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Home , Academic art, Tony Hancock

Context and the half-life of Dr Steven Adams University of Hertfordshire, UK

I Introduction

In the first two decades of the nineteenth century, many middle-class lovers and art critics worried about the state of the in . Two related anxieties can be identified. On the one hand were concerns about romantic artists and critics' repeated assertion of art's transcendental nature, the idea that it defied prescription, exegesis and rational explanation; on the other hand, was the anxiety expressed by conservative art critics and the public at large about the absence of a clear and authoritative template by which to make judgements about the arts. In this paper, I want to suggest these anxieties are historically connected to the position we find ourselves in today when we also search for some kind of critical template to assess where knowledge and value might be located within the arts and ask how that value might be expressed within the context of academic research.

The assertion that there is a link between the art of the early-nineteenth and the early- twenty-first centuries is not as strained as it might first appear. An examination of the genealogy of clearly shows a continuity between the conditions under which art was made, written about and consumed in the early-nineteenth century and some of the ways in which it was made, valorised and consumed in the recent past. Both then and now, the arts were/are popularly thought to be incomprehensible to the un-initiated; they are considered largely the domain of bohemians, and have no obvious social utility. A set of links between the past and present can be found in the history of modernism. was the centre of the art world throughout the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, and when the European avant-garde migrated to the United States after the Second World War, they took many of their modernist cultural habits with them. The quest for art's essential purity and the assertion of a teleological march towards its transcendental essence first evident in art criticism in the early1800s, recurs throughout the nineteenth century, and is still evident in the 1940s and 50s in the writing of modernists such as , Michael Rosenberg, Alfred Barr and others. Through an analysis of the modernist art in its formative phase – and here I contend that modernism begins much earlier than is generally acknowledged, sometime around the 1790s – we may gain an insight into why the locus of art's value is historically so singularly difficult to locate. In this article, then, I want to examine not the theology of – is it transcendental, or isn't, and, if so, how and why might it get academic plaudits for something that cannot be explained - but to take an atheistic stance and look at the wider institutional contexts in which a modernist theology of art first came about and look briefly at the durability of its half-life over the past 150 years.

II

What was the nature of aesthetic transcendence in early nineteenth-century writing about art? Central to early-nineteenth century French criticism was the assertion that the substantive core of art defied analysis. Pierre-Marie Gault de Saint-Germain, writing in a guide book for bewildered collectors in 1816, complained that the art market was a 'maze', that 'it was impossible to find a solid base to appreciate the arts', and that art dealers were using 'exaggerated sales puffs' to valorise works of dubious worth and provenance. 1 The widespread fear that there was no stable set of agreed values in the arts, recurred in the conservative journal the Annales française of 1817. Competition and free enterprise were suitable for industry and commerce, the anonymous correspondent argued, but the arts needed to be 'directed' by some larger institution to help give them a purpose. As the correspondent pointed out, architects would not consider making a building without a purpose and a patron, and found it baffling to think of why artists would do otherwise. That the arts were made without consideration of a social need, led to perceptions that the ranks of the profession were swelling at an alarming rate. In 1824, a satirical article in the Journal de Paris noted how there were 'seven painters for one poet in the capital and nine poets for every one carpenter', and concluded that 'there must be at least 4000 artists in Paris.' 2 Trade directories of the early 1820s only record around 800 artists registered in the capital, but, even so, the statistic shows a five-fold increase in the size of the profession within 15 years. The art critic for the Annales Françaises concluded that the large number of unemployed artists 'flooding the capital' would lead only to 'idleness and debauchery', among the profession, and it was largely through assertions such as this that the image of artist as wastrel took hold. 3 Stripped of a social context and left to produce work at will, the artist by definition was economically idle.

Anticipating Pierre Bourdieu's research on the structure of romantic by some 150 years, Edme-François Miel, the correspondent of the liberal journal, La Minèrve française, made the leap from context to aesthetics and came to the highly-perceptive conclusion that when artists are unattached to institutions, they only produce works that are 'sterile' 4. This sense of sterility is important because it presages a form of abstraction that would become fully formed in the early to mid twentieth century. Of course, there is no evidence that Miel was thinking of an art without a subject. It is significant, however, that works of art – especially small, portable landscapes that were the backbone of the art market in the early 1800s - were increasing valorised without direct reference to their subject. Rather, art critics and dealers were increasingly concerned with the personalities of the artist, or, when discussion of the subject matter arose, it was seen to point to the character of the maker. When, for example, the collector and art critic Alfred Sensier wrote a monograph on the early-nineteenth century landscape painter Georges Michel, the artist's trademark gestures of thickly-encrusted paint were seen as a sign of his robust personality while the content of his works – Dutch-inspired views of the plains to the north of Paris - was largely ignored. 5 As early as 1817, then, we have a clear indication that the arts not only have a problematic relationship with the economic sphere and function in economically sterile atmosphere, they also respond to this sterility by reconfiguring their work to deprive it of an external referent. Much of Clement Greenberg's assessment of the Impressionists in the 1940's depended on a similar desire to underline the form of the , at the expense of its subject. 'Monet', he states, was a flat (Greenberg's emphasis) painter, and the first concern of his métier – a concern that leads from him straight to Mondrian – was to maintain plastically the equilibrium that the surface of the canvas already possesses physically. 6

