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Feb
03
2012

“Modernist Painting” by Clement Greenberg

THE MODERNISM OF MODERNIST PAINTING, 1960/1 

Clement Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting,” originally given as a radio broadcast in 1916 for the Voice of America’s “Forum Lectures,” was printed in 1961 in the Arts Yearbook 4 of the same year, reprinted in 1965, ’66, ‘74, ’78, and 1982.   The article achieved a canonical status and served as one of the definitive statements of formalism as a mode of visual analysis and of formalism as a critical stance, and possibly, of formalism as a mode of making art.   In his 1961 essay on “Modernist Painting,” Clement Greenberg (1909-1994) defined “Modernism” as the period (in art) roughly from the mid-1850s to his present that displayed a self-critical tendency in the arts.

Greenberg considered Immanuel  Kant the first Modernist.  The essence of Kant’s thesis was the employment of the characteristic “methods” of the discipline to “criticize the discipline itself.”  According to Greenberg, Kant used logic to establish “the limits of logic.”  The Modernist goal of self-criticism grows out of the critical spirit of the Enlightenment philosophical system which was based upon the belief in the power of rational thought and human reason. “Critique,” as a method, analyzes from the inside, from within the object being examined and does not judge from the outside, according to external criteria.

Painting must analyze itself to discover its inherent properties. Painting, according to Enlightenment methodology, must be interrogated according to its inherent purposes.  The key term here would be “inherent,” for analyzing an object according to its essential definition must preclude bringing forward any non-essential or external criteria. In other words, a painting telling a “good story” is not necessarily a good painting.   In this article, Greenberg carries on his attempt to “save” and to define “high art,” and “Modernist Painting” of 1960 can be compared to “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” of 1939.  Two decades had passed and Greenberg had progressed from being an up-and-coming art writer to being the arbiter of fine arts in New York, enjoying a truly hegemonic position.  His crusade was all the more urgent in 1961, as territory of the avant-garde was being invaded by popular culture and the forces of disrule, exemplified by Neo-Dada and Pop Art and Fluxus.  Greenberg had also shifted his political position, from being an intellectual Marxist, to being a Kantian formalist, a far safer situation which removes the critic and art from current cultural considerations.

Greenberg stated that art can “save” itself from being entertainment by demonstrating that the experience it provides is “unobtainable from any other source.” It is the task of art to demonstrate that which is “unique” and “irreducible”, particular or peculiar to art and that which determines the operation peculiar and exclusive to itself.  All effects borrowed from any other medium must be eliminated, rendering the art form pure.  “Purity” becomes a guarantee of “quality” and “independence” of avant-garde art.  All extrinsic effects should be eliminated from painting.

One could say that it is not the essential to the definition of a painting that it re-create the world realistically.  Today, that role can be fulfilled by photography or film.  Film and theater are defined by storytelling and narrative, enhanced by illusions of everyday reality.  Following Greenberg’s line of reasoning, realism and story telling and illusionism should be eliminated from painting.   For Greenberg, art was used to call attention to art.  Clement Greenberg logically worked out the limitations and peculiarities of painting, which are a flat surface, the shape of the support and the properties of the pigment. These physical and material limiting conditions became positive factors.

Once suppressed by artists through under-painting and glazing, these material aspects of painting were now acknowledged by Modernist painters.  Because he appeared to have considered and taken into account the limitations of painting as the application of paint upon a flat surface, or a stretched canvas, Édouard Manet is designated by Greenberg as the first Modernist artist.  Manet “declared the surface;” his follower, Paul Cézanne, fit the drawing and design into the rectangle of the painting.  In Modernist painting, the spectator is made aware of the flatness and sees the picture first, before noting the content.

Modernist painting abandoned the principle of representation of Renaissance illusionistic space inhabited by three-dimensional objects, giving the effect of looking through the canvas into a world beyond. Modernist painting resists the sculptural, which is suppressed or expelled.  The question is that of a purely optical experience.  With Greenberg, flatness alone is unique to painting.  For this critic, “art” carries within itself its own teleology.  As art seeks self-definition and determines its own uniqueness, it becomes more pure, more reductive in its means.  More is eliminated—subject matter, content, figuration, illusionism, narrative—and art becomes independent, detached, and non-objective, that is, abstract.  Content becomes completely dissolved into form.  Greenberg, in looking back selectively at the history of art, presented a map of progress and evolution of painting, away from representation and toward purity, abstraction, reductiveness; to flatness, to pure color, to simple forms that reflected the shape of the surface.

The essay noted that Modernism “resists sculpture” or three-dimensionality and reminded the reader that this “resistance” was by no mean recent. The critic pointed to Jacques-Louis David as an example of an artist whose work was flat and surface based.  Greenberg insisted that the scientific method justified the demand that painting (and art) limit itself to “what is given in visual experience.”   Greenberg equated the artist to the scientists, both of whom “test” and experiment.  The equation of art with science, replaces his earlier equation of the avant-garde with politics:  “…a superior culture is inherently a more critical culture.”  One can “only look” at a work of visual art, which is discernible only to the “eye.”  Poetry is “literary,” art is not and should not attempt to be, for as Greenberg reminded us, any translation of the literary into the visual “loses” the literary qualities.

