition of mourning and melancholy, pictured in ruins.  And yet, like Charles Baudelaire, Benjamin is torn.  He mourns the loss of the Old Paris, but like a Baudelarian flâneur, strolls through time and collects fragments or “remnants” and recombines them into an excess of writing.  Benjamin’s writings were very metaphorical, as though he turned to the past to express the future.  He understood Baudelaire’s metropolis as a manifestation of space within which new technologies were displayed as spectacle.

In an age of secular spectacle, fashion would be king and anything could be fashion, which is the ultimate form of “false consciousness” and cultural distraction.  Benjamin is fascinated with death and that which is dead, the corpse.  Once the object becomes a fetish and is alienated from social production and social use, it becomes fashion and is worshiped as a commodity.  The fetish is inorganic as opposed the corpse, which is organic.

Feeling that European culture was in a condition of crisis, Benjamin’s gaze is Janus-like.  He understood the past could only exist as ruins and that its fragments would only be displaced into the present as fetishes.  The future was even more bleak and marked by a mourning for the past.  The future could never be authentic; art could only be allegorical; and Baudelaire as the quintessential poet-critic exemplified the only stance of the artist that of an observer of the spectacle, alienated and enlivened only by cynical commentary.  Although we can read his literary action as allegorist in The Arcades Project, the work of Benjamin was re-read by postmodern critics and philosophers as portents of Postmodernism.

The arbitrary and nostalgic piling on of historical traces torn from the fabric of time, decontextualized and overwritten by the present, while retaining the trace of the past would be the prime strategy of postmodernism.  The Frankfurt School philosopher, Theodor Adorno, who survived Benjamin, would complete the setting of the stage for Postmodernism.  Critical Theory would be developed in its contemporary form after the Second World War, in the wake of the Holocaust.  “There is no document of civilization, which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” Walter Benjamin prophetically remarked in his essay On the Concept of History of 1937.

Benjamin’s insight that a dislocated history could be nostalgically fetishized for the Nazi cause, that art would become allegory and could be fetishized as propaganda seemed both prophetic and tragic.  All that he feared came true. Towards the end of what would turn out to be his only book, Walter Benjamin wrote,

Allegory goes away empty-handed. Evil as such, which it cherished as enduring profundity, exists only in allegory, is nothing other than allegory, and means something different from what it is.  It means precisely the non-existence of what it presents.  The absolute vices, as exemplified by tyrants and intriguers, are allegories.  They are not real and that which they represent, they possess only in the subjective view of melancholy; they are this view, which is destroyed by its own offspring because they only signify its blindness.

And then he concluded,

In the ruins of great buildings the idea of the plan speaks more impressively than in lesser buildings…Others may shine resplendently as on the first day; this form preserves the image of beauty to the very last.

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

 

Share

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Modern Aesthetics, Modern Culture | No Comments »

Jun
24
2011

Surrealism in Context

THE MAKING OF SURREALISM

SURREALISM

1924 – 1939

Wounded and home from the Front, the dying poet, Guillaume Apollinaire, went to a play by Diaghilev, Parade. The sets had been made by his good friend, Pablo Picasso, the music was by Erik Satie, the by Leonide Massine, and the scenario was written by Jean Cocteau.  The poet had written the program notes for the play which opened on May 18,1917.  Apollinaire had been using a new term, “surrealism,” one that he had coined in preference to “supernaturalisme” for several years.  According to Robert Mazzocco and Cecily Mackworth, the poet had already decided on his term months before he saw the play:  “After thinking over the question carefully, I prefer to adopt the word Surréalisme, rather than the Surnaturalisme I used at first. Surréalisme does not yet exist in the dictionary and will be easier to manipulate than Surnaturalisme, which has already been used by philosophers.”  After the play, the poet was ready to unleash his new term, which would be picked up by his friend André Breton.

Surrealism was a movement born out of the remains of madness and terror.  After the Great War, the writings of an obscure psychologist in Vienna, Sigmund Freud suddenly seemed relevant.  Soldiers had experienced what was called “shell shock” in the early twentieth century ever since war was invented.  The Great War produced such numbers of afflicted soldiers that no excuses of cowardice or treason, no amount of executions could make vanish the effects of war on the mind.  As a wartime nurse, André Breton had observed the power of the wounded mind over the helpless body and in 1921, he visited Freud to learn more of what the doctor called the “unconscious mind.”

For Freud, dreams were “the royal road to the unconscious,” meaning the mind was capable of communicating at various levels, and perhaps the least of which was the conscious level.  The deeper buried layer of the mind “spoke” in codes, whether linguistic or visual, and these clues had to be decoded by the psychologist who could translate the obscured messages.  What he learned from Freud gestated in the mind of Breton and his fellow poets while he joined forces with the Dada artists.  Dada, in Paris, was not nearly as cohesive as the Berlin group and for a poet with different ideas, wartime Dada was not the mindset needed for a new decade.

For an artist and poet, this subterranean mind, was a site of untapped potential for art making. The poets of Littérature, founded 1919, André Breton, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, Jean Paulhan, Paul Eluard, Georges Robemont-Dessaignes, were more and more out of sympathy with Dada.  Dada wanted to sweep the slate clean to create a tabula rasa, but the teachings of Freud stated that there could be no such thing.  The mind, far from being erasable, was like an archaeological dig, buried under layers and layers of repressed memories.  By of spring, 1920, Dada had outlived is usefulness as an anti-war movement, and Littérature was independent of its parent and was moving towards “surrealism.”  In this same year, Breton and Souplault experimented with automatic writing or écriture automatique, published as “Les Champs magnétiques” in Littérataire.  It was time to move on.

Breton announced, “Leave everything. Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow. Leave your easy life, leave what you are given for the future. Set off on the road.”  André Breton believed that “If there is to be an attempt at subversion, it will have to be sought on terrain other than Dada.” For Breton rebuilding the future of art into something positive was the goal of post-war artists. For the next three years, Breton attempted a “dialectical transformation” of Dada into Surrealism.  With the stated goal of Surrealism being the polar opposite of Dada, Surrealism looked back to the fin-de-siecle period at the poetry of the Romantic-Symbolist tradition, reviving the deeply nuanced subjectivism of Symbolist poetry.

