Shaking Things Up in the Art World: The Biennale de Paris and the Salon des Refusés

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aesthetic philosophy, aesthetic standards, aesthetics, Alexandre Gurita, Alexandre Gurita's Biennale de Paris, André Malraux, art, art blog, art history, Claudia Moscovici, conceptual art, contemporary art, controversial art, Déjeuner sur l'herbe, Edouard Manet, Emile Zola, fine art, fineartebooks, fineartebooks.com, history of art, Impressionism, la Biennale de Paris, le Biennale de Paris, Le Salon des Refusées, pluralism in art, postmodern art, Romanticism and Postromanticism, Shaking Things Up in the Art World: The Biennale de Paris and the Salon des Refusés, the Biennale of Paris, the Impressionist movement

André Malraux the founder of the Biennale de Paris by Gisèle Freund in 1935. © Agence Nina Beskow

As an inherently subjective field despite (or perhaps because of) its many changing standards, art has been surrounded by controversy (at least) ever since the Impressionists changed the aesthetic standards of the Academy in the nineteenth century. What was at stake then in the heated debates surrounding the official Salon is similar to what is at stake now in the controversy surrounding the Biennale de Paris: an understanding of art, its forums, its distribution and its cultural value. The Biennale de Paris was launched by Raymond Cogniat in 1959 and set up by the writer André Malraux, who was at the time the Minister of Culture. Its role was to showcase creative talent worldwide and to provide a place where artists, critics, gallery owners, and others involved in the fields of art could share their work and exchange ideas. But ever since Alexandre Gurita took over the BDP in 2000, this forum has been plagued by debates that get to the core of the meaning and place of art today: should it be a place or places? Who counts as an artist? What is art? What counts as an artwork? Who should give it value or cultural meaning?

Will the real Biennale de Paris please stand up?

According to Gurita, the controversy surrounding the Biennale de Paris “would make a best-seller”. The BDP originally directed by Malraux was abandoned by the Ministry of Culture in 1985. Between 1985-2000, there were debates and investigations concerning the ways in which to modernize it and how to relaunch it. In 2000, Alexandre Gurita took over this project and changed it radically, from within. Through the notion of  « invisual art »⁽¹⁾, he broke the sacred law that says « art = art objet » which creates an automatic dependency between art and work of art. He asserts that art can express itself otherwise than through art objects and declares : « There is no proof  that art is depending from the art object. For that reason we can assume the contrary ». In a move that the sociologist of art Pierre Bourdieu would have been proud of, he also challenged the hierarchies imposed by all the mediators – art critics, gallery owners, museum curators – between artists and their public. In so doing, he also disposed with the idea that some artistic spaces – like museums of contemporary art or posh galleries – are privileged spaces to exhibit artwork. Some of the French officials and art critics were up in arms, even though many of them had applauded Bourdieu, one of the most highly consecrated philosophers and sociologists of art, for proposing exactly the same ideas. Gurita just put them into practice.

In his ground-breaking book, Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu argued that society uses “symbolic goods, especially those regarded as the attributes of excellence, […as] the ideal weapon in strategies of distinction” that shape various hierarchies, especially class hierarchies. The art world is still filled with such social distinctions, which aren’t only class-based, by the way. As I’ve argued before, most contemporary artists–no matter what class or place they come from–don’t have meaningful access to the public. Aside from a handful of (mostly postmodern) artists, most artists find it impossible to showcase their art in museums of contemporary art or in the most prestigious galleries. In turn, this means that collectors don’t get to see and buy their artwork and that critics don’t view it and discuss it. To change this hierarchical system of distinction, Alexandre Gurita dispensed with the mediators (gallery and museum curators) between the artists and the public. The participants set themselves the dates and the places for their own activities. On its official website, http://biennaledeparis.org  the reinvented Biennale de Paris includes the following tenets, a true Manifesto of a new aesthetic pluralism:

« The Biennale de Paris was launched in 1959 by André Malraux with the purpose of creating a meeting place for those who would define the art of the future. After a hiatus of several years, the Biennale was relaunched in 2000. Since then it has not ceased in its efforts to unravel art from institutions. The Biennale de Paris rejects the use of art objects, which are too alienated by the market. It does not confine itself to a framework that would hinder its present actions or its political, economic and ideological evolution. By acting upon everyday life and its unfolding realities, the Biennale seeks to redefine art by using criteria which rejects the idea of the artist as the sole protagonist in his work. Simply stated, the Biennale de Paris refuses to participate in today’s conventional art world. By mixing genres, exploiting porous frontiers and practicing the redistribution of roles, the Biennale de Paris allows art to appear precisely where it’s not expected. Furthermore, the Biennale de Paris has its own guidelines⁽²⁾.

