The Perpetual Guest

Art in the Unfinished Present

Barry Schwabsky

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781784783242
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784783266
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

Contemporary art sometimes pretends to have made a clean break with history. In The Perpetual Guest, poet and critic Barry Schwabsky demonstrates that any robust understanding of art's present must also account for the ongoing life and changing fortunes of its past.

Surveying the art world of recent decades, Schwabsky attends not only to its most significant newer faces-among them, Kara Walker, Thomas Hirschhorn, Ai Weiwei, Chris Ofili, and Lorna Simpson-but their forebears as well, both near (Jeff Wall, Nancy Spero, Dan Graham, Cindy Sherman) and more distant (Vel?zquez, Manet, Matisse, and the portraitists of the Renaissance).

Schwabsky's rich and subtle contributions illuminate art's present moment in all its complexity: shot through with determinations produced by centuries of interwoven traditions, but no less open-ended for it.

IV
Unfinished Tradition

… that non-finito is the medium not only of synthesis but of a scattering or disruptive force that will lend itself to effects that mirror those of flood-water or of lightning.

—Adrian Stokes, Michelangelo: A Study in the Nature of Art

27

Unfinished Tradition: Édouard Manet

“You must live like a bourgeois and save all your violence for your art”—has anyone ever fulfilled more completely Gustave Flaubert’s directive than his younger contemporary, Édouard Manet? And has any artist ever been, as a result, more of an enigma? Even those rare few spirits of his time who valued his art at its true worth nonetheless often misunderstood it. Manet’s contemporaries saw him as above all else a realist, the heir of Gustave Courbet. Had any of them been sufficiently realistic to take Émile Zola as an investment advisor, they would have done well indeed: “So sure am I that Manet will be one of the masters of tomorrow,” the critic and novelist wrote in 1866, “that I should believe I had made a good bargain, had I the money, in buying all his canvases today. In fifty years they will sell for fifteen or twenty times more … It is not even necessary to have very much intelligence to prophesy such things.” As the art historian George Heard Hamilton remarked, Zola’s guess as to the rise in value in Manet’s prices was stunningly accurate—and this, some five years before Manet had managed to sell, as far as we know, even a single picture. Although Zola grasped many of the subtleties of his friend’s art, he could yet imagine that Manet “came to understand, quite naturally, one fine day, that it only remained to him to see Nature as it really is,” and that he thus “made an effort to forget everything he had learned in museums” in order to transcribe what he saw with unexampled freshness.

Today, it is hard to see Manet as a realist. Not that he neglects to picture the life around him, far from it—but he so often does so in such skewed, confounding, contradictory ways. He made his style modern by quoting the art of the past—not to use it as a model in the approved academic manner, but to cite it in an alienated way, at times reminiscent (retroactively reminiscent, one might say) of what would later be dubbed “appropriation”: Manet seems to use a painting by Velázquez or Goya, Titian or Raphael, in much the same oblique and riddling way that Jeff Wall, for instance, would use Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) as a source for his own Picture for Women (1979). For Manet as for Wall, tradition is unfinished and therefore open to reinvention.

Needless to say, Zola eventually came to realize that Manet was not a realist after his own heart. In 1879 he wrote on the artist again, this time regretting that “he is satisfied with unfinished work; he does not study nature with the passion of the truly creative.” Just as the ordinary run of critics were finally getting, not yet to like Manet, certainly, but at least used to him, Zola was starting to sound like them. That Manet’s paintings looked unfinished had always been their complaint. He seemed to violate a sort of artistic ethic, as if he could not be bothered to bring his work to a conclusion. The subjects of Manet’s many portraits, at least, knew that the unfinished look of his paintings was not the result of laziness. They had to sit through the incessant sessions in which he would attempt again and again, sparing neither their time nor his own, to satisfy the artistic scruples that he could never quite put words to but which are so evident now on his canvases. But this lack of finish was not the only objection that Manet faced. There was something else, something less specific, a more inchoate feeling: these paintings were just incomprehensible. “Olympia can be understood from no point of view, even if you take it for what it is, a puny model stretched out on a sheet,” insisted Théophile Gautier. He was the leading critic of the day, a man who had earlier considered Manet promising, and might have been expected to have some sympathy for him thanks to their shared friendship with Charles Baudelaire. One Louis Etienne confessed, “I search in vain for the meaning of this unbecoming rebus”—meaning Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe.

