Art for Art’s Sake: Our Blessing and Our Curse

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aesthetics, art criticism, art for art's sake, Art for Art's Sake: Our Blessing and Our Curse, Claudia Moscovici, fineartebooks, l'art pour l'art, Mademoiselle de Maupin, modern art, nineteenth-century art, postromanticism, Romanticism and Postromanticism, Théophile Gautier

Before the nineteenth-century, originality and individuality were not the most highly prized qualities of art. As for autonomy, or regarding art as separate from social functions, this notion didn’t even exist. During the Renaissance, the artist emerged as an individual assumed to have a unique talent that was in some way useful to those in power—by helping elevate the status of the Church or the State through art—and to society in general, by providing works of rare and incredible beauty that all could enjoy. Nonetheless, Renaissance artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo perceived their paintings and sculptures as a means of elevating and preserving the social order of their times not only as a mark of their individual genius. No doubt, both Leonardo and Michelangelo could afford to select among patrons and to aggravate those they did serve by postponing deadlines to perfect their masterpieces. In this way, they created the blueprint of the temperamental and independent “artistic” personality that would emerge more fully with Romanticism. Despite the increased prestige of masterful artists, however, Renaissance art contributed to the glory of the patrons and the community or the nation it was created for. In other words, art’s undeniable beauty was inseparable from its social usefulness.

As artists’ prestige increased during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so did their relative power and independence from patrons. Romanticism marked this transformation by explicitly declaring the artist to be a creative genius and by regarding individuality and originality as the supreme qualities of true art. Yet for most Romantic poets, writers and artists, as for the Renaissance masters, art was still bound to its social function. The artist or writer imagined by poets like Wordsworth, Lamartine and Hugo spread to the public, through his unique aesthetic sensibility, imagination, discernment and talent, not only aesthetic pleasure but also a heightened and more empathetic moral and political consciousness.

While earlier forms of Romanticism couple social utility and beauty, late Romantic and Modern art and literature would come to disassociate them. As early as the 1830’s, the autonomy of art from society was proclaimed by Théophile Gautier’s phrase, “art for art’s sake,” and by his criticism of the notion that art had to be in any way useful to society. In his writings on art in the 1860’s, Emile Zola transformed Gautier’s provocative and amusing Preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin into a characteristically serious, polemical argument. Yet despite the difference in style, his message is resonant with Gautier’s, since Zola also defends the autonomy of art and the individuality and originality of true artists. I’m interested in reexamining here Gautier’s and particularly Zola’s arguments concerning the originality, individuality and autonomy of art because they mark a turning point—and a moment of incredible ambivalence—in what we can call the cultural logic of art. Retrospectively, we can say that these authors articulated the standards that would both establish the autonomy and importance of art as a separate domain and those that would undo the very notion of originality, genius and individuality in art.

Today, these concepts seem almost as dated as the even older notion of artistic genius. Such notions are occasionally resurrected, but usually only to be critiqued, pastiched and spoofed rather than taken seriously. Gautier’s well-known polemic in his 1834 preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin—“the most useful place of a house is the latrine”—seems to have turned into a twisted prophecy almost a hundred years later, when Marcel Duchamp, under the pseudonym R. Mutt, exhibited a urinal as an objet d’art at the 1917 Independents’ Exhibition in New York City. With this partly joking provocation, art took a seemingly irreversible conceptual turn. As the philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto convincingly demonstrates, what constitutes art can no longer be discerned visually. Let’s begin to see how the notion of art for art’s sake contributed both to the rise and the fall of art as a privileged domain.

Gautier: L’art pour l’art

Théophile Gautier’s (1811-72) contributions to Parisian culture spanned almost half a century, beginning with his youthful defense of Romanticism, to the aestheticism of his famous Préface to Mademoiselle de Maupin, to his leadership in the circle of formalist poets associated with Le Parnasse. Although he wrote on a wide range of topics, including literature, art and dance, he’s best known for his preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1834), where he proposes his model of art for art’s sake.

