The Present Prospects of Social Art History 9781501341564, 9781501341595, 9781501341588

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The Present Prospects of Social Art History

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The Present Prospects of Social Art History Edited by Anthony E. Grudin and Robert Slifkin

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2021 Selection and editorial matter © Anthony E. Grudin and Robert Slifkin, 2021 Individual chapters © their authors, 2021 Cover design: Ben Anslow Cover image: JJ Peet, BRICKVACEVEST, 2016, porcelain, stoneware, cotton, nylon, aluminum, paper, digital camera, soil, seeds and flowers, 47 x 20 x 10 inches, private collection All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Grudin, Anthony E., editor. | Slifkin, Robert, editor. Title: The present prospects of social art history / edited by Anthony E. Grudin and Robert Slifkin. Description: New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020039287 (print) | LCCN 2020039288 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501341564 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501341588 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501341571 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Art–Historiography–Methodology. | Art and history. Classification: LCC N380 .P66 2021 (print) | LCC N380 (ebook) | DDC 709--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039287 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039288 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-4156-4 ePDF: 978-1-5013-4158-8 eBook: 978-1-5013-4157-1 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Illustrations

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Introduction: The Present Prospects of Social Art History  Robert Slifkin and Anthony E. Grudin 1 1 Social Art History in Retrospect  Elizabeth Mansfield 11 2 Marat’s Two Bodies  Hector Reyes 33 3 The Anti-Heroism of Modern Life, or the Social History of Art in Standard Time  André Dombrowski 51 4 T. J. Clark, Peasant Materialism, and the End of Social Art History  Anthony E. Grudin 69 5 Daumier and Method  Jordan M. Rose 85 6 The Age of Social Art History: Berger, Clark, Fried  Alexander Nemerov 101 7 A Secret History of Martin Wong  Marci Kwon 113 8 Vernacular Modernism All Over the Deep South  Our Literal Speed  131 9 Note to Self: On the Blurring of Art and Life  Jo Applin 143 10 The Role of Form in the Social History of Art  Joshua Shannon 159 11 Abject Art History  Robert Slifkin 175 List of Contributors Index

189 191

Illustrations Mourning Athena, fifth century BCE, marble Johannes Vermeer, A Maid Asleep, 1656–67 Gustave Courbet, A Burial at Ornans, 1849 Jacques-Louis David (studio of), The Death of Marat, 1793 Michel Bourdin, Henri IV, King of France (1553–1610) Le portraict du defunct roy Henry le Grand IIII du nom roy de France et de Navarre en son lict de deuil, c. 1610 2.4 Jacques-Louis David, Michel Gérard, member of the Convention with his family, n.d.  3.1 Carl Spitzweg, The Cactus Enthusiast (Der Kaktusliebhaber), c. 1850 3.2 Carl Spitzweg, The Cactus Friend (Der Kaktusfreund), c. 1858 3.3 Carl Spitzweg, The Knitting Sentinel (Der strickende Wachposten), c. 1855 3.4 Gustave Caillebotte, On the Pont de l’Europe, 1876–7 5.1 Honoré Daumier, Monsieur Daumier, votre série est charmante . . . , Caricaturana, 1838 5.2 Honoré Daumier, C’est toujours de même flatteur . . . , Caricaturana, 1838 5.3 Charles Philipon, Louis-Philippe’s metamorphosis into a pear, 1831 5.4 Honoré Daumier, Projet d’une médaille, 1848 5.5 Honoré Daumier, Gargantua, 1831 5.6 Honoré Daumier, Un héros de juillet, mai 1831, 1832 5.7 Honoré Daumier, La Lecture, 1840 6.1 Le Nain Brothers, The Card Players, c. 1640–45 6.2 Paul Cézanne, The Card Players, c. 1890–92 7.1 Martin Wong, My Secret World, 1978–81, 1984 7.2 Martin Wong, Quong Sang Chong Co. Sky Ship, 1982 7.3 Wong Family Benevolent Association, 1990 7.4 Martin Wong, Harry Chong Laundry, 1984 7.5 Martin Wong, Portrait of the Artist’s Parents, 1984 7.6 Martin Wong, Grant Avenue, San Francisco, 1992 7.7 Martin Wong, Chinese Telephone Exchange, 1992 7.8 Martin Wong, Saturday Night, 1992 7.9 Martin Wong, Ms. Chinatown, 1992 7.10 Heinz Peter Knes and Dahn Vo, photograph of Martin Wong’s Collection at the Wong Fie Residence in San Francisco 7.11 Heinz Peter Knes and Dahn Vo, photograph of Martin Wong’s Collection at the Wong Fie Residence in San Francisco 7.12 Martin Wong, Chinese New Year’s Parade, 1992–4 1.1 1.2 1.3 2.1 2.2 2.3

20 23 23 36 43 43 47 55 57 57 61 86 87 88 90 91 92 96 102 109 114 116 117 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127

 Illustrations vii   8.1 OLS First performance in Greenville, South Carolina, September 26, 2015   9.1 Lee Lozano, “Private Book 1,” c. 1968    9.2 Lee Lozano, 12 Wave, 1969   9.3 Lee Lozano, “Private Book 8,” April 5, 1970, p. 114   9.4 Lee Lozano, No title, 1969 10.1 Edouard Manet, Argenteuil, les canotiers, 1874 10.2 Robert Havell, Jr., after John James Audubon, American Flamingo, Phoenicopterus ruber, 1838 10.3 Frederic Edwin Church, The Heart of the Andes, 1859 10.4 Robert Bechtle, Foster’s Freeze, Escalon, 1975

132 146 150 153 155 164 167 168 169

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Introduction The Present Prospects of Social Art History Robert Slifkin and Anthony E. Grudin

In a recent account of the impact of social art history within the subfield of American art, Alan Wallach has persuasively argued that the history of the methodology can be separated into three distinct phases. The first of these was inaugurated in 1905 by Georgi Plekhanov, who took up the question of “a discernible causal relationship between . . . economic relations in society . . . and art” and made it central to art historical inquiry.1 The debate over art’s autonomy or historicism had long divided art history; indeed, it seemed to be installed within the field’s very name. From Vasari and Winckelmann through to Burckhardt, Wölfflin, and Warburg, art history struggled to find ways to elucidate art’s relationship to its historical context without conflating the two spheres completely. Rather than solving this problem, Plekhanov’s question gave it new relevance and urgency, tying it to fundamental issues of inequality, exploitation, and social justice. This proved compelling for scholars like Frederick Antal, Arnold Hauser, and Max Raphael, who attempted in various ways to pursue Marx’s insight that art was one of the “ideological forms in which men [sic] become conscious” of conflicts regarding “economic conditions of production,” and “fight [them] out.”2 What’s more, as Gail Day has shown, they attempted to pursue this new “materialist direction” without succumbing to “orthodox Stalinism,” and its tendency to view culture as a mere consequence of economic forces.3 Wallach’s second phase of the Marxist social history of art was inaugurated in 1973, with the publication of T. J. Clark’s books, Image of the People and The Absolute Bourgeois. Clark claimed that, by focusing so heavily on styles and their purported tendency to “reflect” their social context, the previous phase of social art history had tended to overlook the specific ways in which art and society interact, and particularly in moments when art might, like theory in Marx’s formulation, “become a material force once it seizes the masses.”4 The most pressing of these, for Clark, were times when artists had volunteered their work or had it pressed into service, during political crisis and revolution. Clark proposed a return to the intensely critical and self-critical intricacies of Hegelian dialectics in order to pursue these goals, which would have to include a reinvestigation of deep questions regarding consciousness, representation, and the powers and limitations of aesthetic experience.5 Social art historians, he argued, would also have to confront the intentional and unintentional complicity of their own field in various previous depoliticizations of radical art.

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Wallach notes that Clark’s project was pivotal in defining “the art-historical generation of 1968,” but that it also faced significant—perhaps fatal—structural obstacles in the American academic context. The relentless and radical criticality it demanded was typically unwelcome in universities that were rapidly transforming into “corporatized institution[s]” mostly defined by strict disciplinary specialization. New critical approaches to art history, most notably those influenced by feminism, postcolonialism, queer studies, and French and Frankfurt School theory, also posed powerful alternatives. Faced with these challenges, social art history split into Marxist and merely “Marxian” variants, the latter “a far-from-Marxist ‘social history of art’ that contributed to a rejuvenation of the subject within the strict confines of the academic marketplace.”6 As a result, Wallach argues, social art history has been simultaneously universalized and defanged: many of its basic questions and assumptions are now widely accepted in the field—practically “a disciplinary reflex” for histories of modern art—but they are only rarely yoked to its foundational commitments to radical social critique and upheaval.7 Indeed, a number of scholars have recently identified social art history as “the most widely practiced approach to art history today” and “something of a new default function of the field.”8 Certainly, for many students of art history—those who might encounter the discipline in an introductory survey lecture, for instance—a socialhistorical perspective is almost understood as the basis of the discipline so that one takes the requisite art-history course as an efficient—and hopefully entertaining— opportunity to learn about, and orientate oneself within, the vast and ever-growing arc of world history (or at least western history, from the proverbial Parthenon to Picasso or the only slightly more adventurous if equally alliteral Pyramids to Pollock.) Yet, such an understanding of art as an index of historical change, which provides a rudimentary but no doubt essential foundation for a great deal of social-historical analysis, has become increasingly tenuous as the traditional boundaries, both spatial and temporal, seem fractured and ill-equipped to comprehend the intersections and multiplicity of historical narratives that a globalized, postcolonial, and technologically mediated world has engendered. These acts of decentering and acknowledging differences, generally categorized by the term “postmodernism” and sometimes understood as motivating what has been called “the new art history” that emerged in the 1970s, sought to emphasize the contingency of meaning across time and space. They have also brought to the fore how many of the most influential models of historical causality and change rely upon artificial and idealistic norms that are typically predicated on hierarchies of power which largely have advanced a western, European, patriarchal, heteronormative, and humanistic perspective at the expense of other cultural and subcultural traditions.9 These new, postmodern approaches have greatly expanded not only the sorts of questions scholars bring to their inquiries but also, equally important, the types of objects deemed worthy of analysis. Marshaling a variety of interdisciplinary methods ranging from semiotics to psychoanalysis, the new art history sought to wrest the work of art out of formalist hermeticism and into larger cultural fields, so as to consider, as Svetlana Alpers wrote in one of the earliest declarations of this trend, “the work of art