Like Avant-garde and Kitsch, Modernist Painting, had a subtext, Enlightenment philosophy, especially that of Kant’s Critique of Judgment.  The 1939 article concerned itself with aesthetics but more with the “experience” of the aesthetic.  In Avant-garde and Kitsch, it is possible to believe that Greenberg was writing of the experience of the aesthetic in terms of the placement of art in the culture, in other words, it is not so much the “how” of the experience but of the “where” of the aesthetic.  In Modernist Painting, the experience of the aesthetic is located in the realm of the how one looks at a work of art.

The proper attitude of the spectator was important to Kant who recommended a posture of detachment from personal desire and indifference to artistic content in search of a universal means of judging the efficacy of art.  The Enlightenment philosophy cherished the idea of the universal or the absolute, for some kind of standard had to be erected to replace the all-knowing presence of the now-banished God.  Kant was not interested in defining what “art” was but in establishing the ground for the judgment of art.  Working in the new philosophical field, aesthetics, Kant attempted to establish the epistemology of art, based, not in individual works but in a method of knowledge.

Greenberg’s understanding of Kant led him to use the methodology of critique but the critic took “critique” in a rather different direction.  Writing two centuries after the German philosopher, Greenberg looked backwards in time and implied another favorite Enlightenment idea, that of progress.  Modernist art, if one understands the essay correctly, seems to “progress” and move forward in time, away from manifestations of extrinsic properties and towards a purity of means.  “Modernist art develops out of the past without gap or break, and wherever it ends up, it will never stop being intelligible in terms of the continuity of art.”

The ground has shifted away from a means of judgment (Kant) to a theory of the evolution of art along telelogical lines with a goal in mind: purity.  Even though as Greenberg pointed out, “The first mark made on the canvas destroys its virtual flatness,” purity seems to imply a historical rejection of representation and a validation of abstraction. The point of noting Greenberg’s development of Kantian theory and its application toward Modernist Painting is that, without the notion of progress, the critic’s theory of artistic development would have to include some of the masters of flatness, such as William Bourguereau and some of the masters of the surface such as Thomas Kincaide, both of whom Greenberg would have excluded from the family tree of modernism.

While Kant would at least judge these two artists (and perhaps find them wanting), Greenberg seems to imply a connection between Modernism and the avant-garde and establish ground for exclusion of the unworthy. The oppositions of the dialectic are implied: those who did not follow the path of Modernist reductionism were, like dinosaurs, left behind.  If one reads in a connection between Modernism and the avant-garde, even if only through the names of the canonical artists Greenberg mentioned and thought his previous articles, then the conflation between the continuity of art and the avant-garde, which supposedly breaks with the past, becomes rather awkward.     Indeed, Greenberg does not mention the avant-garde, he uses the term “authentic art,” instead.

“Nothing could be further from the authentic art of our time than the idea of a rupture of continuity.  Art is, among many other things, continuity.  Without the past of art, and without the need and compulsion to maintain past standards of excellence, such a thing as modernist art would be impossible,” Greenberg stated.

However, as pointed out in his earlier work, Greenberg refused to connect the avant-garde with a rejection of the past: “…the true and most important function of the avant-garde was not to ‘experiment’ but to find a path along which it would be possible to keep culture moving…” (Greenberg’s italics).  The underlying continuity of the two articles can be seen in the precursor remark in the 1939 writing on the role of the avant-garde artist: “’Art for art’s sake’ and ‘pure poetry’ appear, and subject matter or content becomes something to be avoided like the plague.” Given the openness of the construction of this essay and the plurality of texts mobilized by Greenberg, it is no wonder that “Modernist Painting” lent itself to so many causes, whether as a rallying point or as a bête noir.

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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Mar
18
2011

Podcast 43 Painting 9: Pop Art

Pop Art and Popular Culture

Pop Art was essentially an American phenomenon that included European responses to the imagery of the post-war consumer culture pioneered in New York ad agencies. Like Neo-Dada, Pop Art exposed the limits of Modernism and the prevailing discourse on the aesthetics of painting.  These two movements supported mixed media, mass media, hybrid objects and anti-art gestures, employing sources from popular culture, low art and advertising.  Perhaps more interesting than the art was the new attitude of the artists—irreverent and business-minded, they thumbed their collective noses at the high-minded, humanist based Abstract Expressionism.  But the biggest change wrought by the post Ab Ex movements was the return of representation, upending the dominance of abstract art.

 
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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.

 
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Nov
19
2010

Podcast 35 Painting 1: Preface to the Avant-Garde

Advanced Guard before the Avant-Garde

There is some historical disagreement over when and where the avant-garde movement in the visual arts began.  But it is clear that that the notion that changes in art come from the margins not the center came into existence and began to impact painting by the middle of the nineteenth century.  What were the aesthetic and cultural conditions that made the avant-garde possible?