The meaning that was missing, in the eyes of Manet’s contemporaries, was what would tie together the people and things depicted in his paintings into a legible story—and that’s precisely what Manet wouldn’t give them. There’s always a sense of the arbitrary in the relationships in his paintings. No “realistic” narrative can hold things together. The solution of modernist critics was to say that what unifies Manet’s paintings is form—that the imagery is incidental. Yet his recurrent resort to topical, politically provocative subject matter—The Execution of Maximilian in the late 1860s, The Escape of Rochefort in 1881–82—should undermine that notion, which now seems no more plausible as an explanation for Manet’s painting than was Zola’s realism. Instead of seeing Manet as an exponent of realism, or as an implicit abstractionist, it might be better to think of him as a precursor of Surrealism, whose inspiration was Lautréamont’s image of a boy “as beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella.”

If Le Déjeuner is beautiful, it’s beautiful like that—in the spark it generates by short-circuiting meaning. As entwined as each of the three foreground figures seem to be, they are also strangely disconnected from each other. Yes, the man on the left, the one with the fez-like headgear, seems to be gesturing toward the man on the right—but the latter seems to be in some other space entirely, both physically and psychologically, as does the nude woman, who seems quite unaware of either of her male companions, looking out in the direction of the viewer. And then their relation to the landscape background is ambiguous. Don’t the trees seem small in relation to the size of the figures? And what about the fourth figure, the woman in the background? It’s impossible to judge her distance from the other three; it’s almost as if she is part of a painted backdrop, a painting within the painting. Altogether, Le Déjeuner recalls more than anything Max Ernst’s definition of a Surrealist collage, as a coupling of apparently irreconcilable realities, on a plane that would apparently not suit them. It is this incipient Surrealism that made the painting so detestable in 1863 and that accounts for its tremendous popularity today, a popularity that can be measured in part by the fact that it is one of the most parodied and pastiched images in Western art—coming in third, by my estimate, after the Mona Lisa and The Scream.

That Manet is a tremendously popular painter today—and the crowds you will have to contend with if you visit the exhibition “Manet: The Man Who Invented Modernity” at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris are proof enough of that—is a curious fact, because he is also a difficult and unpredictable painter. Moments of resolution in his oeuvre are few; sometimes it seems like his paintings are most interesting for their problems, for their quiet sense of unease with their own devices. Manet’s paintings rarely have the calm, soothing quality of so many of the landscapes by his younger friends, the Impressionists; he doesn’t glam up the people he paints as a bravura brush-man like John Singer Sargent (who followed his lead in looking to Velázquez for inspiration) would do; and, aside from Le Dejeuner, his paintings are rarely very sexy—his other famous nude, Olympia, is distinctly tough, without a hint of come-hither, which is one reason why the painting kicked up such a storm when it was first exhibited. Besides, there’s no sensational or pitiable backstory à la Caravaggio or Van Gogh; Manet’s early death at the age of fifty-one is apparently not early enough to wring many tears. Could it be the inner quality of his work that accounts for his popularity, along with the fascination of his historical position as “the painter of modern life”? It would seem the general like their caviar after all.

A word is in order about that phrase, “the painter of modern life.” Baudelaire coined it, of course, before he knew Manet’s art—he applied it to the illustrator Constantin Guys, a few of whose drawings are included in this exhibition. But it has long been understood to apply best to Manet. The real poignancy of it, in retrospect, is that Manet really turned out to be the painter of modern life and not simply a painter of modern life, since for his successors modern painting became increasingly divorced from anything resembling those “sketches of manners” or the “portrayal of bourgeois life and the fashion scene” that Baudelaire saw as essential to the depiction of modern life; painting was giving up whatever journalistic function it had. The critic Michael Fried, who would go on to write a monumental study of Manet, famously spoke of a “history of painting from Manet through Synthetic Cubism and Henri Matisse … characterized in terms of the gradual withdrawal of painting from the task of representing reality—or reality from the power of painting to represent it.” What was lost, in truth, was a common sense of what would count as a reality worth representing; what was gained was a feeling for the means of representation as realities in themselves. Henceforth ambitious painting was not going to reflect modernity primarily through its subject matter but through its technique: Picasso and Matisse—let alone abstractionists like Malevich and Mondrian—were modern painters, but not painters of modern life; in their own way the German Expressionists strove to be painters of modern life, it’s true, but their exacerbated sense of the clash between inner experience and objective reality made it impossible for them to be clear-eyed chroniclers. Only in the 1960s, a full century after Manet appeared on the scene, did a few photorealists on the one hand and Alex Katz on the other find more or less credibly modern ways of painting modern life again.