"Déjeuner sur l'herbe", Catherine et Jacques Pineau, Biennale de Paris 2004

In a personal interview, Gurita told me that he perceives undermining the system of distinction as “an instrument of liberty placed at the service of art. In 2000 my act created an enormous scandal and enraged certain representatives of the system. Others, however, liked the idea that an artist combats an institution.” Not everyone in France greeted this radical overhaul quite as enthusiastically. Government officials initially disowned the Biennale de Paris, claiming that the real Biennale was moved to Lyon. Even art critics–who generally can’t praise enough the cutting-edge and avant-garde art–weren’t too flattering. Did the Biennale escape them? In the Editorial of Beaux-Arts Magazine, for instance, Fabrice Bousteau referred to the project as “the regrettable Biennale de Paris, mixing expos, concerts, performances, conferences, and accomplish with the creators of the whole world in several areas of the city” (May 2007). The critic for France’s elite leftwing newspaper, Libération, adopted the official government position that the Biennale de Paris has been transferred to Lyon: “Since 1991, France itself has its Biennale in Lyon. The latter picks up the slack from the defunct Biennale de Paris, which had its last meeting in 1985.” (Libération, April 2006)

The objective of the new Biennale de Paris is nothing less than changing the idea of art as a unified domain of cultural production and rigid, hierchical distinctions. More than that, it proposes an art “without pieces of art, an art without exhibition, an art without spectatorship, an art without curatorship, authors without authority.” As for when it happens, don’t set your calendars, since that’s also relative. “The Biennale de Paris takes place when it happens. It exists in real time. Each biennial begins when the previous ends. Associated practices evolve over the course of successive editions.” Where does it take place?  “The Biennale de Paris takes place where it happens. Relocating itself, it looks for a reciprocity with the practices locality, in order to ponder over and modify social, economical, political and ideological backgrounds.

The Precedent of Impressionism and the Salon des Refusés

"Déjeuner sur l'herbe", Edouard Manet, Wikipedia Commons, Warlburg.edu

Before you conclude that you’re finding yourself in one of Eugen Ionesco’s absurdist plays, I’d like to remind you that the art world has often been subject to radical redefinition from within. To stick to the theme of French culture, I’ll use the Impressionist movement as an example. The Biennale de Paris is not the only one to be rejected by the establishment. It finds itself in good company, since the Impressionists –  are arguably still the most popular artists in the world–were rejected as well.

If any art collection can be said to have a profound impact upon the history of art and aesthetics, the paintings exhibited at the Salon des Refusés in 1863 would certainly be on a top ten list. This collection of paintings marks both a change of views about what counts as good art and a liberating shift in the institutions that consecrated French art to begin with. Before this crucial moment, the production of good art was heavily regulated. From the seventeenth-century, when Colbert instituted the first Salon that would display the art of the painters of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in the Salon Carré of the Louvre, the Salons and the Academy largely determined artistic standards. Even when the Salon was opened to all artists in 1791, the rules by which they were judged did not become less rigid, even though the number of artists who could display grew substantially as did the public patronage of the arts.

When in 1863 the official Salon rejected 3000 pieces out of the 5000 submitted by artists, with hindsight we can safely say that it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. In a half-mocking, half-appeasing gesture towards the rejected artists, Napoleon III authorized a Salon de Refusés in a space that was distinct from the prestigious Salon sponsored by the Académie.

Like Napoleon I, the Emperor utilized art to express the glory of the French empire. The standards of the official salon were set by the traditional Count Nieuwerkerke, who was the Intendant of the Beaux Arts. He lived in a seventeen room suite in the Louvre and regulated all artistic life at court. By the 1860′s, however, artists and intellectuals–especially in more liberal newspapers– began to object to the rigid standards of the Academy and the Salon. Many of them demanded inclusion in the Salon for a wider range of talented artists.

