Impressionism, Originality, and Laissez-Faire

ROBERT L. HERBERT

with the advent of Symbolism in the late 1880s, that in their mature work Morisot, Degas, Monet, and the growth of an antinaturalist current in the Renoir, Cassatt, and Manet were depicting their own paintings of younger artists (Seurat, Van Gogh, Gau- society without analyzing it. They enjoyed theaters guin), Impressionist art came to be regarded as an un- and promenades in the country and simply rep- thinking form of naturalism. The Symbolist critics resented these innocent pleasures. Praise for them praised the new painters by claiming that their art was therefore fell not on their images of contemporary rich in intellectual, expressive, and decorative ideas, life, but on their innovations in color, brushwork, and as opposed to Impressionism which, they believed, other aspects of “pure painting,” so congenial to the merely added a heightened color sense to the old Re- era of abstraction, given the premium it has placed naissance tradition of verisimilitude. Impressionist on the formal components of painting. naturalism was dismissed by Félix Fénéon, Seurat’s Since the 1940s this view has been discredited, and chief defender, in these derisive terms: scholars have expanded the range of issues eligible for analysis to include complicated interrelationships The spectacle of the heavens, the water, greenery, among painting, literature, and the history of Paris varies from moment to moment, professed the ﬁrst from 1848 to the 1880s.2 We now know that Impres- Impressionists. To imprint one of these fugitive sionism was not a simple-minded representation of appearances on the retina was their goal. Thus arose color-light, and we are constantly reminded of the the necessity to paint a landscape in one séance and a tendency to make nature grimace in order to prove painters’ innovations, for which the words “radical” that the moment was unique and that one would never and “revolutionary” are frequently used (especially again see it.1 by corporate sponsors of the recent spate of “block- buster” Impressionist exhibitions). We have learned This view became commonplace in the twentieth that Impressionism really was born of adversity and century, and until the 1940s it was generally believed miscomprehension; its new brushwork, color, and

23 Copyrighted Material spatial organization were subversive; its devotion to urbs for most of their subjects; even when they turned the immediate present was profoundly shocking; its to the countryside, they represented it as though it subjects and attitudes undermined the whole concept were newly seen, free of the literary, historical, and of what art was, what art schools should teach, and moral overlays that had characterized the work of how art exhibitions should be organized. the preceding generation. They dealt in what are, af- All this is well worth pointing to, but were the Im- ter all, slight events in the history of humankind, pressionists radicals? On the surface of it, no. Caille- mere ephemeral moments seized from the pleasure of botte, Degas, Manet, and Morisot were upper-class leisure-time activities. Not only did they turn toward Parisians who can readily be assimilated with their present-day subjects, they also emphasized features peers, and who demonstrated no wish to make pro- that pointed to the immediate and the momentary. found alterations of their society. Monet was the up- There are many ways to represent a moored sailboat start son of a shopkeeper, eager to be accepted, and or a ballet rehearsal, but Monet and Degas used bro- Renoir, the only Impressionist of artisan-class ori- ken brushwork, indistinct contours, bright colors, and gins, was critical of the ruthlessness of urban-indus- striking compositional geometry to induce in the trial society, but wanted to return to a premodern pa- viewer a sense of the spontaneous, the unresolved, trician order.3 Pissarro was the only political radical that which is just now being seen. Impressionism, among the painters, but he remains a special case, and wrote César Graña, he dealt with rural life, not with the urban and sub- urban society the others preferred. assumes a world in which moments can exist as total What is needed in order to assess the label “rad- units of experience: where self-feeling, as well as the ical” are inquiries along new lines. Further investi- perception of others, has a new swiftness and, within gation of the artists’ subjects, especially their pref- that, a new, flickering poignancy; where the ephem- erence for themes of leisure and entertainment, eral and the unguarded can be memorable and must should be revealing.4 Systematic study of the artists’ be followed and scanned by the painter with a flash- 6 clients and dealers, not yet undertaken, would cer- ing perceptivity of his own. tainly be rewarding. Many of their early patrons, for example, were not long-established members of high Graña’s words point to the combination of external society, but wielders of new money: the financier observation and subjectivity that marked Impres- Ernest May, the banker Albert Hecht, the retailer and sionism. When the painters concentrated upon the il- speculator Ernest Hoschedé, the renowned baritone lusion of what could be seen in the flash of a moment, Jean-Baptiste Faure. The links between the new they seemed to reduce experience to the self, unsup- money and the new painting are doubtless there, but ported by references to other moments, to other ex- will remain speculative until someone does the work. periences. This was upsetting to many, for the viewer, In addition to these aspects of social history, we required to concentrate on this one moment, was de- should look more deeply into the often discussed is- nied contact with other moments—with memory, in sues of the “caught moment,” the hedonistic indul- eªect. gence in natural light and out-of-doors living, the Denial of memory meant denial of history, a per- pronounced individualism of the painters, and their vasive consequence of the Impressionists’ orienta- concern for originality. This chapter concentrates on tion. “History” was not simply the discarded subjects the last two of these.5 of earlier painting, but the means by which they were The Impressionists’ devotion to contemporary rendered, particularly the structure of light and dark phenomena is now recognized as one of the key ele- that gave conventional painting the satisfactory illu- ments of their art. They looked to Paris and its sub- sion of three dimensions. The exaltation of bright