 Introduction 3 as a ‘piece of history,’” thus suggesting the fundamental social-historical (if not outright Marxist) influence on many of these theoretically inclined postmodern methods such as feminism, postcolonialism, and other approaches to the study of art that position the art object within broader cultural factors.10 While the academic study of art has regularly regarded the aesthetic object as an index of history (through such signifiers as style, iconology, and authorial performance), the new art history and the subsequent waves of postmodernisms (globalism being one of the most recent) have made the work’s broader cultural engagement a central albeit highly problematic issue. As the conception of visual representation expanded to include a host of new objects (as well as events and actions), various thinkers began to consider the pivotal role of image-making within a wide spectrum of social practices and accordingly developed sophisticated critiques of an image’s corroboration to external reality. By questioning representational veracity and the politics of vision, the new art history (as well as a great deal of art produced in the past thirty years) demanded, in Leo Steinberg’s famous terms, “other criteria.”11 These questions regarding the appropriate methodological perspectives or even the appropriateness of evaluative criteria for the study of art have become especially problematic as the subfields of modern and contemporary art have taken on an increased visibility in the discipline. The long-established approaches of iconography and stylistic attribution, as well as the more vanguard conventions of modernist self-reflexivity, are arguably unsuitable to much of the new art being produced, which often defies conventional notions of authorial intention and medium specificity. Likewise, the new art history’s attention to context and contingency enabled contemporary art (along with the so-called global art)—art, one might say, with an “underdeveloped” relationship to the past whether because of the recentness of its creation or its appropriation of non-western heritage—to be considered an acceptable subject for art historical analysis.12 As the discipline’s focus became more synchronic and less diachronic and scholars began to reconsider established canons and previously marginalized artists and objects, a conceptual space opened up for works of art whose analysis was not dependent on questions of periodization. Consequently, a number of important approaches emerged in the last decades of the twentieth century that sought to complicate these models of genealogical development across time and within bounded spaces. If this unbracketing of the work of art from its context was first performed in the name of demythification, typically through some form of structural analysis or through an engagement with phenomenological and spatial modes of perception, more recently scholars have paid attention to the anachronistic ways works of art can resonate across time and space.13 How, one might ask, can a social art historical method dedicated to a model of historical specificity— let alone Marxist teleology of international revolution—continue to be meaningful in the face of such potent (and, one may argue, historically grounded) critiques? * * * The title of our volume, The Present Prospects of Social Art History, summons Clement Greenberg’s 1947 essay “The Present Prospect of American Painting.”14 In it, the critic

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presents a summary of the history of modern art, breathtaking in its sweeping precis on what the critic saw as the material conditions that propelled the history of art from the mid-nineteenth century to his postwar present (and, as is often noted, serving as a nationalistic justification for the US prospect of becoming the new epicenter of modernism).15 Greenberg’s jingoism is evident in the word “American” in the title of his essay, which we have removed in our appropriation, not least because the adjective has become problematic as scholars have become increasingly attentive to questions about the United States’ imbricated relations to global and especially Pan-American politics and have sought to interrogate the country’s assumed central place from accounts of postwar modernism. And while, as the range of subjects addressed by the authors in the volume attests to the fact that there is nothing specifically American about the book’s contents, one might discern a distinct western focus raising questions concerning the relation between social art-history approaches and those attuned to a global art history. Likewise, it should be noted that all of our contributors come from the Anglophone realm of the discipline. While it could be argued that Great Britain and the United States have produced the most influential models of social art history, at least since the postwar period, there are vital and significant practitioners of the social art history in other countries.16 The allusion to Greenberg’s essay also, to a certain degree, summons the work of T. J. Clark, a scholar whose English training and academic career, largely in the United States, in many ways exemplifies this Anglophone tradition of social art history even as his work has done much to expand upon the conventions and whose influence over the “present prospects” of the practice continues to be significant.17 This seems especially important considering the long shadow cast by Clark upon many of the chapters in this volume. A number of the contributors studied with Clark and even those who didn’t cite his work in their chapters. One might even go so far as to describe this book’s interest in “the present prospects” of social art history as motivated by the question of what a “post-Clarkian” social art history would look like: Does it entail a social art history devoid of an ardent commitment to Marxist politics (and one that may event reflect Clark’s own arguably softening politics in his recent work)?18 Finally, on a more basic level, our title is meant to suggest that our book presents a selection of chapters by some of the most innovative and promising scholars who continue to explore the social bases of artistic production. A brief synopsis of their respective contributions in the volume follows. * * * Elizabeth Mansfield’s essay, “The Social History of Art: The Doing and Undoing of a Discipline,” proposes a social historiography of social art history, arguing that (contrary to most accounts) the method’s origins can be traced to the eighteenth century rather than the nineteenth or twentieth, and that its history has been governed by three successive (although often overlapping) guiding principles: positivist, Marxist, and subjective, each influenced by “specific temporal and cultural geographies.” This revised history suggests that the very tensions and contradictions that social art history

 Introduction 5 traced in art history were formative, and ultimately fatal, for it as a methodology, as well. The globalization of the art market, with its signature emphasis on trade and the romanticization of art, Mansfield argues, has revealed the impossibility of social art history as a plausible methodology. Hector Reyes’s essay on “Marat’s Two Bodies” challenges social art history from another direction. Arguing that many of T. J. Clark’s art-historical contributions remain opaque to the field at large, Reyes proposes a reconsideration of his achievements as primarily in the field of intellectual history rather than Marxist theory. By shifting the emphasis of art history from a history of ideas to an intellectual history, Clark was able to abandon the rigid categories of period and style and pursue a more critical and situational method of inquiry, an “alternative intellectual history” upon which contemporary scholars can still draw. Reyes argues, however, that Clark’s work is limited by its tendency to prioritize synchronic analysis over “the ways in which form accrues and acquires meaning over time.” Reyes tests the potential of this approach by proposing a diachronic reading of Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat (1793) and focusing on the ways in which Marat was, like a monarch, “invested with two bodies,” one representational, the other corporeal. A similar concern for temporality and the importance of diachronic analysis guides André Dombrowski’s essay, “The Anti-Heroism of Modern Life, or the Social History of Art in Standard Time.” Through an investigation of paintings by Carl Spitzweg and Gustave Caillebotte, Dombrowski argues that social art history tended toward a synchronic, presentist orientation that prioritized moments of dramatic rupture and overlooked the social history of time and, more specifically, the drastic rationalization of temporality undertaken in the late-nineteenth century. Spitzweg’s and Caillebotte’s paintings counteract this tendency through their comical and critical appraisals of these shifting approaches to time. In Spitzweg’s mid-nineteenth-century paintings The Cactus Enthusiast and The Knitting Sentinel, Dombrowski sees a humorous mood that “derives from the codependence of two seemingly opposed time-frames”: continuity and regularity. This canny meditation on modern temporality is further explored in the artist’s letters. Caillebotte’s On the Pont de l’Europe (1876–7), with its flâneur mesmerized by trains flowing through a station, evidences a similar interest in modern temporality and the “systematization of time” it inaugurated. In his essay on Honoré Daumier, “Daumier and Method,” Jordan Rose proposes that the artist’s caricatures from the 1830s and 1840s undertook a sustained and illuminating investigation of the consequences of economic liberalism. Focusing on Caricaturana (1836–8) and A July Hero (1831), Rose argues that Daumier used caricature to investigate the possibilities of “counter-languages” and “anti-imageries” that could critically examine the new world of speculation, opportunism, and greed. In A July Hero, this analysis culminates in a reading of the image—Rose’s essay thus directly contributes to a social art history that would prioritize moments in which specific artistic practices and works contribute to a critical investigation of capitalism. His essay closes with a meditation on the ways in which social art history can continue to pursue an investigation of the possibilities of representation within a world pledged to abstraction and fungibility.

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In a related vein, Anthony Grudin’s chapter on “T. J. Clark, Peasant Materialism, and the End of Social Art History” explores hints that Clark has offered regarding a future for social art history beyond its apparent subsumption into a depoliticized academicism. Grudin argues that this future centers on a constellation of ideas related to “peasant materialism,” a worldview that Clark describes as having been almost lost to historical knowledge, but still at least partially retrievable through sustained attention to certain works by Bruegel, Poussin, and others. This constellation, Clark has argued, might provide the contemporary Left with a more effective framework for meaningfully contesting capitalism—“a worldview that is tragic, earthly, and stubbornly resistant to promises of redemption and revolution.” Alexander Nemerov’s essay, “The Age of Social Art History: Berger, Clark, Fried,” addresses social art history’s history and prospects through the matrix of life stages, stages he sees visualized in Louis Le Nain’s well-known painting, The Card Players. Nemerov correlates these stages with the careers and approaches to temporality of three prominent art writers: John Berger, T. J. Clark, and Michael Fried. In Berger’s work, the Le Nains are celebrated as maverick artists whose messianic objects anticipate the future. Clark shares Berger’s respect for the intelligence of art, its propensity to know things its viewers do not, but emphasizes its negative and critical insights above its positive and prophetic ones. On Fried’s account, an artwork’s greatest achievement with regard to temporality is its capacity to achieve presentness, and thus to escape or suspend the pressures of history. For Nemerov, each of these three approaches provides its own striking and distinct forms of access to historical time, forms that coalesce in the painting and ultimately resonate physically on an existential level for its viewers as a profoundly unanswerable question. Marci Kwon’s chapter “A Secret History of Martin Wong” considers how the meticulously detailed paintings of the queer, Chinese-American artist present an alternate model of social-historical practice that pays less attention to large-scale “world-historical” dynamics and, instead, focuses on the mundane, day-to-day, yet no less significant, events which serve as archival references in their own right and, as the author notes, “invite us to question what constitutes proper historical fact.” Unlike many of the most well-known artists (and related critical approaches) associated with the heyday of postmodernism in the 1980s, Wong’s practice is less concerned with critical models of skeptical disclosure than a process of revelation of occluded subjects and histories. Kwon argues that the series of works depicting landmarks and seemingly commonplace scenes from San Francisco’s Chinatown offers a form of history from the bottom up in which the lived experiences of subjects that have been typically marginalized from conventional accounts of the city’s history are given voice and recorded for posterity. Moreover, specific details that the artist included in his imagery contain “secret histories” of these populations that Wong emphasized in his imaginative and fictional recreations, which often included objects taken from the artist’s own vast collection of ornamental objects. As such, a paradoxical connoisseurship informs the social-historical matrix established by Kwon’s analysis of Wong’s art, one in which the question of who was an insider and who an outsider to certain realms of knowledge becomes fundamental to understanding the possible significance of the works, both now and when they were produced.

