The Painting of Modern Life

"This is an extremely fascinating account of nineteenth-century French art in the age of Baudelaire, Manet, and moving forward into the Impressionists. I came across this fairly early on after I switched from studying English literature as an undergraduate to being a postgraduate studying history of art. When I studied literature, there were many brilliant books I read about why Byron wrote what he did, or why Shakespeare’s work is good and how it related to the time, what the historical or social dimensions behind the work were, and so on. But in history of art, there was absolutely nothing like that. It was all just description. This goes back to the origins of art history as a discipline. Its function was not to understand art, but fundamentally to establish whether ‘m’lord’s Canaletto’ was really a Canaletto. That’s what art historians were: they were people whose job was to make certain that this or that rich person’s picture was indeed what it said it was. It bore that kind of stigma. Of course, there were exceptions to that in the writing before T J Clark, but these are very few. Lawrence Gowing was writing before that and he’s absolutely brilliant on art, but it was very very hard to find a book that connected art with society in the way that Clark connected the art of the nineteenth century to the society in which it was produced. I found this book really exciting, interesting, and very thrilling. He would write about Manet’s Olympia , but he would begin by writing about perceptions of the prostitute in nineteenth-century Paris. How were prostitutes seen? Where did they work? What kind of people were they? What age were they? How were they treated? How were they represented in literature? And what is Manet doing that’s different? Likewise, with A Bar at the Folies-Bergère , Clark writes very illuminating passages about the buying and selling of alcohol in order to captivate people and bring them to these new environments and this new place called a city , that people hadn’t lived in before. Alcohol becomes capitalistic bait in a very strange world which is so familiar to us now that we almost don’t realise we live in it. I think Clark drew those lines of connection between society and art with a strong left-wing bias—and there’s nothing wrong with that. I just thought it was very captivating and interesting. Yes. There’s a sort of lazy attitude to Impressionism which has it as, in a way, the ‘art of the picnic’. This is the idea that it’s all about drinking a little bit too much wine when you’re on an outing in the countryside and then painting everything a bit blurry. For me, and probably T J Clark as well, Impressionism as a form of painting is brought into being by the city. “If you situate Impressionism as an art of relaxation or bourgeois comfortable life, you’re making a fairly profound mistake.” There may be some painters like Monet whose response to the city is to escape it and to paint nature or to try and find a reality that’s more real than the temporary realities on the city which confront you on every side. But there are the other painters like Manet or Degas whose work is the exact opposite. It’s all about modernity, it’s about speed, it’s about what life is like now that we have trains. It’s about what life is like now that we have bars on every corner. It’s about what life is like when ninety-nine percent of the people who you meet or pass, you don’t know any more, whereas in the past you knew who everyone was. You knew who everybody was and you knew what they did. Now suddenly you don’t. So, it’s this new bewildering world that is also the world alluded to in many of Baudelaire’s poems in Fleur de Mal . It’s the world that’s passed on in literature to T S Eliot’s “The Waste Land” which in itself, one could say, is a piece of Impressionist poetry. I think the traditions in which you situate works of art and schools of art are very important. If you situate Impressionism as an art of the picnic, an art of leisure, an art of relaxation or bourgeois comfortable life, you’re making a fairly profound mistake. You’re failing to understand how it helps to shape and shift people’s sensibilities of the nineteenth century, moving towards the fin de siècle , the First World War, and thereafter. Impressionism and post-Impressionism truly changed everything. It’s not entirely true. If you think of pictures like Degas’ L’Absinthe and all those little girls doing ballet , they’re from lower class backgrounds. I think he called them his “little monkey girls”. It’s probably true that as far as Clark is concerned, no one went as far as they could. I see him as a Marxist who is basically bemoaning the fact that that school of painting didn’t throw up an equivalent to Karl Marx. You have to look, perhaps, to the social realists of the French tradition for that. It’s a rather different tradition of painters. There were painters in France that did paint these things, but they didn’t tend to do it in the Impressionist style. I’m thinking of those that follow Courbet. There’s Millet as well, and you might say they go on to breed people like Gauguin, painting the peasants of Pont-Avon and, indeed, van Gogh painting those pictures of relatively poor people. The last thing I’ll say about Clark is that as well as being a refreshing antidote to this rather dilettante form of attributional art history, he wrote with a burning sense of the idea that art matters and that how we see the world matters. This is part of the legacy of his Marxist background, but it’s also true ."

"The second stage of my history of celebrity focuses on Paris at this time. A new kind of phenomenon is beginning to declare itself, which is the process whereby the fashion industry becomes industrialised and the whole novel notion of glamour attaches itself to people who are known and recognised. T J Clark wrote his wonderful book to study how the great painters of the day, people like Manet, Renoir and Redon, depicted the new, very appearance-conscious life of the city. The Impressionists took off at that time because people of the day aspired to public self-display and therefore, as we understand it, celebrity. “The fashion industry becomes industrialised and the whole novel notion of glamour attaches itself to people who are known and recognised.” Some of Manet’s best paintings mark out the coincidence of the new fashion and the new self-displaying class. In his painting of the garden at Tuileries the people portrayed were almost all his friends and acquaintances. Manet himself is also in the picture and you can see that people are in the latest fashions. Clark’s wonderful book traces those processes through the paintings. And at the same time he follows up what Brewer was talking about in Pleasures of the Imagination, which is a new type of leisured life, especially in rather shady bars which hovered on the edge of ordinary drinking bars, dance halls and bordellos. Manet’s famous picture of the girl at the bar of the Folies Bergère shows in the mirror behind the bar the whole scene in the theatre. And this is one of the pictures of the day which most marvellously shows this new kind of social life."