 
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Nov
05
2010

Impressionism and the Landscape

THE SUBJECT MATTER OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS

Redefining Landscape Painting

The term “landscape” comes from the Dutch term “landskip,” and today when one thinks of landscape painting, an Impressionist work immediately comes to mind: soft and lovely colors, gently brushed surfaces, sites where the always-shining sunlight is captured in shards of broken brush strokes.  Like the English artist, John Constable, the Impressionists painted objectively, as observers with a scientific frame of mind.   But in contrast to their predecessors, they sought to capture a fleeting moment out in the open air.  Today, Impressionism is often still thought of, incorrectly, as an art of landscape, just as it is thought of as only an art of broken brush-work, also incorrectly.  There was no single Impressionist subject matter and no single style.  There was also no single coherent group of Impressionists, only a group of painters who chose to exhibit independently together as a group.  Some of the artists were highly trained, such as Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, and Mary Cassatt.  Others, Claude Monet and Pierre Renoir, were outsider artists.  The artist of interior scenes, Frederic Bazille, died young, while Pierre Renoir, a figure painter, lived well into the Twentieth century. The wealthy artist, Gustave Caillebotte was, until recently, respected more as a collector than as a painter was largely an artist of the upscale cityscape. Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, and Edgar Degas were well-to-do, while Pierre Renoir was terribly poor. Those three did fewer landscapes than Monet, for example, possibly due to gender and class constraints and preferences.

Edgar Degas despised the outdoors, but Claude Monet was a painter of the urban landscapes, until he retreated to the peace of suburban town, Giverney.  Alfred Sisley was a weaker artist, producing pleasant suburban landscapes of lesser distinction compared to the thoughtful examinations of a changing physical and social landscapes produced by Camille Pissarro, the political radical. Pissarro, himself, lived in Pontoise, located on the river Oise, which was already lined with factories.  He was a kind of mentor to Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin and together in the “School of Pontoise,” the three of them painted the hilly suburban villages. Of three, only Pissarro was willing to paint the contemporary city, and his late paintings were from high atop Parisian buildings. By then, Cézanne had retreated to Aix and lived beyond the reach of industrialism, Gauguin had sought the exotic in the South Pacific where he died. Cézanne continued to paint the hot dry landscape of Provence until he died, but Gauguin had long since devoted himself to scenes of the South Pacific.

Impressionist painting is usually defined in terms of the style used by Claude Monet and Pierre Renoir for their landscape paintings, but, however convenient, this identification is too reductive.  As was pointed out, not all Impressionists adopted the style of the “pure” landscape painters and even those artists, later in their careers, began to work on the landscapes in the studio. During their ten-year exhibition period, the Impressionists were divided into two camps: the “pure” Impressionists and the Independents, gathering around Monet and Degas, respectively.  This is an aesthetic divide only, however, and the Impressionists were united in their iconography of urban life and with their equation of artistic experimentation with modernity. As a group they created a new language and a new understanding of painting technique, treatment of space and composition. These new pictorial structures can be called a “New Painting.”

The new painters have tried to render the walk, movement and hustle and bustle of passersby, just as they have tried to render the trembling of leaves, the shimmer of water, and the vibration of sun-drenched air—just as they have managed to capture the hazy atmosphere of a gray day along with the iridescent play of sunshine….

At last the subject matter of art includes the simple intimacies of everyday life in its repertoire, in addition, to its generally less common interests…

From The New Painting: Concerning the Group of Artists Exhibiting at the Durand Ruel Galleries, by Louis Emile Edmound Duranty, 1876

The New Suburban Landscapes

However “common” and “everyday,” according to the critic Duranty, the subject matter of the first decade of Impressionism is deceptively radical, often submerged under the novelty of the swift execution of the paintings and the change to a sketchy technique.  While the landscapes of Impressionism were direct descendents of the Barbizon School, their sites were very different.  The Barbizon landscapes were poetic and romantic, and turned away from the urbanization all around the Forest.  The Impressionists were possibly the first generation of French artists who grew up with urban living and industrial landscapes and they accepted the modernism and the changes it had brought to the traditional scenery.  When Monet and Renoir set up their canvases at La Grenouillère, they were accepting the modern suburban life of leisure, depicting very modern people engaged in activities that were entirely new.  Men and women came to a public place of play, bathing and boating, mixing class and gender in a somewhat scandalous fashion.  In 1869, the two artists were far from the nostalgic longing of the Barbizon as they swiftly constructed the scene with quick choppy brushstrokes.

The Impressionists painted the lower classes but as newly aspiring members of an urban society, upwardly mobile proletarians enjoying themselves. Impressionist subject matter was quite novel in its ordinariness and newness, not a narrative, but simply a presentational record of the Third Republic.  This presentation of subject was quite different from Edouard Manet, who tended to display his subjects like products in a store window and to confront and confuse the viewer.  There is something curiously and frankly voyeuristic about Manet’s oeuvre.  He is often somewhere where he shouldn’t be; doing something he shouldn’t be doing, at least according to the dictates of decorum.  But the Impressionists reject provocation in favor of painting the new Paris and its suburbs. Renoir always preferred the figure and often used the landscape as a backdrop for his fashionable young men and women enjoying themselves in the open air, such as La Promenade (1870). Perhaps more than anyone, Renoir exemplified the “social landscape” of Impressionism.  An early work, La Promenade predicts his later works, which redefine landscape as a social site, places which people have altered and transformed for their own uses.  Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881 pushed the very definition of landscape.  Here the owners and customers of a restaurant in Chatou, along with Renoir’s friend Caillebotte and his mistress Aline, enjoy a lunch on a balcony, which overlooks the river Seine.  The outdoors occupies only a tiny sliver at the top of the painting, glimpsed under the striped awning, but what makes this painting a landscape is the fact that it is flooded with light.  When viewed in person the canvas seems to emanate the sun, warming the room.

