THE PAINTING of

MODERN LIFE
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRISS PRINCETON, NEW JERSLY PARIS IN TIlE ART Of MANFT AND IllS FOLLOWERS

T.J. CLARK
 INTRODUCTION

This book is about Impressionist painting and Paris. It had its beginnings,
as far as I can tell, in some paragraphs by Meyer Schapiro, published first
in January 1937 in a short-lived journal called Marxist Quat·tedy. Early
Impressionism, wrote Schapiro, depended for its force on something more
than painterly hedonism or a simple appetite for sunshine and colour. The
art of Manet and his followers had a distinct "moral aspect," visible above
all in the way it dovetailed an account of visual truth with one of social
freedom.

Early Impressionism . .. had a moral aspect. In its discovery of a constantly

changing phenomenal outdoor world of which the shapes depended on the mo­
mentary position of the causal or mobile spectator, there was an implicit criticism
of symbolic social and domestic formalities, or at least a norm opposed to these.
It is remarkable how many pictures we have in early Impressionism of informal
and spontaneous sociability, of breakfasts, picnics, promenades, boating trips, hol­
idays and vacation travel. These urban idylls not only present the objective forms
of bourgeois recreation in the 1860'S and 1870'S; they also reflect in the very choice
of subjects and in the new aesthetic devices the conception of art as solely a field
of individual enjoyment, without reference to ideas and motives, and they pre­
suppose the cultivation of these pleasures as the highest field of freedom for an
enlightened bourgeois detached from the official beliefs of his class. In enjoying
realistic pictures of his surroundings as a spectacle of traffic and changing at­
mospheres, the cultivated rentier was experiencing in its phenomenal aspect that
mobility of the environment, the market and of industry to which he owes his
income and his freedom . And in the new Impressionist techniques which broke
things up into finely discriminated points of color, as well as in the "accidental "
momentary vision, he found, in a degree hitherto unknown in art, conditions of
sensibility closely related to those of the urban promenader and the refined con­
sumer of luxury goods.
As the contexts of bourgeois sociability shifted from community, family and
church to commercialized or privately improvised forms-the streets, the cafes
and resorts-the resulting consciousness of individual freedom involved more and
more an estrangement from older ties ; and those imaginative members of the
middle class who accepted the norms of freedom , but lacked the economic means
Nadar, photograph of Manet, c. r875. to attain them, were spiritually torn by a sense of helpless isolation in an anonymous
indifferent mass . By 1880 the enjoying individual becomes rare in Impressionist
... ,. II~. P A I N TIN G 0 F MOD ERN L I F E introduction· 5

come to characterize the pleasures on offer in these "commercialized or

pri vately improvised forms ." If that is the argument, we might ask how
informal and spontaneous is the sociability depicted already in Manet's
Dejeuner sur l'herbe, or for that matter in Monet's, with its anxious regard
for the latest fashions and its discreet servant (in livery?) crouched on the
other side of the tree.
But these objections are small beer. Schapiro's "Nature of Abstract Art"
was an essay, after all; and the few lines it devoted to Impressionist painting
still seem to me the best thing on the subject, simply because they suggest
so tellingly that the form of the new art is inseparable from its content­
those "objective forms of bourgeois recreation in the 1860'S and 1870's."
That is the suggestion which this book takes up. The reader will find
that discussing it in any detail-and trying to get at least a little way
beyond suggestion and metaphor-involves me in repeated use of the terms
"class," "ideology," "spectacle," and "modernism." Therefore it might be
helpful if I offered straightaway some definitions of concepts which may
appear obscure, or at any rate disputable. The trouble is that defining any
one of them, especially the first, entails a string of very general, not to
say banal, propositions on the nature of society as such. Nevertheless I shall
proceed, with only the standard proviso that the definitions which follow
are not worth much apart from the instances given in the text.

2. Claude Monet, Dcjeuner sur I'herbe, 1865-66.

1. Edouard Manet, Dcjeuner sur I'herbe, 1863.

art; only the private spectacle of nature is left. And in neo-Impressionism, which
restores and even monumentalizes the figures, the social group breaks up into
isolated spectators, who do not communicate with each other, or consists of
mechanically repeated dances submitted to a preordained movement with little
spontaneity. '
The argument in these paragraphs has some strange shifts, and I have
done my share of quibbling with them . For instance, the actual bourgeois's
being brought on to enjoy Impressionist painting, and to revel in its con­
sonance with his day-to-day experience, is no doubt marvellous; but it does
not seem to me much more than a metaphor, and is surely not warranted
by what we know of this painting's first purchasers and enthusiasts. Equally,
it is not clear if Schapiro believes that once upon a time the bourgeoisie,
or at least its enlightened members, really did delight in an "informal and
spontaneous sociability," and that only later did estrangement and isolation
6'THE PAINTING OF MODERN LIFE Introduction· 7