 Introduction 7 A related interest in the everyday and the regional rather than the “world-historical” informs “Vernacular Modernism All Over the Deep South,” the contribution of Our Literal Speed (OLS), a collective of artists and art historians whose performances and published works creatively and provocatively reconsider established forms of the practice of art history. Blurring the line between scholarship and fiction, OLS seeks to encourage new models of addressing cultural practice, one that recognizes the fundamental affinity between art history’s manifest object of analysis and its manner of analysis. Taking social art history’s avowed commitment to common or vulgar subjects as a sort of starting point, the authors present a vivid fictional narrative that takes place in southern United States around 1959, which is to say at the height of both the “American-type formalism” as championed by Clement Greenberg and the moment of the civil rights movement which found some of its most potent manifestations in cities like Selma, Alabama. On one level, the text presents an array of vernacular techniques that the discipline of art history has conventionally ignored, which nonetheless employ instances of self-reflexivity and formal strategies similar to the so-called high modernism. On another level, it serves as an extended allegory of the limits of modernist aesthetics circa 1959 by locating concrete moments when these modernist discourses intersected with spaces uncolonized by modernist thought to consider the ways that these established aesthetic paradigms failed to attend to matters of race or vernacular cultural practices.  In her essay “Note to Self: Lee Lozano and the Blurring of Art and Life,” Jo Applin considers another atypical if not vernacular cultural practice in Lee Lozano’s series of fastidiously filled notebooks. Recognizing the artist’s note-taking as a crucial component of her more conventional artistic production, Applin analyzes these dynamics of intimacy and publicness as a way of addressing the particular pressures facing women artists working in the wake of the first wave of feminist activism. Understood as part of a broader countercultural politics that sought to blur if not bridge the gap between art and life, Lozano’s notebooks invest the day-to-day exigencies of bohemian life with a formal structure that, as Applin shows, aligns with other practices from the period such as happenings that sought to register new modes of experience and bring new materials into the aesthetic realm. Applin goes on to consider how the artist’s series of “Wave” paintings, which were often conceptualized in the notebooks, attempted to align the private aspects of life into the public realm, and how this desire to align these conventionally separated realms took a psychic toll on the artist. On a more methodological level Applin considers how the inherently personal format of the notebook makes questions of self-exposure and intimacy crucial as factors that inform any art historical analysis that seeks to incorporate such archival materials, as well as how questions of gender inform both artistic practice and the archival record. Joshua Shannon’s essay, “The Role of Form in the Social History of Art,” addresses one of the most persistent criticisms waged against social art history, namely its tendency to foreground the content (and for that matter, context) of a work of art over its formal properties. As he notes, such contextual analyses run the risk of art history losing its identity as a discrete academic discipline. Arguing that form is central to the most stimulating and important examples of social art history, Shannon identifies a

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tradition of formalist social art history by first considering the survival and expansion of a certain strand of formalism in the poststructuralist art history associated with the journal October and the perhaps surprising formalism undergirding T. J. Clark’s influential study of impressionism in his book The Painting of Modern Life. Shannon then goes on to analyze an array of recent contributions to the field of American art history in which questions of form motivate the fundamentally socially informed theses. In these examples, scholars study the ways that social structures inform aspects of artistic representation and, even more crucially, the way that social structures in themselves can be studied as formal entities so that cultural discourses themselves are recognized as forms of representations and “frames for knowledge.” As such, art historians, those who are experts in the dynamics of representation, can offer analyses of both cultural artifacts and the cultures that produce them. The question of social art history’s place within the larger discipline of art history is central to Robert Slifkin’s essay, “Abject Art History,” which considers how the method’s fundamental commitment to external (i.e., non art historical) evidence marks it as what he describes as an example of abjection. According to Slifkin, the practice of social art history, in the way that it seeks to situate artistic production and reception within broader historical contexts, can be understood as a methodological approach that ultimately reveals something that is categorically not art historical. Understanding this supplemental character of social art historical method in terms of the concept of abjection, Slifkin argues that this referential excessiveness determines the methodology’s engagement with reality with all of its messy contingency. An abject art history is one in which the significance of a work of art is always tangled up with objects and events beyond its material form or even the artist’s intentions, engendering a notably indecorous conception of the work’s place in the world. Recognizing the abject excessiveness of social history brings to the fore the challenges and advantages of such an approach (while it also underscores the critical reproach it often receives from certain theoretical perspectives).

Notes 1 Georgi Plekhanov, “French Drama and Painting of the Eighteenth Century,” in Art and Society & Other Papers in Historical Materialism, trans. Anon., http:​//www​.marx​ ists.​org/a​rchiv​e/ple​khano​v/190​5/fre​nch-d​rama.​htm (accessed January 5, 2019); cited in Alan Wallach, “On the Social History of American Art,” in A Companion to American Art, ed. John Davis, Jennifer A. Greenhill, and Jason D. LaFountain (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2015), 72. 2 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, https​://ww​w.mar​xists​ .org/​archi​ve/ma​rx/wo​rks/1​859/c​ritiq​ue-po​l-eco​nomy/​prefa​ce.ht​m (accessed January 5, 2019); cited in Wallach, “On the Social History,” 72. 3 Gail Day, Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 10. 4 Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right,” ed. Joseph O’Malley, trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 137.

 Introduction 9 5 T. J. Clark, “The Conditions of Artistic Creation,” Times Literary Supplement, May 24, 1974, 561. 6 Wallach, “On the Social History,” 74, 75, 79; Warren Carter, Barnaby Haran, and Frederic J. Schwartz, “Preface,” Renew Marxist Art History (London: Art Books, 2013), 29. 7 Day, Dialectical Passions, 25. 8 Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk, Art History: A Critical Introduction to Its Methods (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 134; Thomas Crow, “The Practice of Art History in America,” Daedalus 135 (Spring 2006): 86. 9 See Jonathan Harris, The New Art History: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2001.) 10 Svetlana Alpers, “Is Art History?” Deadalus (Summer 1977): 1. 11 Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 55–92. 12 On the appropriation of cultural heritage as a critical strategy within contemporary global art, see David Joselit, Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalizaton (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020). 13 For representative examples of such structural and anachronic decontextualizations, see Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981); Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Book, 2010). 14 Clement Greenberg, “The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture” (1947), in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 160–9. 15 Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 16 One could cite the work of Martin Warnke and Horst Bredekamp in Germany and a somewhat more sociological strand of social historical practice in France in the work of Dominique Poulot and Antoine Lilti. 17 Our citation of Greenberg’s essay, with its attention to the material conditions of production, however roughly sketched out, were indeed crucial to Clark’s own scholarship and it could be argued that a great deal of Clark’s most influential work was filling in the blanks with archival evidence and more nuanced models but nonetheless maintaining a very similar canon to Greenberg’s. See T. J. Clark, “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,” in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, ed. Francis Frascina (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 47–64. 18 On this tendency, see T. J. Clark, “For a Left with No Future,” New Left Review 74 (March–April 2012): 53–75 and Daniel Spaulding’s review of Clark’s Picasso and Truth, “Towards an Apotropaic Avant Garde,” Mute, February 14, 2019. http:​//www​ .meta​mute.​org/e​ditor​ial/y​our-p​osts/​towar​ds-ap​otrop​aic-a​vant-​garde​ (accessed March 11, 2019).

10 

1

Social Art History in Retrospect Elizabeth Mansfield

What’s in a Name? The term “social history of art” asserts reassuring methodological transparency. Not only does the phrase deliver a straightforward description of the subjects presumably at hand, but it also echoes the title of a formative text: Arnold Hauser’s The Social History of Art (1951). That the term “social history of art” came into wide use only after the appearance of Hauser’s study would seem to confirm the origin of the methodology as a postwar tendency, Marxist in its approach to cultural analysis, and a likely offshoot of the field of historical study called social history. But such a genealogy would be incomplete. What came to be designated as the social history of art in the second half of the twentieth century is an approach with much earlier origins, its antecedents coalescing as a methodology in the eighteenth century in response to Enlightenment ideas about culture and society.1 Broadly defined, the social history of art is a mode of analysis that privileges material forces of production and consumption over individual volition or metaphysical impulses as determinative for the history of visual culture. This emphasis on material conditions overlaps to some extent with social history, but distinctions between the two practices are significant and worth noting. Scholars from both fields have tended to assume that their methods were homologous if only by virtue of their shared nomenclature: surely, the social history of art is an extension of social history into the area of visual studies? Yet, though the interests of the social history of art and social history certainly have intersected, especially during the 1970s and 1980s, social history dates not to the Enlightenment but was, instead, developed largely in Britain during the 1960s as an emphatically empirical, quantitative, and socially conscious corrective to the discipline’s tendency to privilege diplomatic, military, and elite histories. A chief aim of social history was to broaden the scope of historical inquiry to include ranks of society normally left out as irrelevant: the urban working classes, criminals and the incarcerated, rural laborers, women and children, for example. Methodologies that would facilitate a more even-handed, democratic approach to historical analysis were especially sought after, and quantitative analysis quickly emerged as an essential tool in this vein. Microhistory would follow as a standard for social history, allowing the

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The Present Prospects of Social Art History

particularities of individuals’ lived existence to take precedence over accounts of the rise and fall of empires, kingdoms, and nations. The social history of art, in addition to its much earlier origins, has never exhibited an attachment to quantitative methods. Even now, with the so-called “empirical turn” in humanities exerting pressure on the field of art history—largely through growing interest in digital and computational methods—social art history is moving sluggishly (if at all) in this direction.2 Another distinction concerns the role of microhistory as a means of reorienting historical analysis. Localized study of an individual artist or family of artists, a single patron, or a particular workshop or atelier has always figured into art historical practice, whether in the service of connoisseurship or formal analysis or any number of methods and is not a distinguishing characteristic of social art history. What is more, the social history of art maintains an interest in elite culture and society. Even as social art history has alternately widened or narrowed the scope of its field of interest since its emergence in the eighteenth century, its methods have been elastic enough to accommodate elite as well as humble social actors and cultural forms. The distinction between social history and the social history of art bears delineating here, because the occasional conflation of these endeavors has contributed to a misunderstanding of the aims and the history of social art history. It might even be a factor in recent disavowals of social art history by scholars formerly allied with its practice. A potent illustration of this retrenchment occurred in the year 2000 at art history’s annual professional meeting in North America, organized by the College Art Association. That year, a panel of four art historians and one social historian addressed the question, “Whatever Happened to the Social Art History?”3 The presumed kinship between social history and the social history of art that structured the panel contributed to a heated discussion among panelists and audience members, with several attributing the declining influence of social art history to its failure to fulfill the promise of its presumptive formation in the wake of 1968. Others heralded the emergence of visual culture as an antidote to the hegemonic and hide-bound social history of art, a critique that failed to recognize visual culture’s own descent from the incorrigible methodology. Anxiety about the status of the social history of art persists. “For many today, it seems difficult to ascertain whether the social historical approach has succeeded beyond all expectations or failed completely.”4 Behind statements like this hover questions about methodological efficacy and ethics. What are a methodology’s terms of success or failure? By what means might they be measured? Pursued energetically enough, questions like these begin to reveal uncertainties about the integrity of the discipline itself. Methodological debates inevitably reveal a discipline’s vulnerabilities. And in this case, discipline and methodology share a history: both emerged as expressions of Enlightenment attitudes toward culture and society, and both find their earliest codification in the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68). For this reason, a consideration of the history of the social history of art promises insight not just into the vagaries of methodological trends but into the intellectual and ideological investments of the discipline as well. This enmeshed history of discipline and methodology invites a reflexive historiography. Because the discipline of art history and the social history of art are,

 Social Art History in Retrospect 13 to some extent, mutually constitutive, it makes sense here to apply the axiom that a methodology cannot be an exception to its own theory.5 To seek to understand the social history of art by attending to the material conditions from which it arose along with the circumstances of its development, promulgation, and reception serves both to demonstrate and to test its premises. The social history of art is as much a consequence of specific economic, political, and institutional conditions as any form of cultural production, and a materialist approach to historiography could elucidate these forces. What is more, because this methodology is intrinsic to the discipline, a reflexive approach offers a means of identifying the limits of art historical inquiry.

