Posts Tagged ‘Second Empire’

Sep
24
2010

Manet and Modernité

MANET AND MODERN LIFE

The laughing, blond Manet

Emanating grace

Gay, subtle and charming

With the beard of an Apollo

Had from head to top

The appearance of a gentleman.

Théodore de Banville, poet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

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Sep
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
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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Sep
03
2010

Gustave Courbet

AVANT-GARDE REALISM IN FRANCE: COURBET

In 1845, The art critic, Théophile Thoré (who “discovered” the Dutch artist, Jan Vermeer) complained that French art was “…without system, without direction, and abandoned to individual fantasy.” According to another critic, Eugène Fromentin, “…We revolve in a viscous circle. Public taste is injured; that of the painters is no less; and we vainly seek to know which of the two should seek to elevate the other.  Sometimes we say that the opinion ought to act as the quality of the work and elevate it; and again, according to a new idea, it must be the works themselves that must act upon opinion and convert it by good example.” Echoing the complaints of other observers, the famous Salon artist and Academic teacher, Thomas Couture, stated, “Alas, we have fallen low…Art has become small and commercial.”  The social changes across Europe combined with the lack of purpose within the art world itself combined to give art a new goal, that of social critic and social revolutionary, as artists began to take notice of the neglected peasant, laborer, and the inherent morality of the “timeless” countryside. This new approach, focusing on “low” subjects was called Realism.

For the Realists, art had to be “sincere.”  By “sincere,” the artists and writers meant that art had to be of its own time in content, as opposed to imaginary scenes of events that never happened. To sincerity, one can add “authentic.”  Art had to be real.  Realism can be broken down into two phases in France.  The first phase was diverse, including the censored and outspoken political cartoonist and painter, Honoré Daumier, the cautious Socialist, Jean François Millet and his careful social landscapes and the radical lesbian Socialist, Rosa Bonheur and her patriotic celebrations of Second Empire prosperity. Realism developed out of literary Naturalism and became more radical after the Revolution of 1848 with the art of Gustave Courbet (1819 – 1877).

In the beginning of his career, Courbet’s sympathies were with the petit bourgeoisie, the small town dwellers outside of Paris in provinces considered “provincial” by the Parisians. Courbet came from a small town in the undefined middle of the country, called Ornans, and migrated to the sophisticated urban milieu of Paris, where he stressed his “country bumpkin” origins.  As a wily outsider artist, with little training, Courbet took what were deficiencies—his accent and his relative lack of training—and transformed them into virtues—only an “outsider” could reform the Academy.  The academic artists and their traditional ways were being tested by social and political changes, which were bringing new ideas and new people into the capital, and Courbet was a harbinger of challenges to come.

After a decade of being on the fringes of the closed and rarified world of the Salons, Courbet witnessed, from the safety of the sidelines, the fall of the regime of Louis Philippe and the Revolution of 1848. This Revolution was the moment that Louis Napoléon had been waiting for and the nephew of the Emperor Napoléon returned from exile in London to establish himself as the new head of government.  But the Revolution was an opportunity for Courbet as well, because this was the year that the artist changed his entire approach to art.   When Courbet arrived in Paris, Romanticism was breathing its last and a nascent realism devoted itself to accurate genre paintings.  At first Courbet did not seem inclined to follow the example of Honoré Daumier and use the possibilities of painting contemporary life in order to critique the government.

According to the art historian, Petra Chu, in The Most Arrogant Man in France (2007), Courbet took advantage of the presence of journalism and the spread of newspapers to generate publicity for himself and his art, which was very mainstream. He also made himself a virtual presence through a series of self-portraits that were acceptable and inoffensive.  It might seem as if Courbet had built his career backwards: he had a persona, an established identity, he had supporters, but the artist was a man in search of a purpose and a style.  However, the inoffensive late Romanticism of his art proved to be a good training ground for the shift in style that would be responsible for his sensational success.

The breakthrough for Courbet came in 1847 when he visited Holland in search of the newly discovered Dutch paintings of the Seventeenth century.  The Dutch artists provided an important precedent, and, indeed, the only possible precedent, for an art of the middle class.  Painting outside of Holland was classical, devoted to Europeans courts, but the Netherlands was a new country, independent of the domination of the Spanish crown.  The Dutch ruled themselves in  republic free of class and devoid of aristocrats.  Adventurous sailors and tenacious traders, they became prosperous, forming the first European middle class, who created an identity through art.  It is perhaps less important to know what the Dutch artists actually intended than to understand what the French artists made of the art.