With its adherence to Symbolism, one could question if Surrealism was regressively looking back but one could also argue that Symbolism was a poetic movement unfulfilled and deferred by the Great War.  Symbolism was not “expressionistic” in the way that the German movements were personal and emotional.  A largely literary movement, Symbolism demanded reader response by using language as a raw material to evoke rather than describe, to suggest rather than create atmosphere or mood. The founding poet of Symbolism, Charles Baudelaire wrote, “Nature is a temple in which living pillars/ 
Sometimes give voice to confused words;/ 
Man passes there through forests of symbols/ Which look at him with understanding eyes.”

In this poem, Correspondences, Baudelaire indicated that communication was symbolic and that one acquired a deeper and denser understanding through symbols, so much richer than mere words.  Word should be assembled to indicate something beyond.  A contemporary of Baudelaire, Isidore Ducasse was also fascinated with the romance of evil in Maldoror but, unlike Baudelaire, Ducasse lived and died—less than then years after Baudelaire—in relative obscurity.  Revived by Breton known under his nom de plume, Comte de Lautréamont, the novelist was best know for his signature phrase and the slogan of Surrealism: “As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella!”

While Symbolism sought to activate the mind of the reader through suggestive language, for Surrealism, the unconscious mind was an important source for art that could not be imagined by the conscious mind.  By 1924, André Breton was ready to release the Surrealist Manifesto.   This manifesto both nodded to its predecessor, Dada, and laid out its distinct philosophy, based on Freudian ideas. “If the depths of our minds conceal strange forces capable of augmenting or conquering those on the surface, it is in our greatest interest to capture them; first to capture them and later to submit them, should the occasion arise, to the control of reason,” Breton wrote.

The phrase, “control of reason” separated Dada from Surrealism.  Breton concluded his manifesto by giving the reader two definitions of Surrealism, first as a word: “Pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations,” and next as a philosophy:  “Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of the dream, and in the disinterested play of thought. It leads to the permanent destruction of all other psychic mechanisms and to its substitution for them in the solution of the principal problems of life.”

According to Breton, the question of the meaning of life should be changed from the expressionist solipsistic,  “Who am I?” to “Whom shall I haunt?” While Dada was a political and social art of anger and social protest, Surrealism was concerned with art as a means of expressing the buried or as an instrument of self-discovery, not as an end in itself.   Surrealism, then, put to itself a task and a purpose. Although placed within the ranks of the avant-garde, Surrealism should not be relegated to art-for-art’s-sake, for this movement had a job and this mission was to heal the torn fabric of society through private introspection.

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

Share

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Modern Art | No Comments »

Dec
17
2010

Symbolist Art and Poetry

SYMBOLISM

Art history usually places Symbolism, after or coinciding with Post-Impressionism.  But Symbolism was much older and could be traced back as far as the painting of Gustave Moreau in the 1850s and the poetry of Charles Baudelaire of the 1860s. This movement was, from the very beginning, both a literary and visual movement, meant to counter empiricism. Symbolism became an attitude towards art when Moreau resisted Realism with his elaborate fantasy paintings and became a counter to the supposed empiricism of Impressionism in the 1880s when the painter Odilon Redon imagined fantastic sights that could come only from dreams.  Symbolism was not just a French movement; it was one of the first global or international art movements.  If the train allowed French artists to fan out to the countryside from Paris, the railway also connected nations and carried artistic ideas across borders.

Many international artists acted almost independently of the French realism-idealism dialectic.  The art of the Belgium artist, James Ensor, the Norwegian artist, Edvard Munch, for example, are often thought of as reactions, not against naturalism but against the entire modern era itself. Ensor used metaphor to speak of a larger and deeper truth.  The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889 (1888) shows a diminutive Jesus on a modest donkey moving among a sea of people wearing masks at a carnival-like political rally.  The masks magically reveal the truth of their lost and ugly souls, all ignoring the small halo of light struggling to be seen.  What Christ found upon his return to earth is a modern world, full of madness, as seen in Munch’s The Scream (1893) a portrait of contemporary angst.

Meanwhile, in other countries, such as Germany and America, a lingering Realism reigned almost unchallenged and extended well into the 20th century.  Thomas Eakins and the later Ash Can School in New York coincided with Symbolism in Europe, creating a cacophony of avant-garde art for the public to assimilate.  At the turn of the century, France, the birthplace of Symbolism, the art public was still bewildered by Impressionism, becoming acquainted with artists who had long since disappeared (Gauguin) or died (van Gogh and Seurat) from the scene or were in advanced age (Cézanne). Critically speaking, the scene was one of chronological confusion; culturally speaking, the scene was one of defiance and decadence.

“Decadence” was the watchword for Symbolism.  Decadence signified ennui, the fading of a century, the loss of energy, and a general decline in old values which ere not replaced.  The future loomed, but no one could see past the dissipation of the present.  For a time, it seemed that to be modern was to be world-weary and decadent.  Some artists awaited the end of the century on drugs, others left town and went to the country, in search of simpler and purer ways of life and of new experiences.  The issues now became less about subject matter and more about philosophical issues: how should one look at the world and how should one represent it?

It was felt that Impressionism was played out as a style and by 1880; the Impressionists themselves were reacting to the criticism of their lack of structure. Impressionism was also criticized on the grounds of content that was too materialistic and too naturalistic.  Impressionists were accused of simply copying without thinking.  Nature was merely something to be represented, not something which had any other meaning…at least according to their detractors. The Nineteenth Century was stretched out to unnatural lengths by a long “fin-de-siècle” period, lasting approximately from 1880 to the Great War, which began in August of 1914.  Never was a century so long, and never did artists long so fervently for a century to end.