Three Tendencies in the Social History of Art It is possible to discern over the long history of the social history of art three successive tendencies within the method, what here will be described as positivist, Marxist, and subjective. These tendencies should not be understood as discrete phases. Though they developed more or less sequentially, they also overlapped and, at times, blended. And the point of identifying these three tendencies is not to insist on a rigid structural account of the social history of art, but to give shape to the fact that it has a history.6 Methodologies—like works of art—operate within specific temporal and cultural geographies. In the case of the positivist tendency, the dominant social conditions were those of European mercantilism and nascent nationalism. Within the same compass as these social forces arose the intellectual practice of empiricism and an attendant desire for predictive approaches not just to the natural sciences but to human behavior as well. Thus, the use of “positivist” to describe the initial mode of the social history of art is not intended to link the movement to a particular philosophical movement, but, rather, merely to highlight the empirical and predictive impulses that propelled early contributions to the methodology.

Positivist The 1764 appearance of Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art confirmed the influence that empirically grounded research in natural philosophy was having on studies of culture. Art thus joined history and even theology as domains of the new science.7 Winckelmann’s monumental publication dispensed with then dominant approaches to the analysis of the art of antiquity. Aesthetic philosophy and antiquarianism were pushed aside in favor of direct observation and a systematic appraisal of the visual arts as products of local climate, geography, political systems, and the artistic temperaments fostered by these conditions. Just as important, his field of study—ancient art—could not be accommodated by the genre of artists’ biographies popularized by Giorgio Vasari (1511–74) two centuries earlier.8 With few works convincingly associated with a named artist, ancient art resisted classification

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The Present Prospects of Social Art History

according to individual skill or genius, a method so persuasively applied by Vasari to the artworks made by his Italian colleagues and near-contemporaries. Winckelmann begins the first chapter by announcing the systematic approach through which he will explain the origins of art and the causes of differences in the appearance of art through time and across cultures. Every aspect of artistic production and reception can be traced to social and material conditions. An ardent Hellenophile, Winckelmann nonetheless had to accommodate the apparent fact that Egyptian sculpture—which he found aesthetically wanting—reached its maturity long before Greek sculpture.9 The causes why art flourished at an earlier date among the Egyptians appear to have been the dense population of the country, and the power of their kings . . . nature has apparently intended for it a single, indivisible, and consequently mighty kingdom, since it is traversed by one large river, and its boundaries are the sea on the north, and lofty mountains on the other sides. . . . Hence, Egypt enjoyed in a greater degree than other kingdoms tranquility and peace—by which the arts were brought into being and nurtured.10

Straightaway, Winckelmann lays out the factors that guide the production of art. Geography, climate, political system, and social temperament not only determine where and when the visual arts will develop, but these conditions also affect the formal character of works of art. This happens through two means. The first is the popularity of human figures in art. “Man has been in all ages the principal subject of art,” an observation from which Winckelmann proceeds to assert that individuals from temperate climates are inherently more beautiful and, therefore, artworks that represent these peoples are de facto the most beautiful. The second means by which the physical and social conditions of a culture determine the appearance of its visual arts is through their influence on language and “mode of thought.”11 And, just as the most attractive bodies were formed in Greece, so were the most aesthetically sympathetic minds: “The Greeks . . . lived under a more temperate and a milder rule; . . . and as their language is picturesque, so also were their conceptions and images.”12 Advantageous natural resources only tipped the scales further in favor of the Greeks. Their access to diverse types of fine marble (a material particularly coveted, according to Winckelmann, by all cultures that value art) contributed to the superiority of their art.13 Winckelmann presses his theory even further, observing that aesthetic sensitivity— once formed by local social and material conditions—is so culturally specific as to be incapable of even recognizing foreign works of art. We must . . . take into consideration, not merely the influence of climate alone, but also that of education and government. For external circumstances effect not less change in us than does the air by which we are surrounded, and custom has so much power over us that it modifies in a peculiar manner even the body, and the very senses with which we are endowed by nature; thus, for instance, an ear accustomed to French music is not affected by the most touching Italian symphony.14

 Social Art History in Retrospect 15 With this, Winckelmann offers not merely a mode of social art history, but also a theory of visuality that holds that visual perception is learned and mediated by cultural experiences. Here, then, is an early hint that the eventual shift toward visual culture as a distinct mode of analysis was always a part of the agenda of the social history of art. Winckelmann’s attraction to empirical and systematic methods was, of course, not unique in the eighteenth century. By the time Winckelmann published his History of Ancient Art, metaphysical rationales for imperial expansion had already been jettisoned for frankly economic ones; political realms were increasingly justified on the basis of linguistic, ethnic, or national identities of “citizens” rather than on intangible ties of fealty or custom. Winckelmann’s social history of art deploys a similar logic. Defining cultural production in terms of communities, geographies, raw materials, and genetic inclinations confirmed the naturalness and inevitability of incipient nationalism and its attendant codification of racialism; what is more, casting art as a particular sort of cultural commodity satisfied the demands of an ascendant bourgeois patron class keen to assert its legitimacy. A collector might acquire Flemish lace, Chinese ceramics, Italian pictures, and shawls from Kashmir; Winckelmann’s approach comported well with an expanding conception of material and cultural value. Also characteristic of this initial, positivist mode of social art history was its predictive character: whereas metaphysical accounts of artistic production accommodate exceptional instances of cultural expression, social art history circumscribed artistic production within the bounds of normativity—there are no artists ahead of their time. A more ambivalent meditation on the degree to which individual agency is contingent upon larger social forces appears in Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (1860).15 Though not addressed specifically to the history of art, the book highlights cultural production and the fame attained by artists as distinguishing qualities of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian society and served as a model for scholars seeking to analyze the visual arts in relation to social and material forces. Burckhardt never doubts or discounts the capacity of an individual to achieve significant social or cultural ends, even to influence the course of historical events, through personal volition. But he does contend that the existence of this capacity for individual agency was as much a response to prevailing social conditions as Venice’s prosperity was a response to its geography. “Man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such,” Burckhardt states, before asserting that “It will not be difficult to show that this result was owing above all to the political circumstances of Italy.”16 Even so, Burckhardt at times strains to accommodate the surpassing achievements of some individuals, notably artists, within his stated rubric. The work of the artist is attributed as much to the “deepest spring of his nature” as to the social conditions of the period. Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo are the only figures cited as full embodiments of the Renaissance impulse toward “perfecting the individual.”17 The tension apparent within Burckhardt’s text bears consideration at this point. His insistence on social forces as the agents of cultural change softens when he is confronted with artistic achievements that seem to exceed social needs or his own historical

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The Present Prospects of Social Art History

expectations. Artists are, for Burckhardt, somehow different sorts of cultural actors than the dukes, popes, merchants, and condottieri that likewise rose to prominence in Renaissance Italy. Art is a category of social production apart. This distinction reveals something about the culture within which Burckhardt himself was living. By the midnineteenth century, romantic theories of art’s transcendent character had become mainstream in Europe, fueling popular fascination with outré artistic personalities as well as the market for art. That Burckhardt could comfortably excuse artists from being wholly subject to social forces accords with the prevailing assumptions of his time. What is more, the exceptional quality afforded to art in Burckhardt’s writing gives an early hint of a tension latent within the social history of art. Once endowed with the potential for transcendence, works of art stood capable of upending the project of social art history itself: if there are some forms of cultural expression that cannot be accommodated by the rigorous application of materialist analysis, then maybe a systematic, empirical approach to the study of culture is impossible? Certainly, Burckhardt had his doubts: In the wide ocean upon which we venture, the possible ways and directions are many; and the same studies which have served for this work might easily, in other hands, not only receive a wholly different treatment and application, but lead also to essentially different conclusions.18

With this, Burckhardt distances himself from the confident positivism of Winckelmann’s approach, signaling the advent of the critical self-consciousness that would inflect the later development of social art history. Burckhardt’s postromantic ambivalence about the metaphysical status of “art”—is it just another product of prevailing social conditions or is art invested with some ineffable quality that defies social analysis?— came in for a sharp corrective by social historians of art with greater faith in positivist methodology. If Winckelmann first codified the positivist approach to the social history of art, the French cultural historian Hippolyte Taine (1828–93) added sufficient rigor and scope to the approach to make it foundational for the nascent academic discipline of art history. Taine emerged as a major thinker in France at the dawn of the Second Empire. His unorthodox ideas, which included a pronounced anticlericalism and resembled too closely the radical positivism of Auguste Comte, made it difficult initially for Taine to launch an academic career.19 His close ties to the court of Napoleon III, however, eventually smoothed the way to his appointment as professor of art history at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. There, he expounded his positivist mode of social art history, an approach he clarified in a book of literary history, History of English Literature (1864).20 It was here that he first tendered his dictate that culture derives from three essential influences: “la race, le milieu, et le moment.”21 Art, like literature, was not the product of an individual genius. Instead, it is derived from the social and material conditions in which the artist or writer worked. For Taine, “la race” accommodated inherited traits or genetic propensities; “le milieu” encompassed geographic, material, and social conditions, and “le moment” referred broadly to a period and its attendant attitudes and beliefs.

