Tag: Cézanne

Review of Michael Fried’s ‘French Suite: A Book of Essays’

By Christian Kile

http://www.sehepunkte.de/2023/01/36992.html

This book of essays by Michael Fried covers a selection of the painting and literature of France, focussing on the nineteenth century and Impressionism together with an argument about the evolution of French art which led to it. The ideas of Denis Diderot, a long-time influence on Fried, are central in this collection. For it is in the philosophe’s art criticism that a key criteria of French painting became defined: a will to isolate itself from, or even deny the existence of its viewer or beholder – a rejection of what Fried terms “theatricality”. To achieve this, a method of “absorption”, depicting figures engrossed in their situation and an emphasis on “dramatic unity” to achieve “a compositional effect of closure vis-à-vis the beholder” became prominent (326-327). [1]

In the first chapter it is Louis Le Nain’s group of peasant paintings which come under study with their often “strongly frontal, not to say self-presentational orientation” of figures – works which form part of the “‘classical’ turn” initiated by Nicolas Poussin (25, 36). A number of these would be to hand for Édouard Manet “at the very moment, the outset of his career as a painter of major ambition, when he could best make use of them” (48).

In 1767, Hubert Robert, mostly remembered for his paintings of classical ruins, “provoked a seriously brilliant discussion” about his Salon submissions by Diderot, then said by Fried to be at his zenith as an art critic (51). Offering an alternative to the absorptive approach, Robert’s work is conceived as “pastoral”: bridges, walkways, tunnel like spaces and differing vantage points are all utilised; an approach that encourages a viewer to enter a picture (57).

It is that Romantic icon, Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault in which the theme of absorption is intensified. Fried describes the painting as having been the artist’s sole attempt at a career defining achievement, and even then, one that apparently for the artist “fell painfully short” (114). Like Keats who died a few years before him, the Frenchman would die convinced that he had not fulfilled his promise. In the Raft the shipwrecked men or naufragés are desperately baying at a distant ship on the horizon away from the beholder. Fried goes further and speculates that judging by the men’s “actions and orientation” their rescue would result in them passing from the viewer, “as if we, in our capacity as beholders, were the ultimate cause of their predicament” (105).

Along with Flaubert, Baudelaire is one of the writers allotted a chapter. Fried focusses on the latter’s Salon of 1846 where the poet-critic’s great criterion of “memorability” and its “assumption that those works of art are best that leave the strongest and most lasting impressions on the memory” is considered (118-119). Good art, for Baudelaire, eschews explicit citation of past art: “only the experience of a ‘unified’ work in the present would sufficiently recall – would lend itself to being supported by memories of – ‘unified’ works from the past” (127). Therefore, according to Fried, it is curious that Baudelaire championed Delacroix whose works often bore “unconcealed relation to famous prototypes in earlier art” (151).

Manet’s two paintings, The Luncheon in the Studio and The Balcony, are seen to mark a highly significant shift in the artist’s work in which the presence of a viewer is acknowledged with a new force. Essentially, they are portraits of Manet’s stepson Léon Koëlla and close friend and fellow painter Berthe Morisot. They signal the abandonment of Diderot’s near century long theory of absorptive criteria to produce an effect of “radical facingness”, so achieving a new way for a painting to face its beholder and bringing an end to the antitheatrical project (212). [2]

Leaving aside the landscape paintings, Fried considers the lesser known figurative works of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot: usually women, the models are painted in various poses; reading, playing instruments, perhaps ruminating, contemplating, or just bored. Corot continued the tradition of portraying figures absorbed in actions or thinking even though, as Fried suggests, Manet’s interventions had already established that “absorption was no longer unproblematically available for antitheatrical purposes” (260). This thinking is in line with an early decision Fried took “to become an art historian of a particular kind”, developing a highly specific narrative of art from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, based on the principles laid out in his early essay, Art and Objecthood (1967) (12).

According to Fried the work of Charles-François Daubigny is the most “seriously misunderstood” of significant nineteenth century French painters, the result of a tendency to view it firmly through the lenses of Barbizon and Impressionism (278). The “sensation” aspect central to the latter is not prominent in his work (280). Rather he is seen by Fried as closer to Courbet, his paintings regarded by some contemporaries “as evoking an extraordinary range and intensity of sensory, which is to say bodily, impressions” (305).

Pushing on into “The Moment of Impressionism”, by far the most enjoyable chapter, Fried seeks to challenge the general consensus that this movement forms one more part of French paintings continuity. He argues instead that the shift to Impressionist landscape painting marks a “fundamental break” from the antitheatrical aim (326, 341). It would be in the 1860s that the question of “neutralizing of the beholder” became untenable, with Manet’s revolutionary figurative works ending the absorptive phenomenon, which began in the mid-eighteenth century according to Fried’s model (327).