24 ROBERT L. HERBERT Copyrighted Material color and patchy brushwork was the Impressionists’ ence for painting, were discarded with surprising ra- way of presenting what one could see, without re- pidity during the third quarter of the nineteenth cen- course to what one “knows” by virtue of traditional tury, first by the Barbizon artists in the second halves artistic training. This was only an apparent spon- of their careers, then by the Impressionists (after taneity, for Impressionism was just as artfully con- youthful essays in traditional subjects). An education structed as earlier painting. However, to many obser- in Greek and Latin, in Homer and Virgil, and in the vers, then and later, the concentration on spontaneous Bible had little real function for the entrepreneurs of vision and the absence of memory-trained techniques industrial capitalism: “If you’re so smart, why ain’t condemned the Impressionists to a superficial indul- you rich?” These premodern subjects, which had gence in pleasures. Max Friedländer, gifted historian been attached to monarchy, nobility, and theocracy, of Lowlands art, could not grant profundity to Im- eventually ceased to underpin public education (pri- pressionism because he believed that seeing was not vate schools, out of class solidarity, retained the old just looking with the eyes, but with the judgments curriculum for much longer). The Impressionists provided by memory and history: were ahead of most of their contemporaries when they denounced the Academy and its retardataire al- The man who knows most sees most; he sees more legiance to those traditional sources. than is actually visible to him in a given instant and To uproot the past was no easy step for the painters from a given standpoint. The Impressionists, how- to take, and this is evident when we reflect on the ever, were at pains to forget what they knew so as to upheavals it caused. Manet’s mocking of history in notice only what fell within their field of vision. . . . his Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia (both Musée The Impressionists, deliberately forgoing all d’Orsay, Paris), as well as in other pictures of the criticism and judgment in respect of the phenomenal 1860s, was linked to his defiance of the government’s world, appealing neither to sentiment nor to sense of guardians of history—the directors of fine arts, the humor, absorbing the prismatic glitter of things with a positive neutrality, mark the visual art oª from the Academy, the juries of o‹cial exhibitions. The other art of poetry, from history, from satire, as also from Impressionists did battle with the government by or- the aªecting, entertaining, instructive or informa- ganizing their own exhibitions, a step which eªec- tive type of narrative. The picture is no longer the tively, by the end of the century, demoted the Acad- exemplar of an idea, does not point beyond the visi- emy’s shows to minor status, and set the pattern for ble, strikes us as something unique, individual, like a twentieth-century exhibitions, so often sponsored by portrait.7 independent artists’ societies. A number of the Im- pressionists had only perfunctory periods of training For this reason, Friedländer denied the label “genre” in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and their example led to to Impressionism. It lacked the moral ideas that he re- its rapid decline, if we are to judge by the pattern of quired for his definition. Similarly, Graña, while ad- artists who dominated early modernism. Few of them miring the Impressionists, said that they cannot be studied in sanctioned ways, and by ignoring govern- called “naturalistic” because their art is one of “ami- ment exhibitions, prizes, and fellowships, rendered able lyricism” that mirrors but does not interpret con- them obsolete. The whole world of o‹cial painting temporary life.8 came tumbling down, at least as far as alert young The Impressionists’ disavowal of memory and of artists were concerned. history was one symptom of the gulf between present Because they turned toward contemporary sub- and past that opened ever wider with the spread of jects, the Impressionists had to disavow tradition and the urban-industrial revolution. History, mythology, its institutions—hence their constant demands for and religion, for centuries the chief points of refer- freedom. Critics close to them made a virtual litany

