Context and the half-life of romanticism Dr Steven Adams University of Hertfordshire, UK <[email protected]> I Introduction In the first two decades of the nineteenth century, many middle-class art lovers and art critics worried about the state of the arts in France. 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 modernism 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. Paris 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 Clement Greenberg, 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 modern art – 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 aesthetics 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 painting, 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 art history 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 Nicolas Poussin, 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 paintings 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 Charles Le Brun, was variously handed down to European art academies 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 Academy 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 French Revolution 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.