What the French artists needed was a way out of academic subject matter and a way in which to address the reality of their own lives, from an objective perspective.  What the French artists saw in Dutch were paintings of contemporary life, a kind of realism of the ordinary.  Without an overt narrative, the Dutch artists captured frozen moments in time, enriched by carefully observed detail, which created a portrait of a particular group of people at a specific point in time.  What was especially compelling to the French artists was the sheer ordinariness of the everyday lives of simple people who were unremarkable and unpretentious.  Above all, for the French artists,  Dutch art was an alternative to Romanticism and a doorway to a new form of Realism.

Courbet used the occasion of the Salon of 1848 to present a summation and a closure to his outmoded Romanticism, and by the time of the Salon of 1849, Courbet was ready to take advantage of his next opportunity: this Salon was juried by his peers—artists who knew him and how understood that he was a good painter.  If this salon had been juried by the gatekeepers of the Academy, the painter would have been a modest footnote in art history with his mild romantic paintings. But Courbet’s previous paintings did not prepare the Salon audiences for the work that took the Salon of 1849 by storm: After Dinner at Ornans.  Based upon Dutch painting, the genre scene was dark in tone and ordinary in content.  It was not the sight of country folk listening to music that was impactful, but the artistic tactics, read as political after the Revolution, caused a sensation.

The strategy of Courbet was to celebrate the everyday world of the inconsequential petit bourgeois, not in small sized genre paintings but in large sized canvases, heretofore reserved for history paintings.  That said, the content was neutral enough for Courbet to win himself an award of being hors concours or out of combat.  Although technically, this honor meant that his art could not be excluded from the Salon, some of his later works, judged to be pornographic, were refused.  But his status allowed, the admission of paintings that were more overtly political in the next Salon.  In the Salon of 1850 (which actually took place in 1851), life sized paintings, such as the The Funeral at Ornans, The Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair, and The Stonebreakers (destroyed during the bombing of Dresden), asserted the social importance and historical significance of the petit bourgeois class and the sans coulottes.  Unlike the middle class elites, these classes had lost all the revolutions of the past four decades, especially the one of 1848.

It would be incorrect to think of Courbet as a “peasant painter,” such as Millet or Jules Bastien-Lepage.  The Parisian audience of the Salon was more accepting of traditional labor, especially if the images were sentimentalized, like Jules Breton.  The Salon goers liked the images of peasants toiling, where they belonged, in the country, consumed with timeless labor.  Instead of maintaining the traditional myth of the countryside as a classless society where all lived in harmony with nature, Courbet revealed the social changes that had transformed the provinces.   As a painter of the lower middle class in a small village, Courbet used his own family as models for the newly empowered and newly upwardly mobile petit bourgeois.  The Courbet family was typical of the kind of people who had marginally gained from the social changes, wanted no further disruptions, and were, therefore, conservative and apolitical.

But, as T. J. Clark pointed out in his book of 1999, Image of the People, the sophisticated city dwellers were distressed at the sight of the pretentions of the villagers who played at being “upper class.” Although the Dutch of the Seventeenth century had lovingly and unsparingly depicted the lower middle classes, the precedent mattered not to the offended Parisians.  Courbet was acknowledged as a great painter but his paintings were condemned as “ugly,” that is, the people he rendered were unattractive and badly dressed. Funeral, a long horizontal painting, crowed with mourning villagers in black and white, was an unlikely combination of a Roman sarcophagus and a Dutch group portrait.  Devoid of drama, the sheer boredom of the content was broken only by the open grave at the bottom of the canvas. Perhaps most offensive to the audience was the lack of story and the absence of the opportunity to identify with any of the characters in his paintings.  The man and the young boy in The Stonebreakers are in profile to the viewer and no narrative is offered.  Instead of eliciting sympathy, the artist presented blunt facts of social deprivation and the toll of unending labor.

Equally disconcerting to the Parisians were the “primitive” techniques employed by the artist, who based his compositional devices upon popular images.  The images d’Epinal were widely circulated in the French countryside, made by untrained printers for an unsophisticated reader. The Stonebreakers deliberately failed to integrate the bleak figures into the un-scenic background.  The same disregard for the convention of Renaissance perspective was present in Funeral, where the bleak landscape of Ornans stretched out behind the isocephalic composition, like a backdrop in a theater.  But these paintings were at least well-organized compared to the deliberate disorder of The Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair, which was a clutter of stolid peasants and their equally unremarkable animals.  None of these paintings accounts for spatial distances and all ignore academic conventions.  Using popular imagery, Courbet succeeded in discarding outmoded training and insisted on the artist’s liberation from tradition.

