Conclusion: Impressionism, Leisure, and Modern Society

Herbert, Robert L.

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Conclusion: Impressionism, Leisure, and Modern Society

Robert L. Herbert

Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society

In this book I have tried to show that impressionist paintings cannot be separated from the history of the events, places, persons, and social institutions they represent; indeed, that to talk only of...

Author

Robert L. Herbert

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00067.012

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15809

Chapter subject tags:Art and society--France--History--19th centuryImpressionism (Art)--FranceLeisure in art--France--History--19th centuryPainting, French--19th century

Conclusion: Impressionism, Leisure, and Modern Society

The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theater, the dance hall, the public-house; the less you think, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save—the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour—your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life….

—Karl Marx, 1844, from Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.

In this book I have tried to show that impressionist paintings cannot be separated from the history of the events, places, persons, and social institutions they represent; indeed, that to talk only of “style” or “motif” is to diminish the true richness of art by limiting the extent of its domain. I have tried also to show that the paintings are not the results of some ineluctable social process, that paintings do not simply illustrate social history, that one cannot detach color, brushwork, and compositional structure from the images they conjure up. Painting is an inventive process that produces an imaginative result; the artist’s critical faculties are engaged in reformulating both the language of art and the subjects chosen from events and places shared with other members of society. The floating planes of Monet’s Garden of the Princess (Pl. 14) are inconceivable without the cleared-out perspectives of Haussmann’s new Paris; the dynamic movements of Degas’s milling jockeys and racehorses give visible form to his era’s competitiveness and its hunger for controlled motion; the puzzling close-ups and odd spatial encounters of Manet’s The Plum (Pl. 75) and A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (Pl. 80) are brilliant interpretations of urban tensions; the caressing colors and textures of Renoir’s Moulin de la Galette (Pl. 135) and Oarsmen at Chatou (Pl. 254) shape modern Arcadias full of longing for social harmony.

Although the impressionists were part of their society, and not separate from it, they occupied a peculiar place. Historians have exaggerated their isolation and the radical nature of their painting, but it is apparent that they formed a vanguard whose role was to reeducate the eyes of contemporaries. They did this in different ways, according to their origins and their temperaments. Manet had the security of an upper-class position, one that let him indulge in a chic world of fashionable elegance, but also allowed him to probe beneath the surfaces of Parisian leisure and entertainment to reveal unexpected psychological and social complexities, couched in terms of bemusement and irony. Morisot, equally upper class, gave professional vision to landscapes and to woman’s domain: domestic interiors, park-like estates, vacation villas. Degas associated with the wealthy and privileged among whom he was born but, embittered by the decline of his family’s business enterprises, he revealed the anxieties and the tensions of his contemporaries with surgical cruelty. Caillebotte, from a wealthy family and younger than the other impressionists, was first interested in the psychology of urban spaces, and then in rowing, sailing, and the landscapes associated with his own suburban properties. Monet was more the upstart provincial, devoid of irony and cynicism, determined to make his way by celebrating the landscapes of modern life. Renoir, the only major impressionist from the working class, was equally incapable of irony, and created the social harmonies that he feared were disappearing amidst the cruel calculations of modern life.

The impressionists were therefore devoted to interpretations of a contemporary life with which they were intensively involved. After youthful essays in mythological, religious, and historical subjects, or in landscapes in the manner of the previous generation, they turned to the characteristic haunts of modern urban life. They frequented the cafés, theaters, parks, and suburbs that they painted, and knew many of the performers and promenaders who appear in their pictures. Since prior conventions of painting were linked with the discarded subjects of traditional art, they had to create new ones. Line, color, shape, compositional design, brushwork, all these had to be recast in response to subjects which until then had been principally the province of illustrators and caricaturists. This they did within the parameters of naturalism, encouraged often by writers who saw in their paintings the common territory of modern life.

Naturalism, for the impressionists, did not mean the detailed narratives of contemporary Paris found in the paintings of fellow professionals and friends like Béraud, Duez, or Stevens (Pls. 22, 74, 269). These other painters did not renew the language of art to the same extent, and they had no significant roles in the development of modernism. Subjects of contemporary life did not suffice for a place in history. It is the particular ways in which the impressionists interwove pictorial form and subject that made their art the dominant vision of early modernism. Their denial of conventional anecdote and inventories of vision sprang from an attitude of detachment in which, like the scientist or detective, the author’s presence was hidden from the viewer in order to give the appearance of objectivity. This detachment or objectivity was not at all passive, but instead a highly concentrated, active force. Vested in paintings, this analytical activity became visible in brushwork and structure as well as in subject, all the more effective a means of communication because the viewer is led to believe that she has deduced the picture’s meaning by herself, without the painter’s interference. Additionally, the subjects of contemporary life did not seem to contain the moral and educational lessons that underlay history painting, and the viewer was further disarmed.