With characteristic panache and irony, Gautier begins his preface with a provocation:

“One of the most ridiculous things of the glorious epoch which we have the fortune to live in is without question the rehabilitation of virtue by all the newspapers, no matter what color they are, red, green or tri-colored.” (Préface a Mademoiselle de Maupin, 1834, Théophile Gautier, Flammarion, Paris, 1966, 25)

It’s not only the literature and journalism of his day that Gautier attacks, but the whole history of French literature from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. He locates the source of the reduction of literature to utility in Neoclassicism, latching on in particular to Molière’s comedy as guilty of infusing morality in art. In Molière’s writing, Gautier charges, every play has a moral; the lovers are duly beautiful and good; the duped appropriately ridiculous and bad yet somehow endearingly human; while the women with common sense show the good sense to be both beautiful and moral. Gautier considers this infusion of morality into literature ridiculous and even dangerous.

To sever art from social utility in general, he maintains, one has to disassociate it first from morality in particular. For, Gautier suggests, it’s in fact the moralizing impulse which modern art preserved from Neoclassicism—the tendency to elevate nature and cultivate bienséance (good manners) in the reading and viewing public—that has degenerated even further during the nineteenth-century into a translation of art into moral and social lessons. Rather than looking at its aesthetic qualities, Gautier charges, modern critics and readers read literature only to ask themselves utilitarian questions such as: “What good is this book? How can we apply it to the moralization and good of the most numerous and impoverished class?” (42)

With the advent of the industrial revolution, increase in readership and the broadening of public education to all social classes of men, what was the inculcation of etiquette or bienséance during the seventeenth-century mostly for the benefit and entertainment of the social elite is transformed, during the nineteenth-century, into a broader moral education of all social classes: of what was rather abstractly called humanity itself. This explains why, Gautier complains, modern literature is no longer literary. Like journalism and conduct books, it brainwashes the working classes into adopting middle class values in the name of social progress. In the face of such “serious” goals, Gautier suggests facetiously, the creation of an art that does not aim at improving the human condition seems downright frivolous and irrelevant. (42) But only if we accept these erroneous premises, the author adds.

Gautier proposes an expedient solution to this conflation of literature and utility: severing art from its social function once and for all. To defend this radical and new proposition, Gautier relies upon the conventional and old philosophical concept of Beauty:

“Nothing which is beautiful is indispensable to life… Nothing is truly beautiful except that which is useless; all that is useful is ugly, because it’s the expression of some need, and those of mankind are ignoble and disgusting, as is his poor and weak nature—The most useful place of a house is the latrines.” (45)

Gautier assumes that we all know what the concept of Beauty is from the commonplace examples he gives: pretty women and lovely flowers. In the absence of a more specific definition that might unite these particular examples, Gautier presents a negative definition that fits his argument: beauty is not opposed to ugliness, as we might believe, but rather to usefulness. Which is why, the author playfully suggests, the most useful place of a house–the toilet–is also the ugliest. His logic implies: a pretty young woman is beautiful; a useful old toilet is ugly. Wouldn’t you prefer the former to the latter? An obvious answer to this question—it depends on what you want to do– is prosaically utilitarian by Gautier’s standards. Fortunately, his argument isn’t meant to be reasonable or systematic, but rather polemical: it serves as a battle cry for a new attitude towards art and literature. Even his examples–pardon the pun–aren’t meant to hold water. To offer just one example, there’s nothing about Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel’s social usefulness as a place of worship and as a celebration of the glory of the Roman state that takes away from its beauty.

Gautier’s preface is less notable for its argumentation than for its poignancy, novelty and influence upon subsequent currents in art and literature. It left a particularly strong impression upon the poets of Le Parnasse, who used his arguments to defend aesthetic formalism in poetry both against the impassioned lyricism of Romanticism and against the proclamations of the social value of art made by realist and naturalist literature. This legacy was perpetuated by formalism and by certain trends in modern and postmodern literature, art and criticism. We find traces of it even in Clement Greenberg’s influential defense of conceptual art and even in Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation.

In these later currents, Gautier’s original appeal to beauty was, for the most part, dropped. What remained was the notion that art owes nothing to society. The principle of the autonomy of art made plausible by Gautier’s preface has come to carry with it several corollaries:

1. Art is a separate domain all unto itself; 2. Art cannot be judged by common standards of morality or utility. Art is therefore separate from morality and religion as well; 3. In being a separate aesthetic realm, art is not easily accessible. Often it takes a very refined, sensitive temperament and perhaps even a team of experts trained in that art to explain it to the broader public. Art may seem to be within everyone’s grasp, but in fact appreciating it requires a deeper, elite understanding; 4. When judged by the standards of social utility—does it lead to an improvement of the human condition; does it teach us anything useful—art is irrelevant.

