Nineteenth-Century Painting

Ben Sonnenberg

Nineteenth-Century PaintingAuthor(s): Richard HowardSource: Grand Street, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Summer, 1985), pp. 198-210Published by: Ben SonnenbergStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25006781 .

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GRAND STREET

NINETEENTH-CENTURY PAINTING

Richard Howard

he witty and learned authors of Romanticism & Real ism: The Mythology of Nineteenth-Century Art

(Viking)-Charles Rosen, a musician whose study The Classical Style has become something of a classic, and Henri Zerner, an art historian, chiefly of Mannerism-have not beaten their swords into ploughshares (or plan chettes), but by judiciously recasting a series of polemical articles and reviews into this still very pungent and perti nacious book, they have moderated their argument. The avant-garde, that argument runs, is an historical construc tion rather like the French Revolution; it embodies a simi lar idea of historical change, an acknowledgment that the nature of art was radically altered from 1800 to 1950, and that this alteration, sometimes called the modern tradition,

was achieved by a small group of artists and was opposed, for the most part, by governments, museums, academies and important sections of the press. Moreover, the ap parent triumph of this modern tradition in our galleries and textbooks is now reported to be precarious, jeopar dized by ignorant and venal opportunists.... Lurking in the shadows of auction rooms, museum cellars and school corridors are any number of academic ghouls slavering over their loathsome repast. Despite the amenity of the Rosen/Zerner prose ("The fashionable has existed

throughout history, while the idea of the modern

progressive, continuous and inevitable change-has ap peared only rarely"), despite too their easy way with the

maggots of recidivist colleagues ("The trouble with Boime's middle-of-the-road is that after he has finished

expanding its importance there is nothing left on either side of it"), the authors are passionately committed to the difficult tradition of modernism they characterize as

welling up initially from Romanticism as a mode of anti nomian understanding, a continuous process of refusing definition, and then from Realism as an emphatic sense of the work of art's material presence. Indignantly they fling down their corrective gauntlet: "Real discoveries in nine

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teenth-century painting are to be made in other fields than the revival of faded reputations, above all in the interac tions of social and technological change with the major artistic movements of the time."

Diverse their essays' occasions may be-must be, if they are to be responsible to the origins and development of the

ubiquitous split between avant-garde and academic art. They range from the recovery of Vermeer:

Why was Vermeer ever forgotten? . . . There is in Ver meer a certain alienation or remoteness-at once dis

passionate and intense [so that the] peculiar qualities Thore discovered in him were present in the advanced art of his own time [Manet] . . . Fromentin even claimed that Vermeer was now fashionable because his painting looked like Millet's!

to the language of landscape in Friedrich and Words worth, a landscape that has a significance but no message, being untranslatable and immediate:

In Friedrich, the meaning is general and inexhaustible, diffused through the forms . . What was needed was a

natural symbolism, which would remain eternally new. . And when Wordsworth writes:

And afterwards, the wind and sleety rain

And all the business of the elements, The single sheep, and the one blasted tree, And the bleak music of that old stone wall, The noise of wood and water, and the mist ...

he gives each of these elements an extraordinary signif icance merely by naming them in a certain order. Nor do

they have an autobiographical significance for him: he does not value them for their power to recall the past. On the contrary, that single moment in his life served to release the powers of speech in Nature.

