Posts Tagged ‘Gustave Courbet’

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Apr
01
2011

Podcast 44 Painting 10: Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol and “Decorative Art”

Andy Warhol played many roles in the art world of the sixties.  Although he produced more films than paintings and sculptures, he re-defined “painting” and “sculpture,” bringing these traditional practices into the modern age. Using serigraphy as a metaphor for commercialism and consumerism, Warhol brought his advertising sensibilities to fine arts.  Wooden boxes with purloined logos suggested that the art world was a market place for the high-end consumer.  Casting aside hierarchy and judgment, the artist consumed the ubiquitous imagery of his time and put together an encyclopedia for his decade.   Acting like a bricoleur, he gathered the pictures of  mass media and re-produced and re-presented the already known and the already seen and forced the viewers to examine the overlooked and the banal of the culture.

 
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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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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.

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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

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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.

 

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Sep
10
2010

Naturalism and Art-for-Art’s Sake

Art-for-Art’s-Sake in Context

In the Salon of 1846,  the poet and art critic, Charles Baudelaire argued that average people (in modern clothes) were as heroic as any Roman heroes of ancient times. In the waning days of the July Monarchy, the Greco-Roman legends and myths represented in French Academic art  were no longer relevant to a society which was rapidly modernizing. Art, Baudelaire insisted, should be about “us” and “our” heroism and “our” time.  Within the world of Academic art, his idea of conceiving of the contemporary period as being special or even worthy of depiction was controversial and heretical.  The emotional investment that the Academy and its artists had in the classical tradition has to be understood, not as a stubborn preference for a particular style, but a reaction to the rapid and unstoppable social and economic changes.

These alterations to the cultural fabric were unstoppable, beyond anyone’s control.  Even worse, the consequences of the constant upheavals could not be predicted.  It is also important to realized the stress the French people had been under since the French Revolution, as the political scene veered wildly from King to Emperor to revolution to war and rebellions.  Periodically the nation would be caught up in a never-ending civil war which was a struggle between the lower and middle classes for political power.  Only one class could rule, according to the bourgeois mindset, and the upstart class must be crushed.  When seen in the context of the desperate rear guard struggle against cultural change, the intensity of the artistic quarrels of the Nineteenth century is easier to comprehend.

Classical art and traditional Academic teachings, whether philosophical or technical, were a bulwark of reassurance, as if the “timeless” would protect the nation from all that was “modern.”  The “modern” and “modernité” were, quite simply, dangerous to the status quo and to the stability that was so hard to come by and so hard to maintain.  The Second Empire devoted enormous amounts of time and energy to controlling thought.  Previous freedoms were revoked. The press was strangled and killed and the publications that were left were heavily censored.  Art was strictly controlled by the government.

Those who dedicated themselves to economic pursuits were celebrated and ennobled by the state, but those who rejected the bourgeois lifestyle were suspect.  It is out of these suspect people, poets, writers, visual artists, déclasse members of la bohème, that the new concept of art-for-art’s-sake developed.  This new approach to art and how and why art should be made differed from the Romantic justification for art in that, with the Naturalist artists, their stance was impersonal rather than personal, and objective rather than subjective.  A reflection of the demand for individualism, the Romantic artist based everything on personal vision and personal expression.  But the Naturalist perspective comes, not from selfhood, but from science.

The Naturalist artist had a new role, that of an observer who was disinterested and detached.  In some ways, this role sounds similar to that of the Realist artist—to depict life as it really was.  However, there is an important difference both in intent and in effect: the Realist artist was “interested.”  In the art of Gustave Courbet, for example, the purpose of recording ordinary life was to make a political point, giving  the artist a social purpose and the art a social role.  Courbet and his art were intended to work within the stystem, reforming it from the inside.  This new social utility of art and the resulting political engagement was a necessary wedge between the old Romantic “art-for-art’s-sake” and the new concept of “art-for-art’s-sake.”