Symbolism: Return to Romanticism

Painting had become an arena for yet another larger philosophical quarrel, this time, between materialism and idealism.  Is life simply what one can see; is life merely empirical, measurable and quantifiable; is life only the facts?  Or is life based upon ideas, upon concepts, which, in fact, order and rule our perceptions?  How do we see anyway?  Only with our eyes?  Or does our mind order what we see?  These are not esoteric philosophical questions.  For the artist they are very real issues.  It is upon these considerations that an artist’s art and convictions rest.  By shifting the task of the artist from that of an observer, even a voyeur, the new artists at the fin-de-siècle, took up the question of how do we see and how do we know the world again.  If Impressionism asks the question how do we see, by presenting us with a variety of versions of seeing and looking, Symbolism suggested a different dialogue, a mental one.  Seeing is what we think it is.  Seeing is less important than what we see makes us feel.  Life is in the mind, not just in the eyes.  Symbolism explored the human mind as exhaustively as Impressionism explored the human world, and was nothing less than the return of Romanticism in a different guise. Rather than being erotic and exotic, Symbolism was decadent and jaded. Rather than being a celebration of the personal revelations of the artists, Symbolism was the place where all the forbidden desires of the decaying century could find refuge.

Symbolism was an all-inclusive movement, encompassing poetry, prose, music and painting–all resolutely opposed to Realism.  Symbolism was, in many respects, deeply politically conservative in that it ignored social questions and became obsessed with the subjective state of the individual. The flight from the threat of social emancipation of women and the rise of the dangerous proletariat was achieved through a late Romanticism, a flight that became an escape and an escape that became a devotion to decadence. At its extremes, Symbolism could descent into the eccentric, but as a general movement, it would point the way to important developments in the 20th century. Philosophically, Symbolism stressed a theory of Correspondences, theorizing that material things may correspond to spiritual elements.  Baudelaire thought of nature as a dictionary of forms from which the artist made symbols. But these symbols were neither pictorial nor descriptive: words were sounds and were strictly formal in nature, depending entirely upon suggestion and nuance.

What the poetry of Baudelaire suggested in his poem, Correspondences, the poetics of Stéphane Mallarmé materialized.  In Un Coup de Des, 1887, the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, isolated one of the components of poetry–the word–and a neglected part of poetry–the page–and arranged words on the white page in a flow of moving forms.  The reader was converted into viewer by the roll of the words, acting as if they were tracing the path of a die, tossed across the pages. Mallarmé was a student, a translator of the American poet, Edgar Allan Poe. Aware of Poe’s alliteration, Mallarmé played with words. ‘Die” in French is pronounced “day” as is “de.”  So the pronunciation in English would be “day” “day” an alliterative repetition, as beloved by Poe.  The French original word means “something given or played.”  For those of you who are reading ahead, the title of Marcel Duchamp’s last work, Etant Donnés means “Given,” a clear reference to Mallarmé’s poem. While Mallarmé did not eliminate the tradition of arranging verses into stanzas, neatly marching down a blank page, he did usher in a century of art that combined word and image.

(This poem, “Un Coup de Des,” in its original format is available on the web)

This poem is one of the most important in modern literature, because Mallarmé suggested through oblique words that life was a game of chance, given to the player, who could only watch the die roll across the pages.  The words of the poem became visual elements, differing in size and font and placement.  The words acted visually upon the reader who was pulled through the act of reading which had become a visceral and physical action.  Words rolled from page to page, playing against each other in different typographies, words that never explained or described, words that only suggested through mental associations created spontaneously by the reader. “To name an object,” Mallarmé said, “is to suppress three quarters of the enjoyment to be found in the poem, which consists in the pleasure of discovering things little by little–suggestion, that is, the dream.”

Symbolism was an important precursor for Twentieth-century visual art, not just in the art works that were specifically “symbolic” or emotional, such as Munch’s The Scream but because the artists used formal elements suggestively and forced the shapes and colors to “stand for” something else. The Scream is indicated by undulating waves of screeching colors, reds and oranges and yellows and claw lines of pale blue.  The curvilinear lines of color are visual manifestations of what a scream would look like if sound could be seen Aside from the radical simplification and reduction of poetic elements, Symbolism, both as poetry and painting, fore-grounded another heretofore neglected aspect of the art experience: the reaction of the spectator or the reader who now became an active participant.

“The Scream” asked the viewer to wonder what colors and what shapes a sound of fear would possess. Un Coup de Des forced the reader to literally “follow along” and to participate actively in the game of chance that is life itself. Rather than being a passive receiver of a reiterated optical experience, the viewer was invited into a world of poetic suggestiveness as the artist evoked responses rather than dictated a particular understanding. The theory of correspondences led to a theory of the work of art as one of synesthesia, that is, a total experience. The work of art becomes a parallel universe that excluded reality and created mystery.  This separate, self-sufficient reality is characterized by a deliberate ambiguity, a hermeticism or secret language that was closely related to the concept of art-for-art’s-sake.

The poet Paul Verlaine wrote Art poètique in 1882 in which he said, “For we wish for the nuance still/Not color, only the nuance!/Oh! Only the nuances marries/Dream to dream, and the flute to the home!”   “Symbolism” as a movement was “named” by a minor poet, Jean Moréas, in a manifesto published in Le Figaro, September 18, 1886. Albert Aurier in the Mercure de France, 1891, formalized symbolism into a doctrine.  According to Aurier, Symbolist work of art should be “1. ideative, 2. symbolist, 3. synthetic, 4. subjective, 5. decorative.”  Despite the uses future artists would make of Symbolism–the poetry of the Futurists and the Dada artists, the collages of Cubism–this movement is also linked with a fin-de-siècle malaise that was the anguish of young elite males who became involved in cults of death and melancholy. Fleeing from all that was modern, they lost themselves in myths and legends of the Celtic era and in occultism.