But whether they are discussing Stendhal's grasp of the economic basis of academic discourse or the Realism of Tannhduser, which because of its avant-garde character was championed by the Realists and even won for Wagner the label "the Courbet of Music," Rosen and Zerner note

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that their essays are united by certain assumptions, even certain pervasive methodologies. In the nineteenth cen

tury as they read it and see it and hear it, the distinction between high art and all the other kinds-low, popular, commercial, applied-has been lost or deliberately dis carded. Traditional relegation of caricature, journalistic art, photography, book illustration and commercial art to

minor and subsidiary roles has little justification after 1800, and indeed our authors see one of the initiating acts of Romantic (hence Realist, hence Modern) art as the evasion of "the traditional distinctions between major and

minor genres, between the sublime and the ordinary, between tragedy and comedy, between art and the worlds of nature and human affairs." Rosen and Zerner are as

quick to realize that energies from "outside" high art can become, say with Bewick and the illustrative vignette, a

part of the century's centrifugal postulations, as they are to dismiss "official" or pompier art to its final (?) resting place on chocolate boxes, soda bottles, magazine covers and television commercials. "The history of art is not made

up of everything artists have done," they witheringly retort to certain attempts at rehabilitation. In fact what

they demonstrate, with exemplary wit, is that the history of commodity is precisely made up of what the history of art rejects in its axiological pursuit.

One of the vividest strategies this book employs in order to establish a coherence of the avant-garde tradition

("There was no break between Realism and Impression ism-the autonomy of art is already both implicit and

explicit in Realism: it is the guarantee of the truth of what is being represented") is the authors' exploration of the shared technical innovations of the most interesting writ ers and painters (and composers). Where Kierkegaard once referred to the Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates, Rosen and Zerner now invoke "the

quality of irony in Daumier, Courbet, Manet, Degas and Seurat that sets them off from other painters of contem

porary life" with constant reference to Flaubert, who had said, "I believe in the ironic acceptance of existence and its plastic and complete recasting through art."

Indeed the level of literary and musical sophistication throughout these essays is one of their sources of power,

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strongest among their many pieces a conviction, as in this

epitome of the Romantic achievement of immediacy:

We may doubt that forms have a meaning independent of culture, that language is immanent in Nature. But there is no question of the achievement: Wordsworth,

Holderlin, Constable and Friedrich contrived to let the elements of Nature appear to speak directly and without

intermediary; Schumann and Berlioz caused elements of abstract musical form to bear meanings that are anal

ogous to verbal meanings if rarely coincidental with them.

This is criticism of a very high, as well as intricate, order. It is raised to a certain power by a splendid capacity to

quote decisively, from both the poets and from the dis cursive writers of the period. Moreover, Rosen and Zerner are generous in their distribution of credit for insight among critics (the book is dedicated to Meyer Schapiro), and you cannot leave the arena without a sense that there are further and rewarding combats being conducted else where. The spirit of the entire venture is one of collabora tion and participation-the reader is not permitted to feel that these are deliberations to be conducted only among initiates. Just once, I believe, is a great name invoked de travers-when Tennyson is mentioned in the same breath as Bouguereau as being ripe for revival. Though the Laureate was certainly overpraised (or misappre hended) by the Victorians, there was never a moment

among the poets-from Whitman to Stevens-when he was not accorded an incontestable mastery, and never a failure among our best poet-critics-Eliot, Yeats, Auden to acknowledge his value for modernity.

The second half of the book is concerned with the

apparent paradox that Realism, properly apprehended, is coincident with the autonomy of art, what is usually meant

by the phrase "art for art's sake"-the historical anomaly that Mallarme and Zola are in fact united in their aims if

not in their achievement. "The Ideology of the Licked

Surface," an essay that concludes and in every sense finishes off the discussion, is the authors' most brilliant contribution to an interpretation of the nineteenth-cen

tury's superstitions and rebellions, and except for the

essay "Literature and Discontinuity," by Roland Barthes,

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with which it should be paralleled by some imaginary Plutarch of criticism, I know of no more useful attempt to account for the (often unacknowledged) motives of cul tural acceptability. "Academic finish," Rosen and Zemer observe, "is always associated with qualities of probity, assiduity, professional conscience-and also discretion."

Whereas an "unfinished texture implied a phenomenologi cal realism, a faithful representation of the process of vision and an insistence on the material presence of the work of art."