To back up these unconventional techniques and subjects, Courbet and his supportive critic, Champfleury (Jules Husson), co-wrote their “Realist Manifesto” as the catalogue for his independent exhibition of 1855.  Excluded from the Second Empire extravaganza, the Exposition Universalle, Courbet set up his own Pavilion of Realism in opposition to the “official” artists, Delacroix and Ingres. “I have simply wished to base upon a thorough knowledge of tradition, the reasoned and independent feeling of my own individuality,”  he said.  The Manifesto was a statement against Romanticism and idealism, against exoticism and fantasy, and elitist politics.  It was a statement for the ordinary and everyday, for what was apprehensible to the senses alone, even if what was real was unaesthetic to the Salon sensibilities. “To be able to translate the customs, idea, the appearances of my epoch…in a word to create living art, that is my goal,” he stated.  Courbet was very modern in the way in which he built his artistic career.  First, he created a persona, created a series of artistic scandals, and, finally, in a rare move, he set up his own independent exhibition in 1855.  Although the show could hardly be called a financial success, Courbet had asserted himself against the forcible artistic controls of the Second Empire.

For five years, Courbet painted what he preached but in 1854, he once again summed up a phase in his career, with a painting, titled An Allegory of the Last Seven Years of My Life. That The Artist’s Studio was subtitled as an “allegory,” was a signal that Courbet had abandoned optical realism.  The Artist’s Studio was a testament to his success in the art world, a masterful exhibition of egoism, a confounding statement about his political concerns, and the beginning of a new phase of his career as an Insider Artist.  The Artist’s Studio featured Courbet himself in the center, painting a bright and natural landscape.  He is surrounded by allegorical figures: “the nude,” a female model and “the innocent eye,” two small boys.  Other allegorical figures are arranged on the left, while on the right, he gathered together his friends and patrons.   The iconography of this work is complex, signaling the artist’s next career move.

As the artist acquired more important patrons, his subject matter became less confrontational and more conservative, veering often towards pornography. The lesbian theme of The Sleepers was part of the discourse of la bohème, but outside of the demimonde, the works that were sexually explicit, such as Woman with a Parrot and the very private, The Origin of the World brought Courbet into conflict with the Salon and the public and his friends.  By 1858, Courbet had serious disagreements with early supporters, his patron, Albert Bruyas and his best critic, Champfleury, over his suggestive paintings. Meanwhile aristocratic patrons in Germany were demanding princely themes, such the hunt.  For many of his former supporters, it seemed that Courbet had lost his way.

Courbet’s political conscience reasserted itself in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 with his involvement with the short-lived and ill-fated Commune. In the post-war confusion, radical socialists, or the “Reds,” attempted to seize power and bring about some kind of social equality, but the new French government, the Third Republic, defeated the Communards in a long and bloody massacre.  Courbet was one of the many sympathizers who were punished after order was restored.  Given that thousands were slaughtered, Courbet, who had had the bright idea of toppling the Vendôme Column, got off easy.  He was put on trial for  the felling of the Vendôme Column and  the government made an example of him in its reassertion of authority.  Forced to pay the expenses for repairing the Column, the politically naïve Courbet spent the rest of his life in exile in Switzerland, painting for aristocrats, finally abandoning his Realist subject matter.  In one of his last works, he painted a Trout, which was helplessly caught on a hook.  Less of a hunting picture and more of an autobiography, Trout summed up those last years before Courbet’s time ran out.

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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Aug
20
2010

Charles Baudelaire, Author of Modernism

BAUDELAIRE AND MODERNITY

Every age needs its observer and every era requires an interpreter.  That individual has to be an odd cross between a poet and a reporter, to elevate the culture above mere description.  Charles Baudelaire (1821 – 1867) was a renegade poet, a syphilitic art critic, and above all a disaffected and alienated student of a society under the pressure of a transition.  That Baudelaire was a marginal character who lived on the fringes of a cynical consumer society was crucial to his ability to describe and define the new phenomenon, “modernité.”  Although the poet wrote extensively on a variety of topics, he is especially significant for essays, prose poems, poetry and art criticism that articulated a new way of life. In 1947, Jean-Paul Sartre accused Baudelaire of “bad faith” due to the many contradictions in his life and work.  However, a self-destructive poet and drug addicts, who lived in debt on the run from creditors, while, at the same time, taking part in the intellectual and artistic life of Paris, can hardly be expected to be consistent.  The very times of Baudelaire were paradoxical.

