Authenticity in Painting: Remarks on Michael Fried's Art History

Authenticity in Painting: Remarks on Michael Fried’s Art History Robert Pippin My topic is authenticity in or perhaps as painting, not the authenticity of paintings; I know next to nothing about the problem of verifying claims of authorship. I am interested in another kind of genuineness and fraud- ulence, the kind at issue when we say of a person that he or she is false, not genuine, inauthentic, lacks integrity, and, especially when we say he or she is playing to the crowd, playing for e ff ect,or is a poseur. These are not quite moral distinctions(no one has a duty tobe authentic), but theyare robustly normative appraisals, applicable even when such falseness is not a case of straight hypocrisy but of lack of self-knowledge or of self-deceit. (A person can be quite sincere and not realize the extent of her submission to the other’s expectations and demands.) This sort of appraisal also has a long history in post-Rousseauist reflections on the dangers of uniquely modern forms of social dependence, and they are prominent worries in the modern novel. Why talk about paintings in such terms? The Western art tradition has been in a famous conundrum about thestatusofartworks—thedissolution of the borders between art and nonart, and the possibility of great art—for some time now, but it has rarely seemed to any discussant in that tradition that the normative issues at stake in a possibly modern art are like theques- tions sketched above about authenticity in a life. But it began to seem that way to Denis Diderot, a dimension of his work rescued, developed, and transformed with great elegance and persuasiveness by Michael Fried. In A version of this paper was deliveredat a conferenceat the E´ cole Normale Supe´rieure, “Autour de Michael Fried,” organized by Claude Imbert and Eric Michaud. I am grateful for the invitation, the discussions at the conference, and for many conversationswith Fried about this and other subjects. Critical Inquiry 31 (Spring 2005) 2005 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/05/3103-0009$10.00.All rights reserved. 576 Robert Pippin / Authenticity in Painting Diderot’s case, he linked his distaste with “mannered” paintings with his distaste for what he saw all around him as an ever more mannered life. He made clear that his art criticism was informed by the same distinction as that between “a man presentinghimself in company and a man actingfrom motivation, between a man who’s alone and a man being observed.” 1 Like- wise in The Salon of 1767, Diderot’s frequent synonym for the theatrical— the “mannered”—is invoked “in morals, discourse or the arts” as a general “viceofregulatedsociety,”andina particularlytellingdefinitioninthesame work he associates being so mannered with being “less than fully committed” to one’s role or occupation or pretended virtue. 2 It might seem odd to say that paintings can be true to life in ways quite diff erent from simple verisimilitude and so can be false in a way similar to the ways in which a person can be false. (This would appear to claim that a painting can seem to proclaima “commitment” to paintingitself, to beinga painting, butthen be “less than fully committed.”) But, however odd, that is what Diderot seems to be suggesting. And it is not all that strange. New movements or schools in all arts are often oriented from some such claim—that the prior school or tradition was phony, had become mannered or theatrical and in that sense had lost its vitality, its life.3 At any rate, such correspondingforms 1. Denis Diderot, “What Everyone Knowsabout Expression and Something Everyone Doesn’t Know,” Notes on Painting, in Diderot on Art,trans.John Goodman, 2 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1995),1:214. 2. Diderot, “On Mannerism,”The Salon of 1767, in Diderot on Art, 2:320, 323. 3. A later, betterknown, similar claim:Nietzsche’s in The Birth of Tragedy that, to speak with Diderot, ancienttragedyhad ceased to be drama and had become theatre, that tragedyhad died from a kind of suicide, had become untrueto itself by becomingphilosophical, by addressing the audience, as if with problems and puzzles. There are many other permutationsof the claimof a false or dead life. TheodorAdorno was willing to go very far. “Our perspective on life has passed into an ideology which conceals the fact that there is life no longer” (Theodor W. Adorno,Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem bescha¨digten Leben, vol. 4 of Gesammelte Schriften [Frankfurt am Main, 1951],p. 13; my trans.). This air of paradox is only intensified by the epigraph forMinima Moralia, from the Austrian writerFerdinand Ku¨rnberger: “Life does not live.” Such an evaluation is not unprecedented,although one sees it mostlyin modernist literary contexts. T. S. Eliotin The Robert Pippin is the Raymond W. and Martha Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the