III

A bit of provides a context for some of the changes in the way the arts were made and understood prior to the emergence of a transcendental aesthetic. In the eighteenth century, the arts were often seen as a tool for public instruction. Art and artists were consequently required to make their work legible. The seventeenth-century French painter , the corner-stone of the French academic tradition for well over two centuries, maintained that painting and poetry were 'two sisters' and adapted a code of gestures and expressions taken from the liberal art of Rhetoric to ensure that his work was legible. 7 Writing to his friend and patron Fréart de Chantelou in 1642, Poussin claimed that his could be 'read' through the use of a code of gestures and expressions whereby the body's external appearance was formed by the state of the soul. This essentially Cartesian position, codified by Poussin's student , was variously handed down to European art in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and enabled its exponents to communicate with a level of clarity that by the start of the nineteenth century would be largely inimical to the romantic movement and wholly inimical to artists throughout the twentieth century. It is only when the gets interested in the arts again through the conduit of their integration into the British academic system that this romantic trend is bucked.

How did the Academy's decline come about? The was largely instrumental in loosening the grip of academic rationalism. In 1791 the French academy and guilds were abolished, art was deregulated as a professional activity and academic rationalism was no longer a requirement for ambitious art. Art that followed academic principles continued to be made during the Revolution. Jacques-Louis David championed a brand of austere rationalism that saw austerity and reason as tools for both aesthetic and political reform. Here, art's job was to act on the moral fibre of the spectator and to improve the citizen. However, after the Revolution and the economic changes it brought about, it was increasingly possible for artists to make work that had a personal rather than an institutionalised agenda and to be taken seriously. In the early nineteenth century, painters (the word 'artist' is too grand for this level of the profession in its formative phase) that were once characterised as itinerant artisans made a claim for professional credibility on the basis that their personal insights and instinct should be taken seriously. For the first time, the artistic psyche was taken as the subject of art.

The levelling impulse of the French Revolution abolished not only academic art and its pretensions but also art's traditional patrons, the clergy and the nobility. After the mass executions of the Terror in 1793-4, the conservative press looked wistfully back to a time when the wealth and the knowledge of the gentleman connoisseur – a class of patrons now either in exile or dead – could be relied upon to fund ambitious work. The wealth that remained in revolutionary France was redistributed following the abolition of the law on primogeniture of March 1790; thereafter, all estates were distributed equally among male heirs. The result of this legislation was the creation of a large middle-class with moderate resources, plenty of 'enthusiasm', but little conventional understanding or 'connaissance'. When the Revolution ended in 1815, the French state largely withdrew from large scale patronage of the arts and it is at this point that the embryonic discourse around aesthetic transcendence began to take hold. From now on, art's most singular characteristic was that it defied rational explanation; at its core, its exponents maintained, was something pure that transcended any defining code. As Frehnhoffer, the hero of Balzac's short story The unknown masterpiece of 1830 explained, 'many painters triumph instinctively, knowing nothing of the canon of art.' Frenhoffer would have little difficulty in identifying fellow travellers for the next 150 years.

Among the most sustained critiques of the post-revolutionary art market came from authors of one act comedies or vaudevilles. In Etienne Morel's play Le café des artistes of 1799, a part time sign-painter and waiter (now, like then, it was not unusual for romantics to subsidise creative work that had no obvious commercial viability through a second job, or 'portfolio careers') decided to paint a masterpiece, a 'chef d'uvre'. 8 Speaking in the argot of the Parisian working classes – an indication of the extent to which professional levelling had taken place in the post-revolutionary period – the artist (one Croutignac) explained how he had painted a picture that surpassed the best efforts of and , but had covered it with a painting of a curtain. The picture had a double appeal, Croutignac explained. It was apolitical in a politically febrile period in which attitudes to art was often seen to be partisan. But more importantly for our purposes, it had a wide market appeal because, as the artist explained, it was possible for potential buyers to imagine that behind the curtain 'was the picture of their choice'. Croutignac not only made a bid for a mass appeal but also mass production. His name derived from the slang for a quick sketch, 'croute'. Here, there was the implication that the works were made very quickly not because rapidly produced works mediated that artistic psyche more authentically, the position taken by the apologists of romanticism, but because they were quicker and cheaper to produce.

