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A painting is a painting? Some cracks in the armour of formalist aesthetics and analytic philosophy
HistoryofEwopemI&as, Vol.18, No. 1, pp.
79-85, 1994 Copyright@ 1994 ElsevierScienceLtd Printedin Great Britain.All rightsreserved 019I-6989/94 $6.00+0.00
Pergamon
REVIEWS A PAINTING IS A PAINTING? SOME CRACKS IN THE ARMOUR OF FORMALIST AESTHETICS AND ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY The Painting of the Modem Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers, T.J. Clark (Princeton, 1986). Manet’s Contemplation at the Gare Saint-Lazare, H. Rand (Berkeley, 1987). BERNARD ZELECHOW *
*hat is the appropriate way to interpret works of art? When is a painting or a text self-referential? In what manner is a text either a reflection and/or critique of social reality? Is there a necessary platform from which works of art must be interpreted? The questions surface today with renewed urgency in the postmodernist critique of modernism. Modernism is more than one hundred years old. The distance between the intellectual milieu of the nineteenth century and the contemporary cultural environment invites us to examine the assumptions and presuppositions of the modernist world. Critics and artists are m-evaluating modernism and its link to the postmodem world. The investigations derive directly from the modernist construction of the self-legitimising exclusive definition of art and knowledge. Modernism is premised on a series of paradoxes. It created its world view by selectively distilling from history evidence to construct and justify its new art which it claims is unique and discontinuous with the past. Paradoxically modernist valorisation wants things both ways. It makes claims to the new and original while justifying it with reference to the past. For example, abstract expressionist aestheticians reinterpreted Renaissance art to conform to its novel conception of form as aesthetic content. Similarly, the originality of the new music (‘second Viennese school’) was understood teleologically, according to its practitioner, as an outgrowth of the old (‘first Viennese school’). Whatever did not fit the framework was excluded as minor art or non-art. Canonic autonomy putatively guaranteed a self-conscious clarity guiding artists and thinkers in their creation of new cultural artifacts. But autonomy and self~onsciousness produced a culture of ambiguity and purposeful intricacy. Critics denounced works of art that failed to follow modernist canons as reactionary, lacking in originality, and without insight. The cryptic ethos of modernism pervades not only the plastic arts but applies to all formal communication. When the message is ambiguous, the task of interpretation is exacerbated. Modernism in art, or art composed in language which borders on the literally inaccessible “private’, presents a paradigmatic case study in the probiems of interpretation. Manet’s art, supe~cially so simple, falls into this category. *Humanities and History, York University, North York, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3. 79
80
Reviews
Manet is a painter for the twentieth century. He satisfies the contrary aesthetic and existential assumptions of our time-existential ambiguity’ and aesthetic formalism. We delight in the aspects of his art which drove contemporary critics livid with rage. We marvel at ambiguities, discontinuities, and the ‘unfinished’ qualities which lurk just beneath his apparently simple compositions. His secretive nature and his reticence about his work allow much latitude for speculation about the meaning of his paintings. The evident elementary formal quality of his work paradoxically also satisfies the twentieth century obsession with formalist aesthetics. In response to the incredulity and incomprehension of Manet’s hostile critics, his defenders argued that Manet’s paintings were intentionally without content. They contended that Manet’s interest was solely in the format elements of painting, light, texture, and the two-dimensionality of the surface. Manet’s reputation was made and bolstered during the heyday of formalist criticism. All formalist theories, in whatever variations and themes, are reductive, by that making all attempts to ‘read’ the art work almost impossible. Ironically the justification for the formalist stricture against communication of meaning is the defence of the autonomy and integrity of aesthetic endeavour. The probity of art, according to formalism, requires that works of art be entirely self-referential. In Manet’s case formalist interpretation suppressed his political interests as well as his acute awareness of the history of Western art. The need for this peculiar defence arises out of the internal critique of art and the general intellectual milieu of this century. In our time positivist ‘scientific’ assumptions bolster the power and importance of formalist aesthetics. Positivism asserts that meaning is limited to discursive propositional sentences (or by extension literal physical objects) by that making art meaningless.2 Formalism redeems the impiied meaninglessness inherent in logical positivism by transforming the ground assumptions (i.e. formal elements) of the various arts into the significant enterprise of criticism. 3 Ironically, formalism provides a r&on d’dtre for artists and thinkers who despair at meaninglessness and find solace in form as an end in itself. Otherwise, the logic of their position is nihilism. Significantly, Manet’s art is a magnet for revisionist renderings of modernism. For much of this century only Marxist critics opposed the hegemony of formalism and positivism.4 A growing resistance to the assumptions of formalism and positivism has flourished in the last ten years. Works have appeared that reinstate an appropriate regard for the aesthetic and social context of making art. Recently, a flood of books has appeared challenging the formalist canon from within a quasi-Marxist framework and more ‘traditional’ art history. Four recent publications on Manet show the ways in which contemporary critics, despite their aesthetic presuppositions, deal with the historical burden of formalist and Marxist assumptions. T. J. Clark’s The Painting ofModern Life has been reissued in paperback, Harry Rand offers us Manet’s Contemplation at the Gare Saint-Lazare which also has been reissued in paperback, and Eunice Lipton has just published Alias Olympia.5 Finally, The National Gallery in London mounted a polemical show of Manet’s ‘political’ paintings accompanied by a full-scale catalogue discussion.6 The authors come from different ends of the aesthetic spectrum. Clark