Napoleon III paid a visit to the Salon and told Nieuwerkerke–perhaps in part to clip his wings–that many of the works rejected were just as good as those accepted. He then ordered that all the works rejected by the Salon be shown in the Palais de L’Industrie in its own show that would be called, condescendingly, the Salon de Refusés. This created the opportunity for new artists such as Manet, Pissaro and Whistler –the generation that had a profound influence upon modern art and especially upon the Impressionist movement–to become more visible in the public eye.

Manet also proved to be a key factor in the dissolution of the Salon de Refusés, however. Once the Emperor saw his Déjeuner sur l’herbe, he was shocked by its undisguised sexuality and agreed with the Academy that the first Salon de Refusés should also be the last. Nonetheless, the controversy stirred a heated debate over the nature of modern art and eventually opened the way for the Salon des Indépendants, galleries, and other institutions that soon rivaled and eventually exceeded the official Salon’s influence upon art. In fact, in a reversal of aesthetic values, less than twenty years after the Salon de Refusés, the artists associated with this controversial exhibit, particularly Manet, would be enshrined as the founders of modern art. Conversely, the official Salon art would fall into disrepute as mechanical, uninventive, formalistic: in short, l’art pompier, a pejorative term used to describe David’s Roman headgear, which resembled the helmets of firefighters (pompiers). As it often happens, the most effective subversive, anti-establishment artists and artistic movements often become–by their sheer cultural impact and visibility–the new establishment in art.

I believe that a similar process is at work in the manner in which Alexandre Gurita is redefining our understanding of the art world today. His pluralistic understanding of art opens up the field of cultural production to diverse artists, locations, modes of giving cultural value, and audiences. Although his project may have been accused by some of nihilism, I’d say that there’s a big philosophical –  actual – difference between pluralism and nihilism. Nihilism represents a flat denial of all values, be they ethical or aesthetic. By way of contrast, pluralism supports the value of a multitude of standards. Although pluralism can be relativistic, it doesn’t have to be. The standards for many aesthetic values can be defended and validated. Personally, as the founder of a more or less traditional movement in art (postromanticism.com) I’ll take artistic pluralism over rigid hierarchy any day.

As I have argued in my previous article, The Conformism of Postmodern Style, I object to the fact that elitist practices in museums of contemporary art and in some galleries impose a certain conformity (which I loosely associate with postmodern art) upon the art world. In so doing, they don’t give diverse artists a real, fair and democratic shake at presenting their works to the public. But, to my mind, envy of those artists who have “made it” or tearing down the entire artistic establishment is not the solution. Opening up the art world from within is. The French have a saying about this: Vive la différence! The art that Alexandre Gurita endorses – invisual art – is as far removed from my more traditional postromantic art movement as you can get. However, to my mind, the real issue is not imposing one standard of what constitutes good or true art, but making it possible for different kinds of artists and artistic styles to be shared with the public in a multitude of venues. This is what the reincarnated Biennale de Paris directed by Gurita aims to do.

In such a newly redefined art world – or art fields, more like it–it’s possible for more traditional artists like the postromantics to coexist and share cultural space and ideas with the more avant-garde postmodernists.  And if anybody in France still accuses Gurita of political correctness, they can blame it on Pierre Bourdieu, who, incidentally – and ironically – won the prestigious Médaille d’or du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). This goes to show that it pays to shake things up and repudiate cultural consecration. You might even get awarded a medal for it!

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

⁽¹⁾ The invisual is visible but not as art. Invisual do not need to be seen to exist.

⁽²⁾ -Orientations : The Biennale de Paris rejects exhibitions and art objects. It refuses to be ”thought by art”. It identifies and defends true alternatives. It calls for “non-standard practices”.

-Strategy : To be liquid. If the ground floor is occupied, occupy the floor below.

-An Invisual Art : No serious proof exists that art is dependent on the art object. We can therefore assume the opposite. The Biennale de Paris promotes invisual practices which do not need to be seen to exist. The invisual is visible but not as art.

-A Non-Artistic Art : The Biennale de Paris defends an art which does not obey the common criteria for art: creative, emotive, aesthetic, spectacular…

-An Art which Operates in Everyday Reality : The Biennale de Paris promotes practices that relegate art to the background in order to conquer everyday reality.

-A Public of Indifference : With the Biennale de Paris there are no more art spectacles. The Biennale addresses what it calls “a public of indifference”: persons who, consciously or accidentally, interact with propositions that can no longer be identified as artistic.