department of philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books on German idealism, including Kant’s Theory of Form; Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness; and Modernism as a Philosophical Problem. His last book was Henry James and Modern Moral Life . A collection of his recent essays in German, Die Verwirklichung der Freiheit, will appear in 2005, as will The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath . He is the winner of the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities and was recently a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Critical Inquiry / Spring 2005 577 of falseness (in painting and in life), and the question of why both might seem a growing threat, are the issues I want to raise in what follows. 4 Now Diderot was very probably not thinkingin world historicalor philosophical terms and was likely concerned much more with the contem- porary results of a corrupt court culture, by his time already a very old theme in French literature, especially drama. However, by themiddleofthe nineteenth century, the falseness theme had become much broader, and it also came to seem to some philosophers (especially Kierkegaard andNietz- sche) that there can be a unique way in which a whole mode of being in a world can lose its vitality and honesty, that the normative constraints and guidance at work within such a world, directions of a sort about how to go on, make sense of things, can lose genuine hold in some way. Many post- Hegelian philosophers seemed to think this was especially true of the modern world as a whole, the product of the European Enlightenment. This proved extremely hard to explain coherently in traditional terms since the most sophisticated of these post-Kantian philosophers did not believe that what was going wrong was infidelity to a moral ideal, a falling away from the true religion, or a failure to realize the truth of human nature as such. Some kind of historical or internal critique seemed necessary to explain how, in eff ect, living a life could come to be false to life itself, could only seem to be living or leading a life. (Or living in a worldwithout appreciating this possibility of failure could come to look comic. Don Quixote cannot be a knight, can only theatrically pose as one, not because he is insincereor phony, butbecause theworldhadchanged.)5 Ifmodernpaintingscouldalso be said both to reflect such anxiety and respond to it, confront it and try to avoid such falseness, then there might be in the history of modern painting something documented that goes beyond the reverberations of Diderot’s criticisms. Said one final way: this sort of falseness (to “life”) might be odd and philosophically problematic, but perhaps problematic in the sameway that painting in the course of its development might be said to have finally turned against its very status as painting, to have become false to itself or aspired to mere “objecthood.”6 (Fried has, in other words,discovereda dis- Waste Land had compared modern office workers crossing London bridgewith the lost souls described in Dante’s Inferno (“I had not thought death had undoneso many”[T. S. Eliot,The Waste Land, in The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950 (New York, 1952),p. 39]). And the accusation (that we have become the living dead) is prominentin George Orwell, D. H. Lawrence, Nietzscheof course, and many other modernists. 4. On the generalissue of responding to pictures, or “physiognomies,”or even words,as like responding to another human being,see Stanley Cavell,The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality,and Tragedy (Oxford, 1979), p. 355. 5. Some of the anxiety in philosophy about philosophy is clearly like this worry about seeming a Quixote figure,playing the role (the ancientrole) of rather than being philosophers. 6. See MichaelFried,“Art and Objecthood,”Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago, 1998),pp. 148–72. 578 Robert Pippin / Authenticity in Painting tinct way in which paintings can be said to fail, and his narrative, on its art critical side, points to the highly paradoxical situation in which somepain- ters then embrace this “failure,” much as Lui embraces, is deliriouslyproud of, his own theatricality in Le Neveu de Rameau .)7 For such an art history and art criticism, noting Diderot’s own understanding of what was going wrong in theatricality in general, and both the historical and philosophical assumptions that mightliebehindsuchaclaim, would lead one to tie painterly meaning not so much to working out problems in perception, mimesis, iconography, formal organization, and the like, but to the problem of genuine and false “modes of being” of the art- work itself, all within a more general understanding ofmeaning-responsive beings at work in a social world in historical time.

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