One of the curious features of Impressionism that at first was difficult for viewers to accept was the apparent casualness of their work. By shedding the careful modeling of prior generations, the painters gave the impression of hastily concocted canvases which resulted more from inspiration than from patient labor. The effortless stroke of genius became a leading measure of artistic quality, partly because it denied mere “work.” To examine the paired opposites of creativity and labor is to uncover the profound contradictions of the impressionist era—and of our own. As we shall see, it takes us back to the all-important issue of leisure.

The idea that imaginative products should be free from mere labor is usually traced to the romantics earlier in the nineteenth century. They, in turn, had looked back to the previous century’s ideal of the “natural” person, because they felt that the calculations of industrial life were rooting out instinct, which was seen as the vital force of creativity. Nineteenth-century artists were no longer commonly supported by royalty, aristocracy, and church, which were being shunted aside by the rising middle class. Some artists who went through government schools and submitted themselves to the protective regime of fellowships and government purchases, could fashion successful careers. Others had to go out into the market and sell their products, an expulsion from the shelter of traditional patronage that they converted to the doctrine of “freedom.” It was nothing other than freedom to compete on the open market. At the same time, the prosperity and high culture that they aspired to had to be sharply distinguished from the money-grubbing activity of the bourgeoisie, as well as from the repressive and monotonous character of labor in shop, factory, or field. “Art for art’s sake” was an invention of the romantic era in France, when artists were anxious to establish their own new aristocracy of esthetic virtue. They looked towards a mythical past in which the “natural” person could cultivate self-expression, free of the claims of social utility. This fantasized past, loosely based on eighteenth-century prototypes, had an anti-industrial character. It linked creativity with spontaneity and individuality, with freedom from social restraints and from demands for usefulness. Work was despised because the growing industrial revolution was separating it from inventiveness, originality, and individualism. The products of the factory were despised because they were standardized and marked by a superficial kind of polish or finish. The owners of the factories were despised because they used rationalism and utility as instruments by which to deny the creativity of the worker, to thrust down natural feeling and variety, to subject society to the results of naked calculation.

The inventiveness and spontaneity that independent artists sought were therefore opposed to industrial work, to industrial products (with which they associated academic art), and for many of them, to industrial cities as well. Nature was the desired realm, both the inner world of untrammeled instinct and the outer world of field, forest, riverbank, or seashore. In mid-century, Barbizon art, with its pastoral animals, its peasants and villages, its meadows and harvests, offered consolation to the unwelcome realities of the urban-industrial world. Heroes were made of artists who painted out of doors in order to steep themselves in nature, the better to express this profound longing. Well into the twentieth century, until Impressionism took over, the art of Corot, Diaz, Daubigny, Théodore Rousseau, and Millet constituted the natural vision of the world, the most sought-after art in Western culture. They portrayed a pre-industrial, countrified province where the viewer could recover a sense of pastoral nature that served human needs in its forests, orchards, and fields. Landscape painting, and the closely allied genres of animal and peasant art, rose to prominence in France in the middle third of the century alongside the urban-industrial revolution. It is no real paradox, for “nature,” unspoiled but productive, was one of the city dweller’s essential fantasies. The collectors who towards the end of the century vied for Corot’s forest glades, Daubigny’s ducks, and Millet’s peasants were not farmers, but factory owners, railway magnates, and financiers (and the Japanese who now emulate them are corporate executives and bankers).

Impressionism was grafted onto mid-century painting and slowly made its way during the period when Barbizon art was considered the natural way of seeing. Among vanguard collectors and critics it gradually displaced its predecessor and then, after World War I, it became the dominant form of naturalism. Among the reasons for this is its citified conception of nature and the prominence it gave to leisure and entertainment. Millet’s and Courbet’s social realism was turned into suburban realism. Women and men held parasols and croquet mallets, not sickles and hoes, and dahlias were more attractive than cabbages. (It is true that Pissarro retained much of the outlook of Barbizon artists, but most of his villagers are resting or frankly posing for us.) The work ethic implicit in Barbizon art—it is that which has made the Japanese into the prime collectors of Barbizon art, quite like Bostonians of a century ago—was done away with by the impressionists. The suburb and the coastal resort, not the farm, is the landscape of Morisot, Renoir, Manet, and Monet. This is one of the reasons why Impressionism made Barbizon art seem outmoded: leisure became a vital element of urban longing and one of the chief links with nature. Leisure was a way the city dweller had of sopping up nature by indulging in outdoor exercises beneficial to body and spirit: swimming, boating, or promenading, those middle-class versions of necessitous rural occupations (washing animals, crossing a river, ferrying produce, walking to market).

