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?
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.
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.
Realism in French and English Art
The main goal of a Realist artist in France was to create an objective and detached description of banal reality, as it existed, in all its ordinariness. Realism, tended to adhere to a particular social point of view that of championing the poor or the lower classes. Depending upon the artist, Realism could be very confrontational, like the art of Gustave Courbet or very conservative, like the paintings of Rosa Bonheur. Basically Realism, expressed a modern desire to look at that which existed in the here and now, rather than re-create a dead world in a dead language, such as Neoclassicism, or to imagine a fantasy world, in the way of Romanticism. Realism demanded, not only new content, but also a new way of making art, based upon the question of how to see, really see, and to look at the “real.” The result of these Realist experiments was a certain consistency in subject matter but a variety of approaches to executing a response to the world, as it existed. But Realism was far too complex from nation to nation to be reduced to a simple-minded contrast to Romanticism.
Like Romanticism, Realism was never a style and was never uniform in content. Full of contradictions, Realism could include, in France, the daughter of a Saint-Simonist, Rosa Bonheur, the petit-bourgeois painter, Gustave Courbet, the narrator of amusing tableaux of middle class life in America, Lily Martin Spencer, the elegant portraits of British society by James Tissot, and the international provocateur par excellence, international artist, James Whistler. Realism incorporated a number of artistic and literary impulses, including Naturalism and Impressionism, and would be a longer movement, lasting at least forty years until the 1880s.
Although the Romantic imagination is often compared to Realist observation of every day life, Realism contained elements of escapism, just as Romanticism had contained elements of Realism. France continued its dominance in the world of the arts, but Realism was far from a French phenomenon. Realism begins, in fact, in England in 1848 with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The PRB was founded while the rest of Europe was embroiled in yet another Revolution. The Brotherhood was inspired by the events on the continent but concentrated, at first, on religious subjects.
Perhaps because the artists in France experienced the uprising directly, their artistic response was more political and more politicized by the art audience. The Revolution of 1848 was the final blow to Romanticism and all illusions of the French Revolution of 1789 died on the barricades. The impact of the Revolution of 1848 is the chief reason why realism in America is a special case and why when the term “Realism” is used in art history, the speaker often thinks of England or France, and especially France.
First, Realism was a revolt against the Academies in both England and France, where classicism still ruled. For the Realist artist, the transcendence of time seen in the academic worship of the past should be—had to be—replaced by the particular and observable events of the contemporary era. The universal event was replaced by the unique event, taking place in a fleeting moment of time. In Academic art, “history” signified an entire narrative that had moral and ethical importance. Within Realism, the anti-academic approach told no story and imparted no significance to the depicted scenes. Contemporary history was approached with the same deadpan viewpoint used for more banal moments. There is nothing romantic or glorious about Manet’s Execution of Maximilian (1867), only embarrassment and tragedy. Realism was also anti-Romantic by rejecting the escape into the unreal.
The Romantic artist’s struggle for self-expression was replaced by the desire to depict one’s own time. Honoré’s statement, “Il faut être de son temps” was the battle cry of the Realists who preferred humble subjects compared to the exotic and fantastical narratives of the Romantics. The rejection of both Academic art and of Romantic ideals signaled a new understanding that even the ordinary is important and should be rendered as seriously as a noble deed from the past. Taking note of the funeral attire, the black suits of the bourgeoisie males, Charles Baudelaire argued that there was a unique kind of “modern” heroism of everyday life. In the Salon of 1946, he wrote,
But to return to our principal and essential problem, which is to discover whether we possess a specific beauty, intrinsic to our new emotions, I observe that the majority of artists who have attacked modern life have contented themselves with public and official subjects – with our victories and our political heroism. Even so, they do it with an ill grace, and only because they are commissioned by the government which pays them. However there are private subjects which are very much more heroic than these.