It sounds right-it corresponds to normal usage-to say that any social In capitalist society, economic representations are the matrix around
order consists primarily of classifications. What else do we usually mean which all others are organized . In particular, the class of an individual­
by the word "society" but a set of means for solidarity, distance, belonging, his or her effective possession of or separation from the means of produc­
and exclusion? These things are needed pre-eminently to enable the pro­ tion-is the determinant fact of social life. This is not to say that from it
duction of material life-to fix an order in which men and women can can be read off immediately the individual's religious beliefs, voting habits,
make their living and have some confidence that they will continue to do choice of clothes, sense of self, aesthetic preferences, and sexual morality.
so. Orders of this sort appear to be established most potently by represen­ All of these are articulated within particular, separate worlds of represen­
tations or systems of signs, and it does not seem to me to trivialize the tation; but these worlds are constricted and invaded by the determining
concept of "social formation"--or necessaril y to give it an idealist as op­ nexus of class ; and often in the nineteenth century (he presence of class as
posed to a materialist gloss-to describe it as a hierarchy of representations. the organizing structure of each separate sphere is gross and palpable: only
That way one avoids the worst pitfalls of vulgar Marxism, in particular think of the history of bourgeois costume, or the various ways in which
the difficulties involved in claiming that the base of any social formation the logical structure of market economics came to dominate the accounts
is some brute facticity made of sterner and solider stuff than signs-for on offer of the self and others. This makes it possible to expand the concept
instance, the stuff of economic life. It is one thing (and still necessary) to of class to include facts other than the economic: for instance, to talk of
insist on the determinate weight in society of those arrangements we call certain forms of entertainment or sexuality as "bourgeois." There seems
economic; it is another to believe that in doing so we have poked through to me no harm in doing so: it registers a connection which was perceived
the texture of signs and conventions to the bedrock of matter and action by the actors themselves, and it would be pedantry to avoid the usage
upon it. Economic life-the "economy," the economic realm, sphere, level, altogether; but we should be clear about the liberties being taken and
instance, or what-have-you-is in itself a realm of representations. How beware, for example, of calling things "inherently bourgeois" when what
else are we to characterize money, for instance, or the commodity form, we are pointing to is relation, not inherence. This caution has more of a
or the wage contract? point, perhaps, when we turn from (he bourgeoisie to its great opposite in
I believe it is possible to put this kind of stress on representation and the nineteenth century, since here we are so clearly dealing with a class
remain, as I want to, within the orbit of historical materialism. Everything and a set of "class characteristics" still in the making-as evinced by the
depends on how we picture the links between anyone set of representations simple instability of vocabulary in the case, from peuple to proletariat, from
and the totality which Marx called "social practice." In other words, the classes laborieuses to classe ouvriere.
notion of social activity outlined so far can be sustained only if we simul­ Class will in any case necessarily be a complex matter: to make the
taneously recognize that the world of representations does not fall out simplest point, there is never only one "means of production" in society
neatly into watertight sets or systems or "signifying practices." Society is for individuals to possess or be denied: any social formation is always a
a battlefield of representations, on which (he limits and coherence of any palimpsest of old and new modes of production, hence old and new classes,
given set are constantly being fought for and regularly spoilt. Thus it and hybrids born of their mating. Notably, for the purposes of this book,
makes sense to say that representations are continually subject to the test it is clear that the reality designated at the time-in the 1870s, say-as
of a reality more basic than themselves-the test of social practice. Social petit bourgeois included men and women whose trades had previously
practice is that complexity which always outruns (he constraints of a given allowed them a modi,um of security in the city's economic life, but who
discourse; it is the overlap and interference of representations; it is their had been robbed of that small safety by the growth of large-scale industry
rearrangement in use; it is the test which consolidates or disintegrates our and commerce; but it also included new groups of workers---clerks, shop
categories, which makes or unmakes a concept, which blurs the edge of a assistants, and the like-who were the products, offensively brand-new
particular language game and makes it difficult (though possible) to dis­ and ambitious, of the same economic changes, and whose instability had
tinguish between a mistake and a metaphor. (And in case the imagery of nothing to do with the loss of bygone status but, rather, with the inability
plenitude which creeps in at this point should be misread, I shall add that of the social system to decide what their situation, high or low, might be
it too--social practice itself-is analyzable, at least in its overall structures in the new order of things. To call these different people petits bourgeois
and tendencies.) was not wrong: it may strike us now as profound of contemporaries to
 8··IH~. PAINTING OF MODERN LIFE
Introduction· 9