Reviews
81
grounds his work in Marxist aesthetics which by definition dismisses all formafist assumptions. Marxism has never wavered in its commitment to the notion that works of art are meaningful. But this determination and defence of social meaning has been won traditionally by an inherent reductionist tendency that views art as a reflective superstructure of social conditions. Lipton writes from a postmodern feminist perspective mixing history, fantasy and autobiography. Manet virtually vanishes as the subject, replaced by his model for Olympia and MS Lipton’s autobiographical and fictional musings. On the other hand, Dr Rand’s work emerges out of more ‘traditional’ art history. Rand’s project retains a faint resonance of the formalist presuppositions of ‘traditional’ art history and the aesthetics of Suzanne Langer. But, Dr Rand makes normative art history elastic and flexible. In his introduction Rand identifies his position with a formalist variation, structuralism. Despite his empathy for structuralism he avoids the reductive nihilism inherent in structuralism. Of particular interest in both Clark and Rand’s work is the attenuation of their allegiance to the presuppositions of their respective theoretical ground. Rand shares with Clark and the curators of the National Gallery a concern for the question of meaning in Manet’s work. Both Clark and Rand are like-minded in their determination to redeem Manet from the judgement that he was merely an unreflective ‘painting animal’. Wresting significance out of a Manet painting is no mean feat. Manet reveals few pointers to his intentions. Nor does his subject matter definitively illuminate his concerns. An opaque residue remains even after critical explication of his pictures. Clark in his four substantive chapters attends to this problem of the opaque ingeniously. He examines, in detail, what Manet’s contemporary critics had to say. If Manet will not tell us directly what he intends, maybe his hostile viewers will explicate what in Manet enraged them. There is little question that Manet provoked them with a powerful irritant. However, beyond the critics’ banalties stimulated by the unfamiliar in Manet, the criticism is not enlightening. Critical apoplexy serves as a mask for the lack of insight. Manet’s critics expressed an alienated, inchoate and inarticulate response. Clark exploits the critics’ rantings. His employment of contemporary criticism exhibits the strength and weakness of his approach. He tells us a great deal about Paris but not much about Manet. If the critics do not illuminate Manet’s pictures, they disclose a great deal about themselves and the world in which they live. They display their dismay and frustration with the new Paris and the consolidation of large-scale capitalism. Using the attitudes, presuppositions and values inherent in the contemporary criticism Clark provides a detailed, and informed analysis of the rapid changes occurring in Second Empire Parisian life. He analyses the displacement of workers and craft industry to the banlieue. This population shift transformed central Paris into a world of consumerism and commercialised entertainment. Clark’s analysis of the transformation of Paris into bourgeois Paris is relevant to an understanding of the context of Manet’s art. His presupposition that the history of art and history are not separate but intimately related is valid. But you may wonder where Manet is in this critical and historical work? That of course is precisely the rub in Clark’s book. Clark pays little attention to the four paintings
82
Reviews
ostensibly under discussion. This is not a result of Clark’s inability to ‘read’ Manet. What little he says about the paintings is tantalizing. He is particularly astute in discussing the genre of the nude and its relation to Manet’s Olympia. He draws his conclusions from the meaning of the painting and then relates his judgements to the historical context. The flaw in Clark’s work is neither methodological nor aesthetic. It is ideological although it does not descend into vulgar Marxism. Clark seems more intent to undermine indirectly Meyer Shapiro’s judgement’ that Impressionism was a moral assessment which reflected consciously a new sense of freedom and relaxation in French society than reading the paintings. It appears as if Clark cannot transcend the bourgeois content of the paintings. The content stands as a wall barring Clark from positively evaluating the paintings’ meaning. Clark treats Manet, by implication, merely as a reflection of the negatively valued unstable society of the Second Empire. He interprets the ambiguity and incompleteness in Manet’s paintings as a reflection of the anxiety created by the dynamics of nineteenth century society. Clark neither underplays Manet’s ambiguity nor does he force Manet into the role of defender or critic of capitalism. He does not force the paintings to yield what is not there. We simply do not know what