In the next few posts, I’ll explain how these tenets have become the blessing and the curse inherited by modern and contemporary art.

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

http://www.amazon.com/Romanticism-Postromanticism-Claudia-Moscovici/dp/0739116754

 

Modern Classics: The Sculptures of Martin Eichinger

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Claudia Moscovici, Martin Eichinger, Modern Classics: The Sculptures of Martin Eichinger, postromantic art, postromanticism, Romanticism, Romanticism and Postromanticism, sculpture

Martin Eichinger studied design and anatomy at Ferris State University and did his postgraduate work in sculpture at Michigan State University. He also pursued independent studies of classical sculpture in Europe. He has won numerous awards and competitions including a Kellogg Internship and NEA grants.

When one looks at the astonishing feminine beauty represented by Martin Eichinger’s sculptures, it’s difficult to believe that the ancient Greeks denuded and placed young men on a pedestal first, long before acknowledging the beauty of women. Praxiteles was the first Greek sculptor to recognize in the nude feminine form the unique undularity, tenderness, expressivity and sensuousness of the female form. Since then, sculptors have celebrated the beauty of femininity in countless sculptures, busts, reliefs. In our day, Martin Eichinger stands out as a master of this longstanding tradition. He combines the elegance and simplicity of sculpture inspired by the classical tradition with the sense of movement and emotion that is, above all, the legacy of Romanticism.

Like the classical Greek sculptors, who painted their works of art in vibrant colors as if attempting to bring to life the human forms, Eichinger sometimes adds colors, gems and iridescence to the timeless beauty of his sculptures. His figures often tell a story: “I am a narrative sculptor creating my cast bronze sculptures using the “lost wax” process. I don’t feel that my art work is complete until I sense that it has entered someone’s life in a meaningful way; that it moved someone, changed someone, or explained a person’s perspective.” Indeed, it is this narrative bent that modernizes and gives a unique personality to each one of Eichinger’s figures.

In “Pillow Dance,” for example, the young girl shifts her weight on one foot, her body almost taking flight along with the dreams that still appear to envelop her, comforted as she is by her familiar pillow. Like neoclassical art, this sculpture is more allegorical than realistic. The beautiful girl, a vision herself, embodies–in her somnolent grace, her precarious poise and her restful flight–the very boundaries between dream and reality that are evoked by all of Eichinger’s visionary art.

Claudia Moscovici, Romanticism and Postromanticism (Lexington Books, 2007)

 

The Iconic Art of Alexandru Darida

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Alexandru Darida, art, art blog, art criticism, Claudia Moscovici, contemporary art, fine art, fineartebooks, postromantic art, postromantic movement, postromantic painting, postromanticism, postromanticism.com, Romania, Romanian art, Romanticism and Postromanticism, The Iconic Art of Alexandru Darida

Alexandru Darida was born in 1955 in Romania. He benefited from an extensive artistic training. He studied at the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Romania, the Liberal Academy of Art in Rome and the American Academy of Art in Chicago. His work has been featured in Municipal Galleries and the National Museum of Art in Bucharest, Romania. It has won numerous awards, including the prestigious Formello-Rome International Prize for painting.

Alexandru Darida was born in Transylvania, the region best known in the West for its ruthless ruler, Vlad Tepes, and the myth of Dracula that it later inspired. Yet his is not a regional work, but an art that recaptures the timeless magic and imagination of fairy tales. His iconographic paintings, though they retain an Eastern European feel, transcend any particular place and time, in the same way the fairy tales of the brothers Grimm did during the eighteenth-century and the Romantic poetry of Romania’s national poet, Mihai Eminescu, did during the nineteenth-century.

Just as the Romantics sought inspiration in medieval and gothic literature, architecture and art, so the postromantic art of Alexandru Darida harks back to the radiance of medieval illuminations. His mysterious, ethereal female figures seem transposed from a distant place and time; a time when femininity was associated with magic, mysticism and spirituality. Light, winged, golden and glowing like religious icons, embellished with flowers and crowns like classical goddesses, Darida’s women are allegorical phantasms that populate our childhood fantasies and dreams. His application of paint is both delicate and rough. Soft plays of light and shadow highlight the luminosity of gold. At the same time, the vitality of heavy, swirling and knife-edge application of paint endows his paintings with a modern feel: as if bringing down to earth, into our very lives, the lightness and elevation of his fairytale-like art.