IMPRESSIONISM, ORIGINALITY, AND LAISSEZ-FAIRE 25 Copyrighted Material of this demand. Manet’s friend Théodore Duret wrote rated as a cooperative business, and began display- of all “true artists” that they ing their wares in rented quarters in the fashionable center of Paris. are vigorous persons, profoundly original, most often Forced to seek their own outlets, the painters had obeying in their methods of production a kind of to claim value for their product. This value was lo- instinct and inherent natural strength. Let all these cated in their originality, in the very way their works individuals develop instead of trying to restrict them, were produced. Their paintings were said to be the let them freely express the outstanding aspects of result of the creative individual working in freedom. their nature. Everything that will contribute towards Creativity, that is, was identified with the individual, assuring the individual his freedom of action will not within the social, and originality was the precise 9 contribute to the development of the artist. locus of value. Originality in the business world was equated with invention, and it is revealing that both The Impressionists and their supporters in the words are used repeatedly by the defenders of the Im- press demanded freedom from the restraints of o‹cial pressionists. Real artists, according to Duret, “are in- art policies. In this context, the term “freedom” has ventors, men who have an unusual character, an orig- political meaning, for it paralleled the freedom from inal way of feeling and, if they are painters, a touch, prior restraints that entrepreneurs were pleading for. a sense of color, a way of drawing that are entirely Duret’s words (including the phrase “methods of personal.” Their works are original because they do production”) could have served the cause of a Pari- not imitate existing ones. They earn their way, fur- sian businessman trying to market a product in the face thermore, because they succeed “by painful labor, a of government restrictions that survived from an ear- tension of all their faculties, in giving form to their lier era. Edmond Duranty, another friend of the Im- conceptions.” And these forms are like other prod- pressionists, after invoking the word “liberté” several ucts whose originality guarantees their value: “new times, used the famous economic phrase “laissez- forms, original creations.”11 faire, laissez-passer” to initiate a plea for freedom from By using the phrases “painful labor” and “origi- “this bureaucracy of the mind, steeped in rules, that nal creations,” Duret was crediting the Impression- weighs on us in this country.”10 ists with two kinds of entrepreneurial virtue: hard, Freedom, quite logically for the artists, was re- steady work and brilliant flashes of genius. These two quired both for the sake of producing their works (art values were often separated. Horatio Alger’s boy he- historians recognize this) and for marketing them roes made it the hard way, with patience and dutiful (most art historians avoid this). The laissez-faire attention to the boss’s wishes. Victor Appleton’s Tom market they fought for is the most obvious compar- Swift also made it by the end of each of his books, ison with the commercial world. Having rebelled but it was invariably thanks to his remarkable inven- against the subjects of a prior age, they had excluded tive powers, such as building a giant searchlight in his themselves from the patronage of government and garage. The Impressionists were more like Swift than church, and were forced to develop their own mar- like Alger’s heroes, but Duret and other critics had ket. The role of private dealers greatly expanded in to allay bourgeois fears by showing that genius was their era, and some of the painters, particularly Monet accompanied by hard work and skill. and Degas, were very clever in manipulating their The Impressionists’ originality was based upon in- markets. They played one dealer oª another, learned dividuality and craftsmanship, and was therefore free various maneuvers to keep their prices up, and by- of the monotonous eªects of that unimaginative passed commercial galleries when they could reach kind of work that emulates the perfectly finished clients directly. In December 1873 the Impressionists product, that is, the industrial artifact. This product formed their own exhibition society, duly incorpo- was equated with clever academic art, so that Du-