 Social Art History in Retrospect 17 Accessing these influences required historians to work empirically, with a positivist’s faith in the possibility of confirming absolute truth. Taine’s definition of empiricism was unshrinking: “Its first rule in the search for truth is to reject all extraneous authority, to yield only to direct evidence, to wish to touch and to see, to have faith in testimony only after examination, discussion, and verification; its greatest aversion is for affirmations without proof, which it calls prejudices, and for unquestioning belief, which it calls credulity.”22 Thus cloaked in the apparent universality of positivism and empiricism, Taine’s method promulgated a decidedly local ideology. His attachment to the inevitability of biological inheritance resonates with contemporary racialist theories. Likewise, “le moment” resembles then current theories of the Zeitgeist and alluring notions of national and cultural destiny. With “milieu,” Taine transfers Winckelmann’s constellation of influences from a context of mercantilism—where natural resources are not seen as having any relationship to social systems—to a context of colonialism, which condenses material and human resources along with location. In other words, what was formerly just accessible here becomes annexable. The influence of Taine’s ideas on his contemporaries was profound, and it shaped the course of social art history through the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.23 His ideas were perhaps most readily accepted in Britain, where Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art was widely read and cited through the nineteenth century, paving the way for Taine’s approach. Also contributing to the Victorian sympathy for a social history of art were the writings of John Ruskin (1819–1900), which often presented works of art as evidence of cultural values and social conditions. Like Winckelmann, Ruskin attributed superior artistic achievement to optimal social circumstances. In Ruskin’s case, however, such conditions were to be found only in a Christian society: it was a gothic cathedral rather than a marble statue of a Greek athlete that testified to the existence of conditions best suited for the creation of great art.24 And Ruskin commended direct observation. Rather more deductive than inductive in his approach to empiricism—Ruskin never developed as rigorous or systematic an approach as Winckelmann—he nevertheless recognized his method as a form of social science.25

Marxist A new pulse can be discerned in the writings of Ruskin’s followers, among them artist and social theorist William Morris (1834–96). Morris’s insistence that the quality of all forms of visual and material culture depended on the conditions in which artists and artisans labor was in keeping with the ideas of socialists like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65) and Karl Marx (1818–83). Indeed, Morris attempted to enact in much more concrete terms Ruskin’s airy pronouncements regarding the necessity of endowing labor with the dignity of physical as well as intellectual production. And the admixture of socialist and Marxist theories into Ruskin’s foundational teachings produced not just an approach to arts production but also a new mode of social art history.

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Another early herald of the influence of Marxist ideas on the practice of the social history of art was Emilia Dilke (1840–1904). She was, unlike Morris, one of Ruskin’s lapsed disciples; the cause of their break was Dilke’s decision to pursue a forthrightly positivist mode of art historical scholarship. This eschewal of Ruskin’s subjective analysis of the relationship between society and art in favor of Taine’s cool scientism struck her mentor as a disavowal not just of his method but also of his values. Her eventual adaptation of Marxist ideas to the history of art was, for Ruskin, completely indecipherable; her decision to devote herself to the study of French art of the sixteenth through to the eighteenth centuries was equally mystifying. Dilke’s efforts in this vein culminated in a book on the early history of the French Royal Academy under the direction of Charles Le Brun, Art in the Modern State (1888). The study fuses Tainean cultural inquiry with a Marxian concern for class struggle and the “invisible pressure” of socioeconomic forces. Unlike Ruskin and Morris, whose writings placed the blame for the breakdown of society (and, hence, the corruption of art) at the feet of the Industrial Revolution, Dilke saw industrialization as a necessary step toward democracy. The strife produced by industrialization is, for her, a catalyst for revolution rather than an impediment to it. This important distinction in her approach emerges in the dialectic through which she structures her argument. Dismissing the popular contrast between medieval and industrial societies as mere nostalgia, she looks, instead, to a dialectic between democratic and absolutist ideologies. Although Dilke never uses the term ideology in her discussions of state formation, the concept is central to her argument as the “invisible pressure” of a political and social system.26 A form of false consciousness motivates the artists and administrators described in Art in the Modern State. What is more, Dilke exhibits a critical selfawareness in her insistence that she, too, is subject to the invisible pressure of social systems. Her identification with those subject to absolutism in the seventeenth century at moments even leans toward a kind of exhortation to her readers to resume the social transformation abandoned with the accession of Louis XIV: Just as in the sixteenth century we see the individual upraising himself against moral and religious oppression, even so we see today the revolt of those who have suffered from the social and political tyranny inherent to that ideal of the state which was inaugurated by Richelieu and Colbert.27

Where Ruskin lamented the Industrial Revolution, Dilke accepts it as an inevitable stage in historical progress; and where Ruskin called for a revival of medieval practices and aesthetic values, Dilke awaits the resumption of an interrupted Renaissance and the restoration of its ideals of individual agency and artistic perfection. Thus, by the second half of the nineteenth century, social art history had shifted to accommodate political theories that presumed the workings of a kind of social unconscious. The popular dissemination of the theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1820–95) prompted receptive scholars and critics to consider the possibility that the unseen forces of ideology were as constitutive of culture as were political systems, social attitudes, and access to raw materials. Marxist social art historians

 Social Art History in Retrospect 19 insisted upon the capacity for culture to serve political ends, whether radical or conservative. What is more, these social art historians saw their own participation in a dynamic cultural-political matrix. Early experiments in application of political theory to art history by writers such as Emilia Dilke were surpassed in scope and influence by the signal contributions of the Hungarian expatriates Frederick Antal (1887–1954) and Arnold Hauser (1892– 1978). Only the more ambitious scope of Hauser’s social history of art argues in favor of its greater attention here, its broader schema revealing in sharp relief the intellectual and political efficacy promised by Marxist cultural analysis in post– Second World War Europe and America. Trained in aesthetics in his native Hungary and in art history in Italy, Hauser worked in Berlin and Vienna before relocating to London in 1938 to escape Nazism. It was there that he first published, in English, The Social History of Art (1951). The importance of this text for the development of social art history cannot be too strongly emphasized. Hauser, importantly, departed from his predecessors by applying to the history of art a fully developed methodology adopted from the discipline of sociology. Whereas writers like Winckelmann and Dilke worked up ad hoc sociohistorical approaches in response to the specific aesthetic, material, or cultural characteristics of the art they sought to analyze— ancient Greek and Roman art in the case of the former; early modern French art for the latter—Hauser brought a well-tempered methodological apparatus to bear on the objects of his study. A consequent rhetorical forcefulness and internal cohesion distinguish his writings. Furthermore, while earlier examples of social art history focused on a discrete period or style of art, Hauser confidently provided an account of the entire history of Western art, from Paleolithic cave paintings to cubism and film. In this way, Hauser was able to illustrate how the history of art could be understood within a Hegelian structure, which is macrocosmic in its conception of inevitable progress through successive phases of dialectical tension and synthetic resolution. Hauser’s resolution of the vagaries of millennia of visual arts production into a tidy dialectical sequence might seem, at first consideration, to be a departure from the fundamental preoccupations of the social history of art on the conditions of production and reception. On the contrary, Hauser’s discussions of formal characteristics of works of art arise out of lengthy preliminary analyses of political systems, economic conditions, and, above all, class relations. “One may, indeed, one must, be content to establish a correspondence between the history of style and the history of labour organization; it is idle to enquire which of the two is the primary and which is the secondary.”28 Despite the breathtaking scope of his study, which was initially published as two hefty volumes, Hauser nonetheless draws his reader into a close examination of economic, political, and material factors that affect arts production in such different contexts as Neolithic settlements and Hollywood film studios. Despite Hauser’s unprecedented ambition in seeking to accommodate the whole of Western art history within his sociological schema, he echoes Jacob Burckhardt’s earlier awe in the face of certain works of art. Some pieces, such as the fifth-century

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The Present Prospects of Social Art History

Figure 1.1  Mourning Athena, fifth century BCE, marble. (Source: Art Resource). BCE Greek marble relief sculpture known as Mourning Athena (Figure 1.1), prompt a kind of methodological humility. It would, however, be quite wrong to conclude that the social conditions of contemporary Athens were necessary or even ideal for the production of art of this type or rank. For the creation of high artistic value, no simple sociological recipe can be given; the most sociology can do is to trace some elements in the work of art back to their origin, and these elements may well be the same in works of very different quality.29

That Hauser should here characterize his preceding arguments about the relationship between ancient art and prevailing social systems as a “simple sociological recipe” is striking. His otherwise confident presentation of his account of Western art history falters when negotiating the sculpture of the Athenian Acropolis. Unexceptional artworks are, apparently, perfectly suited to sociological analysis. So, what is it about the Mourning Athena or other works of “high artistic value” that renders a sociological approach ineffectual? Hauser makes clear that, in terms of the social forces that produced them, they are identical to any other works performed under the same conditions; yet, works of high artistic value are apparently the result of something more or something different than social forces, which Hauser does not here attempt to explain. But a hint may be found earlier in his discussion of Greek art. Hauser attributes to seventh- and sixth-century Ionian sculpture evidence of the first manifestation of “art for art’s sake.” During the period of rule by the Tyrants, there emerges “a completely new conception of art, it is no longer a means towards an end, but an end in itself.” This crucial step away from a purely utilitarian role for art makes this perhaps the most important moment in Western art history. Yet, it coincides with a relatively ignoble phase in Greek political history. Hauser redresses this by proposing that the then prevailing political system had nothing to do with art’s apparently sudden liberation from its utilitarian character. “It may be that this change cannot be located in any period of time, that it is the eruption of a primeval impulse whose first intimations

 Social Art History in Retrospect 21 are as old as art itself.” Here, Hauser risks undermining his entire enterprise: if social conditions do not matter in this case, why should they matter in other instances? Then, as if rhetorically throwing up his hands, Hauser wonders whether anyone can discern in an ancient statue how much is meant to serve “magic, propaganda or cult, and how much is pure, autonomous, aesthetic creation detached from the struggle for life and the fear of death?” Holding up the possibility that no analysis can ever retrieve the historical meaning of artworks, Hauser regains the courage of his methodological convictions: Even if there is some primeval impulse breaking through, the fact that it now gets the upper hand so that works of art are created for their own sake is very significant indeed, although the allegedly autonomous forms which arise in this way are no doubt sociologically conditioned and may serve a hidden purpose.30

While the uncertain ontological status of the work of art occasionally derailed Hauser’s account of the social history of art, this was not always the case for subsequent scholars. Indeed, it is precisely art’s exceptional status that drives T. J. Clark’s social history of art. Clark remains strongly identified with the post-1968, Anglo-American efflorescence of social art history. Since the publication of his first two books in quick succession in 1973—companion volumes devoted to the French Realist artists Honoré Daumier and Gustave Courbet, respectively—Clark has been an important theoretician of the social history of art and its chief popularizer.31 In the introductory chapter to the second book, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution, Clark introduces an important new idea into the social history of art. Here, he asserts that art is not a reflection of ideology, by which he means that it is not a simplistic case of social cause and cultural effect. The latter mode of analysis is what he attributes to Hauser and Antal. And the weakness of their accounts, for Clark, derives not merely from their mechanistic model of cultural production, but also from their failure to see that the special status of art is precisely the means of entry into the social history of art. In other words, the surplus of meaning or the intense aesthetic experience provoked by works of art is the clearest path into the dense forest of ideology. For his predecessors, then, it was a case of failing to see the trees for the forest: What is barren about the methods that I am criticizing is their picture of history as a definite absence from the act of artistic creation: a support, a determination, a background, something never actually there when the painter stands in front of the canvas, the sculptor asks his model to stand still. There is a mixture of truth and absurdity here. It is true and important that there is a gap between the artist’s social experience and his activity of formal representation. Art is autonomous in relation to other ahistorical events and processes [e.g., “aesthetic tradition”], though the grounds of that autonomy alter.32