This is the time of the prominence of the Rose + Cross, a new salon set up by Josephin Péladan who revived Rosicrucianism which was linked to the Kabala, the Freemasons and the occult.  Rosicrucianism was part of a neo-Catholic movement that included many important artists and poets, Maurice Denis and Paul Claudel, (brother of Camille Claudel) respectively, as a reaction to materialism and the scandals of the Third Republic. Decadents worshiped the “green fairy,” the potent and dangerous drink called absinthe and its close cousins, opium, morphine and ether. They carried on the role of the alienated and despairing dandy, begun by Beau Brummell in England and taken up by Charles Baudelaire in France. The “over-ripeness” of the end of the century had its English counterpoint–the English Aesthetes, which included the domed and persecuted poet, Oscar Wilde and the illustrator of seductive women, Aubrey Beardsley, who died young.

A recurring theme in Symbolist art was the dangerous woman who threatened the peace of mind of men.  Often she appears as a ruthless succubus, sucking the life out of men.  The descendant of the Pre-Raphaelite beauty, longed for but untouchable, the Symbolist female was a precursor to the “femme fatale” of the Twentieth-century.   She appears in Moreau’s Salomé Dancing Before Herod (1876) was greatly admired by the impresario of decadence, Joris-Karl Huysmans.  Salomé demanded and got the head of John the Baptist from her father, Herod, frozen into a trance of desire by the erotic dance of his daughter.  The message is clear: women are the ruin of men.  Whether it was the blood thirsty women of the Revolution of 1789 or the women who lit the fires of the commune in 1871 or the women who were demanding their “rights,” the female was to be feared and the “femme fatale” is the star of Symbolist art.

As an artistic movement, Symbolism tended to be literary and illustrative, dependent upon the viewer’s imagination.  From the Swiss artist, Ferdinand Hodler (The Chosen One, 1893) to the Belgium artist, Ferdinand Khnopff (I Close the Door Upon Myself, 1891), Symbolist art was esoteric and hermetic, eccentric and introspective.  But Symbolism was more important to the art world than the odd subject matter would imply. The movement demanded artistic freedom.  Many of its adherents and many of the artists associated with it were genuine outsiders, real rebels who fought for the right of art to exist in its own right, for it’s own sake.

Shuttling back and forth between London and Paris, the American expatriate painter, James Abbot McNeil Whistler avoided the occultism of Symbolism but adopted the ideas of poetic nuances to painting, much to the dismay of the critic John Ruskin who accused Whistler to throwing a pot of paint in the face of the public.  Whistler’s “Nocturnes” series certainly lacked the work ethic of the Pre-Raphaelite artists but the artist insisted that the paintings contained his life’s knowledge and creative talents. Although awarded only one farthing in damages in his lawsuit against Ruskin, Whistler defended himself successfully in court on the grounds of artistic freedom.  In public, the artist put forward the doctrine of art-for-art’s-sake in his famous treatise, “Ten O’clock Lectures,” 1885. “To say to the painter, that nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player, Whistler remarked, “that he may sit on the piano.”

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

Share

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Modern Art | No Comments »

Dec
03
2010

Podcast 36 Painting 2: Manet to Post-Impressionism

The Painters of Modern Life

Although the Pre-Raphaelite artists initiated the artistic interest in contemporary urban life and the problems of modern people, the Parisian artists are given credit for learning how to express modernité in formal terms.  The French painters found the seventeenth century Dutch painters important precursors.  Inspired by the depiction of ordinary moments of daily life among the middle class in Holland, the emerging avant-garde artists began to rethink, not just how to handle modern content, but also how to use paint itself so that their art could be “of its own time.”  The result of this experimentation was an evolution of painting into the twentieth century.

 
Share

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Modern Art Podcasts | No Comments »

Nov
05
2010

Podcast 34 Whistler, Part Three

Whistler and Art-for-Art’s-Sake

Whistler was unusual among artists of his time in that he answered back to critics and took pains to establish his own discourse on his own art.  Fiercely independent and willing to lose a patron for the sake of his artistic vision, the artist sued when the aging British critic, John Ruskin, accused him of disrespecting the public.   The resulting trial established a new definition for Modernist art, with Whistler following up with his now-famous “Ten O’Clock Lecture.”

 
Share

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Modern Art Podcasts | No Comments »

Oct
08
2010

Podcast 32 Whistler, Part One

Whistler the Realist

One of the most overlooked avant-garde pioneers was the American in Paris (and London), the expatriate, James Whistler. Although overshadowed in art history by his good friend, Édouard Manet, Whistler was the other scandal in the Salon des Refusés and instituted installation techniques later adopted by the Impressionists.  Always controversial, Whistler’s art, like that of Manet, established Modernist tenets with his groundbreaking paintings.

 
Share

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Modern Art Podcasts | No Comments »

Sep
24
2010

Manet and Modernité

MANET AND MODERN LIFE

The laughing, blond Manet

Emanating grace

Gay, subtle and charming

With the beard of an Apollo

Had from head to top

The appearance of a gentleman.

Théodore de Banville, poet

Édouard Manet was not the artist that the Second Empire would have selected to be its chronicler, but, in the end, it was Manet’s impressions of France’s last monarchy that would make an indelible mark on the public memory.  Napoléon III followed in his uncle’s footsteps when it came to art.  Although he knew less about art than the former Emperor, he was determined to harness the visual arts to the machinery of the Empire.  The designated watchdog for the difficult and hard to handle artists was Comte de Nieuwerkerke who remorselessly restricted entry to the Salon both in number of works allowed and in kind of subject matter approved.  The Count wanted to stop time and to force the artists to concentrate on the ancient past and, if the artist wanted to do contemporary topics, these offerings should add to the glory of France.  It could be argued that Manet was very conscientious in recording the glory days of the Second Empire, but he recorded too much, too well.  “The eye,” Manet said, “should forget all else it has seen…and the hand become…guided only by the will, oblivious of all previous training…”  It would take a flâneur with an adventurous spirit to capture the empty splendor and gaudy spectacle that was the Second Empire.