have seen from the start how the various fractions would be made, by About the concepts of "spectacle" and "spectacular society" it is not so
monopoly capitalism, into one thing. But the one thing, in the case of class,
easy to be cut and dried. They were developed first in the mid-I960s as
is regularly made out of the many and various.
part of the theoretical work of a group called the Situationist International,
It is somewhat the same with ideology, since I use the word to indicate and they represent an effort to theorize the implications for capitalist society
the existence in society of distinct and singular bodies of knowledge: orders
of the progressive shift within production towards the provision of con­
of knowing, most often imposed on quite disparate bits and pieces of
sumer goods and services, and the accompanying "colonization of everyday
representation.' The sign of an ideology isa kind of inertness in discourse:
Iife."3 The word "colonization" conjures up associations with the Marxist
a fixed pattern of imagery and belief, a syntax which seems obligatory, a
theory of imperialism, and is meant to. It points to a massive internal
set of permitted modes of seeing and saying; each with its own structure
extension of the capitalist market-the invasion and restructuring of whole
of closure and disclosure, its own horizons, its way of providing certain
areas of free time, private life, leisure, and personal expression which had
perceptions and rendering others unthinkable, aberrant, or extreme. And
been left, in the first push to constitute an urban proletariat, relatively
these things are done-I suppose this is the other suggestion carried in the
uncontrolled . It indicates a new phase of commodity production-the
word-as it were surreptitiously. Which is to say that ideologies, like any
marketing, the making-into-commodities, of whole areas of social practice
forms of knowledge, are constructs; they are meanings produced in a special
which had once been referred to casually as everyday life.
and partial social practice; they are most often tied to the attitudes and
The concept of spectacle is thus an attempt-a partial and unfinished
experiences of a particular class, an'd therefore at odds, at least to some
one-to bring into theoretical order a diverse set of symptoms which are
extent, with the attitudes and experience of those who do not belong to
normally treated, by bourgeois sociology or conventional Leftism, as an­
it. (This is a cautious statement of the case: in fact there is often a positive
ecdotal trappings affixed somewhat lightly to the old economic order :
antagonism between the ideological frames of reference belonging to dif­
"consumerism," for instance, or "the society of leisure"; the rise of mass
ferent and conflicting classes; it is hard to avoid the sense of bourgeois
media, the expansion of advertising, the hypertrophy of official diversions
ideology actively struggling in the nineteenth century to include, invert,
(Olympic Games, party conventions, biennales). The Situationists were pri­
or displace the meanings of those classes the bourgeoisie sought to dominate.
marily interested, in ways which have since become fashionable, in the
I shall point to such a struggle taking place, for example, in the cafe­
possible or actual crisis of this attempt to regulate or supplant the sphere
concert, or in the attempts made to stabilize an image of prostitution.) But
of the personal, private, and everyday. They described the erosion offamily
in any case, the function of ideology is as far as possible to dispose of the
controls in later capitalist society, and derided their febrile replacements­
very ground for such conflicts. Ideologies tend to deny in their very struc­
the apparatus of welfare, social work, and psychiatry. They put great stress
ture and procedures that they have any such thing: knowledge, in ideology,
on, and a degree of faith in, the signs of strain in just this area: the question
is not a procedure but a simple array; and insofar as pictures or statements
of Youth, the multiplication of delinquent subcultures, the strange career
possess a structure at all, it is one provided for them by the Real. Ideologies
of "clinical depression," the inner-city landscape of racism and decay. The
naturalize representation, one might say : they present constructed and
cor:cept of spectacle, in other words, was an attempt to revise the theory
disputable meanings as if they were hardly meanings at all, but, rather,
of capitalism from a largely Marxist point of view. The most celebrated
forms inherent in the world-out-there which the observer is privileged to
ofSituationist metaphors-it comes from a book by Guy Debord-is meant
intuit directly.
more soberly than it may seem at first sight: "The spectacle is capital
Therefore one ought to beware of a notiQn of ideology which conceives
accumulated until it becomes an image.'"
it merely as a set of images, ideas, and "mistakes," for its action on and
There are various problems here: for instance, deciding when exactly
in the process of representation is different from this: it is more internal,
the spectacular society can be said to begin. One is obviously not describing
more interminable. Rather, an ideology is a set of limits to discourse; a set
some neat temporality but, rather, a shift-to some extent an oscillation­
of resistances, repetitions, kinds of circularity. It is that which closes speech
from one kind of capitalist production to another. But certainly the Paris
against consciousness of itself as production, as process, as practice, as
that Meyer Schapiro was celebrating, in which commercialized forms of
subsistence and contingency. And of necessity this work of deletion is never
life and leisure were so insistently replacing those "privately improvised,"
done: it would hardly make sense to think of it finished.
does seem to fit the preceding description quite well. And it will be argued
 10' THE PAl N T 1 N G 0 F MOD ERN L 1 F E
Introduction· ••

in chapter one that the replacem ent was not a matter of mere cultural
and of words which we owe to Clemen t Greenbe rg, where each art in
ideological refurbis hing but of all-emb racing econom ic change: the new
a move to
age is thought obliged "to determi ne, through the operatio ns peculiar
the world of grands boulevards and grands magasins and their accomp to