We have in the form of Croutignac's Café des artistes, one of the first images of Bohemia, a paradigm of modernism where art is divorced from the economic and social sphere and where its exponents are forced to make a living on the margins of society. The same paradigm still had a resonance some 150 years later in Robert Day's 1961 film The Rebel. Here, the hero Tony Hancock makes his own symbolic right of passage from the philistine world of commerce into an art world of sterile production by throwing his bowler hat and umbrella into the English Channel, taking his allotted seat at a Parisian café and producing works that only Parisian bohemians could understand. Patronised largely by the same impecunious 'types' found in Etienne Morel's play, the artists in Day's film infuriate the patron by making one glass of wine last an hour as they debate the respective merits of their work in incomprehensible jargon. Real or fictional, café life was an important mise-en- scene for modern art and its aspirations throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: deprived of an institution that had need of their work, the café des artistes was a public counterpoint to the garret and provided a meeting place for a deracinated and often destitute profession.

The tone of some early-nineteenth century art criticism was often satirical; at heart, artists were typically charlatans and the art world was a scam. Around the same period, art dealers re-contextualised these circuits of artistic production and consumption and found new ways of valorising art that had no value other than its status as a commodity. Writing on the sale of the collection of one Robert de Saint-Victor, his dealer Pierre Roux de Cantal described the collection as having been put together not by a connoisseur, a learned collector of works with a recognised and established financial and aesthetic value, but by an art lover, an 'amateur', with 'natural taste.' 9 This was an important claim. In Saint-Victor's collection there were some new examples of the work of late eighteenth and early-nineteenth century artists without an established market or aesthetic value. As such, the works needed an alternative form of consecration which came in the form of both the instinct of the collector and that of the artist. However, the work of one artist in the collection -Simon-Mathurin Lantara - presented a problem. In 1808 the painter was the subject of a one-act comedy, Lantara ou le peintre au cabaret by Louis Picard in which the artist fulfilled the bohemian ideal perfectly. 10 Cast as a feckless drunk, he turned out pictures as quickly as his avaricious art dealer could sell them, and when times were bad he settled his restaurant bill in return for a quick sketch, or croute. Writing in the catalogue for the Saint-Victor sale, Roux de Cantal challenged this reputation. Through the intercession of the art dealer's narrative, Lantara re-emerges as 'a man of simple tastes' and 'a refined spirit'. 11 More importantly, his pictures became the locus for the intuitive sensibilities of artist and it is at this point that sensibility is singled out as a defining category of good art. Under Roux's guidance, the collectors of Lantara's work were buying not the work of art but the creative sensibility that made it. Seem more cynically, collectors were buying the narrative context that singled out Lantara's 'nature fine'. When the value of Lantara's pictures began to increase in the 1850s, Roux's story was retold in expanded form by the art historian Emile Bellier de la Chavignerie. Again, the process whereby Lantara's work was re-consecrated depended on an attack on the bohemian tropes set out in Picard's play, and the assertion of the painter's good nature. According to Bellier, Lantara rejected the distractions of the city for the innocent joys of the countryside where he painted in lonely isolation and the pictures emerged as a sign for the sensibility that made it. By the 1860s it was common for the work of progressive landscape painters to be valorised in this manner and by the turn of the nineteenth century the narrative was institutionalised by the French government in the history of mapped out in the Exposition Universelle of 1900.

The history of the autonomous creative psyche is complex and totalising frameworks are unhelpful when confronting the messiness of art's histories. Furthermore, the retreat into the psyche that characterises the history of modernist art was inevitably driven by very different historical and political motives at different times. There is, however, a clear connection between some of the ways in which French art was valorised in the early 1800s and the ways American art was similarly valorised in the 1940s and 1950s. Abstract Expressionists were quintessential Bohemians. They were feted as social and economic outsiders, either as Jews or 'Coonskinners', the term Harold Rosenberg uses for American art's misfits, men whose lack of contact with the venal mainstream of American culture was read as a sign of their work's creative authenticity. As the artist David Salle observed in an interview as late as 1992, 'to be a serious artist in America is always to be marginal and alienated'. 12 Donald Kuspit has examined some of the ways in which American art translated this sense of alienation first into professional credibility and ultimately into financial value dramatically increased by the rhetoric of rejection. He notes how both Greenberg and Rosenberg used a critical framework whereby the serious artist was first tested by the immediate but transient rewards offered by ''. 13 To reject this immediate reward is seen as a sign of integrity which can ultimately by translated into a higher aesthetic and financial value. As with early nineteenth-century French art, artistic value was mediated through an emphasis on personal expression mediated directly through the person and often the body of the artist. Here, the speed and the authority of the croute has mutated into Abstract 's drip, and it is significant that Tony Hancock – the purveyor of croutes par excellence - was comfortable with both forms. In each instance, the croute and the drip test the credulity of the philistine public while at the same time working as a signifier for personal integrity. Perhaps the fullest renunciation of the venal world of the market was suicide, the idea that the values of the philistine world were so inimical to those of true art that authentic creative integrity demanded self- destruction. Whatever the avant-garde gestures adopted by advocates of romanticism be it the execution of croutes, the drip or suicide, those that are not part of their circle the public at large, the art market, academies past and present are excluded from their circle and struggle to codify a practice that has historically set out to kick over the traces of its own production in order to assert its transcendental nature. If a continuity exists over the past 150 years, it does so, perhaps, at the level of economics, the way in which the arts were both imbricated within and excluded from the circuits of capitalist production and the manner in which artists' alienation from the social sphere was reshaped into an economic commodity.