-A Unified Criticism : Organised as a network, the Biennale de Paris constitutes a critical mass composed of hundreds of initiatives, which would otherwise have been isolated and without impact.

The Art of Michael Bell: Aesthetics, Education and Activism

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art against domestic violence, art and activism, art blog, art criticism, art for art's sake, artistic autonomy, Claudia Moscovici, contemporary art, domestic abuse, domestic violence, Guernica, http://www.youtube.com/user/ClaudiaMoscovici#p/a/u/0/NS75xHKgjp4, l'art pour l'art, Love and Pain, Michael Bell, Pablo Picasso, postromanticism, Théophile Gautier, Voices of Violence

It’s only since the nineteenth century that art became its own autonomous domain, separated from education and politics. Before that, the art world was shaped by the tastes of rich patrons, the Church, the Salons, and the art Academies. In the early nineteenth century, the French writer, Théophile Gautier, coined the term “l’art pour l’art”, or art for art’s sake. Although this concept doesn’t describe all art during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it had an enormous impact upon the attitudes of modern artists, critics and viewers. And yet, there were significant exceptions. Even the most modern of the moderns, Pablo Picasso, made a spectacular political statement in his painting Guernica. This painting represented a cri du coeur against the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian forces at the behest of the Spanish Nationalistists in 1937.  Picasso’s Guernica brought the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War to the public’s attention and stood as an anti-war symbol for years to come.

Today I’d like to introduce a contemporary American artist, Michael Bell, who perpetuates the long-lost tradition of seeing art as a means of educating the public and of changing society for the better. Michael Bell’s paintings seamlessly combine aesthetic talent, educational value and political activism. Michael is best known for painting some of the most famous–and infamous–celebrities of our time, such as John Gotti and other actors from popular gangster movies like “The Sopranos,” Goodfellas” and “A Bronx Tale.” The artist has also won numerous awards in the field of art education as one of the pioneers of the Visual Journaling movement. He gives free workshops that educate the general public about art and art history.

Michael also participates in charity benefits. He raises thousands of dollars for worthwhile social causes from his painting sales. As an art critic who also writes about domestic abuse, what caught my attention most was his contribution to raising public awareness about domestic violence. On October 1, 2005, Michael Bell received the Good Shepherd Community Service Award at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles for his activism in raising domestic violence awareness.

Michael Bell’s series of paintings, Voices of Violence, expose the vicious cycle of love filled with pain, abuse and reconciliation, which many victims go through. These paintings follow the gaze of the model, ex-mafia wife and Hollywood stunt actress Georgia Durante, as she attempts to cope with years of abuse and free herself from the painful cycle of love filled with violence, which isn’t really love after all, but an expression of dominance and possession. Michael’s painting Love and Pain (see above) executed, appropriately enough, on two separate, fractured canvases, reveals the ambivalence that victims of domestic violence experience, as they remain hopelessly attached to the very person that causes them most pain. Please find below the link to the youtube video I made featuring Michael’s Voices of Violence paintings:

http://www.youtube.com/user/ClaudiaMoscovici#p/a/u/0/NS75xHKgjp4

It’s relatively rare for an artist in our times to use his talent for the social good. Even though, truth be told, art is not just for art’s sake. Art is a human creation by talented human beings for the benefit of other human beings. For as long as we continue to view art as completely detached from our nature, our struggles, our mistakes and our goals, we’ll alienate viewers, as they’ll become detached from the world of art as well. An artist through and through–as well as an educator and a humanitarian–Michael Bell eloquently states: “All I am is what I create. It’s my blessing to share with the world.”

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

The Legacy of Impressionism: Individualism, Autonomy and Originality in Art

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art, art blog, art criticism, Autonomy and Originality in Art, autonomy of art, Claudia Moscovici, Edouard Manet, Emile Zola, fineartebooks, Impressionism, Impressionists, individuality of art, Luncheon on the Grass, Manet, modern art, modernism, modernity, Monet, originality in art, Renoir, Romanticism and Postromanticism, the Impressionist movement, the Impressionists, The Legacy of Impressionism: Individualism

If any art collection can be said to have a profound impact upon the history of art and aesthetics, the paintings exhibited at the Salon de Refusés in 1863 would certainly be on a top ten list. This collection of paintings marks both a change of views about what counts as good art and a liberating shift in the institutions that consecrated French art to begin with. Before this crucial moment, the production of good art was heavily regulated. From the seventeenth-century, when Colbert instituted the first Salon that would display the art of the painters of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in the Salon Carré of the Louvre, the Salons and the Academy largely determined artistic standards. Even when the Salon was opened to all artists in 1791, the rules by which they were judged did not become less rigid, even though the number of artists who could display grew substantially as did the public patronage of the arts.