Such awareness instructs: Rosen and Zerner suggest that the detestation of the modern tradition (which they per ceive to be much more resolute among us than I myself had supposed) has a meaning, even an ominous one. Behind every collective rejection we must look for what has been offended. The refusal in 1874 to "read" the Im

pressionists was a refusal to abandon certain (hard-won) privileges which the artist, the collector and the critic might have supposed were eternal. If such assumptions were to be swept away by the First World War, they are nonetheless not out of reach, and Rosen and Zerner inti mate that many are reaching for them even now. "We should not be surprised," they say, "by the attempted rehabilitation of official art today ... it takes on a political coloring independent of the very diverse tendencies of the

people behind it."

xtended and detailed as is 19th-Century Art by Robert Rosenblum and H. W. Janson (Abrams), this hand

somely illustrated history is not a reference compilation to be dipped into for local lore (though it is copious with

regard to dates and sizes and places, and provides gener ous bibliographies), or consulted for those encyclopedic glints and glimpses which might settle a dispute or win a round of Trivial Pursuit (Where-O symbol!-was the first, 1874 Impressionist exhibition held? Answer: In the studio of the photographer Nadar). Rosenblum (three of

whose earlier books-on Ingres, on transformations in late

eighteenth-century painting, and on what he calls the Northern Romantic Tradition-I had read with great en

joyment and benefit) and the late H. W. Janson (whose study of the century's sculpture has subsequently been

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published as an independent text, here much abridged) have written a book, and to discern its achievements, even to respond to its qualities, requires a reading, not an easy

matter when confronted with the dimensions of the object itself. When even a history textbook such as this becomes a coffee-table book, indeed becomes a coffee table, the student is as much burdened by the illustrations in his

attempts to gain access to the text as he is likely to be enchanted by their profusion and excellence.

The historians have followed, have pursued the devel

opment, the sometimes breathless revelations of the nine teenth century almost year by year. They have tried, notably, "to give the nineteenth century back to itself, to read it more in its own terms than in those of the twentieth

century." This emphasis produces consequences, chiefly those likely to raise the hackles of Rosen and Zerner: "Rosenblum's view of the nineteenth century"-they write of an introduction to a catalogue of a Vernet retrospective

-"has always been characterized by a deep and infectious

appreciation of kitsch, a taste that is intimately related to his understanding of recent trends in New York painting. Nevertheless Rosenblum's enthusiasm makes him a mav erick among neoconservative art historians, most of whom see their position as a great plea for a return ... to a more

impartial view of history." Apart from the fact that one

probably cannot contend with the lineaments of nine

teenth-century art, as Hermann Broch has remarked, without some appreciation of kitsch, one senses that the hackles are to be smoothed by genuine competence, even

by something more than competence, as the remark on maverick status implies. Indeed, surely the first thing to be observed about this very long text by this very energetic writer (who comes on stage before the curtain, wringing his hands that he couldn't find room for Bonington, Sisley and Vrubel, some dozen others!) is the enthusiasm regis tered and communicated for an amazingly wide (and deep) range of art. Rosenblum actually enjoys painting, and he lets you know that his enjoyment is not his alone you can have it too, if you are willing to look as hard, to learn as much, to listen as carefully, and then once again to look, even harder.... When Rosen and Zerner speak of this critic's "infectious appreciation of kitsch," the word

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that should receive our attention and their emphasis is

infectious, not kitsch. I have never read a history of art of any century, not merely of this most perplexing and

contradictory nineteenth, a mythic interval so traversed

(trampled?) by conflicting impulses as to be almost stu

pent, impenetrable, opaque-which made me feel to such a triumphant degree that the writer's attention has not

flagged, cannot flag, for it is seen to be an attention

authentically nourished by love, by a free interest. That is, by some long-elaborated and deeply personal process of