The art critic straddled the divide between waning Romanticism and emerging Realism, watching Eugène Delacroix after his creative peak and not living long enough to see Èdouard Manet reach his full artistic potential.   While there may never have been an artist who coincided with the poet’s desire to describe modernité, Baudelaire addressed the unfolding of a new way of life in a dense urban environment of the “crowd” and the impact of technology upon society and art.   By the 1840s, not only was Romanticism over but the art produced by the salon system was also becoming increasingly irrelevant.  The excuse for academic art was that it portrayed the “heroic” life of the ancient world, but, for Baudelaire, it was necessary for artists to be of their own time.  But what that “their time” mean?

The industrial revolution came slow and late to France, not in small part because many of the technological changes had been developed in the homeland of their hated enemy, England.  While England was already adjusting to industry, France, by mid-century, was just beginning to cope with the transition from an agricultural society to an urban and industrial one.  It is possible to see the process of artistic adjustment to these changes in the paintings of Jean-François Millet and Gustave Courbet.  Millet presented the countryside as frozen in time while Courbet showed the class tensions even in small villages.  Meanwhile, the mainstream salon artists chose to ignore the present in favor of the historical past. Few artists had to ability to see their age in all its uniqueness.  To be fair, the cultural changes caused by the Industrial Revolution were so extensive and far-reaching that it was easier to look away.  The problems for the artists during this transition period were, first, content of art—contemporary or traditional? and what new artistic techniques would be appropriate for the new age?

More than anyone, Baudelaire articulated both the new content and the new way of expressing the new content.  In doing so, he impacted many of his contemporaries and influenced later generations of writers and poets.  As an art critic who had to work the salon beat, it was his job to discern a trend or a concern with each annual exhibition.  One of his most important salon statements was penned in 1846.  In an essay published as a section of “The Salon of 1846″: “On the Heroism of Modern Life,” Baudelaire argued that modern life was as heroic as ancient life and that men in frock coats were as brave in their own time as the Roman gladiators were in the arena:

It is true that this great tradition has been lost, and that the new one is not yet established.  But what was this great tradition, if not a habitual everyday idealization of ancient life—a robust and material form of life, a state of readiness on the part of each individual…?  Before trying to distinguish the epic side of modern life, and before bringing examples to prove that our age is no less fertile in sublime themes than past ages, we may assert that since all centuries and all peoples have had their own form of beauty, so inevitably we have ours. That is the order of things…But to return to our principle and essential problem, which is to discover whether we possess a specific beauty, intrinsic to our new emotions…The pageant of fashionable life and the thousands of floating existences—-criminals and kept women—which drift about in the underworld of the great city; the Gazette des Tribunaux and the Moniteur all prove to us that we have only to open our eyes to recognize our heroism.  For the heroes of the Iliad are but pigmies compared to you—-who dared not publically declaim your sorrows in the funeral and tortured frock coat which we all wear today!—you the most heroic, the most extraordinary, the most romantic and the most poetic of all the characters that you have produced from your womb!

The “hero” is male but not just any male.  The poet’s hero is not the contented businessman who as prospered under the Citizen King, Louis Philippe, but the hero of la bohème, a cultivated and well-educated man who was also an outsider: the dandy.  “…a dandy can never be a vulgar man,” Baudelaire said.  The dandy wears the new uniform, the habit noir, the black suit with distinction, proclaiming middle class status.  And yet the dandy keeps himself apart from the bourgeoisie by moving with the “crowd,” without ever being part of the crowd.  Being a dandy, standing aside and watching, is a strategy of self-defense.  But a dandy, par excellence, is also a man who is able to walk the city, freely.   Baudelaire is the new man, the flâneur, the person who strolls the side streets, peruses the new arcades and watches the carriages pass down the wide boulevards.  At the same time the arcades were ushering in a new form of looking, the spectacle of window-shopping, a new nocturnal Paris sprang into being with the introduction of gaslight in the 1820s.   Here, in the darkness, is where we find the poet’s world of marginal people who live a “floating existence,” and it is here were we find the female counterpart to the dandy, the prostitute, the only kind of woman allowed to go abroad at night.  Modernism and its heroes is not for the respectable nor the faint-hearted.