Manet was trained by the open-minded academic painter, Thomas Courture for six years but drifted away from ancient precedents.  The successor to Gustave Courbet as the resident rebel, Manet was part of the dominant class and not particularly interested in the lower classes per se, as a political topic.  For Manet the main opponent was the Salon system itself and he jousted with the received language and rules of art and the unrelenting hostility of the jurors of the Second Empire.  His early foray into the art of modern life, Music in the Tuileries (1862) was rejected by the jury for its sketchy treatment of a non-narrative version of modern life.  Fashionable Parisians met and mingled in the fashionable garden: the men in their black frock coats and tall shining top hats, the women in their full skirts, perched precariously on the new wire backed chairs, and a little girl playing in her brightly sashed dress.  There were over a dozen portraits of notable Parisians, Baudelaire and Champfleury, members of the artistic elite—music, literature, art, poetry—brought together in a crowd that included the artist.  The painting could be seen as a counterpart of Courbet’s Funeral at Ornans, painted over a decade before.  Modern life was being redefined, not as the situation of the country folk but as the pleasures of urban sophisticates.

When seen in relation to his entire oeuvre, Manet’s nudes, Le Dejeunner sur l’herbe and Olympia, were ploys, a means to get noticed.  The heavy quotation of historical paintings fit better into a part of body of work that showed his devotion to Spanish and Dutch masters of past times. (For a further discussion of the way in which Manet mined the history of art, see Michael Fried “Manet’s Sources” in his book, Manet’s Modernism, 1996) The scandalous nudes helped make his mark, but the strategy of quoting (perhaps mocking) classical traditions would quickly give way to the detached and disinterested portrait of modernité.  Manet’s The Street Singer (1862) serves as a useful comparison to Courbet’s The Young Women of the Village Giving Alms to a Cowgirl, painted around the same time.  The critics were sarcastic to Courbet for the pretentions of the three young women—so obviously lower middle class—who dared to give charity.  What was perhaps worse for the critics was the unfashionable attire of the women (Courbet’s sisters), who were dressed for the country but did not wear the layers of the crinolines required of city women.  Manet’s street singer is a woman of the same social stratum, aspiring lower class, making her way in the world in a precarious profession.  She sweeps by in her chic and fashionable dress, exuding the urban self-assurance and street smarts of a city woman.

Trapped in an unhappy and unfulfilling marriage of inconvenience, Manet was a great appreciator of women.  When men appear in his art, they are usually supporting figures, or they are solitary portraits, such as of his critics, Emile Zola and Théodore Duret.  However, Manet did, when the occasion arouse, forayed into contemporary history painting and the deeds of modern men.  Among his best-known history paintings is Execution of Maximilian of 1867, a clear rebuke to the Emperor and his imperialist ambitions.  Over-eager to follow in his uncle’s footsteps, Napoléon III, had attempted to manipulate Mexican politics while the Americans were looking the other way, fighting a protracted Civil War.  The result was a disaster for the tragic puppet rulers, Maximilian and Carlotta, who set up a short-lived European court in Mexico City only to be quickly deposed.  Maximilian and his closest advisors were executed, ending the ill-advised adventure.  Working from newspaper accounts and photographs of the August event, Manet based the painting of the execution on Goya’s The Third of May of 1808 (1814), but eradicated the earlier artist’s symbolism.   There are five versions of this difficult composition, the best known in Mannheim today.

According to Michael Fried, this is one of the many works by Manet that were “…within the framework of a contemporary discourse of painting with its own history…” But the art historian quite correctly points to the dialectic within Manet’s works, that of the “universality” of references clashing with “…contemporary painting’s deeply problematic relation to the great art of the past.”

It is the female who is Manet’s signifier of Modern Life, because she, the powerless outcast, carried the unquestioned political and social power of the bourgeois male.  The artist was the consummate flâneur, the sophisticated dandy, who strolled elegantly among the crowd.  Independently wealthy, he was able to partake of the many sexual pleasures the city of Paris could offer the haute bourgeois male.  Inflicted with syphilis, as were most males of the time, Manet frequented the brothels and cabarets and bals, all of which featured available women for hire.  The presence of these anonymous women of the city, fighting to survive in their unsavory trade, stand in comparison to perhaps the love of his life, the artist, Berthe Morisot, who would later marry his brother, Eugène.  Unlike the professional women who were forced into the sex trade, Morisot came from the same background of privilege as Manet.  A professional artist herself, she would often pose for him, so many times, in fact, that it becomes clear that the posing sessions were occasions for the couple to enjoy each other’s company.  She is seen “lounging,” in a manner that disconcerted the critics, in Repose, or sitting stiffly in The Balcony (1868 – 9), her dark and brooding beauty commanding the canvas.  Her gravity and seriousness outweighs the lightweight charmer, Nana, the enchantress of the brothel boudoir.

The friendship of Manet and Morisot was indicative of other partnerships that would be forged, for example, Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt.  Such friendships between men and women of equal rank were rare during the Nineteenth Century.  In the late Nineteenth century, it was thought that croquet, a newly invented game, could take the place of actual warfare, but this new form of combat was a threat to the good order of society because men and women played together.  A “mixing of the sexes” was reserved for the unequal relationships between the upper class male and the lower class female.  This mixing can be seen in Manet’s Ball at the Opèra, painted three years after the end of the Second Empire in 1873.  The Third Republic proved to be no more moral than that of the Empire and the “decadence” that had supposedly brought down Napoléon continued unabated.  Once again, Manet employed the now familiar device of the crowd stretched out in an isocephalic arrangement.   The gentlemen in their black uniforms mingle with the women for hire.  Both groups are in disguise: the men in their anonymous clothes are unseen and disappear into the crowd; and the women in their masks and costumes are on display for male selection.  This scene has been called a “meat market,” by art historians, meaning that the men were indulging in the favorite pastime of the Parisians, shopping.