Manet’s feelings are about the new age. But the reader is left with the sense that Manet was merely a neutral voyeur. The problem that bedevils Clark is the weak link in the fine National Gallery show and catalogue. The central theme of the show is the execution of Maximilian, erstwhile Emperor of Mexico. The centre pieces of the show are Manet’s three depictions of the execution. The exhibit provides a wealth of pictorial and visual data about Mexican and French attitudes about the execution. However, the curators make a serious logical category error. If the subject matter is political, then Manet was political and the politics were Republican. Indisputably, the paintings are political. For that matter all works of art are political in their broad implications. However, Manet’s paintings do not display a pro-French or a pro-Mexican stance. They do not even evoke a sense of how we should feel about Maximilian. What they do rouse in the viewer is a sense of horror at the sight of an execution. ’ The curators, like Mr Clark, are not responsible for Manet’s reticence. However, they don’t struggle insistently with the problem. Coming from a different intellectual perspective Dr Rand avoids also the temptation to say more than can be said. But he avoids the formalist censorship of narrative meaning. The great strength of Dr Rand’s book is his insistence that the painting’s meaning must emerge from a ‘reading’ of what is in the painting. He adopts an appropriate hermeneutical stance. Rand assumes that the inherent meaning will emerge despite its elusive and opaque qualities. Dr Rand asserts that he provides a ‘grammar’ for reading Manet and that his work is ‘structural’. He insists that his approach does not try to make the ‘text’ yield allegorical or discursive narrative.9 The autonomy of the text remains inviolable. Dr Rand does not waste time on these philosophical categories. This brevity is laudable. His explication of Manet’s paintings is sophisticated, perceptive, and illuminating. To be more precise Dr Rand explores and wrestles with At The Gare St Lazare in the manner appropriate to the ‘reading’ of all texts. Indeed, he treats the painting as a text to be read. Dr Rand does this in a most astute manner.
Reviews
83
In Dr Rand’s interpretation of At the Gare St Lazare, states of consciousness and human relationships materialise as central themes. He argues forcibly that the young woman facing the viewer directly is startled by our presence jolting her out of her concentrated intense reading. Dr Rand supports this judgement by examining the way in which the woman holds her hand in the book. According to Dr Rand the position of her hand suggests that she has been reading intensely moving back and forth between different sections of the text. She is surprised and her direct gaze startles us. This meeting of painted figure and viewer creates a reciprocal relationship between the woman and the viewer. Dr Rand gives the painting a temporal dimension. He shows the viewer how the painting expresses what the woman was doing before our entrance on the scene through indirect evidence. Similarly, Dr Rand explicates the ‘action’ of the little girl in the middle background who gazes away from the eyes of the viewer. She appears to be staring at the trail of smoke left by a passing train. Dr Rand interprets the child figure in light of the reveries of children and their ability to transform the ephemera of smoke into daydream figurations. Finally Dr Rand reads the meaning of the sleeping dog. The dog is in the dream state of consciousness or more precisely the unconscious state. Dr Rand observes that by placing the dog on the women’s lap the animal has been brought into the context of human culture. There is something missing in Dr Rand’s reading of the painting. Dr Rand’s art historical background inhibits him from completing the analysis. He convinces us that the painting is about states of consciousness. Nonetheless he does not discuss what the painter’s intended meaning about states of consciousness might be. Rand does not attempt to extrapolate from his analysis the possible contextual meaning of the painting as a whole. For example why does Dr Rand, who is so attentive to detail, not discuss the problem of consciousness in relation to the fact that Manet places the figures in a garden? Can the figures be understood as innocents? What is the relationship between reading and reverie? Why does he not take up H. Marx’s metaphor of the machine in the garden?‘O Does the trail of smoke and the railroad shed suggest an intrusive mechanical presence? How are we to understand the peaceful figures and the tranquil foreground scene in contrast to the cacophony created by the iron horse? Dr Rand, despite his reticence, is aware that his close reading is unfinished. He is committed to the idea that Manet’s paintings have intellectual depth and integrity. To show this Dr Rand must transcend his own dicta that paintings must be interpreted as self-referential communications. He introduces two related themes to bolster his estimation of Manet’s intellectual abilities and concerns. These do not impinge significantly on his assumptions of aesthetic autonomy. First Dr Rand demonstrates Manet’s appreciation of the history of Western art. He informs the reader of Manet’s many quotations from the tradition. However, Dr Rand’s show that Manet’s obesiance to tradition transcends mere quotations from the history of art. Instead, he argues that as Manet matures he sublimates traditional elements of painting and transforms them into modern embodiments. These transmutations are new autonomous elements. They are no longer quotation or allegory. Provocatively, according to Dr Rand, the reading Madonna of the painting tradition becomes the lady with the book who confronts us.