Baudelaire, like many inhabitants of the changing city, felt the stresses of the transition.  The city he had been born in was vanishing before his very eyes.  According to one of Baudelaire’s greatest biographers, the German writer, Walter Benjamin, Baudelaire was part of Bohemia, la bohème. A Marxist writer, Benjamin linked Baudelaire to the territory of the dispossessed by quoting Marx on the precarious position of this social class:

…Their uncertain existence, which in specific cases depended more upon         chance than on their activities, their irregular life whose only fixed stations were the taverns of the wine dealers—the gathering places of the conspirators—and their inevitable acquaintanceship with all sorts of dubious people place them in that sphere of life which in Paris is called la bohème….the whole indeterminate, disintegrated, fluctuating mass which the French call la bohème….

By the time of the Second Empire, the chasm between rich and poor had stranded a number of middle class people on the wrong side of prosperity.   “It is bourgeois society that Baudelaire holds guilty of the suffering of the post-aristocratic period, and not the least that art has gone to rack and ruin, that poets and artists like himself now belong to the déclassés,” John E. Jackson remarked in 2005.  Thus Baudelaire wrote as an outsider, not an insider, taking advantage of an unprecedented expansion of the press.  Over the past two decades, new opportunities had emerged for writers such as Baudelaire who was able to find his unique voice and to carve out a position as an observer and witness.  The poet was a character composed of unabashed contractions who had no problem in proclaiming,  “Any newspaper, from the first to the last is nothing but a web of horrors….” As a writer (who wrote for newspapers) he tried to defend traditional art making against the onslaught of technology, mainly photography, while, at the same time, rushing out to be photographed many times.  In “The Salon of 1859,”  there was a section,  ”The Modern Public and Photography,” where Baudelaire complained about the clash between art and photography:

Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.  If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude, which is its natural ally.

These two essays, written over ten years apart, are indicative of the contradictions and confusions over the role of modern life in art.  On one hand, Baudelaire was convinced that the “heroism of modern life” was worth of depiction but on the other hand, that depiction had to be hand made, done in the old fashioned “art” way.   A machine can never replace art.  But more should be said of the difficulty of writing in a moment of social becoming, for Baudelaire, like Denis Diderot, was looking for the artist who could capture modernité or the pulse of his (or her) own time.  Courbet painted contemporary life, but this life was rural and, hence, not the “urban modern” condition that was the daily life of Baudelaire.  The poet was clearly looking for someone who expressed modern life in Paris, the city that Walter Benjamin called “the Capital of the Nineteenth Century.”

Baudelaire found his candidate, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in a fellow member of the fringes of society, an obscure illustrator named Constantin Guys.   The result of the relationship between the poet and the illustrator, both inhabitants of la bohème, was a long essay, almost book length, which described the condition that Baudelaire called modernité. That essay was the famous The Painter of Modern Life.  The poet states, “By ‘modernity,’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable…”  Guys, an illustrator and a quick sketch artist, was the outsider, who, because of his position on the fringes, was able to produce hundreds of quick studies of all that was fast-moving and fleeting in modern life.  Modernism, for both Baudelaire and for Guys, becomes defined by the concept of constant change, or what the art critic, Harold Rosenberg, would term, a hundred years later, “the tradition of the new.”

See also: “Baudelaire as Art Critic” and “Baudelaire and The Painter of Modern Life”

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

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Jul
30
2010

Podcast 26 Realism in Europe, Part Two

REALISM IN FRANCE

Although Realism is usually associated with its principle figures, Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, there were many important Realist artists in France whose ideas about art and whose realist principles were quite varied.  For decades, the broader movement of Realism produced works of art that were supportive of the dominant forces in society or that interrogated the prevailing norms.  The podcast discusses Realism in the context of the political and social conditions in late nineteenth century France.

  FRENCH

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Jan
15
2010

French Romanticism and the Avant-Garde

French Romanticism and the Avant-Garde

The term “avant-garde” is a military one, borrowed from the French phrase, denoting the advance body of the army.  This small group of soldiers goes out in advance of the main group to scout the territory beyond with the aim of reporting back as to the conditions awaiting the other soldiers.  In American parlance, these soldiers are called “F.O’s” or forward observers, and they account for the highest casualty rate, for they are always on the line and out in front. The artists that are historically considered the avant-garde were also “out in front of” the main body of more conservative artists and the recalcitrant public, putting their careers and their lives on the line in order to find new ways of making art.  As Renato Poggioli in The Theory of the Avant-Garde put it,