Perhaps the greatest and most successful painting of Modern Life was the Bar at the Folies-Bergère.  Painted in 1882, few years before his untimely death, this large work, located at the Courtauld today, could be seen as Manet’s final overcoming of art history, which he overwrote with the present.  The setting is a café concert, a new kind of entertainment for the masses, emerging during the Second Empire as part of the spectacle offered to the lower classes.  So alluring was this dazzling combination of performance and social mixing that the upper class male could be found in the crowd of lower middle class workers, identified by T. J. Clark, in The Painting of Modern Life (1985) as the caicots, the lower order professionals, such as bank clerks. The only women in such a place are those who are for sale, sexually available.  At the center of the painting is a bored bar maid, who is wedged between the bar and the mirror behind her.  The mirror, which stretches beyond the edge of the canvas, can be understood as reflecting the unseen foreground—the concert—because of the reflections of the woman, the femme de comptoir, and her customer, a gentleman in a top hat, which can be seen in the mirror.  The reflections are misplaced and function as orientating clues about the mirror, for in “real life,” neither reflection would be possible from the vantage point of the viewer of the painting.  The mirror can be read as “mirror,” because the painting is “wrong,” rejecting the “correct” manner of showing mirror images.

In writing about The Bar, T. J. Clark stated, “There seems little doubt that the structure which gives rise to these uncertainties was devised by the artist with conscious care…” The Bar is one of Manet’s final mysteries, combining foreground (in the mirror), which thus becomes background with the middle ground (the bar maid and the still lives laid out on the bar) and includes the viewer’s foreground, but makes the spectator’s position in doubt.  Where do I stand?  What is my viewpoint?  The audience has been de-centered.  The question is what did Manet do and why did he do it?  This painting connects with the rest of Manet’s oeuvre in the way he played with space, which, with Manet, was always unreadable.  The key word is “play,” for the artist was playful with the elements of traditional art. Manet’s favorite target was the deep space created by Renaissance perspective, beginning with his elimination of the dark ground in favor of his famous “blond” tone, which precluded a feeling of pictorial depth.

However, one should not leap to the conclusion that Manet is “flattening” the surface, as Greenberg insisted.  Greenberg was constructing a theory and therefore, not necessarily seeing “into” the work.  Many of Manet’s paintings depend upon the viewer.  This dependency does not resemble what Michael Fried termed “theatricality,” but is more related to German playwrite, Bertold Brecht’s “alienation effect,” in which the audience is made aware of itself, breaking the illusion of realism.  Traditional painting placed the spectator outside the “window to the world,” peering through the picture plane.  Manet, however, placed the spectator within the scene.  The viewer is forced to interact with the events and becomes part of a usually disreputable place, like a brothel or a cabaret.  Once the viewer is freed from his or her role as outsider, art, with Manet, became the play of new possibilities.  The one theme that recurs in his career is that of the right, if not the duty, of the artist to play and, through play, to challenge. In his last great painting, Manet explained his artistic credo: art, before it is anything else, is not real; art is artificial.

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

Share

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Modern Art | No Comments »

Sep
24
2010

Podcast 31 Edouard Manet, Part Two

EDOUARD MANET, PART TWO

The painter of Parisian modernité, Édouard Manet, abandoned his early strategy of commenting on past masterpieces but continued his quest to update and modernize traditional genres in Salon painting. A transitional painter, Manet pointed to way to the final break from Academic art with his work during the last two decades of his life.

 

Share

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Modern Art, Modern Art Podcasts | No Comments »

Sep
17
2010

Manet and the Nude

ÉDOUARD MANET AND “THE (FEMALE) NUDE”


“The leading characteristic of our century is its historical sense.

This is why we have to confine ourselves to relating the facts.”

Gustave Flaubert, 1854

“The wind blows in the direction of science.

Despite ourselves, we are pushed toward the exact study of facts and things.”

Emile Zola, Salon of 1866

“Il faut être de son temps.”

Honoré Daumier

Unlike his predecessor, Gustave Courbet who carefully directed the critical discourse around his art, Édouard Manet was far more taciturn.  When he spoke, it was in fragments, causal remarks, rarely buttressed by explanations about his paintings.  Against this silence, art historians constructed many frameworks for understanding.  First there is Manet the Formalist, as put forward by Clement Greenberg, as the progenitor of Modernism.  Next, there was the Manet of the Marxists, put forward by writers such as T. J. Clark, followed by Manet of the feminists, such as Griselda Pollock, and then there was the Manet examined by the sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu.   There is validity to all of these approaches, each illuminating the complex artist who ushered the modernité of his friend, Charles Baudelaire, into the world of avant-garde art.  How Manet created a final rupture between the modern realists and the traditional Academy is less interesting than why.   What were his strategies of attack, what were his tactics of provocation?

Manet, who was a child of privilege, born to a comfortable, even wealthy, haute bourgeois family, was typical of the rebellious son of a professional—-supported in his rebellion and cushioned in his insurrection by his father’s fortune.  Manet was never a successful artist, in the sense of sales, during his lifetime.  His financial independence would be crucial to his artistic independence.  He could afford, quite literally, to take risks and to continue without reward.  Part of the dominant class, Manet had no particular reason to destroy the bourgeois source of his position, and he never stopped vying for recognition in the Salon, always needing the rewards doled out by the State.   The artist was less of a rebel than a careerist, seeking a way to get noticed among a crowded field of aspirants.  The career of Gustave Courbet provided an excellent model: find your crowd of supporters among art critics and writers of the literary world, create a recognizable persona, and attract attention to your art through shock and awe.  Like the career of Courbet, the paintings of Édouard Manet cannot be understood without acknowledging the power of the press and the importance of publicity and the new avenues that mass media opened up to the artist.

The Second Empire was a peaceful period, marked by intellectual cynicism and resignation, following a failed revolution.  Open rebellions would fail, rebels caught in the crossfire would get crushed, so the smart move was to retreat to the safety of intellectual dissent.  Literary and artistic language evolved into a subtle network of overt condemnation of the hated middle class and its self-satisfied complacency.   The direct confrontation of a Courbet gave way to the visual ambiguities of a Manet.  Courbet’s paintings were battering rams on the barred gates of the Academy, intended to break in and to reform the wrong-headed taste for the classical.  Manet, with impeccable credentials, direct from his long tutelage under the fine academic artist, Thomas Couture, was already an insider.  His task was not to storm the barricades but the find a way out of the fortress of the Academy.   Manet inherited a group of literary supporters from the avant-garde, such as Emile Zola, and the ready-made role of “the Dandy,” popularized by Baudelaire.  Handsome, elegant, well-dressed, and cynical man about town, Manet succeeded Courbet as the leader of the insurrectionists.  But Manet was a very different kind of “Realist.”