The New Urban Landscapes

During the formative years of Impressionism, Renoir and Monet painted the city as it was recovering from the Franco-Prussian War, treating the urban vistas as landscapes.  The open boulevards created by Haussmann fascinated the artists, who were in search of new subject matter.  The uniform height of the rows of townhouses gave the artist the opportunity to work from a high vantage point and record the busy streets teeming with people and carriages below. Renoir’s Pont des arts (1868) painted at the high point of the Second Empire makes the new Paris seem very chic and very fashionable.  His perspective of the spectacle, the parade is that of the flâneur, watching the world go by. Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines, 1875) painted at the corner of rue Dallnou was criticized for the “licorice” like strokes of paint, signifying Parisians moving down the street.   The soft yellow-orange leaves of the trees nearly obscure the buildings that line the streets and due to the reduction of people to marks, the painting becomes a landscape.

It is often forgotten how much of Impressionist landscape was involved with the modern, for it is not until the 1880s when the group had dispersed that Monet began his series of motifs, haystacks and water lilies, located in the countryside.  Although Degas despised the open air, he contributed to the extension of the expected definition of “landscape.”  The Place de la Concorde of 1875 continued the Impressionist interest in the interaction between humans and their human made territories.  There is nothing green in this now-lost painting, only the buff pavement rising behind the Vicomte Lepic and his daughter and his elegant dog.  The three compose a triangle in gray in the center of an open city square.  As the figures start to move in three different directions they indicate both the flâneur fascination with the city and the alienation of modernity.  Nature has been vanquished completely.  None of the friendship and sense of ease seen in The Luncheon of the Boating Party remains, only the hard lines and high walls of an entirely artificial setting, the kind so prized by Degas.

The New Technological Landscape

This new kind of landscape created by modernity can also be found in the series of paintings Camille Pissarro did of his hometown, Pontoise, already altered by the intrusion of factories.  Although Pissarro carefully edited the buildings along the riverbanks, he deliberately left in the factory at St. Ouen-L’Aumône and accepted the modernity of what had once been pristine.  In contrast to the Barbizon artists who wanted to recreate an Arcadia, the Impressionists both continued and refuted one of the imperatives of “pure” landscape: that the landscape must exist independently of the viewer.  Pissarro’s series at Pontoise dates from the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war, and from 1872 he accepted the inevitability of progress.  But the factory is not necessarily a detriment, for, like the bridge painted by Monet at Argenteuil, it is a sign of recovery and even of celebration of French freedom from the Prussian occupation.  Pissarro’s The Banks of the Oise, Pontoise, 1872 is unspoiled nature at the bottom third of the canvas, a country lane on the left and a river bank on the right.  In the center is the shining expanse of the slow river, but it leads to the center of the canvas; and here, at the heart, is the factory.  The smoke stack, puffing gray clouds towards the blue sky, rises above the suburban dwellings in a confluence of nature and technology.

The presence of artists in these new territories beyond Paris was due to the growth and development of railroads, which bound the nation together.  The coming of the railroads changed a fragmented country divided by culture and language into one society, increasingly homogenized and modernized.  At the very moment of coming together, the old France was put a risk by an increasingly mobile urban population. Quaint villages and remote regions became tourist destinations and artistic sites.

The periodic mass exodus into the countryside made possible by the train and other inexpensive forms of transportation such as the tram not only allowed the urban dweller to reaffirm his humanity away from the hubbub of the city; the countryside and its inhabitants were also affected by increased building and commercial development.

Scott Schaefer in A Day in the Country, 1984

Monet’s Train in the Countryside of 1870-1 showed the train cutting across green and verdant landscape.  Partially hidden by a bank of trees, the open passenger cars can be seen, trailing behind the locomotive, indicated by the index of puffing smoke, rising above the tree tops.  Half the canvas is taken up by a stretch of grass, a picnic ground, where the city dwellers can come and enjoy their day in the country.  This painting demonstrates the sudden changes that are altering the landscape and how “landscape” was defined.  The classical landscape that made Joseph Turner famous was a dead artifact of the past; the desperate effort of the Barbizon artists to keep progress at bay proved to be futile.  By the beginning of the 1870s, Impressionism had redefined landscape.

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
29
2010

Impressionism and the Art Market

IMPRESSIONISM AND THE QUESTION OF CAPITALISM

“Great art,” Honoré Balzac wrote, “is impossible without large fortunes, without secure and private means.”  Emile Zola also bowed to the power of money, saying, “…money has emancipated the writer; money as created modern letters…One must accept without regret or childishness, one must recognize the dignity, the power and the justice of money….”  Although Bohemia is often associated with starving artists, dying in unheated attic garrets, thanks to Henri Murger’s La Bohème, the most successful artists and writers were protected from poverty by money. This fact flies in the face of the myth of the avant-garde, which supposedly insisted on separating art from money.  At first the accepting attitude of supposedly avant-garde artists towards money may seem hypocritical, but their stance towards the financing of art making is more nuanced.  Money, in fact, makes art free from depending upon the traditional patrons, the church and the state.  Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet were eager to sell their art, but both were afforded (pun intended) artistic freedom due to the independent wealth of their families.  What the avant-garde artists sought were old-fashioned patrons, such as the enlightened elites of the Renaissance or like those sophisticated aristocrats who vanished with the French Revolution.