“…the avant-garde…functions as an independent and isolated military unit, completely and sharply detached from the public, quick to act, not only to explore but also to battle, conquer, and adventure on its own…”

The avant-garde as a conscious and deliberate artistic activity is mainly a mid to late Nineteenth Century phenomenon, probably pioneered by the Impressionists who intentionally refused to placate public taste and who deliberately exhibited work outside of the expected channels of the large and popular public Salon exhibitions.  According to Pierre Bourdieu in The Rules of Art, the avant-garde was a sociological affair, born of rising middle class aspirations and the inability of the culture to satisfy talented people.  The Academy controlled entrée to school art school training and had the power to grant access to the Salon.  Although the intention of the academically minded juries may have been to maintain the high level of quality in art, the effect was to restrict economic opportunity, forcing artists outside of the system.  As Bourdieu said,

“…bohemia…grows numerically and as its prestige (or mirages) attracts destitute young people, often of provincial and working-class origin, who around 1848 dominate the ‘second bohemia.’  In contrast to the romantic dandy of the ‘golden bohemia’ of the rue de Doyené, the bohemia of Murger, Chapmpfleury or Duranty constitutes a veritable intellectual reserve army, directly subject to the laws of the market and often obliged to live off a second skill…in order to live an art that cannot make a living.”

The avant-garde grew out of a group of creative people who gravitated to Paris and lived in low-income quarters, suffering from neglect and poverty.  Outside the mainstream and lacking the outlets that would have perhaps earned them a living, these artists and writers could only gather together and form an ideology of failure.  They had failed, they consoled themselves, because they were so “advanced” that the unenlightened public misunderstood them.   Simply put, their art was too good, too “avant.” Success was inverted in to an indictment of failure and failure was transformed into a badge of honor.   It is doubtful that these defiant members of the avant-garde were particularly talented or gifted, for there were member of La Boheme who were quite successful, such as George Sand and Eugène Delacroix. But the formula was high-minded and allowed those who never made a breakthrough an honorable cover for their failure.  The avant-garde artist, then, was a mythic creature who was not appreciated or understood by the masses, one who chose to live and work in obscurity and poverty, believing that one day his/her art would be recognized by an educated art audience either in the near present or in some unforeseeable future.  Savvy and strategic Bohemian artists fueled the myth of the avant-garde by shocking the a public that was very easy to shock.  The rallying cry of the avant-garde was, “Épater le bourgeoisie!” but the idea was to gain attention, not to repel collectors.  Avant-garde artists needed to make a living and used the unexpected as  a strategy to shock and awe the crowd.

Without the church and state and their once limitless funds, without the taste and sophistication of the aristocrats, the artists were faced with the middle class as their main audience. This was an audience that wanted to be entertained and were treated by the artists to large paintings that were precursors to modern day movies—-the grand machines or huge paintings that enthralled them with exciting stories. The new audience was composed of the masses, high and low, average people, undereducated, unsophisticated, but not uninterested in art.  The kind of art they wanted was that which was easily accessible, easy to understand, entertaining and attractive to look at; something like today’s television programs, that reflected themselves and their interests.  For many artists, this new middle class audience was no problem. For other artists, the bourgeoisie was an opportunity.   Although the art viewers were trained to admire the large history paintings, the serious minded displays of ancient virtues and obscure myths were not necessarily what the public actually wanted to see.

Academic art was based upon time honored Greek and Roman art which glorified the human being, divinely beautiful preferably nude, engaged in noble deeds.  Members of the Academy acted as jurors to the annual (or biannual) salons, restricting style and subject matter to that which reflected their teachings and the official preferences of the State. Preferred subject matter favored history and myth with an eye to teaching the unruly public morality, through the lessons of the past. While such allegorical approaches had been very effective in the early years of Neoclassicism, the moral and political fervor had quickened succumbed to the status-quo demands of the State, which wanted to entertain the public and distract it from the problems of the present. Until the end of the Second Empire, artists found success only by positioning themselves within the establishment, if only to fight against it, like Irgres and Delacroix. But as the century progressed, social and political issues became increasingly pressing, forcing the artistic gaze away from the present and towards eroticism and exoticism and the problems of contemporary times. For the avant-garde artist, the historical past was past.  “Il faut être de son temps,” (“It is necessary of be of one’s time.”) the artist Honoré Daumier exclaimed.  A growing number of artists sought new ways to make art, which would reflect the new modern way of life.

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

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