84
Reviews
Dr Rand’s treatment of Manet’s relationship to the history of painting is illuminating and instructive. It places Manet firmly within the historical tradition of art. It also serves as a bridge to Dr Rand’s final probe into Manet’s meaning. For Rand, the Madonna transmuted into the modern woman is similar to the metamorphosis of signs in symbolist poetry. According to his own canons this is the least supportable element in the book. To link Manet to the symbolists he has to argue reductively and in an ad hominem fashion. Dr Rand bases his argument on Manet’s long friendship with Mallarme. The argument is tenuous because we know little about their friendship. However, evidence exists which calls into question the intellectual dimension of the relationship. When Mallarme established his Paris salon which was a meeting place for eminent artists and writers Manet noticeably absented himself. Further, to this reader the simplicity and everyday quality of Manet’s content is closer to Kafka’s spare but detailed linguistic concrete expressions than to the arcane and tortured syntax of a Mallarme poem. The closer we are to the historical context of a painting the less we are likely to require an analysis of the social and historical milieu in order to understand its communication. An impressionist street scene is likely to be more accessible than an eighteenth century history painting. A painting in the Western tradition is more likely to bear meaning for us than a Japanese print. Nonetheless works of art do transcend the limited horizons of their historical era. Great works of art do so almost to the point of negating their context. These rare works reach out to the viewer and communicate without mediation. The greater the work of art the more it will contain autonomously within itself the principles which allow us to read its greatness and its inadequacy. Manet falls somewhere midway between the greatest of painters and those of mere antiquarian interest. Despite the minor flaws in the argument Dr Rand does for Manet what Charles Rosen” did for the classical musical style. He provides an expansive entrance into the inherent autonomous aspects of the pictorial text. He shows us how to understand Manet’s personal signature and vocabulary. But we need Mr Clark to remind us that Manet did not paint in a vacuum. His ideas and his visions develop in an historical and social context which was relevant to his audience and to us. Much of the ambiguities in these volumes are inherent in the subject matter. Manet remains an enigma. Mr Clark and Dr Rand are ingenious in their attempts to break through the opaque quality of Manet’s communication. Even with their insights and illumination the viewer continues to ponder whether Manet is a mere reflection of his social world, a voyeur. Or did Manet take a cryptic critical stance about the meaning of the emerging new world? Bernard York University,
Zelechow
Ontario
NOTES 1. Note Derrida’s delight in pitting Heidegger against Shapiro in their respective antithetical reading of a van Gogh painting. J. Derrida, The Truth in Painting (Chicago, 1987).
Reviews
8.5
2. A most popular formation of the meaninglessness of all communication which falls outside of the definition of a propositional sentence is found in A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (New York, n.d.). The irony is Ayer has, in recent years, produced an autobiography which from his perspective is by definition meaningless. 3. The most poignant example of this is found in the work of S. Langer. MS Langer accepts the presuppositions of logical positivism while simultaneously believing that art is intrinsically valuable. Through more than thirty years of study MS Langer never successfully managed to reconcile the irreconcilable. The value of aesthetic communication is saved only by first reducing art to formal elements and later to biological necessities, cf. S. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge, 1942) and Mind: An Essay in Human Feeling, Vol. 1 (Baltimore, 1967). 4. Derrida claims that he shows that formalism, which harks back to Kant’s misguided conception of aesthetics, is problematic. What he really does is re-introduce the false problem of the nature of art objects. In so doing he deflects our attention from the authentic issue of aesthetic communication. See Derrida, The Truth in Painting (Chicago, 1987). 5. Euice Lipton, Alias Olympia (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992). 6. Juliet Wilson-Bareau (ed.) Manet: The Execution of Maximilian (London: National Gallery Publications, 1992). The exhibit ran from 1 July to 27 September, 1992. 7. M. Shapiro, Modern Art: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York, 1978). 8. The curators base their reconstruction of Manet’s political position on an obscure lithograph by Manet that seems to indicate his opposition to Napoleon III. That does not make Manet a Republican. 9. A musical analogue to Rand’s conception of structuralism is found in Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago, 1956). It is interesting to note that Meyer repudiated his structuralist experiment for a more broadly based cultural-historical approach to music. See, Leonard B. Meyer, Music, The Arts and Ideas (Chicago, 1967). 10. H. Marx, The Machine in the Garden (Oxford, 1967). 11. Charles Rosen, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven (New York).