anying itself, the effects peculiar and exclusive to itself' ;6 otherwis e it declines
industri es of tourism , recreatio n, fashion, and display- industri into
es which entertai nment or edification. It is clear that Mallarm e already had
helped alter the relation s of product ion in Paris as a whole. a sense
of Manet's art as a turning point of culture, which is presuma bly
The other kind of problem is more intractab le but had better be referred why, at
the very end of his 1876 article, he felt entitled to make the Painter
to in passing. The notion of spectacle, as I hope will be clear from -the
even represen tative voice of the whole profess ion-put the case of Art
my dry summar y, was designed first and foremos t as a weapon of in such
combat, Manicha ean terms : "when rudely thrown at the close of an epoch of
and contains within itself a more or less bitter (more or less dreams
resigned) in front of reality, I have taken from it only that which properly
predicti on of its own reappea rance in some such form as this, between belongs
the to my art, an original and exact percepti on which distingu ishes
covers of a book on art. Althoug h I shall not wrestle in the toils for itself
of this the things it perceives with the steadfas t gaze of a vision restored
contrad iction too long, I wish at least to alert the reader to the to its
absurdit y simplest perfection."7 (I shall come back to Mallarm e's account of
involved in making "spectac le" part of the canon of academ it the epoch
Marxism . of dreams and its close in my conclusion.)
If once or twice in the text my use of the word carries a faint whiff
of
Debord 's chiliastic serenity I shall be satisfied.
"Moder nism," finally, is used here in the customa ry, somewh at muddle
3. Paul C~zannc. Lc Viaduc a I'Estaquc, Co .882.
d
way. Someth ing decisive happene d in the history of art around
Manet
which set painting and the other arts upon a new course. Perhaps
the
change can be describe d as a kind of scepticism, or at least unsuren
ess, as
to the nature of represen tation in art. There had been
degrees of doubt
on this subject before , but they had mostly appeare d as asides to the
central
task of construc ting a likeness , and in a sense they had guarant
eed that
task , making it seem all the more necessary and grand . Certain
painters
in the seventee nth century , for example , had failed to hide the
gaps and
perplexi ties inheren t in their own procedu res, but these traces of
paradox
in percept ion-the se markers in the picture of where the illusion
almost
ended-- only served to make the likeness, where it was achieved
, the more
compell ing, because it was seen to exist in the face of its opposite
, chaos.
There is no doubt that Manet and his friends looked back for instructi
on
to painters of just this kind- to Velasqu ez and Hals, for exampl
e-but
what seemed to impress them most was the evidence of palpable
and frank
inconsis tency, and not the fact that the image was someho w preserve
d in
the end from extincti on. This shift of attentio n led , on the one
hand, to
their putting a stress on the material means by which illusions and
likenesses
were made (in this sense, my previous accounts of society and ideology
are
modern ist in some of their emphase s); on the other, to a new set of
proposals
as to the form represen tation should take, insofar as it was still
possible at
all without bad faith . "The scope and aim of Manet and his follower
s ,"
we shall find Mallarm e saying in an article in 1876, "(not proclaim
ed by
authorit y of dogmas , yet none the less clear) is that painting shall
be steeped
again in its cause.. . ."5 This is really very close to the more familiar
form
12'THE PAINTING O F M O DERN LIFE Introduction· 13