Within the city, the arenas of leisure that characterized the Second Empire and Third Republic became the preferred subjects of the impressionists. They were no admirers of Louis Napoleon and Haussmann, nor of MacMahon, but they preferred the new Paris to the old. Renoir and Monet redesigned Haussmann’s projectile avenues with the aid of sparkling brushwork and amended perspectives, while avoiding the monuments the Prefect would have been proud of. Caillebotte, Degas, and Manet showed Parisians strolling or loitering along the widened streets, some of them flâneurs like themselves, reconnoitering public places for the sake of their art, others staring through ironwork at the railroad tracks, converting modern industry into a spectacle. It is true that Monet was drawn to the tracks of the Gare Saint-Lazare, and Degas to the shops of laundresses and milliners, but the workplace remained exceptional in Impressionism. Monet bracketed his paintings of the railroad with views of the Tuileries gardens and the Parc Monceau, and in the same years Renoir was engaged in converting the courtyards and seamstresses of Montmartre into gardens of love from which work and the misery of surrounding streets were excluded.

The technique of the impressionists, at first highly controversial, eventually was accepted as the perfect vehicle for their themes of leisure. Between the two World Wars it was commonplace to liken Monet’s brushwork to the flitting of butterflies or the flight of birds. Impressionist technique embodies an apparent spontaneity that suits the idea of life seized on the qui-vive, a lack of finish that leaves room for improvisation, a heightened color, and animated brushwork that appeal to the sensuousness of our leisure-oriented culture; in short, a way of working that springs from our “natural” depths, not from the authority-ridden dogmas that thwart true feeling. This is why both the institution of the café-concert, and Degas’s spirited renderings of it, look forward to rock-and-roll concerts of our own era.

The harmony of technique with impressionist subjects has been all the more persuasive an ideal because it merges with the view born of the industrial revolution which separates life’s finer things from work. Leisure, nature, beauty, femininity, and culture are loosely grouped together, in opposition to labor. This is an especially pervasive view among the better-educated and better-off members of the middle and upper classes. Leisure and diversion for the lower classes take on forms that retain the anxieties of the workplace and that do not require departure from the city: radio, recorded music, concerts of popular music, professional sports, and television. Those higher up in the social scale can escape into “nature” more readily, out to their suburban dwellings and to Caribbean vacations. In the city they take ballet, classical music, legitimate theater, art collecting, and fine arts museums as their fiefdoms. For them culture and leisure are inseparable because they are the opposite of work, which is the domain of masculinity, rational calculations, machinery, abstract relationships, those harsher things of life that it is better to avoid. Of course, as we saw in the impressionists’ Paris, work is not literally banned from the precincts of culture and entertainment. Behind the scenes at the opera, the sea resort, or the museum are legions of workers, from the performers to the costume-makers, from the groundskeepers to the curators. An exhibition of Impressionism is the result of hard effort, but viewers can nonetheless indulge their own leisure thanks to the high culture involved, which insulates them from the reality of work. Impressionism has become the perfect expression of a culture of leisure.

In its own era, it was the hegemony of entertainment and leisure that linked Impressionism with Parisian society. American and European visitors to the capital were struck by its preoccupation with theaters, cafés, operettas, concerts, dances, promenading, racing, and boating. Paris became Europe’s playground, thanks in part to the fact that Louis Napoleon wielded leisure and entertainment as instruments of public policy, designed to buy off dissent from his autocratic rule and to enhance his government’s prestige. Earlier restrictions on public performances were done away with by imperial fiat, and quick fortunes were built upon the phenomenal rise of cafés-concerts, operettas, vaudeville, music halls, and circuses. Not only were there government-sponsored festivals, concerts, regattas, holidays, and expositions, but also the vast system of parks, squares, and tree-lined avenues which were settings for the simpler forms of leisure. Light and air, those shibboleths of Impressionism, were the gifts that the Second Empire offered to Parisians. Amidst the highly artificial designs of parks and streets, light, air, and foliage functioned as a kind of fashion, an embellishment that exploited progressive social concern for salubrity while it covered over the ruthless uprooting of the old Paris: clean air and entertainment were significant features of the massive transformation of the city.