26 ROBERT L. HERBERT Copyrighted Material ranty, in distinguishing the Impressionists from their originality was the very proof of their genius to a imitators, again used the vocabulary of commerce. larger segment of the middle class, who then pro- In France, he wrote, “the inventor disappears in fa- vided the income. vor of the one who takes out a patent on perfecting; Thorstein Veblen, in The Theory of the Leisure virtuosity wins out over naïve awkwardness, and the Class (1899), oªered an analysis of this phenomenon vulgarizer absorbs the value of the man who has in- that should be applied to artistic originality: novated.”12 The Impressionists’ famous brushwork was cited constantly as proof of their “naïve awk- Hand labor is a more wasteful method of production; wardness,” of their honest and empirical response to hence the goods turned out by this method are more nature, as distinct from the hated polish of conven- serviceable for the purpose of pecuniary reputability; tional painting, where brushwork was suppressed, the hence the marks of hand labor came to be honorific, smooth result constituting a sign of “skill.” Mere pol- and the goods which exhibit these marks take rank ish in painting was equated with the despised values as of higher grade than the corresponding machine of the bourgeoisie, who confused skill with talent, product. Commonly, if not invariably, the honorific marks of hand labor are certain imperfections and and who valued mass production over the rare, imag- irregularities in the lines of the hand-wrought inative, and hand-wrought piece. article. . . . The ground of the superiority of hand- What happened over the course of the nine- wrought goods, therefore, is a certain margin of teenth century was simply this: artists who remained crudeness. This margin must never be so wide as within the sanctioned institutions of art did not have to show bungling workmanship, since that would be to cultivate very much originality (only enough to evidence of low cost, nor so narrow as to suggest the be noticed), because the system of prizes, govern- ideal precision attained only by the machine, for that ment purchases, and church commissions gave them would be evidence of low cost.14 a living. The requirement was to conform enough to these institutions to guarantee continued subsidies Veblen then went on to say that the “honorific” mark and commissions—observing tradition was literally is not appreciated by the ordinary mortals who pre- a way to make a living. How could artists outside this fer the perfection of the machine-made, and there- closed market earn their way? Like upstart busi- fore its appreciation is a way of distinguishing one- nessmen, they had to develop a new product, and in self from the common herd. the process they had to assert its newness, its origi- Originality and handcraft gave distinction and, nality. Their battles with tradition were a means of eventually, great value to the Impressionists’ paint- establishing this essential quality or originality that ings. They were not, therefore, radicals seeking the a few years later was translated into market value. overthrow of their society, despite their flirtations “Radical” or “revolutionary” in relation to the dom- with gypsies, urban itinerants, and other marginals. inant institutions, they were taken up at first by a They were more like other aggressive members of handful of patrons, usually men of new fortunes, the bourgeoisie, doing battle with outmoded institu- and therefore joined the advanced thrust of the ris- tions in order to push themselves and their culture in ing bourgeoisie.13 Their enemy was not the bour- new directions. Nineteenth-century industrial soci- geoisie as a whole, but its stodgiest representatives ety thrived on its critics, using them to lurch forward, who were still mired in the past, whose protection- to shed old ideas, painfully and awkwardly, in a ist attitudes thwarted progress. The painters, like process that bound together critic and target, each re- other advanced entrepreneurs, had di‹culty making quiring the other.15 The Impressionists were the van- their way at first, but this very di‹culty was a sign guard of the bourgeoisie, not of any revolution. Of of their originality, and a half-generation later (for course it did not seem so at the time, not just because most, when they reached their mid-forties) their their work was new or “radical,” but also because the

IMPRESSIONISM, ORIGINALITY, AND LAISSEZ-FAIRE 27 Copyrighted Material world of entertainment and leisure that they favored The whole history of modernism suªers still from was so opposed to the work ethic and the other moral formalism, including its latest manifestation, a underpinnings of the bourgeoisie. trendy combination of semiotics and structuralism From the vantage point of over a century later, it that gives a false veneer of newness, but that pre- is easy to see this. Even so, historians have paid too serves the erroneous idea that art is somehow “pure,” little attention to the undercurrents ﬂowing beneath elevated above history into a realm of its own. Im- the brilliant surfaces of Impressionist paintings. pressionism is a good place to start the necessary Their innovations have been largely seen in terms of reevaluation; it has replaced Renaissance painting as style, and the social meanings of their forms and the art most widely admired and most sought after, their subjects have remained too seldom explored. because it built the foundations for the experience of The history of Impressionism should be rewritten by modern life as it is comprehended and given struc- integrating style and subject, individual and society. ture in visual form.