Mallarme's statement of the modernist case is primitive, and therefore The details of an answer will of course be open to argument as to
optimistic and clear-cut-perhaps misguidedly so--in its picture of the emphasis, evidence, and so forth; but surely the aIlswer must take ap­
future . The stress on exactness, simplicity, and steadfast attention is some­ proximately this fonn. If the fact of flatness was compelling and tractable
thing which was to recur in the next hundred years, but it can hardly be for art-in the way it was for Manet and Cezan~e, for example- that
said to be characteristic of the art to which Manet gave birth. The steadfast must have been because it was made to stand for something: some particular
gaze rather quickly gave way to uncertainty (in this the case of Cezanne and substantial set of qualities which took their place in a picture of the
is exemplary). Doubts about vision became doubts about almost everything world. 50 that the richness of the avant-garde, conceived as a set of contexts
invol ved in the act of painting; and in time the uncertainty became a value for art in the years between , say, 1860 and 1918, might best be redescribed
in its own right ; we could almost say it became an aesthetic. A special and in terms of its ability to give flatness such complex and compatible values­
effective rhetoric was devised-it is in full possession of the field by the values which necessarily derived from elsewhere than art. On various
time one encounters it in the art criticism of the 5ymboliste magazines of occasions, for instance, flatness was imagined to be some kind of analogue
the late 1880s-in which the preference of painting for the not-known, of the " Popular" (a curious fiction whose history is partly traced in chapter
the not-arranged, and the not-interpreted was taken largely as an article four). It was therefore made as plain, workmanlike, and emphatic as the
of faith . Painting has a subject, these critics say, and it is rightly that area painter could manage; loaded brushes and artisans' combs were held to
of experience we dismiss in practical life as vestigial and next to nothing.H be appropriate tools; painting was henceforth honest manual labour. (A
Art seeks out the edges of things, of understanding; therefore its favourite belief of this kind underlies even Mallarme's argument: earlier in the 1876
modes are irony, negation , deadpan, the pretence of ignorance or innocence. text he can be found describing the Impressionist as "the energetic modern
It prefers the unfinished : the syntactically unstable, the semantically mal ­ worker" about to supplant "the old imaginative artist,"9 and greeting the
formed. It produces and savours discrepancy in what it shows and how it development on the whole with glee.) Or flatness could signify modernity,
shows it, since the highest wisdom is knowing that things and pictures do with the surface meant to conjure up the mere two dimensions of posters,
not add up. labels, fashion prints, and photographs. There were painters who took
This is an approximate definition of modernism, and it is not meant to those same two dimensions, in what might seem a more straightforwardly
suggest that modern art is incapable of criticizing its own assumptions or modernist way, to represent the simple fact of Art, from which other
exceeding this one frame of reference. A proper treatment of Picasso's meanings were excluded . But during this period that too v.:a,i most often
Demoiselles d'Avignon, say, or Eliot's Ash Wednesday, would be concerned an argument about the world and art's relation to it-a quite complex
with the hold of conventions of uncertainty in such cases, but also with argument, and stated as such. Painting would replace or displace the Real ,
the degree to which both works succeed in turning the conventions against accordingly, for reasons having to do with the nature of subjectivity, or
themselves, so that Picasso might be said to end up with an image of the city life, or the truths revealed by higher mathematics. And finally, un­
female body which is not simply a tissue of fragments (it is more solid and brokenness of surface could be seen-by Cezanne par excellence-as stand ­
whole than most others he painted in less refractory modes), and Eliot ing for the evenness of seeing itself, the actual form of our knowledge of
eventually to state the grounds of Christian belief with a kind of orderly things. That very claim, in turn, was repeatedly felt to be some kind of
plainness. aggression on the audience, on the ordinary bourgeois. Flatness was con ­
In general, the terms of modernism are not to be conceived as separate strued as a barrier put up against the viewer's normal wish to enter a
from the particular projects-the specific attempts at meaning-in which picture and dream, to have it be a space apart from life in which the mind
they are restated. An example of that truism would be the notorious history would be free to make its own connections.
of modernism's concern for "flatness." Certainly it is true that the two My point is simply that flatness in its heyday was these various meanings
dimensions of the picture surface were time and again recovered as a and valuations; they were its substance, they were what it was seen as ;
striking fact by painters after Courbet. But I think that the question we their particularity was what made flatness a matter to be painted . Flatness
should be asking in this case is why that literal presence of surface went was therefore in play-as an irreducible, technical fact of painting- with
on being interesting for art. How could a matter of effect or procedure all of these totalizations, all of these attempts to make it a metaphor. Of
seemingly stand in for value in this way? What was it that made it vivid ? course, in a way it resisted the metaphors, and the painters we most admire
14 . THE P A I NT I N G 0 F MOD ERN L I FE Introduction· 15

insisted also on its being an awkward, empirical quiddity ; but "also" is

the key word here: there was no fact without the metaphor, no medium
without its being made the vehicle of some sense or other.
In other words, the terms of modernism---even or especially those that
seemed to be given in ""the simple act of painting,.-were also constructs ;
and part of the purpose of this book is to describe the circumstances in
which they first crystallized out. Those last two words are intended to
suggest a sort of sealing and congealing as well as a simple assumption of
order, since at the same time that the terms were arrived at there was a
closure against consciousness of them being terms, and therefore against
an awareness of modernism having circumstances-apart from the tau­
tologous one of modernity. That blanking out of history is hard to escape
from . It is not enough to say, as we all do now, that the terms of modernism
and the facts of Parisian life are somehow linked. Such an insight too easily
leads to our asserting not much more than the tautology I just referred

4. Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
Les Parapluies, 1881-86.

5· Gustave Caillebotte, Rue de Paris, temps de pluie, 1877.

to. The argument I go on to make in this book is somewhat less watertight,

I hope: I wish to show that the circumstances of modernism were not
modern, and only became so by being given the forms called "spectacle."
On the face of things it seems that Impressionist painting was one of those
forms, but the question is: How completely? Are we to take Impression­
ism's repertoire of subjects and devices as merely complicit in the spec­
tacle-lending it consistency or even charm--()r as somehow disclosing it
as farce or tragedy? Is the truth of the new painting to be found in Renoir's
Parapluies or in Caillebotte's Rue de Paris, temps de pluie-in the sheer
appeal of modernity, or its unexpected desolation? Are they grand and
poetic still, these people in their cravats and patent-leather shoes, "these
millions . . . who do not need to know one another" and who lead their
modern lives accordingly? Or has something occurred to make the very
>0

idea of heroism in modern life---even one as hedged in with ironies as

Baudelaire's had been-already seem the relic of a simpler age ?
16 . THE P A I N TIN G 0 F MOD ERN L I F E
Introduc tion· 17