The fact that leisure was an agent of social change, and not just a symbol or by-product, shows most conspicuously in the suburbs. Parisians seeking distraction along the banks of the Seine forever changed its appearance and the lives of former residents. Traditional uses of water and riverbank gave way to rowing, sailing, swimming, promenading, and dining at Bougival, Chatou, and Argenteuil, those favored impressionist subjects. Entrepreneurs of entertainment and real estate bought out fishermen and farmers, or cut up former aristocratic estates into lots for suburban villas. Further from Paris, along the Channel coast, vacationers produced the same kinds of pressure, so that fishing villages were turned into resorts, fishing families into artists’ models, laundresses, or swimming instructors, beachfronts into boardwalks and promenades. A portion of the capital’s entertainment industry moved in summer months to Trouville or Deauville, to play to the Parisians and foreigners who gathered in such places to perform their elaborate social games in the bosom of “nature.”

Artists and writers, as we have seen, were not just observers of these transformations but participants, and for this reason their paintings cannot be regarded as timeless pieces of beauty that rise above social history to some purified realm. Writers like Alphonse Karr, painters like Charles Mozin, and musicians like Offenbach owned resort property, and their activities helped propagate the fame of their chosen villages. The impressionists frequented the suburbs and the seashore in summer months, where they joined other middle-class vacationers (except for Cézanne and Pissarro, so little in sympathy with Parisian society). The families of Morisot, Caillebotte, and Manet owned property in the near countryside; Renoir and Monet, by painting the banks of Argenteuil and Chatou, gave them an enduring fame they probably would not otherwise have enjoyed. Boulogne and Sainte-Adresse did not need Manet’s and Monet’s paintings to ensure their renown, but impressionist pictures, exhibited and sold in Paris, nonetheless had their share in the dialogue between city and resort; they helped prop up the illusions of holiday-seekers. The association of nature and leisure with art meant that eventually, in the twentieth century, tourists went to certain villages and sites because the artists had painted there. Ruskin said that nature replaced God in the nineteenth century. We might add that in the twentieth, art has replaced nature.

The themes of this book could be profitably pursued over the twenty-five years that followed the last impressionist exhibition in 1886. The café was an important subject for Seurat, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec, and retained a key place in pre-war Cubism and Futurism; promenaders, gardens, and parks characterize the work of Seurat, Bonnard, Vuillard, and several of the Fauves; horses and the racetrack reappear in the work of Toulouse-Lautrec, Boccioni, and Jacques Villon; riverbank leisure was taken up by Seurat, and later by Derain, Vlaminck, and other Fauves; déjeuners sur l’herbe and bathers are among Matisse’s favored subjects; seaside resorts were painted by Seurat, Signac, Dufy, Matisse, and Braque. Painters continued to frequent the society of bohemians and marginals, and some of them, notably Toulouse-Lautrec and Picasso, featured circus performers, prostitutes, and urban itinerants to such an extent that the lines between their lives and their art cannot be clearly drawn.

This continuity demonstrates the vital place that leisure and entertainment took in the evolution of modern art. Of course, this does not mean that later artists simply continued Impressionism. The detachment that characterized advanced painting of the 1860s and 1870s virtually disappeared in the following decades. Seurat’s “scientific” objectivity emerged as a puppet-like world of artificial design; instead of the variety and individuality of Degas’s café-concert performers, musicians, and audiences, he gave his figures an Egyptian-like solemnity; his and Signac’s seaports are vacuumed clean of sociability; in Toulouse-Lautrec’s and Picasso’s Blue Period cafés, the reportorial neutrality of Degas and Manet gives way to poignant appeals to the viewer’s emotions; Matisse’s bathers and dancers undulate in a timeless world more evocative of art history than of contemporary life; in Picasso’s and Braque’s cubist cafés, the provocative displacements and subtle disunities of Manet’s pictures turn into a world of fragments and juxtapositions.

By comparison with Cubism, the mother lode of twentieth-century art, and all that evolved afterwards—Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art—Impressionism now seems distant from us. Although we credit it with being the gateway to modern art, we also treat it as the last of the great Western styles based upon a perception of harmony with natural vision. That harmony, long since lost to us in this century of urbanization, industrialization, and world wars, remains a longed-for ideal, so we look back to Impressionism as the painting of a golden era. We flock into exhibitions of paintings that represent cafés, boating, promenading, and peaceful landscapes precisely because of our yearning for less troubled times. The only history that we feel deeply is the kind that is useful to us. Impressionism still looms large at the end of the twentieth century because we use its leisure-time subjects and its brilliantly colored surfaces to construct a desirable history.

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