Science and technology became the basis for knowledge, and Baudelaire’s ideas were in tune with an intensified historical self-consciousness and self-examination that can be found in other disciplines of the time, especially history, which was beginning to take its modern form.  After Courbet, it became necessary to free art from its role as political commentator and social savior.  Art making had to be a detached exercise, and, after Courbet, content should not count, subject matter could not be significant.  At this stage, the object of artistic contemplation could not be totally neutralized but it could be downplayed.  The artists and writers who needed to distance themselves from the old-fashioned Realists deliberately selected subject which were both modern and commonplace.

By commonplace, they meant ordinary as opposed to ancient heroics, but another point needs to be made.  These members of la bohéme were bound to the middle class, depending, like Courbet and Manet, upon private family wealth to fund their artistic rebellion against the establishment.  Men like that were snobs with a profound distaste for the middle classes who were conformist and ordinary, and it is important to understand the importance of their hostility towards that which they examined.  While taking a disinterested stance, the artists exposed the banality of modern life in all its excrutiating detail.  Mere depiction condemned, simple description challenged, hence the crushing reaction of the forces of law and order leveled against these vulgarians. The approach of depicting modern life without trying to exoticize it, symbolize it, moralize it, or idealize it was the basis of  the current Naturalist literature of Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert.  Flaubert insisted that it would be a mistake to conflate Realism with Naturalism.

Everyone thinks I am in love with reality, whereas i actually detest it.  It was in hatred of realism that I undertood this book (Madame Bovary). But I equally despise the false brand of idealism which is such a hollow mockery in the present age…I wrote Madame Bovary to annoy Champfleury, I wanted to show that bourgeois dreariness and mediocre sentiments could sustain beautiful language.

What is important about Flaubert’s statement is, first, his “hatred” for “reality,” i. e. bourgeois life; and second,  is his stress on language.  Flaubert looked at  the sordid word of the unsalvagable middle class and turns that world into a linguistic exercise.  The writer pointed out that is is important to “write the mediocre well,” that is, the content is irrelevant and the form becomes paramount.  The trick is to transcend reality with the transformative power of language.  But this language had to be a neutralized speech: rhetoric had to be stripped away, poetry had to be eliminated.  This new way of writing was one of observation composed of detailed description for no particular purpose other than the sheer act of writing.  Writing was for the sake of writing.  From the perspective of Naturalism, Flaubert’s visual counterpart was Edouard Manet.

Manet may or may not have been Baudelaire’s “painter of modern life,” but he was engaged in the same enterprise as the writer—that of using the language of the discipline against the discipline in order to change, not literature or art, but to change its language.  If the new task of the artist, inherited from the older Realists, was to avoid the “poncif,” then the next step would be to use the scenes of modern life as a vehicle for a modern language.  It would be incorrect to argue that Manet’s content was totally neutral, nor were the scenes of modern life he selected arbitrary.  True, his paintings were charged with social meaning but, in their own time, the truly sensational aspect of his work was not his content but the way he painted: his language.

In The Judgment of Paris (2006), Ross King pointed out that the public cared little for the nudity or prostitution or Manet’s Dejeunner sur l’herbe or Olympia and that the critics were more concerned with his sins against painting techniques.  Emile Zola was one of the writers who urged the public to look away from Manet’s content to his style of painting but we should not read his defense anachronistically as a justification for formalism or a formal reading of a painting.  The importance of Manet, in his own time, is how he took the language of art and renewed it, freeing, painting itself from it traditional role in representation.  As Pierre Bourdieu in The Rule of Art (1992) expressed it,

This is the complexity of the artistic revolution: under pain of excluding oneself from the game, one cannot revolutionize a field without mobilizing or invoking the experiences of the history of the field and the great heretics—baudelaire, Flaubert, and Manet—inscribe themselves explicitly in this history of the field, mastering its specific capital much more completely than their contemporaries, so that revolutions take the form of return to sources, to purity of origins.

“Art-for-art’s-sake” under naturalism was an attempt to remake literature so that writing would be simply writing: word-making; and to remake art so that painting would be simply painting: mark making.  Simple, but profoundly disruptive to a society constantly on the brink of disintegration.  During the Second Empire, art should be mobilized to the purposes of the State and anyone who was suspected of not doing the proper patriotic duty would suffer the fate of an outsider.  Like it or not, art-for-art’s-sake was political stance and a social position.

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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