79-85, 1994 Copyright@ 1994 ElsevierScienceLtd Printedin Great Britain.All rightsreserved 019I-6989/94 $6.00+0.00
Pergamon
REVIEWS A PAINTING IS A PAINTING? SOME CRACKS IN THE ARMOUR OF FORMALIST AESTHETICS AND ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY The Painting of the Modem Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers, T.J. Clark (Princeton, 1986). Manet’s Contemplation at the Gare Saint-Lazare, H. Rand (Berkeley, 1987). BERNARD ZELECHOW *
*hat is the appropriate way to interpret works of art? When is a painting or a text self-referential? In what manner is a text either a reflection and/or critique of social reality? Is there a necessary platform from which works of art must be interpreted? The questions surface today with renewed urgency in the postmodernist critique of modernism. Modernism is more than one hundred years old. The distance between the intellectual milieu of the nineteenth century and the contemporary cultural environment invites us to examine the assumptions and presuppositions of the modernist world. Critics and artists are m-evaluating modernism and its link to the postmodem world. The investigations derive directly from the modernist construction of the self-legitimising exclusive definition of art and knowledge. Modernism is premised on a series of paradoxes. It created its world view by selectively distilling from history evidence to construct and justify its new art which it claims is unique and discontinuous with the past. Paradoxically modernist valorisation wants things both ways. It makes claims to the new and original while justifying it with reference to the past. For example, abstract expressionist aestheticians reinterpreted Renaissance art to conform to its novel conception of form as aesthetic content. Similarly, the originality of the new music (‘second Viennese school’) was understood teleologically, according to its practitioner, as an outgrowth of the old (‘first Viennese school’). Whatever did not fit the framework was excluded as minor art or non-art. Canonic autonomy putatively guaranteed a self-conscious clarity guiding artists and thinkers in their creation of new cultural artifacts. But autonomy and self~onsciousness produced a culture of ambiguity and purposeful intricacy. Critics denounced works of art that failed to follow modernist canons as reactionary, lacking in originality, and without insight. The cryptic ethos of modernism pervades not only the plastic arts but applies to all formal communication. When the message is ambiguous, the task of interpretation is exacerbated. Modernism in art, or art composed in language which borders on the literally inaccessible “private’, presents a paradigmatic case study in the probiems of interpretation. Manet’s art, supe~cially so simple, falls into this category. *Humanities and History, York University, North York, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3. 79
80
Reviews
Manet is a painter for the twentieth century. He satisfies the contrary aesthetic and existential assumptions of our time-existential ambiguity’ and aesthetic formalism. We delight in the aspects of his art which drove contemporary critics livid with rage. We marvel at ambiguities, discontinuities, and the ‘unfinished’ qualities which lurk just beneath his apparently simple compositions. His secretive nature and his reticence about his work allow much latitude for speculation about the meaning of his paintings. The evident elementary formal quality of his work paradoxically also satisfies the twentieth century obsession with formalist aesthetics. In response to the incredulity and incomprehension of Manet’s hostile critics, his defenders argued that Manet’s paintings were intentionally without content. They contended that Manet’s interest was solely in the format elements of painting, light, texture, and the two-dimensionality of the surface. Manet’s reputation was made and bolstered during the heyday of formalist criticism. All formalist theories, in whatever variations and themes, are reductive, by that making all attempts to ‘read’ the art work almost impossible. Ironically the justification for the formalist stricture against communication of meaning is the defence of the autonomy and integrity of aesthetic endeavour. The probity of art, according to formalism, requires that works of art be entirely self-referential. In Manet’s case formalist interpretation suppressed his political interests as well as his acute awareness of the history of Western art. The need for this peculiar defence arises out of the internal critique of art and the general intellectual milieu of this century. In our time positivist ‘scientific’ assumptions bolster the power and importance of formalist aesthetics. Positivism asserts that meaning is limited to discursive propositional sentences (or by extension literal physical objects) by that making art meaningless.2 Formalism redeems the impiied meaninglessness inherent in logical positivism by transforming the ground assumptions (i.e. formal elements) of the various arts into the significant enterprise of criticism. 3 Ironically, formalism provides a r&on d’dtre for artists and thinkers who despair at meaninglessness and find solace in form as an end in itself. Otherwise, the logic of their position is nihilism. Significantly, Manet’s art is a magnet for revisionist renderings of modernism. For much of this century only Marxist critics opposed the hegemony of formalism and positivism.4 A growing resistance to the assumptions of formalism and positivism has flourished in the last ten years. Works have appeared that reinstate an appropriate regard for the aesthetic and social context of making art. Recently, a flood of books has appeared challenging the formalist canon from within a quasi-Marxist framework and more ‘traditional’ art history. Four recent publications on Manet show the ways in which contemporary critics, despite their aesthetic presuppositions, deal with the historical burden of formalist and Marxist assumptions. T. J. Clark’s The Painting ofModern Life has been reissued in paperback, Harry Rand offers us Manet’s Contemplation at the Gare Saint-Lazare which also has been reissued in paperback, and Eunice Lipton has just published Alias Olympia.5 Finally, The National Gallery in London mounted a polemical show of Manet’s ‘political’ paintings accompanied by a full-scale catalogue discussion.6 The authors come from different ends of the aesthetic spectrum. Clark