There are surely readers who right from the start of this for us is a domesti c and charmin g style, and excesses of
introduc tion enthusia sm or
found Schapir o's account overhea ted, and have been wonder derogati on in the face of it seem equally far from the truth.
ing since where
the tradition al notion of Impress ionism has gone. Are we Were not
suppose d these those writers in 1877 simply facetiou s when they recoiled
days to give up believin g in the "paintin g of light" and the from Renoir's
simple deter­ Balanrsoire--of all pictures i-with the epithets "bizarre ," "apocaly
minatio n of these artists to look and depict without letting ptic,"
the mind and "sublim e de grotesq ue"?" Are we suppose d to take any
more seriously
interfere too much? The answer to that question is obviousl Laforgu e's Darwin ian straws of colour, his forest voices, or
y no. The those brush­
problem , on the contrary , is to rediscov er the force of these strokes of Renoir's which one critic perceive d as leaving light
terms-l ight, behind them
looking , strict adheren ce to the facts of vision- since they like "grease spots on the clothing of his figures" ?»
have nowada ys
become anodyne . Here, for example , is Jules Laforgu e's descript I am not sure. These epithets and analogie s are foreign to
ion of the us now, but
Impress ionist at work, in an article written in 188 3: it seems safe to assume that there was somethi ng in the
painting s that
In a landscap e bathed with light, in which entities are modelled as original ly provoke d them. (There is no better writing on
if in coloured Impress ionism
grisaille, the academi c painter sees nothing but white light spreadin than Laforgu e's: his excess seems bound up with his powers of
g everywh ere, descript ion.­
whilst the Impressi onist sees it bathing everythi ng not in dead whitenes He was, after all, a master of understa tement where he thought
s, but in it appro­
a thousand conflicti ng vibrations, in rich prismatic decompo sitions priate). These critics' original sense of things can be retrieve
of colour. d, I think, only
Where the academic sees only lines at the edges of things, holding
modellin g in if we try to unlearn our present ease with Impress ionism-
place, the Impressi onist sees real living lines, without geometrical above all our
form, built from convicti on that its dealings with the world are someho w specially
thousand s of irregular touches which, at a distance, give the thing direct.
life. Where This will be partly a matter of looking at Impress ionist pictures
the academic sees only things set down in regular, separate positions again
within an and being struck by their strangen ess. Let us take, for example
armature of purely theoretic al lines, the Impressi onist sees perspecti , a landscap e
ve established Pissarro showed at the same exhibiti on in which Renoir's
by thousand s of impercep tible tones and touches, by the variety Balanrsoire ap­
of atmosph eric
states, with each plane not immobil e but shifting.
.. . The Impressi onist sees and renders nature as she is, which is • Laforgue's description of the Impressionist project-t he passage I quoted
to say solely was collected
by means of coloured vibration s. Neither drawing , nor light, nor in his Melanges posthumes, pp. I 36-38--brings Cezanne to mind. In Cezanne'
modellin g, nor s art, "seeing"
perspective, nor chiarosc uro: these infantile classifications all resolve is certain tha.t it takes possession not just of straws of colour but of objects
in reality into made out of
them; it believes that it has the world, in all its fullness and articulatio
coloured vibration s, and must be obtained on the canvas solely n, and that the
by coloured vi - world is present in seeing, strictly and narrowly conceived . Yet at the same
time it seems to
brations. grow progressively uncertain as to how its procedures give rise to the
In this small and limited exhibitio n at Gurlitt's , the formula is clearest separateness and
in Monet connection of things. Thus the task of representation comes to be twofold:
to demonstrate
... and Pissarro . .. where everythi ng is obtained by means of a the fixity and substance of the world out there, but also to admit that
thousand small the seer does not
touches, dancing off in all direction s like so many straws of colour~ know-m ost probably cannot know-ho w his or her own sight makes
ach strugglin g The more one looks, the more one attends to interruptions and paradoxes
objects possible.
for survival in the overall impressi on \en concurrence vitale pour in perception,
['impression d'en­ and the more one suspects that the fixity of things is to be found exactly
semble]. No more isolated melodies, the whole thing is a symphon there, at the
y, which itself point where vision gives up the ghost. (The edges of things, to take an
is life, living and changing , like the "forest voices" of Wagner' example Cezanne
s theories each mused over in his letters, are undoubtedly there in vision, but in a specially
perplexing
strugglin g for existence in the great voice of the forest, just as the way. A painter can fix them with a final line, but that line should somehow
Unconsc ious, enact its own
the law of the world, is the great melodic voice resulting from the arbitrariness. Out of the manifold edges of an apple or a shoulder the
symphon y of painter makes one
consciousnesses of races and individua ls. Such is the principle of the edge, visibly a contrivance, visually nonetheless convincing.)
Impressi onist In Cezanne, we could say, painting took the ideology of the visual-th e
school of plein air. And the eye of the master will be the one which notion of seeing
will discern as a separate activity with its own truth, its own peculiar access to the
and render the keenest gradation s and decompo sitions, and that thing-in -itself-to
on a simple flat its limits and breaking point. It is not surprising that this was done in a
degree of isolation
canvas. This principle has been applied in France, not systematically from the actual community of moderni sm (since an ideological communi
but by men ty can be defined
of genius, in poetry and in the novel. as that set of discursive and institutional constraints which turns its members
always away
from the edges or inconsistencies of their practice). Nor is it odd that Cezanne'
This descript ion will probably strike the late-twe ntieth-c entury s achievement
reader was immediately subject to a series of strong misreadings by those who
remained in the
as outlandi sh, at least in its final paragra ph. We are not used avant -garde world-th e series culminating in that proposed by the
to accounts Cubists, whereby
of unpreju diced looking which lead so precipita tely to Wagner Cezanne's art was rendered serviceable for a further round of modernis
's theories t claims to truth
(know-nothing epistemology abruptly giving way to know-everything ontology,
of sympho nic form and Hartma nn's of the Unconsc ious. the latter
Impress ionism more than half pretending to be philosophy, which at least
the former had not).
 Introduction · 19