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

The Photography of Christian Coigny: Women Studio Series

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art, art blog, Christian Coigny, Claudia Moscovici, contemporary art, fine art, fineartebooks, photography, postromantic art, postromanticism, The Photography of Christian Coigny

Christian Coigny is a well-established Swiss photographer. He studied at the Ecole de Photographie in Vevey. His photography has been featured in several books and exhibited in galleries all over the world. Straddling the boundaries between artistic and commercial photography, he has also designed ads for Pirelli, Panasonic, Mercedes and Baume and Mercier.

If Vermeer is known as the painter of women, so Coigny should be known as the photographer of women. It takes much more than just capturing their image to depict women with a sense of intimacy, mystery and respect. Much of figure painting and photography focuses on women. Yet Vermeer stands alone in being able to convey the feminine world with a simplicity, elegance and understatement that makes him a master of this genre. Simple actions—such as pouring a glass of milk or looking at the potential viewer—render every one of his images of milk maids, servants, and country girls more complex than the most intricate portraits of aristocratic women dressed in full regalia.

Coigny has the talent of bringing out such human complexity out of simple, almost stark portraits of women. Some of his pictures, like Vermeer’s, resemble still-life paintings: a woman posing on a table, next to a vase, facing a wall whose every little nook and cranny is visible. The arrangement of the female form complementing the vase could reduce the woman to the status of object.

Yet under Coigny’s touch, just the opposite happens. The young woman’s pose, the play of light and shadow, the lift of her arm, the way in which she holds her head in contemplation, all suggest thought, depth and understated emotion. Coigny’s “Women Studio Series” invite us to rediscover the beauty and complexity of women.

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

The Postromantic Art of Edson Campos

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art, art criticism, Claudia Moscovici, Edson Campos, fine art, postromanticism, postromanticism.com, Romanticism and Postromanticism, The Postromantic art of Edson Campos

Born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Edson Campos has enjoyed sketching and painting since childhood. He is a completely self-taught artist. He moved to the United States in 1978 and exhibited his lifelike, passionate paintings and drawings in major cities throughout the country, winning several awards. Not surprisingly, Campos’ sophisticated artwork also has great popular appeal: it has been commissioned to be exhibited in the Queen Mary Hotel in Long Beach, California and the Tuscany-style Veranda Park of Florida. Recently, Campos participated in the Art Expo New York, where his work was highly praised by critics. The November 1999 issue of The Artist’s Magazine featured his work in a special section on painting techniques.

Pablo Picasso once complained: “Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the songs of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them?” In voicing this objection, Picasso was not, of course, saying that we don’t try to understand the biology of life. He was instead claiming that we don’t try to grasp its mysteries; to understand the whys not just the hows of life in the same way that we try to understand everything about art. Life and art, he implies, are irreducibly mysterious. No science or analysis will fully explain them.

Keeping Picasso’s objection in mind, perhaps the best we can do is try to understand some of their components in order to better appreciate the whole. Which is precisely how the painting of Edson Campos should be approached. In alluding to numerous artistic styles and periods, Campos’ works invite the examination of their parts. But we can’t ignore their overall effect, which creates an entirely new image of representational art. As Picasso reminds us, in art, as in life, the whole is always greater, more interesting and more mysterious than the sum of its parts.

Consider the painting “Paradise.” In the foreground we see a young woman who dazzles with her beauty. Her flesh tones; her slightly ironic but unmistakably sensual pose; her bright red hair all make her radiate with life before our eyes. In her pose, in her look, she’s recognizably contemporary. Nonetheless, the garment folds that ripple around her body evoke the stylization and refinement of neoclassical and romantic art. The background, a Japanese landscape, seems a perfect way to foreground the young woman’s beauty, while also taking us to a third, even more distant, tradition in art—the Japanese prints that, incidentally, marked so strongly the works of the Impressionists. Campos unites and juxtaposes the most distant traditions in art. He has a gift for painterly allusion, for pastiche.

The contrapposto and beauty of classical sculptures; the sfumato, three-dimensionality and mystery captured by Renaissance artists; the conceptuality of modern art; the playfulness, atemporality, subversion of boundaries and mixture of styles of postmodernism; the timeless appeal of beautiful women; the reverence for feminine sensuality, innocence and grace—all these are respectfully saluted, preserved and transformed for our times by Edson Campos’ postromantic art.

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com