Impressionist Exhibitions: Revolution in the Art Market

During the period of Realism, the Salon still dominated and controlled access to success.  The inability of this system to accommodate the ever-larger number of candidates can be measured by the growth and development of an independent artist-dealer system. The more money the avant-garde artist possessed, the more this artist could explore alternatives to a Salon jury, dedicated to maintaining the status quo.  Both Courbet and Manet attempted one person shows during their careers on the occasion of the two Expositions Universelles in 1855 and 1867. Both artists financed their entrepreneurial ventures privately, but the time wasn’t right for the artist to attempt to show outside of the Salons.  Even though the public could not grasp the radical gestures or the radical art, Manet’s followers could.  And in 1874 the “Impressionists” held their first group exhibition.  Like Courbet and Manet, this younger generation was seeking the open-minded vanguard collector and the dealer who was willing to take a chance on contemporary art and new artists.

Those individuals had already emerged, Louis Martinet’s gallery daringly showed Manet’s radical works for public viewing before the Salon of 1863 and a decade later, Paul Durand-Ruel, made two separate trips to Manet’s studio and purchased a large number of works.  It was to this dealer that the Impressionists turned.  But the group followed in the footsteps of Courbet and Manet and organized their own exhibitions.  But there are significant differences between Manet and his followers.  First, Manet never wanted to break free of the Salon.  It was there, he contended, that the real battles took place.  If he was referring to the argument between the ancients and the moderns in the Salon, Manet was correct.  But the Impressionists found that when they attempted to assault this citadel, they were constantly pushed back, rejected by the juries.  Unlike Manet and Courbet, the Impressionists could not find an opportunity to get publicity or notoriety—-no Salon of 1849, juried by artists, no Salon des Refusés, only invisibility. The other difference was that the Impressionists were not wealthy.  Although Cassatt and Morisot were financially secure, as was Caillebotte, the rest were working class (Renoir) or lower middle class (Monet, Pissarro) or middle class (Sisley) or dependent upon an unwilling parent (Cézanne). Quite simply they needed to make money, and because they had traveled too far from official art to please the art pubic, they had to appeal to the mythical collector who was willing to buy avant-garde art.

Some historians place the beginning of the avant-garde at this point in time with the conscious attempt on the part of the Impressionists to exhibit independently and to enter into the emerging art market under the protection of dealers. The avant-garde artists, from this time on, were considered to be ahead of their time and ahead of the public who were incapable of understanding advanced and experimental art.  During the Nineteenth century, these avant-garde French artists challenged several hierarchies.  To begin with the Salon’s ruling power was undermined, if only by the appearance of new opportunities of exhibition in the art galleries. The rise of the dealer system meant the end of the power of the Academic jury, for the artist could go elsewhere and appeal directly to the public.  The Academy and its supporters were fighting a loosing battle by the end of the end of the century, but this “death” was long in being realized.  By the Twentieth century, the traditional academic Salon system had splintered into three separate exhibition entities.

Impressionist Exhibitions: Revolution in Display

It was the Exposition artistique des oeuvres refusées, May 15, 1873, which convinced the Impressionists that they had to find another way to show their art.  The alternative to the official salon was due to numerous protests at jury rejections.  It was history repeating itself, a decade later and the Impressionists were convinced that the Salon jury would never liberalize.  Led by Edgar Degas, an arch trouble-maker, the various and sundry followers of Manet came together thanks to a suggestion by Pissarro, as an independent exhibiting group, a joint stock company of artists.  Their founding charter originally named the Impressionists as the Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, etc., as of December 27, 1873.   The first attempt to gain public recognition and to capture the attention of adventurous collectors took place on April 15, 1874.  Titled the Première exposition de la Société anonymne des artists, peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, etc., the exhibition included Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Degas, Morisot, Pissarro, Béliard, Guillaumin, Lepic, Levert, and Rouart.   The exhibition opened two weeks before the Salon to avoid association with Salon des Refusés.

The group exhibited in the rooms, which had been recently vacated by the portrait photographer, Nadar, on the Boulevard des Capucines, near the studio of the inventor of the carte-de-visite, Disderi—photography territory.  Renoir’s brother painted the walls a dark russet red to replicate the domestic interiors of possible buyers.  Degas’ friend, the American artist, James Whistler, had developed a new way of showing paintings—on the eye line, rather than salon style, and the works were arranged in alphabetical order. Working in London, Whistler had revolutionized gallery installation by creating, first, an upscale interior setting, the kind that might be found in the home of an art collector and second, a total work of art.  The entire décor was color-coordinated with the paintings on view, from the color of the walls, to the upholstery on the chairs, to the color of the servants’ livery.  The artists were, in fact, showing the buyers how to hang their purchases, utilizing the display techniques of the department store: entice and educate.