When in 1863 the official Salon rejected 3000 pieces out of the 5000 submitted by artists, with hindsight we can safely say that it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. In a half-mocking, half-appeasing gesture towards the rejected artists, Napoleon III authorized a Salon de Refusés in a space that was distinct from the prestigious Salon sponsored by the Académie.

Like Napoleon I, the Emperor utilized art to express the glory of the French empire. The standards of the official salon were set by the traditional Count Nieuwerkerke, who was the Intendant of the Beaux Arts. He lived in a seventeen room suite in the Louvre and regulated all artistic life at court. By the 1860’s, however, artists and intellectuals–especially in more liberal newspapers– began to object to the rigid standards of the Academy and the Salon. Many of them demanded inclusion in the Salon for a wider range of talented artists.

Napoleon III paid a visit to the Salon and told Nieuwerkerke–perhaps in part to clip his wings–that many of the works rejected were just as good as those accepted. He then ordered that all the works rejected by the Salon be shown in the Palais de L’Industrie in its own show that would be called, condescendingly, the Salon de Refusés. This created the opportunity for new artists such as Manet, Pissaro and Whistler –the generation that had a profound influence upon modern art and especially upon the Impressionist movement–to become more visible in the public eye.

Manet also proved to be a key factor in the dissolution of the Salon de Refusés, however. Once the Emperor saw his Dejeuner sur l’herbe, he was shocked by its undisguised sexuality and agreed with the Academy that the first Salon de Refusés should also be the last. Nonetheless, the controversy stirred a heated debate over the nature of modern art and eventually opened the way for the Salon des Indépendants, galleries, and other institutions that soon rivaled and eventually exceeded the official Salon’s influence upon art.

In fact, in a surprising reversal of aesthetic values, less than twenty years after the Salon de Refusés, the artists associated with this controversial exhibit, particularly Manet, would be enshrined as the founders of modern art. Conversely, the official Salon art would fall into disrepute as mechanical, uninventive, formalistic: in short, l’art pompier, a pejorative term used to describe David’s Roman headgear, which resembled the helmets of firefighters (pompiers).

Judging by his naturalist novels, socialist leanings, journalistic polemics and particularly by what he says about literature in Le roman expérimental, Emile Zola (1840-1902) would appear to be an implausible spokesman for the autonomy, originality and individuality of art. In Le Roman expérimental, a collection of articles that relies upon some of the ideas developed by Claude Bernard in the biological sciences to explain the principles of naturalist literature, he proposes a view of literature as exposing the underlying temperament of human types. If anything, his literature taps into the deterministic currents of the human condition—its maladies, obsessions, addictions and inherited traits—rather than offering a model of human freedom or any kind of individualist ethos.

Nonetheless, throughout his earlier defenses of Manet and of the Impressionists in the art criticism of the 1860’s, Zola is one of the staunchest proponents of individualism and originality in art. True art, he claims, is individuated, original and, above all, autonomous. Individuated, in the sense of bearing the imprint of the personality and temperament of the artist who created it. Original, if it stands out from the rest. Autonomous, in not being subservient to any social function. It is with these premises in mind that Zola became one of the most visible supporters of Eduard Manet’s art and of the work of the Impressionists and postimpressionists.

Zola uses Manet as a counter-example and ammunition against the official Salon art. It’s not that Manet did not also exhibit in the official Salon, but that he and the Impressionists had an ambivalent relation to academic art because their innovations were not fully accepted by either the Salon or (in the beginning) by art critics. It is these very innovations–Manet’s originality and difference–that Zola wishes to defend against academic standards. These standards, he claims, are best represented by painters such as Cabanel, whom Zola regards as a representative of officially consecrated art. Cabanel’s voluptuous nudes, often allegorized as nymphs and angels to simultaneously hide and reveal their erotic appeal, were consistently embraced by the Salon critics as the epitome of high art. At the height of Cabanel’s popularity, Zola predicts in the Salons of 1866 and 68:

“I know that the crowd would scorn me if it heard me but I affirm that the canvases of Cabanel will pale and die of anemia before more or less twenty-five years from now, while the paintings of Manet will flourish throughout the years with the eternal youth of original artworks.” ( Pour Manet, Emile Zola, Le Regard Litteraire, Editions Complexe, 1989).