Realism also turned away from the concept of style, particularly as a personal trait that expressed one’s personality. Delacroix and Ingres asserted themselves by flouting or by exaggerating the academic style. The Realist artist resisted academic conventions and rejected the influence of the trained artistic eye that came between an honest depiction of reality and the hand of the artist. Many Realist artists expressed the desire to see as innocently as a child and this need for nonconventional innocence resulted in a challenge to the received techniques of the Academy.
The Pre-Raphaelite painter, John Millais, obliterated academic style with his obsessive delineation of closely observed nature. Gustave Courbet mimicked the clumsy and naïve approach of outsider artists. The result, as Emile Zola expressed it, was “nature seen from the corner of a temperament.” In order to see freshly, conventional composition and chiaroscuro were disregarded and color became local rather than emotional or formal. Like philosophy, art came to increasingly rest upon empiricism and close observation. However, there was a genuine desire on the part of the artist to throw off the weight of the dead history of classical art (to paraphrase Karl Marx) and to defy the authority of the previous generation.
The role of the Realist artist was to tell the truth. Reasons for telling the truth and for making objective art varied. Some artists, such as Ernst Meissonier, used the idea of photographic realism to recreate a historical scene with accuracy. Some artists, such as Rosa Bonheur, used realism to celebrate the working animals of the rural life of her country, la belle France. It would be incorrect to assume that those two artists were not political, for both were very nationalistic in their intentions to celebrate France and its heritage.
Other Realist artists, such as Jean-François Millet or Gustave Courbet were considered to be “political,” “Red,” or “communist,” because they did not uphold the existing artistic order and challenged its social preconceptions of rigid class stratifications. Millet’s The Gleaners of 1857 showed the plight of the landless peasant in the age of the collective corporate farm. In England, Holman Hunt took up the theme of the “fallen woman,” the social problem of the Victorian era, and presented a morality tale to the audience with The Awakening Conscience. Edouard Manet had no such moral pretentions in his equally graphic images of the woman in her fallen state, such as Nana, a smiling courtesan inspired by Emil Zola’s novel of the same name.
Whatever the artist’s motivations, Realism was based upon the scientific method. Like scientists, they observed nature and recorded it faithfully. Like scientists, they supposedly sat passively before nature and copied it without comment or judgment. But the vaunted objectivity of any of these artists should not be taken literally, for no human is ever completely objective or nonjudgmental. Courbet had every intention of confronting bourgeois complacency with his realistic depictions of ordinary life among the petit bourgeois of his home territory of Franche-Comté.
The later accusations of passivity that were leveled against the Impressionists especially do not reflect the fact that artists are actively selecting their content. The Impressionists, who extended Realist to its logical outcome, painted their optical impressions of light and color. But the Impressionists eschewed the provocative content of their predecessors and did not confront the audience with social challenges. The last of the Realist groups, the Impressionists selected suburban scenes of middle class life, where the sun always shone and the skies were always blue and the people were always joyous.
Keeping in mind that “impressionism” was a derogratory term, it is also important to be aware of the reception of the Realist artists. The art audience was often hostile towards Realist art in terms of subject matter while accepting, however, grudgingly the talents of the artist. Although there were those who objected to his workman-like use of the palette knife, Courbet’s painting skills were universally acknowledged. Manet, on the other hand, would be roundly condemned for is complete abandonment of academic technique. And the Barbizon School and the Impressionists would be excoriated for their neglect of the rules of academic “finish” when it came to completing a painting in the appropriate manner.
When examining the critical reception of the Realists, it seems that even provocative content could be somewhat tolerated as long as some semblance of recognizable “skill” was visible. When painterly technique diverged too radically from the academic standards, the audience was scandalized, regardless of the subject matter. Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet, both transition artists, would be the last of their kind in their quest for Salon acceptance and the recognition of the Academy. The Impressionists would completely reject the academic system and would make their case to the avant-garde collector. It is here with this last generation of the Realist artists, that the avant-garde matured with Impressionism.
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Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.