self-discipline and training-at least so I must call it, for no mere loitering among catalogues and galleries can result in this kind of contagion (why is it we speak of a shared delight as a disease, and a solitary scholarship as a mastery?)-Rosenblum has been able to attach his affectionate understanding, over and over, to the most diverse, even divergent artists (the Nazarenes and the pre Raphaelites, the Luminists and the Nabis), so that he is as

rewarding about Goya as he is about Seurat, as astute about Turner as about Friedrich. (Notice the displace

ment of Paris, throughout, as the inevitable clearinghouse of reputations, of values ...) As Rosenblum's ten-year-old book about modem art and the Northern Romantic Tradi tion asserts and exemplifies, his concerns are not merely those of convention or mode, they are those of a man who has educated his eyes to remember almost everything they have ever seen, to call up the far-flung and even discrepant images that enrich what often seems stark or even staring. If the obvious and inevitable put-down of this historian is that he is too ready to transform one thing into another

thing, denying to the separate work its aspired-to autono

my by his own perception of how necessarily, in art, the

impulses coalesce, combine, fuse, such tendencies are but the defect of his virtue, his vitality of recognition, which

more readily than in most of us observes the liens and

ligatures that make the enterprise of nineteenth-century art more of an organism than I had ever been able to

guess, or even to hope. This observation has been won expensively: the histor

ian's vocabulary is that of the eager critic (censured for the eagerness of his indulgence, yet capable of accom

modating such "freaks" as Runge and Rosetti till they cast

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off the marginal status accorded them by a narrower tradi tion, or as Rosenblum would say, by an imperialistic impulse), and shows the occasional strain: how often he

will have occasion to speak of figures "locked forever in the

prison of their passion"; of compositions "frozen ... into an indissoluble network ... like a web . . tautly locked

together ... ticking like a Swiss watch ... with clockwork

intricacy ... locking... clicking... ticking... keyed into

place ... in a fixed grid . .." This is the nomenclature of a man quite determined to make the haptic aspect optic for whom, indeed, the optic is haptic. The strain, if that is what it is, resolves itself, though, into strength by the

continuity of the argument addressed. And here Rosen blum is discerned to be closer to Rosen and Zerner than

they acknowledge (surely he is not one of their "revivers of faded reputations," but an intrepid explorer of some

very murky byways, from which he emerges all the more set on what is in the road, obvious), or than he would even claim apart from his undertaking: the argument that Cour bet's, say, is an art

for all its Socialist implications, far more tight-lipped and

dry-eyed than its propagandistic potential, meeting the demands of a new kind of painting based on the equality of all material facts even more than the demands of a new kind of society based on the social and financial equality of all people. [italics mine]

This insight is finely rehearsed, much later on, in the essay on Manet-these individual essays are carefully grafted within the cartilaginous text, so that masters and mysteries are contained by the explanatory historical mathesis-of whom it is said that even the most dramatically centered event, say a goring in the bull ring, could be broken down

into parts of an aesthetic continuum in which the trivial and the momentous are of equal importance, and in

which the picture's rectangular field is the equivalent of a camera's viewfinder picking its image at random.

Such a perception reaches its excruciation with, for in stance, the closing comment on the work of the American

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John Henry Twachtman, whose 1900 painting of a partic ular growth of wild flowers somewhere near the artist's farm property in Cos Cob, Connecticut

dispenses with any such specificity, immersing us instead into a bewildering profusion of leaves and blossoms that are so cropped, top, sides, and bottom, that any sense of the measurable space of the real world is annihilated in

favor of a luxuriant floating surface of colored textures that have no beginning, middle, or end. Although the

messages that emanate from this fragment of landscape may be shallower than those of Monet or of his symbolist contemporaries, it is once again the aesthetic surface that draws us into the painting, as well as reminding us that

this is, finally, art and not illusion.