The author’s distaste for official art was so intense that, ironically, the socialist representative of the working classes even delivers a classist blow below the belt at Cabanel, declaring in the Salon of 1875:

“It’s a composition without defect or merit; the most inimical mediocrity speaks through it; it’s an art made up of all the old formulas, renewed by the able hand of a worker’s apprentice.” (Emile Zola, Ecrits sur l’art, Gallimard, Paris, 1991)

Zola’s prediction about Manet’s success turned out to be accurate, but the question remains: why? Or, otherwise put, what made Manet seem so original to his contemporaries and even to us and how did the aesthetic standards he helped institute come to inaugurate the modernity of art in general? For history, as they say, is written by the winners. So is the history of art, such that now, in hindsight, Zola’s prediction appears to be historically inevitable and his artistic judgment, at least as far as Manet is concerned, infallible. In the attempt to avoid this deterministic outlook, let’s examine how such a view of art emerged as triumphant and whether — or to what extent — its triumph is a positive outcome.

Manet, Impressionism and Postimpressionism have become analogous with the subversion of official academic standards and thus also with artistic modernity. It is said that Impressionism entailed a rejection of the principles taught by the Ecole des Beaux Arts and esteemed by the academic judges of the official Salon. This idea of the subversiveness of Manet and of the Impressionists has been, since Zola, deliberately overplayed to draw a firmer marker that separates old traditions from new art. For not only did Manet and the Impressionists regularly exhibit at the official Salon—with Manet and especially Renoir seeking its approval to the very end of their lives–but also they were influenced, along with the officially sanctioned artists, by the most famous Renaissance artists as well as by the masters of Romanticism and Realism: Delacroix, Corot, and Courbet.

Yet, without a doubt, Manet and the Impressionists did violate some of the important rules of what is called the “Beaux-Arts system.” The Beaux-Arts system was instituted to meet the requirements of the Academy, which were taught at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. These included the following principles:

1. A respect of the hierarchy of genres which privileged, in descending order, history paintings, religious themes, portraits and still-lifes. Of course, principles are always somewhat different from public taste and practice. Even during the eighteenth-century, when Chardin’s still-lifes were extremely popular and defended by notable philosophes such as Diderot, the hierarchy of genres instituted during Louis XIV’s reign was being called into question. During the nineteenth century, with the rise in popularity of realism and the representation of every-day subjects and life, it was even more radically altered. Although some well-respected artists, such as Cabanel and Bouguereau, continued to observe its rules, many artists did not. As Théophile Gautier announced in the 1846 Salon, “religious subjects are few; there are significantly less battles; what is called history painting will disappear… The glorification of man and of the beauties of nature, this seems to be the aim of art in the future.”

2. Drawing is more important than color. The reason behind this rule was that the drawing of forms was considered more abstract because it was not already found in nature. Thus, it was assumed that it took greater artistic talent to convey forms by drawing their shapes and outlines rather than by blotting, from nature, their colors.

3. Drawing from live models in conformance to the study of anatomy, not in order to convey nature as is, but to improve it by rendering it more noble, elegant and beautiful. During the seventeenth century, Neoclassicism perpetuated this improvement of nature, or capturing la belle nature.

4. Painting in the studio, as opposed to in the open air, since the studio was a place where the source and intensity of light and, more generally, the whole painting environment could be controlled to suit the aesthetic needs of the artist.

5. Paintings had to be elaborately detailed, meticulously executed and, above all, look polished and finished.

6. The overarching and unspoken framework behind the Beaux-Arts system was verisimilitude: or representing in painting—through shading, foreshortening, sfumato and the observance of one-point perspective–the three-dimensionality of objects as seen by the eye.