Another innovation of the exhibition was the refusal of the artists to accept the traditional frames for paintings with their Baroque carving and gaudy gilding.  These innovations, which we take for granted today were, in fact, rebukes to the Salon system.  First, by showing the paintings on one line, the Impressionists eliminated the hierarchy of judgment where the least favored entries were “skied,” or hung too high to be viewed.  Second, the frames were plain, simple and often white, drawing attention to the elements inside the frame and on the canvas itself.  In 2006, Leo Carey wrote an interesting article “Frame Game” for the New Yorker Magazine and names Degas and Pissarro as the leaders in frame innovation. Carey pointed out that Pissarro thought the gilt frames “stank of the bourgeois.” According to Carey,

White frames quickly became associated with Impressionism. The Salon, the dominant institution in French art at the time, made conservative stipulations abut how works should be presented and in this context, white frames were a radical departure.

Some Impressionists, searching for an alternative to gold, developed framing styles rooted in the same scientific thinking that inspired their paintings.  Many of them were influenced by the notion of “complementary colors” advanced by Michel Eugène Chevreul…Mary Cassatt mounted her pictures in red and green frames, not a single one of which survives…In the third Impressionist exhibition, Pissarro and Degas both put their pictures in plain white frames…although most of the Impressionists used white frames at one time or another, not more than a handful exist today…none of Pissarro’s frames have survived.

Carey described an attempt made at MoMA to replicate one of Pissarro’s frames:

The immediate impression was that of informality.  The expanse of wood in the sides of the frame implied something rustic.  The bright white strip next to the canvas picked up the color of white-washed houses in the middle distance, and the shallow step in the wooden section drew the eye inward, guiding it through the trees to the roofs beyond.

The Impressionists made no compromises in their art or in the display of their art but did attempt to accommodate the public with the hours the gallery was open, from 10 a. m. to 6 p. m. for those who were free during the day and, for those who were not, from 8 p. m. to 10 p. m.  The hours and the availability of the art did little to placate the viewers who were repelled and amused and complained of the lack of “finish.” The artists were rightly perceived to be rebelling against the expected norms, but wrongly accused of being political rebels.   The connection between art and politics was to be expected during this period, perhaps explaining why the Impressionists’ content was so carefully apolitical and un-provocative.   The artists were aiming for the living room, the drawing room, and the dining room of middle class interiors, as the small to medium sized canvases attest.   Despite the openness to the art audience, the Impressionists were not really reaching out to the conservative spectator in search of sensation. Their real audience was the art dealers.  The Impressionists continued to exhibit, looking for the art market.

Impressionist Exhibitions: Revolution in Definition of Artist

These exhibitions mark another rupture with the Salon, namely, a concerted attempt to break the power of the Salon as an exhibition venue and to end the importance of the Academy as a place of learning.  First, the Impressionists challenged the monopoly of the Salon through the artist-dealer system, then in its infancy.  Rather than depend upon Salon juries, the Impressionists depended upon their dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, often begging him for money.  When times were good, Durand-Ruel could sell the work; but when times were bad, everyone suffered.  Durand-Ruel had little luck with French buyers who remained staunchly opposed to everything avant-garde, but he did quite well with wealthy Americans who wanted to purchase everything “French.” Americans did not distinguish between Bouguereau and Renoir and would feely buy both artists.  Although the new system was subject to economic ups and downs of the external market, the idea of the artist being supported by a sympathetic dealer, selling to sensitive and brave collectors would prove to be an attractive one, both to dealers and to artists.

The second bastion to fall was the bastion of education. The Impressionists were, for the most part, untrained. Only Cassatt and Degas possessed the required academic training. Monet studied informally under Eugène Boudin, Renoir spent some time in the atelier of Charles Gleyre.  Most of the Impressionists artists had some kind of formal training, but academic rules were of little use to artists who painted colored light or who painted modern life.  The Impressionists opened the door for other self-taught artists with their own ideas about how to make art. The rigors and strictures of the academy had limited value and few of the major artists of the 20th century had that kind of training.  Matisse, for example, studied in the atelier of a very permissive and experimental master, Gustave Moreau.  Picasso studied under his father whom he surpassed when he was still a child.  In fact, academic training would not return as a “requirement” to be an artist until the 1950s, almost one hundred years after the Impressionists upended the rulebook.

Impressionist Exhibitions

The Second Exhibition took place in 1876 and by the Third Exhibition of 1877, that artists officially adopted name “Impressionist.”  However, this term was pejorative and the Fourth Exhibition of 1879 was called “Independent” on the suggestion of Degas as a more neutral term. Gustave Caillebotte and Mary Cassatt who would be of crucial help to the artists joined the group.  Cassatt, who was a wealthy American, knew many others of her kind and she advised her friends to buy the contemporary art of her colleagues.  Caillebotte took over from Degas as the prime organizer and also acted as the major funder for subsequent exhibitions.

By the time of the Fifth Exhibition of 1880, Renoir had found patrons and was a successful portraitist and Monet had drifted away.  Pissarro’s student, Paul Gauguin, joined Degas and his friends, including Morisot, who showed at every exhibition. But for Sixth Exhibition of 1881, the veterans abstained and many of the exhibitors were newcomers, who were divided from the “pure Impressionists,” such as Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, and Morisot.  The Seventh Exhibition of 1882, was noteworthy for the return of the “pure Impressionism,” or pure outdoor painting and color experimentation and broken brush work, in contrast to the Eighth Exhibition of 1886 when Degas and associates returned and were joined by a new generation, Redon, Signac and Seurat.  The exhibition of 1886 was to be the last, ending a remarkable run of shows for a group that held together quite well, given that artists’ groups were a new concept.