pea red, his Coin de village, effet d'hiver (Plate I). Pissarro's whole contri­
bution to the show that year came in for rough handling fr om the critics.
"M. Pissarro," wrote one Ernest Fillonneau, "is becoming completely un­
intelligible . He puts together in his pictures all the. colours of the rainbow;
he is violent, hard , brutaL From an effect which might well have been
acceptable, he makes something unbelievable, against seeing and even against
reason." '! It was not eno ugh, some writers thought, for the artist's friends
to tell the viewer to stand back and see the pictures from the other side
of the room :

We have had enough of them repeating that, to judge the Impressionists, one has
to take one's distance. At fifty paces, they assure us, arms bulge, naked legs protrude
from skirts, eyes light up, the painting takes on body, ease, movement, each colour
asserts itself and each tone leaps to its proper place. Thus it gives the impression
of something seen and translated by the feelings rather than with every form
defined. One or two of the coterie just about realize this programme; and all of
them take pains, the sweat standing out on their brow, to spread their colour all
over the can vas, in pursuit of transparency all the while, and, putting green in
their shadows, they stay muddy, without freshness or relief."

7. Paul Cezanne, Une Scene au bord de la mer, 1877.

6. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, La Balanfoire, 1876.

J
20'THE PAINTING OF MODERN LIFE
Introduction · 21

Cezanne one knew about: he was clearly mad . But on reflection , Pissarro false . They are shortcuts for hand and eye and brain which tell us nothing
we do not already kn ow; and what we know already is not worth rehearsing
was almost as wayward:
in paint.
There is no way to figure out M. Cesanne's [sic] impressions d'apris nature ; I took So painting put equivalence at a di stance. No doubt Pissarro and his
them for palettes that had not been cleaned. But M. Pissarro's landscapes are no
friends believed that the look of the world would be found eventually,
more legible and no less prodigio us. Seen close up , they are incom prehensi ble
but only in a dance of likenesses guessed at or half glimpsed, and al ­
and awful; seen from afar, they are awful and incomprehensible. They are like
ways 'on the point of disa ppearing into mere matter. For it was matter­
rebuses with no solution."
paint itself-which was the k ey to any authentic likeness being redis­
These criticisms are ungenerous, but they point to things in the paintings covered.
which truly are odd and ought to be recog nized as such. The pattern of There is certainly a set of Realist intentions still at work here, and even
brushstrokes which Pissarro uses on the right -hand side of the Coin de the stress on painterly substance could be and occasionally was justified in
village-where the branches half obscure the sides of a house, some shut­ empirical terms. "Fo r the sun," sa id Alfred Sisley, "if it softens certain
tered windows, and a door-is very near to not being pattern at all (Plate parts of the landsca pe, intensifies others, and these effects of light which
II). If we look at the picture at arm's length (the painter's distance), the take on an almost material form in nature must be rendered in material
various marks which may stand for branches, shadow, scrub, plaster, tiling, form on canvas.", 6 Perhaps Pissarro would have been happy with some such
the lines of eaves or tree trunks, all do their job of representing in a way form o f words applied to his painting; but they still would not have
which barely makes sense. The individual marks are scratched and spread ex plained the kind of elaborate indirectness I have been pointing to. It
into one another as if they had been worked over too long or too em ­ does not seem to follow, after all, from a simple co mmitment to optical
phatically; sometimes the surface of the paint is vis ibly swollen with separate truth. Painting was now supposed to be about seeing, and the painter
dabs of raw colour, and sometimes it is overlaid, almost cancelled out, with determined to stick to the look of a scene at all costs. But d oing so proved
one or two declarative smears of red or green . The purpose of all this is exquisitely difficult: it involved a set of fragile and unprecedented equations
not clear at arm's length: it is hard to see what produced the build-ups between the painted and the visible, and above all it m ea nt keeping the
and erasures, or the sudden shifts of colour along the line of a branch or two terms of the equation apart, insisting on them as separate quantities.
the edge of a ro of. And presumably these things would have been obscure N o wonder a write r in Le Telegraphe in 1877 could toy with the idea
even to the painter as he put the particular touches down. of figur ation's di sap pearing altogether from painting of this kind. He