Reviews
81
grounds his work in Marxist aesthetics which by definition dismisses all formafist assumptions. Marxism has never wavered in its commitment to the notion that works of art are meaningful. But this determination and defence of social meaning has been won traditionally by an inherent reductionist tendency that views art as a reflective superstructure of social conditions. Lipton writes from a postmodern feminist perspective mixing history, fantasy and autobiography. Manet virtually vanishes as the subject, replaced by his model for Olympia and MS Lipton’s autobiographical and fictional musings. On the other hand, Dr Rand’s work emerges out of more ‘traditional’ art history. Rand’s project retains a faint resonance of the formalist presuppositions of ‘traditional’ art history and the aesthetics of Suzanne Langer. But, Dr Rand makes normative art history elastic and flexible. In his introduction Rand identifies his position with a formalist variation, structuralism. Despite his empathy for structuralism he avoids the reductive nihilism inherent in structuralism. Of particular interest in both Clark and Rand’s work is the attenuation of their allegiance to the presuppositions of their respective theoretical ground. Rand shares with Clark and the curators of the National Gallery a concern for the question of meaning in Manet’s work. Both Clark and Rand are like-minded in their determination to redeem Manet from the judgement that he was merely an unreflective ‘painting animal’. Wresting significance out of a Manet painting is no mean feat. Manet reveals few pointers to his intentions. Nor does his subject matter definitively illuminate his concerns. An opaque residue remains even after critical explication of his pictures. Clark in his four substantive chapters attends to this problem of the opaque ingeniously. He examines, in detail, what Manet’s contemporary critics had to say. If Manet will not tell us directly what he intends, maybe his hostile viewers will explicate what in Manet enraged them. There is little question that Manet provoked them with a powerful irritant. However, beyond the critics’ banalties stimulated by the unfamiliar in Manet, the criticism is not enlightening. Critical apoplexy serves as a mask for the lack of insight. Manet’s critics expressed an alienated, inchoate and inarticulate response. Clark exploits the critics’ rantings. His employment of contemporary criticism exhibits the strength and weakness of his approach. He tells us a great deal about Paris but not much about Manet. If the critics do not illuminate Manet’s pictures, they disclose a great deal about themselves and the world in which they live. They display their dismay and frustration with the new Paris and the consolidation of large-scale capitalism. Using the attitudes, presuppositions and values inherent in the contemporary criticism Clark provides a detailed, and informed analysis of the rapid changes occurring in Second Empire Parisian life. He analyses the displacement of workers and craft industry to the banlieue. This population shift transformed central Paris into a world of consumerism and commercialised entertainment. Clark’s analysis of the transformation of Paris into bourgeois Paris is relevant to an understanding of the context of Manet’s art. His presupposition that the history of art and history are not separate but intimately related is valid. But you may wonder where Manet is in this critical and historical work? That of course is precisely the rub in Clark’s book. Clark pays little attention to the four paintings
82
Reviews
ostensibly under discussion. This is not a result of Clark’s inability to ‘read’ Manet. What little he says about the paintings is tantalizing. He is particularly astute in discussing the genre of the nude and its relation to Manet’s Olympia. He draws his conclusions from the meaning of the painting and then relates his judgements to the historical context. The flaw in Clark’s work is neither methodological nor aesthetic. It is ideological although it does not descend into vulgar Marxism. Clark seems more intent to undermine indirectly Meyer Shapiro’s judgement’ that Impressionism was a moral assessment which reflected consciously a new sense of freedom and relaxation in French society than reading the paintings. It appears as if Clark cannot transcend the bourgeois content of the paintings. The content stands as a wall barring Clark from positively evaluating the paintings’ meaning. Clark treats Manet, by implication, merely as a reflection of the negatively valued unstable society of the Second Empire. He interprets the ambiguity and incompleteness in Manet’s paintings as a reflection of the anxiety created by the dynamics of nineteenth century society. Clark neither underplays Manet’s ambiguity nor does he force Manet into the role of defender or critic of capitalism. He does not force the paintings to yield what is not there. We simply do not know what Manet’s feelings are about the new age. But the reader is left