It could be asked if Manet’s work was the Naturalism of his literary counterparts, Gustave Flaubert and Emile Zola. According to the critic Jules Castagnary, “…its (Naturalism) only object is to reproduce nature and lead it to its greatest power and integrity…the Naturalist school reestablishes the severed relationship between man and nature…” Far more than any other artist of   his time, Manet was a link between the tradition of historical painting and the need to paint new objects in a new fashion.  Less of a history painter and more than a painter of the history of painting, Manet’s representational mode was not that of copying nature but of observing human nature with a shrewd and jaundiced eye.  His highly stylized subjects were presented to the viewer, and this audience—assumed to be white, male and heterosexual and urbane and wealthy—was taken into account and the male viewer was drawn visually and metaphorically into his works. Like his predecessor, Courbet, and his teacher, Thomas Couture, Manet’s work is pastiche-like in its collage approach to putting together many elements, which may or may not fit together.

This pictoral collaging of flattened units, so evident with Courbet, becomes almost a conceit with Manet. Echoing Courbet’s mockery of the rhetoric of academic poses, seen in The Bathers (1853), Manet exploited the customary practice of putting academic poses and postures together into huge history paintings, as was seen in Courture’s Romans of the Decadence (1847). Manet extended the convention of academic visual discourse to its logical extreme, by exposing its inherent artificiality.  In the face of Naturalism and Realism, Manet’s works of art were about other earlier works of art, high and low, serious and commonplace, historical and current.  The result was a series of anti-academic paintings that pushed the Romantic dictum of “art-for-art’s sake” to its logical conclusion, making the artistic statement that art is an artificial product, a cultural artifact that is about reality but that does not mirror reality.   If art is severed from its traditional task of reflecting the world and/or being in the service of society, then art has no purpose other than an existential one: art existed for its own sake alone.

In The Rules of Art (1992), the sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, made a distinction between the successive avant-gardes in Paris: the first avant-garde in of the 1830s, the original la bohème, and the second avant-garde, which engendered the collaboration between the artists and the writers, such as the partnership between Courbet and Champfleury.  The last avant-garde, according to Bourdieu was the art-for-art’s-sake position, held by Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert and carried on by Édouard Manet.  The difference between Courbet’s socially active art and Manet’s socially apolitical art can be summed up in the difference between Courbet the Country Bumpkin and Manet the Dandy.  The Country Bumpkin was a construct in contrast to the sophisticated Parisian, while the Dandy was uninvolved, aloof, alone and apart.  It is this disinterested detachment that allows the new avant-garde artist to separate himself from the “rules of art” and to forge a separate path.  The contrast also explains Baudelaire’s antipathy to Courbet’s politically engaged painting, which kept art in the service of society.  Baudelaire selected Constantin Guys as his “painter of modern life” for a reason—Guys was an outsider who was uninterested in the art world, without a stake in the Academic game.  The poet was saying very clearly that the “painter of modern life” had to be a disinterested observer of society and could not be a participant in that society, thus privileging the alienation of the artist.

For many art historians, Manet was Baudelaire’s “Painter of Modern Life;” but the poet, who died in 1867, did not live to see his friend become successful or at least renowned. Nevertheless, it was Manet who began to capture the essence of modernité, a quality the critic called “the fugitive, fleeting beauty of present day life…” La vie moderne was based in the city, the heart of darkness of the century, a place of anomie and indifference. Wiped clean of anecdote and symbolism and of meaning, Manet’s art becomes a synedoche, a slice of life but a very particular kind of life.  Like his friend, Edgar Degas, Manet was a man about town who knew well the pleasures of the boulevards and brothels and cafés and cabarets and bars.  Life in Paris had a duality and a hypocrisy: a bourgeoisie respectability on one hand and an underground, Baudelaire’s “floating existences,” of marginalized people living on the fringes of respectability or far beyond social redemption.  In Manet’s art, as in Courbet’s later works, women were the main commodities of the era.  Forced into prostitution by economic conditions beyond their control, women were bought and sold, everywhere available to the highest male bidder.  Women, or to be more precise, the “fallen woman,” became the visual images upon which the Second Empire depicted itself as the all-consuming bourgeois male in power.

Did Manet reiterate the conditions of this male-dominated society to simply record, or to comment, or to critique, or to scandalize the male viewer? From viewing his works, it seems that the hero of modern life in the Second Empire was a man with money to spend on women, a member of the haute bourgeoisie who pursues the dubious pleasures of the demi-mondaine.   The artist occupied the protected position of an observer who could slum and escape, retreating to the sanctity of the studio where his adventures could be captured.    But the presence of a suffering urban proletariat in the works of Edouard Manet cannot be considered a critique.  Their misery is presented as a simple accepted fact, which is ironically manipulated through the lenses of art history.  The Old Musician (1862) is a pendant to Music in the Tuileries (1862), as an implied contrast between the lower and upper classes. The Old Musician borrowed from Spanish painting and from the works of the Le Nain Brothers, while Music in the Tuileries was an artist’s attempt to paint the crowd—albeit an upper class one—in the modern city.  Both paintings are group portraits of urban types, but Manet’s lower class people–the ragpicker and the destitute children and the old people–were overwhelmed with allegory and appropriation, used for the artist to mock the tradition for history painting. The presence of the lower classes, displaced by Haussmann’s destruction of the Old Paris, was entirely new subject matter in the Salon.  But any social comment was absorbed into elitist allusions to the history of art, appealing to the well-educated male connoisseur as a series of insider commentary.