The Impressionists’ greatest contribution to art was not so much to change the notion of painting as representing what the eye can see—or the standards of verisimilitude that had been dominant since the Renaissance—but to alter what the eye should see as well as where and how it should see it. Their violation of the rules of the Beaux-Arts system was not revolutionary—in the sense of transgressing its underlying premises or goals–but it was thorough, in the sense of changing almost all of the means of reaching those goals. The Impressionists considered that the best forum to observe and represent nature would be in the open air—which is why their works were called plein air paintings–where the play of light and shadows would be most natural, striking and intense, rather than under the dim and artificial lighting of the studio.

Furthermore, as noted, the art students in the academies conveyed the three-dimensionality of forms by means of the subtle shading which was first perfected by the Renaissance masters. The Impressionists, on the other hand, evoked a sense of three-dimensionality by representing the dramatic contrasts of color which can be observed in vibrant sunlight. In seeking to capture visually the play of light and shadow—and its transformations—the Impressionists used rapid brushstrokes to produce paintings that looked rushed and unfinished as opposed to the well-rounded, glossy and polished forms and subtle shadings respected by the Beaux-Arts system. Similarly, rather than depicting a posed or characteristic angle of the objects painted, Manet and the Impressionists showed objects from uncharacteristic, and often, truncated perspectives. This truncation of subjects and objects, which is especially obvious in the paintings of Renoir and Degas, openly acknowledges the incompleteness of our field of vision and powers of representation.

Although he was Cézanne’s childhood friend, Zola became particularly fascinated with Manet. In Manet he identified the harbinger of a new kind of art. One mark of Manet’s originality for Zola is the painter’s frequent rejection from the official Salon whose standards, as we have seen, the novelist considered too rigid and retrograde. The (future) Impressionists were of course also rejected from the Salon—even the widely popular Renoir suffered some setbacks—but it’s Manet’s rejection in particular that drew attention. His painting Déjeuner sur l’herbe divided and riled up the public on the grounds I alluded to earlier: its sketchy and seemingly unfinished style; its minimal use of shading and bright color-contrasts to show perspective; its unadorned and decidedly non-allegorical or idealized depiction of sexuality. A few years later, in 1866, Zola vocally came to Manet’s defense. Of the Déjeuner sur l’herbe in particular he states:

Mr. Manet’s talent is made up of simplicity and justice. Without a doubt, before the incredulous nature of some of my compatriots, he will have decided to interrogate reality, all alone; he will have refused all acquired knowledge; all traditional experience; he would have wanted to take art from the beginning, which is to say, the precise observation of objects. (M. Manet, 1866, p65, quatrième article du Salon, 72)

To highlight the painter’s originality and make more general points about autonomy and originality in art, Zola focuses upon Manet’s difference from the art of the official Salon and uses Cabanel as a foil to Manet. And in many respects Manet does, indeed, violate the official rules. When under the apprenticeship of Thomas Couture, who was considered to be a modern, nonconventional painter himself, Manet is said to have told his models to pose more naturally. One model, the story goes, refused, saying that one of the works she posed for was sent to Rome (she was probably referring to a submission to the famous Prix du Rome). Manet replied: “We are not in Rome! And we do not wish to go there. We are in Paris. We intend to remain here.” (Manet: The Influence of the Modern, Francoise Cachin, tr. Rachel Kaplan, Discoveries, New York, 1995). Yet at the same time Manet, like more traditional painters, trained himself by copying the works of the Italian Renaissance masters, including Tintoretto’s Self-Portrait (1588) and works by Titian. Furthermore, art critics find in his Déjeuner the influence of a Rococo painting by Boucher, Diana and the Bath (1742).

Zola’s main argument for Manet is primarily one explicitly against the official Salon. But in defending Manet’s art, Zola also takes a stand against contemporary utilitarian theory, particularly the aesthetic philosophy of Taine and the social philosophy of Proudhon, who argued in very different ways for the same goal: the social utility of art. Taine used deterministic arguments, Proudhon proposed utilitarian ones, but both critics wanted art to serve the function of improving humanity. In arguing against this model of art, Zola and Gautier likewise share a common enemy and goal. In the essay “Proudhon et Courbet” (1866), Zola argues vehemently against Proudhon’s Du principe de l’art et de sa destination sociale, which was published posthumously in 1866. He takes issue in particular with the philosopher’s definition of art as “an idealist representation of nature and of ourselves, which has as a goal the physical and moral improvement of our species”” (43). While this seems an adequate description of Zola’s own naturalist fiction, the novelist sees art as fulfilling a radically different function: “Art perfects in its own way, by challenging the mind, not by preaching or addressing itself to reason.” (43)