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
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.

 
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Oct
01
2010

Manet and the Impressionists

MANET AND IMPRESSIONISM

Édouard Manet’s images of Paris were unprecedented in their unsparing modernity, the sights and scenes that delighted the boulevardier. The painter himself, an elegant dandy, lounged congenially at the Café Tortoni, the Café Guerbois, and especially the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes, where his followers would gather around. Although he studied as an apprentice under the Dutch Masters and Spanish Masters, the painter asserted, “The eye should forget all else it has seen…and the hand becomes guided only by the will, oblivious of all previous training.” The ideal of the “innocent eye” appeared in the guise of a small boy depicted in Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio (1854) gazing at the artist working on a landscape.  One of the main goals of the Realist artist was to see in a manner uncorrupted by learned habits or by the received wisdom of academic training.  In other words, in the time of Courbet and Manet, “representation” meant a system of rules and conventions, all or which had to be discarded in favor of simple observation and a passive recording of what one perceived.  Whether or not it was Manet’s intention to free painting from its traditional role of representation, he did in fact create a new system of notation, a system of marks of paint, which signed instead of imitated, thus developing a new language of painting, based upon marks of paint.  Manet understood what had escaped Courbet: if painting/representation was a code or a system of signs, then a new system could be created.  All one had to do was to learn this new language in which marks of paint “stood for” something else.

Manet’s rupture with the established way of making art was definitive and final.  Once he pointed out that any kind of mark would do the job, he had sensed the truth that would be iterated by Fernand de Saussure—that the relationship between a word and a thing was arbitrary, bound by a convention based upon a network of relationships among the signifiers.  The Academy understood the surface of the canvas to be a window to the world; and, therefore, this “pane” or canvas must be transparent in order to be seen through.  The Academy assumed that the marks made by the artist were connected to the object rendered, that the two became one, just like a word acquired the properties of the thing.  But Manet created a new language of paint and painting, a system of casual shorthand notation, relying upon the active mind to close the gap between a code and a recreation.  That said, Manet’s followers, the Impressionists, would respond to his method of paining in a variety of ways.  Some would adopt the broken brushwork to plein air painting; others would apply the sketchiness to an informal modern style.  Cézanne would take the idea of mark as correspondence and use the stroke to signify a new way of seeing: without the crutch of perspective.  All of the Impressionists reacted to the famous “blond” tone of Manet and lightened their grounds and their paint colors, creating a burst of light that shocked the art audience.

It was the English art critic, Roger Fry, who attempted to create a family tree of avant-garde art, starting with Manet in his show in London in 1910.  Manet’s younger admirers were nicknamed the “Impressionists” after a now stolen painting by Claude Monet, Impression—Sunrise (1874).  The name was not intended as a compliment but as a condemnation, and, like many names of derision to come, this label stuck.  The Impressionists were unusual in that they formally joined together as an incorporated association and exhibited together from 1874 to 1886.  The Société anonyme des artistes, peintures, sculpteurs, graveurs, etc. also known as the Impressionists, were a varied group.  Claude Monet and Pierre Auguste Renoir were lower middle class men, just one step above working class.  In contrast, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt and Gustave Caillebotte were wealthy haute bourgeoisie. Camille Pissarro was working class and an anarchist, while the others were generally apolitical.   Alfred Sisley was Anglo-French and was overshadowed by the other artists, and, unlike them, did grow over time or create new content.

The mix of class was not that unusual but the inclusion of women marked the association as different from their all-male predecessors.   The mix of class and gender resulted in a variety of content and selection of subject matter among the Impressionists.  Largely self-taught artists, like Gustave Courbet, Monet and his painting partner, Renoir, had neither the money nor the inclination to follow Manet and his rich friend, Edgar Degas, into the brothels, the cabaret and to the bals.   Likewise, Gustave Callibotte and Alfred Sisley seem to have been too respectable for scandalous subject matter.   The American artist, Mary Cassatt and the Parisian artist, Berthe Morisot, were respectable women and were quite restricted in their activities, both social and artistic.   Some of the artists produced landscapes, others interiors only, others, like Manet and Cassatt, treated the exterior like an interior.

The followers of the Impressionists were, in turn, an equally motley crew.  Although there were no women among them, they were all outsider artists.   In comparison, the Impressionist women, Cassatt and Morisot, had impeccable training but rebelled against what they had learned.  The new generation, including Gauguin and Cézanne, later called the “Post-Impressionists,” was mentored by Pissarro.  Impressionist follower, Paul Cézanne had his convoluted and disturbed male fantasies, but he kept them private and on small canvases and honed his craft painting side by side with Pissarro. A devout Socialist, Pissarro rarely left the suburbs to come to the wicked city of Paris, and the two painters produced a memorable series of landscapes. A Sunday painter and student of Camille Pissarro, Paul Gauguin, left his wife and family, was lived his out desire for artistic freedom but kept his sexual passions to himself until his Tahitian period. Vincent van Gogh left his sympathy for the peasant behind in his native country of Holland and his palette burst into bright colors when he saw Impressionist paintings.  With an eye to the art market and possible purchase, van Gogh restricted himself to non-controversial portraiture and landscape paintings.   Only Georges Seurat followed Manet and Degas by continuing to celebrate the popular culture of Paris and its dark and sleazy demi-monde.  Both the Impressionists and the Post-Impressionists were true independents, true avant-garde painters, making and showing art completely outside the Salon system.