But the pair of paintings took their place only as preludes for the seminal works of 1863, two paintings of the “modern nude,” who could only be the prostitute.  The urban poor, inherently unattractive, quickly disappeared from Manet’s work, and attractive women of ill-repute emerged as his major preoccupation by the mid 1860s.  These women, who could be owned by males, were presented with a specifically masculine way of looking: a proprietorial gaze, which implies unmediated and unquestioned power.  As John Berger remarked, men look and women are constructed to be looked at.   The only clue to Manet’s intentions as to why he painted (Le Dejeunner sur l’herbe) Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia, both of 1863, is that the “nude,” by now always female, was the path to fame and fortune in the Salon.  Manet is said to have signed and accepted the inevitable—-to become noticed, he had to stoop to hackneyed subjects.   “It seems I must paint a nude.  Very well,” he said, “I shall paint one.”  The question was how to update the female nude?  Manet was clear that he meant to include “…people like you see down there,” meaning that he was familiar with the people who bathed in the Seine.  These would have been the urban poor who had no other recourse for cleanliness or recreation than the city’s river.  Manet was also familiar with Giorgione’s Fête champêtre (1508), a country or rustic scene with a theme of humans living in harmony with nature.  Apparently, Manet combined the ideal rustic scene with the actual and current way in which ordinary people used nature.

“The public will rip me to shreds but they can say what they like…”  Manet said bravely.  We know that after he was “ripped,” he felt considerable pain but received no sympathy from Baudelaire who was dying in Belgium and blooded by the Empire’s censors.   Manet began a painting named Le Bain, which could be thought of as the beginning of his mature career.  His father had died the year before (of syphilis) in 1862, freeing the son to be his own man.  Updating the nude meant not only making the nude a contemporary one but also to free the nude from symbolism and metaphor and allegory.  The woman most likely to have a kind of “public” nudity would be the prostitute.  The strategy had to be to mask the inherent vulgarity of the prostitute and to avoid the impropriety of presenting the respectable woman by using canonical art historical examples from past times.  In the painting, later renamed Le Dejeunner sur l’herbe, Manet appropriated Giorgione and Titian and Goya and Raphael and mined their art for poses, precedents and legitimacy.  By filtering the nakedness of the modern woman through art history, Manet escaped the trap of Naturalism, that of passively recording reality.  These paintings were artificial and arbitrary and willful in their irony and sarcasm.  While Manet’s work seems satirical, the paintings were also a gamble, as if he bet everything on one throw of the dice.  His goal was probably to be noticed among a sea of earnest and pornographic female nudes, disguised as goddesses.

Courbet’s success owed a great deal to the open Salon of 1848 which allowed him to summarize and end the first stage of his career and to the Salon of 1849, juried by artists, which allowed his Dinner at Ornans to be shown and awarded a second-class medal.  Manet’s success would equally hinge on politics, this time on art politics.  Manet had hoped to soften up the jury by preempting their judgment with a show of is new works at the Louis Martinet gallery.  As would often happen, Manet’s hopes for public acceptance were dashed and the Salon jury was no better disposed towards his work.  The jury for the Salon of 1863 was unusually harsh, an outcome during the censorious Second Empire, which meant that the level of rejection was nothing short of extreme.  Deprived of the right to be seen and, thus of the right to earn a living, the rejected artists protested so much that the Emperor intervened and ordered a second salon, the famous Salon des Refusés of 1863.  Many artists simply slunk away, not wanting to exhibit with the losers, but the more opportunistic painters, such as Manet and his friend, James Whistler, participated.  The Salon des Refusés overshadowed the Salon of the Accepted Ones, and the two artists were the most scandalous painters presenting.  To paraphrase Flaubert, now that Manet was attacked, he now existed in the minds of the art public, which was primed and ready to be horrified at his next offering, Olympia, another modern nude, at the Salon of 1865.  “I render as simply as possible the things I see.  What could be more naïve than Olympia?” Manet protested, perhaps a bit disingenuously.

By layering Le Dejeunner sur l’herbe with references to two paintings by Raphael, to Giorgione’s Fête Competre, to Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love, and Olympia with quotations from Titian and Goya, Manet seemed to ask why couldn’t he be allowed to do the same kind of art as his predecessors?  But his art was not the same. Manet did more than Michel Foucault claimed when he remarked that the artist was the first to paint a “museum painting,” that is a painting that would be comprehensible only to the art educated public.  The paintings Manet borrowed from were all set in poetic spaces, not in real time or in real places.  Only Titian’s Venus of Urbino, the model for Olympia, was contemporary, a private commission, about as high-minded as Courbet’s The Sleepers. But Titian’s “Venus” was demurely distanced from the kind of provocative modernité demonstrated by Manet. Titian’s painting was a private offering to a princely patron; Manet’s paintings were public assaults, exposing the sexual pastimes of the well-heeled male, indiscretions to which the law turned a blind eye.  That willed blindness was pierced by the strident gaze of Manet’s model, the high-priced courtesan watchfully regarding the male interloper, who had apparently interrupted a sexual tryst.  The tactic of breaking through the “fourth wall” of the picture plane predicted the theatrical practices of Berthold Brecht—-the direct address of the actor to the audience, the refusal to accept the rules of virtual reality.  By forcing the Second Empire audience to become part of its own sordid hidden lives, Manet achieved his intention to “do the nude” and to become noticed.  Scandal equaled success and established Manet’s reputation as the leader of the new avant-garde, and freed him from conventional subject matter.  But Modernité would not be the conflation of art history and art present, but the capture of all that was contingent and fleeting, the ephemeral drifting fragments of Paris: the next stage of Manet’s career.

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

Share

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Modern Art | No Comments »

Sep
14
2010

Podcast 30 Édouard Manet, Part One

ÉDOUARD MANET, PART ONE

It is with Édouard Manet that the concept of Modernism as a new form of urban culture is manifested in painting.  This podcast traces Manet’s ironic and satiric play with art historical predecessors in his efforts to both succeed in the Salons and to capture the fleeting world of modernité.

 

Share

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Modern Art, Modern Art Podcasts | No Comments »

« Older Entries