Agreeable as it is, then, to note the felicities of isolated formulations ("In Winterhalter's 1855 Portrait of the Em

press Eugenie surrounded by her Maids of Honor, the authentic traditions of prerevolutionary monarchy have been re-created as a pictorial operetta, both lovable and

silly"), and even to observe the structural toughness of a sustained line of perceived significance, from Friedrich to

Munch, for example; and readily though one may tax Rosenblum for scanting the very Ingres he so lovingly and wisely accounted for in his great study (for this same

publisher) of nearly twenty years back; or can repine that Monet's nineteenth-century production is slighted in favor of Seurat's by an historian plainly eager to get on to Cub ism rather than to loiter over the work of the painter whose

"Impressionism went through the looking glass of the

objective world and became part of the Symbolist esthetic"

(yet how splendid even this reductive moment turns out to

be)-though any undertaking of this scope permits and even pleads for such carping (Rosenblum presents his text as a work-in-progress, a stage in the history of art rather than its stagnation), nonetheless this is a magni ficent and grandly conceived work, fiercely intelligent and

exemplary in its love of the art it so comprehensively, and

comprehendingly, considers. Let us recall that a considera tion is a sighting of the stars together, in the figures they

make against the dark sky, the constellations .... How

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fortunate the students who can take up Rosenblum and

Jansen* as their standard textbook, their manual-how different our own lives in art would have been if we had had such a cicerone at hand, back then!

e have been learning-and T. J. Clark's new book about Paris in the art of Manet and his followers,

The Painting of Modern Life (Knopf) is a milestone in the

process-that there is a long view to take of French cul ture between 1849 and 1918. In literature, the novel's en

terprise between Balzac and Proust no longer breaks down, as it did in my youth, to so many grade-assigning and often invidious discriminations among Zola and Stendhal, Flaubert and Maupassant: we see French fic tion as a nuanced, even as a motley venture, but we see it as one, nor is it any longer amusing to patronize Balzac for his aspirations to style, Zola for his lack of them. Henry James himself has revealed Zola as a poet, and a page of

what is lately translated as Balzac's A Harlot High and Low will be seen to prophesy and fulfill Baudelaire.... Minor productions-the Goncourts, say, or even the aston ishments of Edouard Dujardin and Elemir Bourges-no longer constitute freakish wayside distractions, but plau sible expressions of a grand, a Shakespearean (if it is not

Dantesque) epic, splendors and miseries of the bour

geoisie. And with Clark's book, we perceive the contours of an

other epic, or another way of regarding the same epic. He

began ten years ago with The Absolute Bourgeois (Millet, Daumier, Delacroix) and Image of the People (Courbet),

*Jansen's text here is much more on the old lines of such textbooks, a brisk trot through the world's galleries and around the monu

ments, occasionally turning up some real stunners (from Houdon to Rodin, there are many occasions for amazement, as frequently illustrated as analyzed; I cannot resist pointing out the weirdness of

Fremiet's 1887 Gorilla Carrying Off a Woman, which Jansen does not fail to disentangle from our Kong connections, and the wonders of Auguste Preault's Slaughter of 1834, an achievement unknown to me till Jansen had ferreted it out of the Chartres museum.

Though nicely complementing Rosenblum's full-scale work, Jan sen's critical history of sculpture in the century must await, for

assessment, the consideration of his separate and exhaustive study.

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and his present study focuses-that is surely the right word-on four views of Paris as devised by Manet: the

panorama constituted by a vision of the Universal Expo sition (1867), which is accompanied by an essay on the