In the case of Olympia, this new shift, combined with its prostitute subject, provoked particular notoriety. In response to a used-up tradition of “absorption” Fried makes his most striking claim, that Diderot’s antitheatrical and figurative theory is superseded by a “linked series of ‘formal’ issues and demands that had no single master critic or theoretician” (351). It was Manet’s monopoly on “facingness” that led to the momentous change of representation in the Impressionist landscape, altering the course of major painting.

For Fried this switch ushers in a great shift away from ambitious figure-painting – a phenomenon which to the present has “escaped comment by students of Impressionism” and led to a new kind of unity, achieved with smaller canvasses and raising “the issue of touch, along with that of finish, to a new degree of perspicuousness” (346, 351).

Having spent much of his “critical and art-historical career” discerning his own views from those of Clement Greenberg, one of the most prominent and plainly written twentieth century art critics, it is a shame that Fried, having acknowledged his predecessor’s essays on Cézanne, amongst others, as “incontournable” found himself “defeated” at the challenge of including an essay here on the artist’s painting Mont Sainte-Victoire and the Château Noir (Bridgestone Museum, Tokyo) (10, 356).

Fried goes into great depth about the “formal” aspects of paintings, characteristically drawing rigorously on responses from contemporary critics of his chosen period and “The Moment of Impressionism” in particular presents some fascinating ideas. While the claim that it is through landscape painters that “Impressionism has come popularly to be understood in our own time” may be true it is worth pointing out the importance of other genres within Impressionism and beyond, such as Renoir’s crowds and interior scenes, Cézanne’s still lives and peasants, and much of Caillebotte and Degas (351).

Complimenting and drawing extensively from Fried’s trilogy on the relationship between painting and beholder: Absorption and Theatricality, Courbet’s Realism and Manet’s Modernism, French Suite does not suffer too much from ‘jargon’ but when the prose does get heavy it makes Diderot’s enraptured lines all the more welcome: “One never tires of looking. Time stands still for those who admire. What a short time I’ve lived! How brief was my youth!” (63). [3]


Notes:

[1] Michael Fried: Absorption and Theatricality. Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, Berkeley 1980.

[2] Michael Fried: Manet’s Modernism, or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s, Chicago 1996.

[3] Cf. [1], [2] and Michael Fried: Courbet’s Realism, Chicago 1990.

Review of T.J. Clark’s ‘If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present’

By Christian Kile

http://www.sehepunkte.de/2022/11/37144.html

Establishing himself with two volumes on nineteenth-century French art during the Second Republic, Image of the People and The Absolute Bourgeois (1973), Timothy J. Clark took the ‘social history of art’ and refined it. His work rejected the idea of art as little more than the product of a broad context and offered closer, subtler readings, albeit with radical sympathies. The project aimed to explain the “links between artistic form, the available systems of visual representation, the current theories of art, other ideologies, social classes, and more general historical structures and processes.” [1] More work in this vein followed, most notably The Painting of Modern Life, concentrating on Impressionism and the Paris of Baron Haussmann’s reconstructions, then further into modernism and its demise with Farewell to an Idea.

Clark’s book on Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present has been years in the making, combining decades of looking and thinking about the artist. From Clark’s first memory of being struck by a reproduction of The Basket of Apples (c. 1893) the book includes chapters on Cézanne’s apprenticeship with Camille Pissarro, still lives, landscapes, his relationship with the peasant world, and ends with the impact he had on Matisse’s work, The Garden at Issy (c. 1917). Painted during a time of world war and revolution, The Garden is said to have coincided with the period where Cézanne’s world, that of the nineteenth century, “was going down in flames” and Matisse knew it, the younger artist seeking out material from the French tradition which would prove usable, whilst Cézanne remained the “presiding deity” (17).

Despite Cézanne’s volatility in his early thirties, when he began working with Pissarro, he had already developed what Clark deems his “first style”, integrating “Courbet’s thick handling, Manet’s aggression and Delacroix’s cold lasciviousness” (23). Cézanne’s draw towards and imitation of Pissarro is seen as an attempt to transform what he had already achieved in a search for new forms, and to develop in his work the “petite sensation” – the precise meaning of which remains a mystery (42). Cézanne went as far as to closely copy one of his master’s larger landscape paintings, Louveciennes (1871), emerging as the greater artist, “more tragic and outlandish, more relentless and single-minded – and therefore modernity’s patron saint” (53).

The Getty Museum’s Still Life with Apples (c. 1893-95) provides a focal point in the second chapter. This work is accompanied by a series of detailed and wandering notes by Clark, ruminating on the painting and various other still lives, sometimes running into trouble: “I followed the curves of the straw holder on the rum bottle for minutes – hours – on end. Even now I don’t know why” (69).