It is via this supposition of art’s quasi-autonomous quality that Clark works out his methodological differences with earlier social historians of art. For Clark, works of

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art are uniquely capable of exposing the operation of ideology, which is why they are potentially much richer objects of historical study than, say, mass-produced wares or illustrated technical manuals. “A work of art may have ideology (in other words, those ideas, images and values which are generally accepted, dominant) as its material, but it works that material; it gives it a new form and at certain moments that new form is in itself a subversion of ideology.”33 Clark offered an even more straightforward explanation of the work of the social historian of art in a piece written shortly after his debut volumes appeared. Writing for the Times Literary Supplement’s audience of academics and intellectual elites, Clark makes a case for art history’s disciplinary as well as social value: Take Vermeer, for me a kind of touchstone—of quality, clearly, but also of the elusiveness of this process at its most intense. It seems to me that Vermeer’s work exploits the fact that any ideology is by its nature incoherent: its parts do not fit; its expanding generalizations cannot quite coexist with any one image, with any precision (and the precision itself is always partial, always made out of ideology) in the materials you work with. What we attend to in Vermeer is the subtle— infinitely subtle—lack of synchronization between two different interiors, which ideology wants us to believe are consonant: between the space and furnishing of those ascetic, gaudy rooms and the space and furnishing of a particular gaze, a particular inner life.34

What Clark finally gave to the social history of art was a clear rationale for its chosen subject. And it is Art with a capital “A” that Clark means to set apart here. Technical or aesthetic processes can yield the “anodyne, illustration: we are surrounded by duplicates of ideology: but the process of work creates the space in which, at certain moments, an ideology can be appraised.”35 It was during these certain moments that Vermeer executed his touchstone paintings, that Courbet created The Burial at Ornans, and that the avant-garde artists toward whom Clark directed much of his scholarship produced the seminal works of modernism (Figures 1.2 & 1.3). And what distinguishes these works of cultural expression as art is their capacity to reveal both the inescapable bounds of ideology and the artist’s struggle with or against them. With Clark’s intervention in the field, the equivocations apparent in earlier works of social art history could become an artifact of the method’s early phases. The exceptional character of art made it essential rather than superfluous to the social history of art. Indeed, Clark’s gesture opened the way for a resurgence in the practice of social art history. Typically attributed to the events of 1968, this renewed sense of purpose was also driven by the methodology’s heightened relevance to the study of important works of art.36 Thus, right-thinking (albeit surely left-leaning) social historians of art were as free to direct their study to the glittering salons of ancien régime France and the sacred vaults of the Sistine Chapel as to the gritty realism of Daumier and the rural subjects of Constable. Yet, the seemingly liberatory potential of Clark’s clarion to art historians, exhorting them to see the potential for their field to engage in trenchant social critique and to conceive of their subject as virtually any manifestation of “the means and materials of artistic production,” came to be viewed as politically elitist and

 Social Art History in Retrospect 23

Figure 1.2  Johannes Vermeer, A Maid Asleep, 1656–67, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Source: Art Resource).

Figure 1.3  Gustave Courbet, A Burial at Ornans, 1849, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay. (Source: Art Resource).

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culturally conservative. Ironically, it was precisely Clark’s attempt to demystify “art” for the benefit of social art history that was ultimately cast as yet another instance of the fetishization of the Western canon of fine art.

Subjective Writing in the aftermath of two world wars, the first modern pandemic, and an economic crisis of previously inconceivable proportions, Hauser’s sociological approach to art history offered a reassuringly systematic, rational means of accounting for the efflorescence of art under disparate political and economic conditions. His method gained widespread popular interest if not uniform scholarly praise. Criticized by some for its weak Marxism and by others for its insupportable generalizations and attachment to a Hegelian notion of historical progress, The Social History of Art nonetheless became the model for an art history based on social science. At the same time, another approach to the social history of art was emerging, one that distanced itself from interpretive systems that promised to show how culture was related to broad patterns of historical progress. Taken up, instead, were approaches to understanding human behavior and culture that privileged contingency, subjectivity, and individuality. It was by drawing upon psychoanalytic theory and other philosophies of consciousness—such as phenomenology—that social art history developed its third mode. Subjective—as opposed to positivist or Marxist— social art history attempts to accommodate the psychological and somatic experiences of individuals within broader trends of social and cultural practice. Previous attempts to accommodate individual agency within an approach that tended to cast subjects as socially constituted had faltered, largely due to their reliance on romantic conceptions of artistic production and aesthetic experience.37 Yet, in the final decades of the twentieth century, a number of social historians of art developed persuasive arguments by focusing their inquiries on where the social unconscious (or ideology) intersects with a particular subject’s experience of the visual world. Certainly, T. J. Clark’s scholarship participates in this approach, though his enduring emphasis on class struggle allies his work strongly with the Marxist strain of social art history. More exemplary of the later trend is Michael Baxandall, whose seminal Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (1972) opened the way for new directions in social art history during the final quarter of the twentieth century. His theorization of a “period eye” invited historians to reconstitute—to the extent possible—the psychological, cognitive, corporeal, and social conditions that shape how individuals negotiated their visual surroundings. Not unrelated to Baxandall’s reorientation of the social history of art toward questions of perception and somatic (or, if one prefers, aesthetic) experience was Francis Haskell’s work on the history of taste. Like Baxandall, Haskell applied to cognitive processes formerly viewed as transcendent, ahistorical, and universal—what Hauser would have Romantically cast as “primeval impulses”—the same responsiveness to social systems and cultural norms that earlier authors had attributed to works of art. The synthetic approach pursued by art historians such as Baxandall and Haskell was not unrelated to modes of inquiry being taken up by cultural historians, especially

 Social Art History in Retrospect 25 in France, who injected a strong pulse of historiographic self-awareness into their Marxist or materialist analyses. In this way, scholars like Michel Foucault (1926– 84) and Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) engaged with their historical subjects while simultaneously subjecting disciplinary habits to scrutiny. The terms poststructuralist and postmodernist have been used to describe these methods, largely generated by mid-twentieth-century French philosophers and social critics, that push ahead with ambitious projects of cultural analysis while simultaneously highlighting the assump­ tions and biases inherent in such interpretive schema. New lines of inquiry into the history of art predicated on the inseparability of individual identity formation and performance from social systems and institutional demands emerged from this synthesis, propelling postcolonial, queer, and race-conscious approaches to the social history of art.38 Perhaps most effective in reorienting the scope of the social history of art was Linda Nochlin’s feminist intervention “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” which integrated gender-based cultural analysis into institutional critique.39 As resilient as social art history was in its adaptability to the theoretical demands of feminism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, queer studies, and postcolonialism, the method eventually began to fray. And this happened just as the subjective mode of the social history of art was achieving widespread scholarly acceptance. A new concept animated the analyses of subjective social art historians: the methodological framework of visual culture, also referred to as visual studies. Representative of the crucial role played by visual culture for the subjective mode of social art history is Svetlana Alpers’s The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. A specialist in seventeenth-century Dutch painting, Alpers expanded her field of study to include the practices of visuality. This expansion beyond the circuit of production, acquisition, and appreciation of paintings was, according to Alpers, existentially necessary for her field of Dutch art. Because the art of the Italian Renaissance had played such an outsized role in honing of the methods of art history—the majority of landmark studies produced since the discipline’s inception were addressed to the visual arts of early modern Italy—a raft of assumptions about how and why images look the way they do had been encoded into the practice of art history. In consequence, aesthetic or design practices that failed to align with the values of Renaissance Italian artistic or perceptual norms were inevitably misunderstood or, worse, cordoned off from art historical attention altogether. Alpers’s social history of Dutch art proceeded from a description of early modern Dutch visuality, that is to say, an attempt to recuperate attitudes toward images, contemporary theories about the way vision functioned, social controls on looking, and cultural meanings of sight. “In Holland the visual culture was central to the life of the society. One might say that the eye was a central means of self-representation and visual experience a central mode of self-consciousness.”40 Key to Alpers’s argument was her deployment of the term “visual culture.” As she would later explain, The term “visual culture” I borrowed from Michael Baxandall. But my use of the notion was different from his because of the nature of the case. The difference image/text was basic, in both historical and in critical terms, to the enterprise. But

26

The Present Prospects of Social Art History I was dealing with a culture in which images, as distinguished from texts, were central to the representation (in the sense of the formulation of knowledge) of the world. I was not only attending to those visual skills particular to Dutch culture but claiming that in that place and at that time these skills were definitive.41

As Alpers makes clear, her sociohistorical analysis necessarily had to address the very notion of art itself. The designation “visual culture” allows Alpers to attend to the complex of material and ideological pressures that constitutes the practices necessary for meaning and value to be linked to images. That the social history of art should eventually turn its analytic attention to the status of “art” is, of course, no surprise. It was only by virtue of the long shadow cast by romanticism that categories like “art” and “artist” were able to masquerade well into the twentieth century as something other than expressions of purely social exigency, of ideology. Earlier social historians of art, such as Hauser and Burckhardt, signaled the persistence of this romantic myth when they occasionally confessed to being intellectually overawed by certain works of art. Clark, of course, understood very well the impossibility of excluding works of art entirely from their enmeshment with ideology, and he ingeniously directed the internal tension inherent to the social history of art toward productive ends. In this way, Clark enabled social art history, for a time, to have its artistic masterpieces and demystify them, too. But the social history of art’s inevitable if belated articulation of the concept of visual culture rendered Clark’s approach unsustainable. The context for Alpers’s comments on her invocation of the term “visual culture” was a questionnaire sent to her along with a number of other scholars in 1996 by the editors of October, an academic journal strongly identified with the application of poststructuralist theory to the visual arts. Alpers was among several respondents who had long been associated with the social history of art, and her reply can be seen as a rebuke against the implication embedded within all four of the questionnaire’s prompts that visual culture is at odds with social art history.42 Thomas Crow, whose PhD thesis was written under the supervision of T. J. Clark, offered an even sharper retort to the possibility that visual culture was now itself a discipline as opposed to merely a conceptual bracket. Drawing a parallel with philosophy’s popular displacement by selfhelp books, Crow wrote: “To surrender that discipline to a misguidedly populist impulse would universally be regarded as the abrogation of a fundamental responsibility.”43 Despite the protestations of social historians of art such as Alpers and Crow, the “Visual Culture Questionnaire” makes clear that, even as early as 1996, the historiography of visual culture was not generally understood as intertwined with that of the social history of art. Why this historiographic blindness? To answer this question, it might be useful to return to the conference session described in the first section of this chapter. In response to the session’s eponymous query “Whatever Happened to the Social Art History?” speakers and audience members rehearsed many of the doubts expressed in the Visual Culture Questionnaire. The social history of art was alternately derided for its sentimental attachment to aesthetic experience and chided for not engaging energetically enough with feminism and queer theory; and visual culture was cast either as an external corrective or inevitable outcome of