Haussmannization of the city; the parodic image of Olym pia (1863), with its attendant exploration of the world of

prostitution as commodification of the body; the land

scape of the boaters at Argenteuil (1874), accounted for

by an essay on the class struggle for possession of the en virons of Paris; and A Bar at the Folies-Bergere (1882), a study of modernity as marginality within the spectacle of bourgeois leisure. Now we are informed that Clark is

preparing an examination of Cubism as collective action

during the ten years before the First World War. This will round off, or bring to a point-depending on how com fortable you are with the kind of Marxism that offers

you such instances as "what is visible in modem life is not character but class"-Clark's sense of the bourgeois epic, which I find so arresting and profound that I can not afford to be flustered by the demonism of his (fre quently insolent) vocabulary and the dismissiveness of his vehemence ("Because art was produced in these cir cumstances to serve these interests it could find no basis for representation besides the spectacular ones this book describes"). I do not even need to share his tragic con clusions as to the nature of the entire fresco he will have brushed in-that is, I do not need to see the occlusion of the proletariat as the doom of any progressive art before the Holocaust-to concur with the design and the dignity, the eminent dignity of his analysis. His method is to ex amine the paintings through the lens of contemporary re

sponse, that vast terrain vague of uncomprehending, often hostile criticism which he has the nerve to take seriously. "If we try to unlearn our present ease with Impression ism, this will be partly a matter of looking at Impressionist pictures again and being struck by their strangeness." It is

only when a work of art is strange-as anyone knows who owns a painting-that we can really see it, and my chief

gratitude to Clark is for restoring to my attention a whole

range of pictures (including a lot of Seurat and Monet, of Degas and Pissarro) I had ceased, quite lovingly, to notice at all, merely "knowing" them.

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There are problems-there are even promptings from one's deepest preferences and prejudices that deter as sent. Clark is not at all interested in the artist's hand, in all the creative possibilities of the casual or the decora tive, the surface impulses (might we not call them the

superstructure?) which elaborate the painting's skin and take Impressionism beyond its identity as an advanced form of realism. He looks at the paintings that constitute his epic as products merely, never as process. He does not follow the hand that moves paint over the surface to such

astonishing effect. Thus when he says "to call the picture [Olympia] modern is perhaps more sensible if we mean

by that word desperate, ironic, and grim beneath the fic tion of technique," I am pulled up short by that last

phrase-why is technique a fiction more than the class struggle? Indeed, is it not the means, the fact of technique

which enables Clark to arrive at his finest moments, his

really startling insights?

Modern art wanted to paint Haussmann's Paris as a place of pleasure, but in such a way as to suggest that the plea sures of seeing involved some sort of lack-a repression or alternatively a brazenness.

Styles of spontaneity are repeatedly displaced by styles of analysis-grandly individualistic modes of handling abandoned in favor of ones claiming to be anonymous, scientific, and even collective.

And perhaps most representatively:

The middle class in the later nineteenth century, and even the early years of the twentieth, had not yet invented an

imagery of its own fate, though in due course it would do so with deadly effectiveness; the world would be filled

with soap operas, situation comedies, and other small dramas involving the magic power of commodities. But for the time being it was obliged to feed on the values and idioms of those classes it wished to dominate; and doing so involved it in making the idioms part of a further sys tem, in which the popular was expropriated from those

who produced it-made over into a separate realm of

images which were given back, duly refurbished, to the "people" thus safely defined.

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T. J. Clark has been censured by Richard Shiff in the New York Times Book Review for "nowhere" consider

ing the artist, and by Hilton Kramer in the New Criterion for his "failure to contribute to our understanding of

painting as art." It seems to me that writing about art which avoids such alibis is to be welcomed rather than re buffed, to be attended to rather than derided. If it is mean

ing, if it is ideas that are found to be disconcerting and even destructive (Kramer's word), then we must remem ber that the only way to overcome a thought is by ... another thought. The perception of meaning cannot be silenced or shouted down, it can only be altered and added to by the modification of significance, perceived as Clark has perceived it-by being very intelligent about his looking, very knowledgeable about his seeing, very wise about his vision.

^b

GYPSY TRICK

Kenneth Bernard

she decked herself with fleabane and showed me the corkscrew

it was a tight squeeze and words were superfluous

we arrived at the pop and fell apart

with a sly smile/she said tomorrow the saraband the jumping bean

and the topsy-turvy

I am all ears and tingling

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Nineteenth-Century Painting

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