The very purpose of art, Zola suggests, is to challenge and surprise, not instruct or indoctrinate. Originality and newness are art’s raison d’être—its impact upon the senses and emotions—rather than its contributions to our understanding. The notion that art should be original, emotive and surprising, however, depends upon an even more basic assumption: that of artistic freedom. For Zola proclaims the individuality of art to defend the artist’s right to express his unique aesthetic vision. In so doing, like Gautier, Zola expounds forcefully the notion of artistic autonomy. Whereas Proudhon elaborates a more traditional view of art in which the artist serves his patrons and the public—under the updated guise of serving “humanity” in general–Zola and Gautier both sever the direct link between art and society. In Proudhon’s aesthetics, Zola objects, “By himself the artist is nothing, he is all by humanity and for humanity. In a word, the individual sentiment, the free expression of a personality are forbidden. One must only be the interpreter of the general taste, work only in the name of all to please everyone.” (44)

In so far as an artist attempts to produce art to please others—even something as abstract as humanity or society—his creativity and freedom are constrained. The only art that’s true, Zola suggests, is the kind that fulfills his modern expectation of originality and artistic genius. Art that cannot be separated from religious and political artifact—as in the case of Egyptian tomb statues and papyrus paintings or the gothic cathedrals erected to glorify popes and kings—ceases to be artistic. The novelist thus rejects Proudhon’s aesthetic standards and preferences, whereby “Art attains its degree of perfection once the artist effaces himself, when the work no longer bears his name, when it is the product of an entire epoch, of a nation, as are the Egyptian statues and the Gothic cathedrals.” (44) With this emphasis upon artistic freedom and autonomy that is articulated in slightly different ways by Gautier and Zola, we see the birth of a modern aesthetics from which there would be no turning back.

Interestingly, Zola cites Michelangelo as an example of an autonomous artist, despite the fact that his art, like that of his contemporaries, was a social and religious artifact sponsored by prominent patrons and popes. So it appears that Zola conflates the notion of artistic autonomy with that of artistic originality. Yet he gets out of this logical bind by claiming, more modestly, that art is autonomous not if it’s completely removed from all social use, but if the artist himself is a free spirit—regardless of who pays for his art—and exhibits originality:

I declare in principle that a work of art lives only by its originality. I must find a man in each work of art, or the work doesn’t move me. I clearly sacrifice humanity to the artist. My definition of a work of art, were I to formulate one, would be: ‘A work of art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.’ What do I care about the rest! (44-5)

Later, in his typical demagogical style, Zola asks: “I ask you, the people who allowed themselves to have genius without consulting humanity; the Michelangelos, Titians, Veroneses, Delacroix, who had the courage to think for themselves and not for their contemporaries, to say what was in their guts and not what the imbeciles of their times had in theirs!” (49) If Michelangelo, Titian and Delacroix could be considered autonomous artists by Zola and Gautier—both of whom mention these artists to illustrate the principle of autonomy in art– it’s because, significantly, these nineteenth-century authors do not mean by artistic autonomy what the notion has come to signify during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Nowadays autonomy means that art serves no social purpose whatsoever. Gautier and Zola, despite their bold, polemical language, don’t push the non-utility of art to such an extreme. Gautier doesn’t wish to conflate art and morality, but he still expects that art be beautiful, pleasing and entertaining to its public. Similarly, Zola defends autonomy as the motivation, not as the effect of art. Good art, his examples suggest, can be placed in a Church or city square, can be accessible and enjoyed by a wide public, can illuminate and please the public. What he emphasizes, however, is that an artist should not produce art exclusively to fulfill a set of social goals, concept of beauty or particular ideology.

Seeing what Zola means by artistic autonomy, it makes sense that he uses Michelangelo as his prime example. Even in seeking patronage, Michelangelo was not subservient to the tastes and religious assumptions of his patrons. The Sistine Chapel may have been paid for by a Pope, but it was done according to Michelangelo’s artistic vision and, as the painter’s ceaseless delays indicate, sense of timing. Art may be solicited and bought by others, and it may even serve their social or religious purposes, Zola implies, but it remains artistic only in so far as it does not pander primarily or exclusively to prevailing views, social and political ideologies or public tastes.

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

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