 Social Art History in Retrospect 27 the method. Above all, what shaped the discussion was the panel’s adherence to a truncated history of the social history of art that dated the movement’s initiation to the 1960s. This allowed most participants and even some audience members to couch their observations in terms of their personal experiences: assertions about the aims or scope of the method were frequently introduced with evocations of “according to my memory.” Thus deracinated—and reduced to anecdote—the social history of art could be set aside as a relatively recent methodological trend, the expression of a set of political concerns that had been replaced by newer, more urgent ones. Most important, this revisionist historiography excised the social history of art from its constitutive role vis-à-vis the formation of the discipline itself. Latent within the social history of art—and, therefore, within the discipline since the appearance of Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art—has been the undoing of Art itself. Rescued at first by the accession of romanticism, Art eluded the positivist logic of Winckelmann’s immediate successors. A different sort of reprieve came via T. J. Clark’s reworking of the social history of art. Clark’s Marxist analysis depended on the operation of a potentially transcendent category of aesthetic experience; Art, by virtue of its presumptively ahistorical status, is uniquely capable of revealing the pulse of ideology. Clark could forestall the inevitable only for a decade or two. But if visual culture is the logical outcome of the social history of art, why the historiographic confusion and disciplinary disavowal? When “Whatever Happened to the Social Art History?” convened in 2000, it was against the backdrop of globalization and a surging international art market. The art trade had become the discipline’s dominant institution, exceeding the influence of (by encompassing) the university and the museum. The effects of globalization on the practice of art history are myriad, of course, but of particular relevance to the social history of art is its resuscitation of Art in its fullest romantic sense. Contemporary economic conditions require art to function as an ahistorical, universal category, its potential fungibility based on its capacity to transcend its materiality. Visual culture, predicated as it is on a refusal to prop up ahistorical claims to universal value, has no role to play in this economy.44 Nor does its methodological forebear. With the emphatic reassertion of Art’s inviolable, transcendent capacity, the social history of art is becoming not just irrelevant but possibly even incomprehensible. It was only a matter of time before the conditions of global capitalism—already incipient when method emerged in the eighteenth century— revealed the impossible project of the social history of art.

Notes 1 Excellent recent summations of the methodology include Craig Clunas, “Social History of Art,” in Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, eds., Critical Terms for Art History, 2nd ed. (2003; orig. 1996); Neil McWilliam, “Vers une histoire de l’histoire sociale de l’art,” in Histoires sociales de l’art. Une Anthologie critique, vol. 1 (Paris: Les presses du réel, 2016); Barbara Aulinger, “Social History of Art,” Grove Art Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), http:​/​/www​​.oxfo​​rdart​​onlin​​e​.com​​/subs​​cribe​​r​ /art​​icle/​​grove​​/​art/​​T0794​​57.

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2 Among those calling for greater activity in this area is Paul B. Jaskot, “Digital Art History as the Social History of Art: Towards the Disciplinary Relevance of Digital Methods,” Visual Resources (2019): 21–33, DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2019.1553651. Another possible example is art market studies, which has a strong interest in computational methods, has recently emerged as an energetic field of inquiry. The establishment in 2016 of the International Art Market Studies Association signaled recognition among researchers of the distinct methodologies and aims of this branch of inquiry. Within two years, the organization had over 250 members and had established itself as an affiliate of the College Art Association (the largest professional organization for the discipline worldwide)—further indication that researchers engaged in art market studies perceive their work as, at least in some ways, a distinct practice within art history. Here, it may be useful to note that art market studies includes scholars engaged in a data-driven, often computational approach that seeks to reveal new insights into social behavior and historic trends; also involved in the field are scholars engaged in more traditional approaches to the study of institutional, cultural, and economic histories of art collecting, taste, heritage rights, and cultural property. This said, the relationship of art market studies to the social history of art remains uncertain for reasons that will hopefully become clearer at the conclusion of this chapter. 3 Chaired by Marc Gotlieb, the panel took place in New York on February 26, 2000, and featured James Elkins, Anne Higonnet, Stephen Melville, and Philip Nord; Thomas Crow served as respondent. 4 Anthony E. Grudin and Robert Slifkin, from the call for participation in the panel “The Present Prospects of Social Art History,” convened at the College Art Association annual conference, February 13, 2014. 5 Michael Burawoy, “Critical Sociology: A Dialogue between Two Sciences,” Contemporary Sociology 27, no. 1 (1998): 12–20. 6 By way of further justification for my use of this admittedly gross and limited structure, I appeal to one of the method’s major contributors, T. J. Clark, who wrote that “it is actually a strength of social art history that it makes its analogies specific and overt: however crude the equations . . . they represent some kind of advance . . . because they make their prejudices clear. Flirting with hidden analogies is worse than working openly with inelegant ones, precisely because the latter can be criticized directly.” From Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988; rpt.; orig. 1973), 11. 7 It was originally published as Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (Dresden: Waltherischen Hof-Buchhandlung, 1764–1767), and citations here are taken from the two-volume translation into English by Henry Lodge, The History of Ancient Art (Boston: J.R. Osgood, 1872). On Winckelmann’s interest in Vico, see Robert Nisbet and Gustavo Costa, “Vico and the Idea of Progress,” Social Research 43, no. 3 (1976): 638. 8 Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori (Florence, 1550). Selections were published in English as early as 1719. 9 “But this resemblance does not prove that the Greeks learnt their art from the Egyptians.” Ibid., 199. 10 Winckelmann, History of Ancient Art, vol. 1, 194–5. 11 Ibid., 234. 12 Ibid. 13 On marble, see Ibid., 216. 14 Winckelmann, History of Ancient Art, vol. 1, 23–7.

 Social Art History in Retrospect 29 15 It was originally published as Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (Basel: Schweighauser, 1860), and quotations here are taken from S. G. C. Middlemore’s translation, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (London: Kegan Paul, 1890; orig. 1878). 16 Burkhardt, Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, 129. 17 Ibid., 134–8. 18 Ibid., 1. 19 Whether or not Taine was deeply familiar with Comte’s writings when he completed his studies in 1853 is a point of scholarly dispute; he begins citing Comte only in the 1860s. 20 Originally published as Histoire de la littérature anglaise (Paris: L. Hachette), it soon appeared in English translation by Henri van Laun as History of English Literature (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1871). Taine’s application of his method to the history of art is explained in Philosophie de l’art. Leçons professée à l’Ecole des BeauxArts (Paris, London, and New York: Germer Baillière, 1865); an English version translated by Taine was published in London simultaneously as Philosophy of Art. 21 Hippolyte Taine, Histoire De La Littérature Anglaise, vol. 1 (Paris: L. Hachette), xxii–xxiii. 22 Cited by Irving Babbitt, “The Method of Taine,” iv, Introduction à l’histoire de la littérature anglaise (Boston: Heath, 1898). Babbitt’s source is Michel Salomon, Philosophes et Penseurs: H. Taine, Science et Religion (Paris: Bloud, 1908), 13. 23 Taine’s theories were drafted into the service of fascist ideologies in the first half of the twentieth century, leading to a diminishment of interest in his philosophy and even some condemnation of his writings as proto-Nazi. Sholom Kahn was among the first to address this shift in the reception of Taine and to argue for a reappraisal of the historical significance of his theories. Sholom Kahn, Science and Aesthetic Judgement: A Study in Taine’s Critical Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953). 24 These ideas are carried through most of Ruskin’s prodigious literary production, though the clearest statement of the principles discussed in this paragraph is The Stones of Venice (London: Smith, Elder, 1851–3). 25 Ruskin accuses his former student, Emilia Dilke, of “contradicting everything I had ever said about art, history or social science” in a letter dated January 28, 1886, Dilke Papers, Department of Manuscripts, British Library, London, MS 43,908. 26 Coined in 1796 by the French philosopher A. -L. -C. Destutt de Tracy to describe a science of ideas, idéologie came to refer to a myriad of philosophies and political doctrines by the mid-nineteenth century. Associated with Napoleon’s condemnation of revolutionary excess, Comte’s positive religion, Hegel’s distinction between the real and the ideal, and finally Marx’s notion of false consciousness, the term would have carried meanings beyond the scope of Dilke’s argument. 27 Emilia F. S. Dilke, Art in the Modern State (London: Chapman and Hall, 1883), 5. 28 Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, trans. with assistance of Stanley Godman (New York: Knopf, 1951), vol. 1, p. 252. 29 Ibid., vol. 1, 103. 30 Ibid., vol. 1, 92. 31 For a recent reappraisal of The Absolute Bourgeois and Image of the People, see Alastair Wright, “T. J. Clark’s Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution, 1973,” The Burlington Magazine 153, no. 1298 (2011): 330–4. Clark enjoyed a popular readership not shared by his contemporaries, despite the

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significance of their contributions to the development of a Marxist mode of social art history. Perhaps chief among them is Nicos Hadjinicolaou, Histoire de l’art et lutte des classes (Paris: Maspero, 1973). 32 T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982; orig. London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 13. 33 Ibid., 13. 34 T. J. Clark, “The Conditions of Artistic Creation,” Times Literary Supplement (May, 1974): 561–2 reprinted in Eric Fernie, Art History and Its Methods (London: Phaidon, 1995), 252. 35 Clark, “Conditions of Artistic Creation,” 251. 36 On the post-1968 resurgence of the social history of art, see Otto Karl Werckmeister, “The Turn from Marx to Warburg in West German Art History, 1968-90,” 213–20, in Andrew Hemingway, ed., Marxism and the History of Art: From William Morris to the New Left (London: Pluto Press, 2006); and Clunas, “Social History of Art.” 37 See Jonathan Harris, “The Chic of the New,” Oxford Art Journal (1987): 116–22, esp. 117. 38 An exhaustive list cannot be provided here. It is hoped that the following stand as useful representative contributions to this historiography. Exemplary of early attempts to synthesize social art history and postcolonial theory are Linda Nochlin’s “The Imaginary Orient” Art in America (May 1983): 118–31 and 187–91; and Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Going Native: Paul Gauguin and the Invention of Primitivist Modernism,” Art in America 77 (July 1989): 118–29. Among the pioneering works of social art history directed at understanding culture in relation to sexuality are Jonathan Weinberg, Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and the First American Avant-Garde (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); and Patricia Simons, “Lesbian (In)Visibility in Italian Renaissance Culture: Diana and Other Cases of donna con donna,” in Whitney Davis, ed., Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History, a special issue of Journal of Homosexuality (1994): 88–121. Formative experiments in social art history where race is foregrounded as a category of analysis include Albert Boime, The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1990); and David Dabydeen’s Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art (Surrey: Dangaroo Press, 1985). 39 Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists,” Art News 69 (January 1971): 21–39, 76–1. 40 Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), xxv. 41 Svetlana Alpers, “Visual Culture Questionnaire,” October 77 (Summer 1996): 26. 42 The questions preface the special “Visual Culture Questionnaire” issue of October. Here it might be helpful to acknowledge that the term “visual culture” refers both to the distinct methodology under discussion here and to the range of cultural phenomena that may be experienced through sight. Context usually indicates which meaning is intended, though it is admittedly at times confusing. 43 Thomas Crow, “Visual Culture Questionnaire,” October 77 (Summer 1996): 34. 44 To return to the relationship of art market studies vis-à-vis the social history of art alluded to in note 2, I see the emergence of art market studies as coincident if not concomitant to the suppression of visual culture. Art market studies as a distinct

 Social Art History in Retrospect 31 field offers a timely alternative to visual culture, neatly dispensing with the problem of the status of Art in order to focus on issues traditionally associated with the social history of art. I hope this chapter adds some complexity if not ambiguity to the presumption that art market studies is an offshoot of social art history. Of course, if art market studies is a branch of social art history as opposed to a post-globalization alternative, art market studies will eventually succumb to the same critical selfconsciousness that resulted in visual culture.