Notes

Originally published in Radical History Review 38 (1987): demonstrating that its value as property lies behind 7–15. metaphysical, aesthetic, and other considerations of the term. 1. Félix Fénéon, “Le Néo-Impressionnisme,” Art moderne 6. César Graña, “Impressionism as an Urban Art Form,” 7 (1 May 1887): 139. in Fact and Symbol (New York, 1971), 83–84. Welcome 2. The key work in the revision of Impressionism is T.J. though this view was in 1971, it has been superseded by Clark’s The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Clark’s Painting of Modern Life. Clark embeds the idea Manet and His Followers (New York, 1985), a brilliant, of “flickering poignancy” in the social history of original, and often tendentious interpretation (incor- Haussmannian Paris, particularly well in his first porating, amended, two influential earlier articles). My chapter. regret is that he pays insu‹cient attention to Degas, and 7. Max Friedländer, Landscape, Portrait, Still-Life (1949; little at all to Monet and Renoir. See also my Impres- repr. New York, 1963), 224–26. sionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (New Haven, 8. Graña, “Impressionism,” 74 and passim. 1988). 9. Théodore Duret, “Les Peintres français en 1867,” 3. See my Nature’s Workshop: Renoir’s Writings on the Dec- cited in George H. Hamilton, Manet and His Critics orative Arts (New Haven, 2000). (1954; repr. New York, 1969), 110. 4. Among the rare studies of the art market in late nine- 10. Edmond Duranty, La Nouvelle Peinture (1876), ed. teenth-century art are Nicholas Green, “Dealing in Marcel Guérin (Paris, 1946), 50–51. Temperaments: Economic Transformation of the Artis- 11. Théodore Duret, “Edouard Manet,” in his Critique tic Field in France during the Second Half of the Nine- d’avant-garde (Paris, 1885), 121–22. Richard Shiª, teenth Century,” Art History 10 (March 1987): 59–75 Cézanne and the End of Impressionism (Chicago, 1984), [reprinted as chapter 2 in this volume], and Robert oªers by far the most incisive analysis of the new Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-siècle Europe marks and forms of Impressionism, and he deals ex- (Princeton, 1994). tensively with the issues of originality in artistic 5. Only after the original publication of this essay did I find processes. He limits his discussion to aesthetics, how- Michel Melot’s article “La Notion d’originalité et son ever, and does not incorporate social history. importance dans la définition des objets d’art,” in Soci- 12. Duranty, Nouvelle Peinture, 54. ologie de l’art, ed. Raymonde Moulin (Paris, 1986), 191– 13. See Albert Boime, “Entrepreneurial Patronage in 202. Melot’s incisive article concentrates on the relation Nineteenth-Century France,” in Enterprise and of the quantitative rarity of an object to “originality,” Entrepreneurs in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century

28 ROBERT L. HERBERT Copyrighted Material France, ed. E. C. Carter, R. Forster, and J. N. Moody Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms, ed. (Baltimore, 1976), 137–207. Donald N. Levine (Chicago, 1971), 70–95. See also 14. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class Siegfried Kracauer, Orpheus in Paris: Oªenbach and the (1899; repr., New York, 1934), 159–60. Paris of His Time (New York, 1938); Jerrold Siegel, Bo- 15. In addition to Marx, this process has been studied by hemian Paris (New York, 1986); and Green, “Dealing Georg Simmel, especially in his essay “Conﬂict,” in in Temperaments.”

IMPRESSIONISM, ORIGINALITY, AND LAISSEZ-FAIRE 29 Copyrighted Material figure 2.1. Pierre Etienne Théodore Rousseau, Lisière de forêt: Eªet de matin (The Forest at Fontainebleau: Morning), 1850. Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection, London.