In comparison to the earlier Bohemians, the Impressionists had no desire to starve or to suffer for their art.   They wanted financial success and security, something that could not be found by throwing themselves at the unyielding bulwark of the Salon.  The Impressionists formed an economic organization, designed to sell art directly to avant-garde collectors.  The Impressionists emerged in 1874, four years after the fall of the Second Empire.  The years that followed the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the uprising of the Commune had left the nation exhausted and eager to heal.  The art audiences had lost patience for controversy and provocation.  Respectable and middle class, the Impressionists and their followers did not seek shocking scenes but showed the contented middle class in its new leisure time activities in a world of outdoor entertainment.  Suburbia or the near countryside, just outside of Paris, were the preferred locales for the outdoor artists, in contrast to the sexually charged interiors of Manet and later, of Degas. Impressionist paintings reflected middle class interests and the domestic needs of the aspiring class.  The size of their paintings were small, designed for respectable living rooms, were deliberately decorative and inoffensive, with content free of political contention and sexual scandal.

The Impressionists were not satirical or sarcastic, and only Degas deliberately attempted to be provocative. Unlike Manet, the Impressionists did not consult art historical dictionaries for precedents, nor did they attempt to cater to or react against the Academy.  Certainly, from time to time, some of the group were tempted to try for acceptance in a Salon but insisted on painting in their own terms.  The group had no strategy to assault the Academy but sought to create positions in an unguarded commercial field, in completely new territory.  Their subject matter was wholly new, depicting activities, which had, quite simply, not existed before, such as the new English sport of sailing and the new penchant for the scandalous pleasure of public bathing.  Equally unprecedented was the intimate view into the cloistered world of the privileged middle class woman.  Also new was the male counterpart to Cassatt and Morisot, Caillebotte’s record of the luxurious lifestyle of well-to-do bourgeois men during the Third Republic.  Deliberately severing themselves from the normal channels of artistic recognition, the Impressionists sought the patronage of the newly rich middle classes through a series of independent exhibitions. It can be said that the Impressionists rejected the Romantic conception of the artist as a poet and accepted the entrepreneurial role of the artist as a business-person and upwardly mobile worker.

The Impressionists reached out to the middle class by concentrating on the familiar aspects of city life, the newly developed suburban areas, and the accompanying novelties of respectable entertainment.  The male artists inherited the attitude of the city-dwellers who enjoyed a “Day in the Country,” an excursion now possible because of the spread of a network of suburban railway lines that took the Parisians away from the City of Light.  The female artists developed new content about the “modern woman” who was confined to quarters, living a life of caged privilege.  Courbet and Manet had led the way in their use and appropriation of popular imagery, such as the images d’Epinal, and the Impressionists were equally interested in popular posters and contemporary art and attempted to combine popular iconography with experimental style. On the surface the subjects did not seem to be as provocative as their revolutionary sketchy style born of a necessarily hasty execution.

Impressionist paintings also utilized Dutch and/or Japanese compositions combined with careful optical examination of color and light that alienated them from mainstream art.  Like their predecessors, the Impressionists admired the ordinary vistas and high horizon lines of Dutch landscape painting. The arbitrary cropping of amateur photography also may have had some impact upon the Impressionists.  This combination of the centered subject and the unavoidable slicing off of the unimportant elements could also be seen in Japanese art.  The Ukiyo-e prints, imported from Japan, were erroneously called “Chinese” at first by the French who thought of the Japanese, and all Asians as, “primitive.”  The Edo period prints, collected by the Impressionist artists, thought to be master works of a naïve vision, were actually popular prints with little value in Japan.  Influenced by their exposure to Western art by the Dutch traders, the Japanese artists interpreted perspective as the abstract design it was.  To the delight of the French artists, the Ukiyo-e prints played with a high viewpoint, insistent horizontal banding and spatial ambiguity.

As this general summary of Impressionism indicates, the movement and its art was a complex manifestation of manifold positions and varied influences.  With Édouard Manet as their leader, the Impressionists followed his stylistic example but not his journey into the Salon.  The Impressionists persuaded Manet to leave his studio and to venture out into the sunlight where he produced a few landscapes.  But Manet and the Impressionists came from different generations.  Manet was a dandy, a survivor of the Second Empire, while the Impressionists were sons and daughters of the political patchwork called the Third Republic.  The result was both an extension of the Master’s painting and a rejection of Manet’s subject matter.  Often presented in terms of landscape painting only, as a movement of broken brushwork only, the movement was actually varied in both style and content.  There are many ways to view Impressionism: as a formal revolution in painting, as a contrast between the lives of men and women, as an early foray into the art market, and a study of how artists mature over the course of long careers.

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
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

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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.

 

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