Not irretrie va bly so, of course: if he moved back from his work the offe red the following synopsis for an "Impressionist novel " which would
marks w ould eventually congeal and release so mething seen-the way surely soon replace, he th ought, the "excessively minute descriptions" of
light falls on a house front or the space between one tree trunk and another. Zola:
The technique was nonetheless strange, for as Pissarro was painting-I A white--or black-form, which could be a man unless it be a woman, moves
mean the word "painting" in a crude materialist way, as m odernist writers forward (is it forward?). The old sailor shudders--or is it sneezes r-we ca n't be
might use it- he would have had no very well -formed noti on of what the sure; he cries, "Let's gol" and throws himsel f into a whitish--or blackis h-sea
paint could stand for and how effectively. While it was being made the (we can't be sure) which could well be the Ocean .'7
likeness was barely one at all, and at best the justice of it was provisional;
no doubt the thing did resolve at a distance, and the painter went back And did not all this ambiguity have to do at bottom with the character
and back to the proper point to loo k and compare. But the walk back was of m odern life ? " The Impressionists proceed from Baudelaire," wrote Jules
itself an odd distancing ; it was as if a space had to be kept between painting Claretie .'8 Their exhibition "shows this much, that painting is not uniquely
and representing: the two procedures must never quite mesh, they were an archaeological art and that it accommodates itself without effort to
not to be seen as part and parcel of each other. That was because (the logic 'modernity.' "'9 Well, perhaps "effort" is the wrong word for Pissarro's
he re was central to the m odernist case) the normal habits of representati on procedures, or even Cezanne's, but surely this writer's confidence so mewhat
must not be given a chance to functi on; they must somehow or other be misses the point of the pictures he is describing; and the careful scare­
outlawed. The established equivalents in pai nt-between that colour and quotes he puts round that final " m ode rnity " rather give the game away.
that shadow or that kind of line and that kind of undergrowth-are always If it was so delicate a matter to insert the concept into a sentence in 18 77,
22 • THE P A I N TIN C 0 F MOD ERN L I F E CHAPTER ONE

then getting it into a picture promised to be no easy task . "Yes or no, must
we allow art to effect its own naturalization of the costume whose black
and deforming uniformity we all suffer? In other words, must we paint
the stovepipe hat, the umbrella, the shirt with wing collar, the waistcoat,
The VIEW FROM
and the trousers?" 'o It remained to be seen what the attractive new category
meant when it was reduced to such particulars, and what kind of accom­
modation art could make with it. NOTRE-DAME
Ie suis un ephemere et point trap mecontent citoyen d'une merropole crue
modeme parce que tout gout connu a ere elude dans les ameublements et
l'exterieur des maisons aussi bien que dans Ie plan de la ville . ... Ces millions
de gens qui n'ont pas besoin de se connaitre amenent si pareillement l'education,
Ie merier et la vieillesse, que ce cours de vie doit etre plusieurs fois moins long
que ce qu'une statistique folle trouve pour les peuples du continent.
-Arthur Rimbaud'

1'11< Argument That it is tempting to see a connection between the modernization of Paris
put through by Napoleon III and his henchmen-in particular by his
prefect of the Seine, Baron Haussmann-and the new painting of the time.
A critic unfriendly to that painting, and particularly to its claim to strict
optical neutrality, might be disposed to put the connection thus: It seems
that only when the city has been systematically occupied by the bourgeoisie,
and made quite ruthlessly to represent that class's rule, can it be taken by
painters to be an appropriate and purely visual subject for their art. They
see it as a space from which mere anecdote and narrative have been
displaced at last, and which therefore is paintable; but do they not mean
by anecdote and narrative simply the presence-the pressure, the inter­
ference--of other classes besides their own l Haussmann's modernity, this
critic would say, was philistine and repressive, and it is right that our
gorges should rise at Fourcade La Roquette's unctuous reminder, in the
1869 debate over the baron's achievements, that as recently as 1847 "the
street lamps were still not lit on nights when the moon shone," and at the
"laughter in the House " which greeted the minister 's sally at the bad old
days! For the House knew well that Haussmann's modernity had been
built by evicting the working class of Paris from the centre of the city,
and putting it down on the hill of Belleville or the plains of La Villette,
where the moon was still most often the only stre~t light available. And
what did painters do except join in the cynical laughter and propagate the
myth of modernity?