Stéphane Guégan, the curator of the Orsay’s Manet exhibition, would like to divorce the artist’s “modern” from the Modernism that found its beginnings in his work. Guégan would rather speak, pugnaciously, of “the dead ends of modernism.” And he’s not entirely bereft of evidence. Wasn’t Manet committed to the official Salons as a vehicle for his career, despite the repeated snubs he received there—paintings refused, prizes withheld—and didn’t he decline to exhibit with the Impressionists, who were his friends and widely considered his followers? Degas, who like Manet was a little older than the Impressionists and not entirely at one with their sensibility, nonetheless grumbled that Manet’s refusal to unite with them showed him “more vain than intelligent.” And yes, the young Manet had spent no less than six years studying under Thomas Couture, today best known as the author of a spectacularly monumental piece of kitsch, The Romans of the Decadence, which won a prize at the Salon of 1847 and now hangs elsewhere in the Orsay. The exhibition begins by placing Manet firmly in Couture’s orbit, showing his early works among those of his master. Among the latter are studies whose lack of finish may remind us of the loose facture of those paintings of Manet that his contemporaries slated as uncompleted—but those works of Manet’s were finished. (Incidentally, you can always tell a finished Manet, however loosely painted, from a study or sketch: proof, if it’s needed, of how wrong his critics were in their taunts that Manet was too indolent to see his projects through.) More telling, however, is a group of Couture’s informal portraits, which show a facile touch but also, occasionally, real penetration. Yet here, too, the seeming resemblance between master and student is misleading; Couture has nothing of Manet’s force. His influence is more clearly seen in the relative conservatism of Manet’s friend (and fellow Couture student) Henri Fantin-Latour, whose Homage to Delacroix, an 1864 group portrait that includes Manet and Baudelaire among its subjects, is also included here. Guégan does not quote Manet’s despairing remark on Couture’s studio, quoted by his fellow student and lifelong friend Antonin Proust (and possibly the subject of one of Couture’s portraits here), “I don’t know why I’m here. Everything we see around us is ridiculous. The light is false. The shadows are false. When I come to the studio, it seems to me that I’m entering a tomb.” Proust was writing long after the fact and not without prejudice, but his testimony cannot be discounted, all the more so since, contrary to Guégan, Manet’s mature work owes little to Couture in either technique or attitude.

As Couture dominates the exhibition’s beginning, Baudelaire is the presiding figure over its second section. Manet’s acquaintance with the poet, ten years his elder, developed rapidly after his first Salon appearance in 1861. (He had been rejected two years earlier.) But he had already been a reader of Les Fleurs du Mal and certain of his paintings already had Baudelairian overtones. An 1862 portrait of Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire’s mistress, shows her in a vision that is at once hallucinatory and hilarious: reclining on a sofa, with harsh features and a pose that might remind you more of a vampire raising herself from her coffin than of a conventional odalisque, her voluminous white skirts have swollen to immense proportions, like clouds that are about to envelop her. Nothing quite like Baudelaire’s Mistress, Reclining would be painted again until Matisse or Beckmann. It’s good to keep this strange painting in mind as one recalls Baudelaire’s famous words in an 1865 letter to Manet: “You are only the first in the decadence of your art.” What keeps those words ringing in our ears is their ambiguity. What did the poet really mean? Was it, “Alas, in our day painting has fallen into its decadence, but at least in this bad time you are the best there is—that is, the least decadent?” This is essentially the position taken by the novelist Philippe Sollers in the exhibition catalog, when he asserts that those who laughed at Olympia were the true moderns, “totally ignorant petits bourgeois,” while Manet was the true classicist. Or did Baudelaire mean, rather, “Painting is heading into decadence and you are the captain leading the charge—you are the avantgarde of decadence, that is, the most decadent of all?” This is the perennial cultural pessimism that will never be refuted or proven, but which is as integral to Baudelaire as his Modernism. Perhaps that’s where the poet and the painter parted ways, intellectually.

If Guégan is on thin ice in overemphasizing Couture, he goes completely off the rails in using Manet’s few paintings on Christian themes, done in 1864–65, as evidence of what he calls Manet’s genuine “attachment to the God of Scripture.” It’s not just that there is no supporting textual evidence for this. Look at the paintings: the best of these is The Dead Christ with Angels (1864). Its Christ is no God, and the death it depicts is an utterly irrevocable one. One believes in the former life of this man to the same extent that one sees that there can be no hope in his resurrection. As for the angels, they appear rather as lovely young actresses in angel costumes; they represent the artifice that sets off the veracity of the scene which arouses our pity, just as the light that caresses the face of the girl on the right, the one supporting Christ, sets off the shadow that bathes his unseeing eyes and separates him from us definitively. The miracle of this painting—to borrow the religious terminology—is that it can be at once an urbane pastiche of art history and a plea for human empathy. Artifice and realism reinforce each other in a direct challenge to the Salon’s conception of history painting, not in expression of piety.