with the sense that Manet was merely a neutral voyeur. The problem that bedevils Clark is the weak link in the fine National Gallery show and catalogue. The central theme of the show is the execution of Maximilian, erstwhile Emperor of Mexico. The centre pieces of the show are Manet’s three depictions of the execution. The exhibit provides a wealth of pictorial and visual data about Mexican and French attitudes about the execution. However, the curators make a serious logical category error. If the subject matter is political, then Manet was political and the politics were Republican. Indisputably, the paintings are political. For that matter all works of art are political in their broad implications. However, Manet’s paintings do not display a pro-French or a pro-Mexican stance. They do not even evoke a sense of how we should feel about Maximilian. What they do rouse in the viewer is a sense of horror at the sight of an execution. ’ The curators, like Mr Clark, are not responsible for Manet’s reticence. However, they don’t struggle insistently with the problem. Coming from a different intellectual perspective Dr Rand avoids also the temptation to say more than can be said. But he avoids the formalist censorship of narrative meaning. The great strength of Dr Rand’s book is his insistence that the painting’s meaning must emerge from a ‘reading’ of what is in the painting. He adopts an appropriate hermeneutical stance. Rand assumes that the inherent meaning will emerge despite its elusive and opaque qualities. Dr Rand asserts that he provides a ‘grammar’ for reading Manet and that his work is ‘structural’. He insists that his approach does not try to make the ‘text’ yield allegorical or discursive narrative.9 The autonomy of the text remains inviolable. Dr Rand does not waste time on these philosophical categories. This brevity is laudable. His explication of Manet’s paintings is sophisticated, perceptive, and illuminating. To be more precise Dr Rand explores and wrestles with At The Gare St Lazare in the manner appropriate to the ‘reading’ of all texts. Indeed, he treats the painting as a text to be read. Dr Rand does this in a most astute manner.
Reviews
83
In Dr Rand’s interpretation of At the Gare St Lazare, states of consciousness and human relationships materialise as central themes. He argues forcibly that the young woman facing the viewer directly is startled by our presence jolting her out of her concentrated intense reading. Dr Rand supports this judgement by examining the way in which the woman holds her hand in the book. According to Dr Rand the position of her hand suggests that she has been reading intensely moving back and forth between different sections of the text. She is surprised and her direct gaze startles us. This meeting of painted figure and viewer creates a reciprocal relationship between the woman and the viewer. Dr Rand gives the painting a temporal dimension. He shows the viewer how the painting expresses what the woman was doing before our entrance on the scene through indirect evidence. Similarly, Dr Rand explicates the ‘action’ of the little girl in the middle background who gazes away from the eyes of the viewer. She appears to be staring at the trail of smoke left by a passing train. Dr Rand interprets the child figure in light of the reveries of children and their ability to transform the ephemera of smoke into daydream figurations. Finally Dr Rand reads the meaning of the sleeping dog. The dog is in the dream state of consciousness or more precisely the unconscious state. Dr Rand observes that by placing the dog on the women’s lap the animal has been brought into the context of human culture. There is something missing in Dr Rand’s reading of the painting. Dr Rand’s art historical background inhibits him from completing the analysis. He convinces us that the painting is about states of consciousness. Nonetheless he does not discuss what the painter’s intended meaning about states of consciousness might be. Rand does not attempt to extrapolate from his analysis the possible contextual meaning of the painting as a whole. For example why does Dr Rand, who is so attentive to detail, not discuss the problem of consciousness in relation to the fact that Manet places the figures in a garden? Can the figures be understood as innocents? What is the relationship between reading and reverie? Why does he not take up H. Marx’s metaphor of the machine in the garden?‘O Does the trail of smoke and the railroad shed suggest an intrusive mechanical presence? How are we to understand the peaceful figures and the tranquil foreground scene in contrast to the cacophony created by the iron horse? Dr Rand, despite his reticence, is aware that his close reading is unfinished. He is committed to the idea that Manet’s paintings have intellectual depth and integrity. To show this Dr Rand must transcend his own dicta that paintings must be interpreted as self-referential communications. He introduces two related themes to bolster his estimation of Manet’s intellectual abilities and concerns. These do not impinge significantly on his assumptions of aesthetic autonomy. First Dr Rand demonstrates Manet’s appreciation of the history of Western art. He informs the reader of Manet’s many quotations from the tradition. However, Dr Rand’s show that Manet’s obesiance to tradition transcends mere quotations from the history of art. Instead, he argues that as Manet matures he sublimates traditional elements of painting and transforms them into modern embodiments. These transmutations are new autonomous elements. They are no longer quotation or allegory. Provocatively, according to Dr Rand, the reading Madonna of the painting tradition becomes the lady with the book who confronts us.