Interspersing formal readings of paintings with reflections on art historians including Kurt Badt and Meyer Schapiro, ideas from figures such as the anarchist critic Georges Lecomte and Rainer Maria Rilke, from Dante to Marx, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Samuel Beckett, various ways into Cézanne’s works are sought. Presented as a series of notes, and with a wide range of references this section has a fragmentary quality, which seems fitting for one of the epoch’s major painters.

The chapters focused on landscapes and the card playing peasants offer more rigorous and at times insightful observations: one of the many paintings of Montagne Sainte-Victoire, from a private collection, is offered as a touchstone, “its vision of nature is both among the most openly, naively physiognomic Cézanne ever did […] The most like a body, the least like an organism. Dreamlike and machinelike” (114-115). However, there are a few long winded and abstract descriptions which do little to complement the paintings.

These protracted meanderings throughout the book remind one of the criticism made by Nicholas Penny, formerly director of the National Gallery in London, who viewed Clark as a “dangerous Marxist professor” whose prose can be “dense” and “elliptic.” [2] However, Clark’s choice of style could be explained when considering his attitude towards Clement Greenberg’s early writing, describing it as “forceful and easy, always straightforward, blessedly free from Marxist conundrums. Yet the price paid for such lucidity […] is a degree of inexplicitness – a certain amount of elegant skirting round the difficult issues, where one might otherwise be obliged to call out the ponderous armory of Marx’s concepts and somewhat spoil the flow of the prose from one firm statement to another.” [3] Stylistically, it sometimes feels that Clark has gone the other way with this book, employing dense language to avoid the shortcomings he perceives in Greenberg’s arguments. Belonging to a later generation and differing from Greenberg’s models, Clark’s arrangement of intellectual sources varies, and includes the work of theorist Paul de Man, whom he acknowledges as informing part of this book (229).

Describing Cézanne as the work’s “presiding deity” Clark discusses his place in the broader context of “modernist” art by looking at Henri Matisse’s painting The Garden at Issy (169). He argues that The Garden is almost “a deliberate art-historical marker” employed by Matisse as “palliative to the rest of the picture’s vertigo – that the little house in the garden is Cézanne. That is to say, a typical Cézanne moment” (187/189). Clark then compares The Garden with Cézanne’s Houses on the Hill (c. 1902-05).

It is at this point the book goes off at a tangent. Clark’s attention moves away from Cézanne’s influence on the Garden to other artists. A selection of explicitly political pictures is mentioned, revolutionary works from Varvara Stepanova and Jörg Immendorff. So too, is Monet’s own hedonism and Giotto with his “deep feeling for ‘nature in its barrenness'” (194). It is the Italian artist and his Dream of Joachim in the Arena Chapel that Clark views as Matisse’s “true inspiration – down even to the Cézanne-type house, since for me Joachim’s dark mountain hut finally trumps the more obvious source” (195). Although this detour doesn’t add much to our knowledge of Cézanne, it does provide an interesting insight into the author’s thinking.

The tone of Clark’s book is set with an epigraph from Ernst Bloch’s Geist der Utopie, and may be deemed provocative by some readers. Clark asserts Cézanne’s art “unthinkable […] apart from the grave dogged optimism of a long-vanished moment” (63). His work, The Basket of Apples “hates the object called modernity […] But not for a moment does the painting ask us to believe that its set-up will stave off the reality of the 1890s. Everything in the painting is falling – and where it falls to is where we are” (10).

Despite the book’s digressions and, by Clark’s own admission, “stodgy” sentences, If These Apples Should Fall provides an absorbing study of Cézanne for the early twenty-first century (117). But the fact remains that whilst the ideas are always interesting, the book is disjointed and lacks cohesion. Reading the accounts of various paintings one can appreciate the effort made to offer something fresh. Clark once observed that “left intellectuals, like most intellectuals, are not good at politics […] Intellectuals get the fingering wrong. Up on stage they play too many wrong notes.” [4] He isn’t wrong there. But they can write some intriguing books, and this is one.


Notes:

[1] Timothy J. Clark: Image of the People. Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution, London 1973, 12.

[2] Nicholas Penny: “Geraniums and the River”, in: London Review of Books, Vol. 8 No. 5, 20 March 1986, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v08/n05/nicholas-penny/geraniums-and-the-river [accessed 8 August 2022]

[3] Timothy J. Clark: “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art”, in: Critical Inquiry, September 1982, Vol. 9, No. 1, 141.

[4] Timothy J. Clark: “For a Left With No Future”, in: New Left Review 74 March/April 2012, https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii74/articles/t-j-clark-for-a-left-with-no-future [accessed 8 August 2022]

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