I don’t mean to imply that Guégan is wrong at every turn. His skepticism toward the idea that Manet became an Impressionist in the 1870s, for instance, is well taken. Not that Manet couldn’t have learned in turn from the younger painters who’d learned much from him. There’s no denying that his palette became more brilliant and the weave of his brush marks looser as he became more drawn to daylight, even indoors—see how the sun pours in on Lady with Fans (Portrait of Nina de Callias) (1873–74). Yet where painters like Monet or Renoir gave a rhythmic regularity to their brushstrokes—it is this that gives their works that sensation of restfulness that has allowed them to be mistaken for a sort of visual easy listening—a painting like Manet’s Croquet Party (1873) is imbued with a sense of agitation that belies its ostensibly bland subject, especially with the overhead foliage that covers the sky like threatening storm clouds. One might be tempted to read some social or psychological drama into this—to see the male figure in the background as somehow alienated from the foreground group involved in the match—but I don’t think you can get very far that way. Manet was simply more interested in the multitude of ways he could apply his paint so as to describe the true visual complexity of all the detail we normally overlook in a seemingly simple outdoor scene—a task he seems to have experienced as a harassing struggle.

Something remains unsatisfactory about a painting like The Croquet Party, but the paintings of café life that began to occupy Manet toward the end of the 1870s would have been inconceivable without such experiments. These culminated, of course, in The Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), which ought to be the climax of any big show of Manet but has remained in London at the Courtauld Institute. Actually this loss might have turned out to be a gain if it had allowed the exhibition to end on an unexpected note, with the still lifes that Manet painted at the very end of his life. Curiously, Guégan downplays them, reminding his readers that Manet never abandoned the old idea of an artistic hierarchy in which “paintings with multiple figures and an indirect narrative … are an accomplishment of an altogether taller order than the seascapes and still lifes.” And it’s true, Manet wanted to challenge the conventional sense of what history painting could be, not abolish it. For Guégan, “the end of the story” lies with the political Manet and a “return to rhetoric and action.” This might well be the direction Manet would have taken, had time allowed. We’ll never know. But what could be less rhetorical than either version of Manet’s last political painting? The escape from imprisonment on the South Pacific island of New Caledonia by the radical political agitator Henri Rochefort in 1874 must have been a dramatic event, or at least a desperate one; but not as Manet shows it. Instead, these are paintings of uncertainty, of waiting—men stuck in a frail craft on rough waters, with a goal nowhere in sight.

Since 1879 Manet’s health had been deteriorating; he was infected with syphilis. In the circumstances, it’s astonishing that he was able to complete The Bar at the Folies-Bergère, which is not only his masterpiece but his testament, a painting full of paradox and irresolvable mystery. And yet another painting of 1882, the fiercely attentive still life Flowers in a Glass Vase, could just as easily be that testament, such are the perceptual complexities Manet has discovered in this everyday sight and the grace with which he’s mastered them. It’s one of a series of some twenty flower paintings that Manet painted between the summer of 1882 and his last day in his studio, March 1, 1883. Even Manet’s detractors had often had kind words for the still lifes that were always worked into his grand compositions from Le Dejeuner to The Bar, but this had been but the other side of a repeated complaint, that he painted the human figure with no more soul than a still life object. Here he finally gives his rejoinder: Who paints the human form with more life than I paint these flowers? For Manet, that’s the end of the story. Even behind the back of a misconceived exhibition, great painting tells its own tale.

2011

28

For and Against Method:
Edgar Degas and Merlin James

My friend waved his hand dismissively when I mentioned I’d recently seen an outstanding exhibition about Edgar Degas. “How can you go wrong with Degas?” he asked. True enough. But what I saw wasn’t another guided tour of the artist’s greatest hits. Instead, the show at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, “Degas’s Method,” is an intellectually challenging one that promises not just familiar pleasures but a deeper understanding. Instead of organizing Degas’s oeuvre around its subject matter (ballet dancers, horses, landscapes) or the diverse media he employed (oil painting, pastels, sculpture) or even chronology, it focuses on his aesthetic premises and representational strategies as they cut across medium, motif, and his lifetime. The exhibition’s curator, Line Clausen Pedersen, has articulated this approach by singling out Degas’s relation to Impressionism—as ambivalent as it was essential—and his ideas of process, draftsmanship, and artifice. Pedersen’...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• I. Negative Theology
• II. Faces out of the Crowd
• III. Old Vagabond
• IV. Unfinished Tradition