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Dr Rand’s treatment of Manet’s relationship to the history of painting is illuminating and instructive. It places Manet firmly within the historical tradition of art. It also serves as a bridge to Dr Rand’s final probe into Manet’s meaning. For Rand, the Madonna transmuted into the modern woman is similar to the metamorphosis of signs in symbolist poetry. According to his own canons this is the least supportable element in the book. To link Manet to the symbolists he has to argue reductively and in an ad hominem fashion. Dr Rand bases his argument on Manet’s long friendship with Mallarme. The argument is tenuous because we know little about their friendship. However, evidence exists which calls into question the intellectual dimension of the relationship. When Mallarme established his Paris salon which was a meeting place for eminent artists and writers Manet noticeably absented himself. Further, to this reader the simplicity and everyday quality of Manet’s content is closer to Kafka’s spare but detailed linguistic concrete expressions than to the arcane and tortured syntax of a Mallarme poem. The closer we are to the historical context of a painting the less we are likely to require an analysis of the social and historical milieu in order to understand its communication. An impressionist street scene is likely to be more accessible than an eighteenth century history painting. A painting in the Western tradition is more likely to bear meaning for us than a Japanese print. Nonetheless works of art do transcend the limited horizons of their historical era. Great works of art do so almost to the point of negating their context. These rare works reach out to the viewer and communicate without mediation. The greater the work of art the more it will contain autonomously within itself the principles which allow us to read its greatness and its inadequacy. Manet falls somewhere midway between the greatest of painters and those of mere antiquarian interest. Despite the minor flaws in the argument Dr Rand does for Manet what Charles Rosen” did for the classical musical style. He provides an expansive entrance into the inherent autonomous aspects of the pictorial text. He shows us how to understand Manet’s personal signature and vocabulary. But we need Mr Clark to remind us that Manet did not paint in a vacuum. His ideas and his visions develop in an historical and social context which was relevant to his audience and to us. Much of the ambiguities in these volumes are inherent in the subject matter. Manet remains an enigma. Mr Clark and Dr Rand are ingenious in their attempts to break through the opaque quality of Manet’s communication. Even with their insights and illumination the viewer continues to ponder whether Manet is a mere reflection of his social world, a voyeur. Or did Manet take a cryptic critical stance about the meaning of the emerging new world? Bernard York University,
Zelechow
Ontario
NOTES 1. Note Derrida’s delight in pitting Heidegger against Shapiro in their respective antithetical reading of a van Gogh painting. J. Derrida, The Truth in Painting (Chicago, 1987).
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2. A most popular formation of the meaninglessness of all communication which falls outside of the definition of a propositional sentence is found in A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (New York, n.d.). The irony is Ayer has, in recent years, produced an autobiography which from his perspective is by definition meaningless. 3. The most poignant example of this is found in the work of S. Langer. MS Langer accepts the presuppositions of logical positivism while simultaneously believing that art is intrinsically valuable. Through more than thirty years of study MS Langer never successfully managed to reconcile the irreconcilable. The value of aesthetic communication is saved only by first reducing art to formal elements and later to biological necessities, cf. S. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge, 1942) and Mind: An Essay in Human Feeling, Vol. 1 (Baltimore, 1967). 4. Derrida claims that he shows that formalism, which harks back to Kant’s misguided conception of aesthetics, is problematic. What he really does is re-introduce the false problem of the nature of art objects. In so doing he deflects our attention from the authentic issue of aesthetic communication. See Derrida, The Truth in Painting (Chicago, 1987). 5. Euice Lipton, Alias Olympia (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992). 6. Juliet Wilson-Bareau (ed.) Manet: The Execution of Maximilian (London: National Gallery Publications, 1992). The exhibit ran from 1 July to 27 September, 1992. 7. M. Shapiro, Modern Art: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York, 1978). 8. The curators base their reconstruction of Manet’s political position on an obscure lithograph by Manet that seems to indicate his opposition to Napoleon III. That does not make Manet a Republican. 9. A musical analogue to Rand’s conception of structuralism is found in Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago, 1956). It is interesting to note that Meyer repudiated his structuralist experiment for a more broadly based cultural-historical approach to music. See, Leonard B. Meyer, Music, The Arts and Ideas (Chicago, 1967). 10. H. Marx, The Machine in the Garden (Oxford, 1967). 11. Charles Rosen, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven (New York).