Galton and Simpson's Rebel ends on a cheerfully British philistine note: common sense rather than romanticism wins the day and the romantic Tony Hancock (and modernism) are exposed as fraudulent. It is highly significant, however, that the tropes of Bohemia contained within the film – the ritual adieu to the real world of productive work and an embrace for the ostensibly non-productive world of the imagination – had so durable a half-life and could still make British audiences of the 1960s laugh a century and a half after Etienne Morel and his contemporaries first set these tropes into place.

Endnotes

1 For a summary account of the interstices between European and American modernism, see D. Kuspit, 'Critics, Primary and Secondary, American Art in the twentieth century, London: Prestel, , 1993.

2 'Petites annonces', Journal de Paris, (1824) vol. VII, p. 292.

3 'M.', 'Considérations sur la situation physique et morale des artistes à Paris', Annales Françaises, May 23rd 1822. p. 60. Anxieties about the increasing number of painters trained in Paris were discussed in social commentaries from the time of the Consulate. See L.-S. Mercier, Le Nouveau Paris, (Paris: Mercure de France, 1994) p. 12. It was primarily during the Restoration, however, that large numbers of untrained artists were seen to be competing for work under what were clearly perceived capitalist conditions of a deregulated economy.

4 E. - F. Miel, 'Beaux-arts', Las Minèrve française, 1819, vol. 8. pp. 505-506. See also P. Bourdieu, 'The market for symbolic goods' Poetics, (1985) vol. 14, pp. 14-16. See also P. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art (London: Polity Press, 1996) pp. 47 ff.

5 A. Sensier, Etude sur Georges Michel (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1873).

6 C. Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism: Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) pp. 22-23.

7 A. Blunt, Nicolas Poussin: The A.W.Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts (London and New York: Phaidon Press, 1958) p. 223.

8 C.- G. Etienne, P.-C. Gaugiron-Nanteuil and E. Morel, Le café des artistes, (Paris: Huet, an VIII, (1799)) p. 25.

9 See Pierre Roux de Cantal's comments on the Saint-Victor sale in the Catalogue d'un riche collection de tableaux des trois écoles qui composaient le cabinet de M. Saint-Victor, (Paris: Roux de Cantal, 1822) pp. 136-137. 10 P. Barré and L. Picard, Lantara ou Le peintre au cabaret, (Paris: Fages 1809). Vaudevilles written during the Restoration included E. Scribe's L'artiste, comedie- vaudeville en un acte, (Paris: Bezou, 1825), La mansarde des artistes, (Paris: Pollet, 1825) and Un coin de tableau; tableau vaudeville en un acte (Paris: Duvernois, 1822); M. Merle's (pseud.) La Saint-Louis des Artistes, ou la fête du , (Paris: Pollet, 1822); Claude-Louis-Marie Rochefort-Lucay's Les singes ou la parade au salon, (Paris: Duvernois, 1825); Etienne Arago's Les quatre artistes, Paris: Barba, 1827); Joseph Brisset's Le peintre et le courtisan, (Paris: Barba, 1828) and C. Mallian and T. Cormon' La femme au salon et le mari d', Paris: Marchant, undated).

11 P. Roux de Cantal, Catalogue d'un riche collection de tableaux des trois écoles de M. Saint Victor, ii.

12 Quoted in D. Kuspit, 'Critics, primary and secondary', American Art in the 20th century: Painting and 1913-1993 (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1993) p. 145.

13 Ibid.

to cite this journal article: Adams, S. (2006) Context and the half-life of romanticism. Working Papers in Art and Design 4 papers/wpades/ vol4/safull.html ISSN 1466-4917