32 

2

Marat’s Two Bodies Hector Reyes

On T. J. Clark’s Theory of Art The similarities between the title of this section and the title of T. J. Clark’s own essay about Clement Greenberg are intentional.1 Within the discipline of the history of art, T. J. Clark is credited with developing a “Marxist” art history and, more specifically, the “Social History of Art.” The titles are not wrong; they are theoretical positions that Clark himself has actively claimed. But I am not sure that the discipline of art history has quite come to any satisfying consensus about how a general method might be extracted from Clark’s own particular analyses of art.2 Just as Clark looked through Clement Greenberg’s self-described positions in order to examine a theory of art underpinning his criticism, it seems to be necessary to define Clark’s intervention in ways that describe his transformative contribution to the discipline, while also leaving behind the forms of analysis that were necessary but specific to his own development (Situationism, Marxist theory, Baudelarian poetics, etc.). If we continue to mistake Clark’s specific tools for his more general method, Clark will suffer the fate from which he saved artists: to become a towering, oracular authority that one day will simply be forgotten, if only because it was never clear what the contribution was, precisely. I propose that Clark’s primary contribution to the history of art is not as a Marxist thinker, but as an intellectual historian. Clark was certainly responding to a Marxist account of art, to an earlier generation of social historians of art like Hauser and Schapiro, who interrogated the relationship between art and society.3 The earlier generation of social historians of art had always privileged “historical context” (like the conditions of artistic production, the status of the artist, the means of patronage, etc.) in order to account for art’s particular form. Clark, on the other hand, assumes that art is part of history insofar as it materializes the metaphors of relationality and power that are the stuff of politics. Clark’s foundational intellectual “move” was the discovery that metaphor was materially inscribed in art and to access its power, to analyze how the metaphors of power really operated, one had to study the diversity of its manifestation across a historical field. In short, art history needed to become a field of intellectual history, and not “the history of ideas” it had always been. History of Ideas, as a method, uses the

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intellectual framework of the historical period being studied as the method of analysis. Such a method will, undoubtedly, offer insights into the period since it is working “from the inside.” Intellectual history, on the other hand, understands that there is no single, eternal, notion of “Reason.” The period to be studied is part of a continuum of ideas; but there is also a sense of historical distance that allows the intellectual historian to put materials into unexpected conversation and to see implicit analogies. Instead of using a period’s intellectual methods as an analytical framework, intellectual history attempts to describe a period’s particular habits of thought across cognitive registers and with a great deal of suspicion about the propositions found in texts. When Clark declares in his “manifesto,” the first chapter of his groundbreaking 1973 publication Image of the People, that nineteenth-century art history has become “a bore,” he means that nineteenth-century analytical frameworks were being used unproductively to continue to tell the story that the nineteenth century would tell about itself. Even if Clark was willing to acknowledge his intellectual indebtedness to the nineteenth century (and to Hegel in particular), he understood that it is unproductive to continue to use the aesthetic and political ideologies of the nineteenth century as a framework for analyzing nineteenth-century art.4 The preservation of Clark’s foundational move, its call for both recuperation of prior models and the development of a more critical relationship to past ways of thinking, requires that we ourselves sever ties with those tools that were specific to Clark’s own historical moment of the 1960s and beyond. From a series of what Clark calls “a multiplicity of perspectives,” he argues that a new type of intellectual history might subvert the ideologies of the “newly dominant classes,” by which he means the bourgeoisie. Clark’s work has often exposed the fraudulence of the (eternalizing) claims of the bourgeoisie by attacking their appropriation of an elite form par excellence, painting. But I want to call attention to the fact that he does this by proposing an alternate intellectual history of the nineteenth century. Clark wanted to sever ties with bourgeois individualism masquerading as collectivity (i.e., the ideology of the avant-garde) and idealism masquerading as materialism (i.e., the ideology of pure sensation).5 To do so, Clark proposes to give an account of the political ideologies and artistic ideologies, in both their “dominant” (read: bourgeois, fictive) form and their “subversive” (recuperatively elite) forms. Courbet’s feudal archaisms presented a more sophisticated, nuanced, and authoritative image of a superseded elite than any of the cultural forms appreciated by mondain Second Empire Parisians. Clark studies Courbet because Courbet’s identity is tied to the “land.” Courbet claims and recovers an elite identity, or at least an elite posture, that post-1789 French society tried very hard to forget. This is Clark’s way “out” of nineteenth-century tautologies: to see the histories of classicism and individualism as nothing more than the narrative given to us by the nineteenth century. Two of Clark’s positive interventions come, I think, from Benjamin: the idea of “the withering away of art”; and a materialism that refuses to take ideologies at their face value, asking, instead, cui bono? I want to argue that Clark’s fundamental contribution as an intellectual historian was to both “provincialize” nineteenth-century thought and accept aspects of Hegel’s thought (via Benjamin). And we must do the same with Clark.

 Marat’s Two Bodies 35 What should we keep from T. J. Clark? At least two things. First, we should continually ask, on the one hand, what should be kept, and on the other, what should be contextualized and contained from our periods of study: what modes of thought continue to inform our critical categories and which modes of thought need to be understood as belonging to the past? Put another way, what types of thinking are the subject of history and what types of thinking allow us to write history? Second, I think that we should keep his redefinition of the artistic subject and his redefinition of the artistic object. Clark rejects our culture’s Platonic claims to artistic subjectivity and, instead, asks: what sorts of political, aesthetic, and personal choices were available to an artist at a given historical moment, and what choices did that artist make? Aesthetic decisions are just one of many types of decisions made by an artist. The concrete artistic choices, still evident on canvas, can then be related to extraartistic realms of experience. By shifting the mediating category of analysis from the object to the artist, the art historian can move between a broad macroanalysis of the social, intellectual, and political context to a detailed microanalysis of art’s form. Clark also redefines the artistic object: not as the “expression” of some interior feeling or of an age, but as the material remnant of a set of decisions that are related, in interconnected ways, to the decisions made by the artist in other realms of experience. What should we leave behind? I think that Clark’s commitment to synchronic analysis, that is, to a specific account of the relationship between form and history at a single moment in time, has been as limiting for art history as it has been generative. To be sure, art exists in a specific context and within a specific, networked set of meanings. Clark’s synchronic analyses and those of his students, together, do tell a coherent history of art over time of historical causality and stylistic change. Yet, the synchronic analysis, within the social history of art, always feels richer than the diachronic because the historical context is assumed to be already known. The story of events doesn’t change; our ability to see a causal connection between historical event and the constitution of form is what Clark’s social history of art clarifies. In other words, Clark is able to relate artistic form to different types of cognitive experiences within a limited time period. But across time, his method obscures the fact that politics, history, and culture happen across different cognitive registers. An overdetermined notion of politics and history, of Great Men and Great Events, enables a rich and expansive social history of art. How might we keep a sense of the cognitive richness of objects and ideas that persist across time so that the social history of art’s diachronic history is not merely a record or litany of heroic deeds? I propose that one might keep Clark’s useful reorientation of the artistic subject and object, while also expanding his analysis to think about a broader chronological scope by considering the ways in which form accrues and acquires meaning over time. To this end, this article will provide a diachronic reading of the representation of the body represented in Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat, Figure 2.1, which is intended to complement the synchronic reading provided by Clark.6 The painting represents the moment of the murder of a revolutionary hero in 1793. The murder of the Montagnard Marat by the Girondin supporter, Charlotte Corday, will set off a series of events that lead to the bloody, state-sponsored murders known as “The

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Figure 2.1  Jacques-Louis David (studio of), The Death of Marat, 1793, Oil on canvas, 165 × 128 cm. Musée du Louvre. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY. Terror.” Clark begins his history of modernism with a purely synchronic analysis of the painting: we are immersed in the politics and debates of 1793. There is perhaps no period in history better suited to synchronic analysis than the French Revolution and, specifically, the period between the fall of the Bastille in 1789 and the Terror in 1793. Rarely were people so keenly aware of the historical significance of the times in which they were living. The first histories of the French Revolution were already in print in 1789. And artists like David used the language of history painting, long used to represent important ancient events, to commemorate important contemporary events of the French Revolution. It is within this historically self-conscious framework that Clark understands the paradoxes of Revolutionary ideology to be congealed in painted form. However, I think Clark blindly recapitulates the rhetoric of heroic “nowness” of 1793, even as he unmasks what Marx called “the form, the self-deceptions, that they needed in order to conceal from themselves the narrow bourgeois substance of their own struggles and to keep their passion up to the height of a great historical tragedy.”7 Clark analyzes the claims to sovereignty of the middle-class, Parisian Montagnards in the summer of 1793. It was a sovereignty, he claims, that was encoded poignantly

 Marat’s Two Bodies 37 and hectoringly in the “corporeal” abstraction of the top half of David’s work. There, working against the “documentary” letter in the foreground of the painting, we find not a “metaphor” for the politics of 1793, but the clearest expression of the Montagnard’s truthful deceptions and its deceitful truths. But Clark’s synchronic account of these claims to sovereignty cannot admit that they were, in fact, borrowed forms of sovereignty. This chapter will argue that they were borrowed and that a diachronic history of form can help us to understand the terms upon which sovereignty was adopted and adapted from the past. In order to understand how authority was constituted in 1793, this chapter will focus on the representation of the body of Marat. My argument will be that Marat was invested with “two bodies” just as the king of France had been for centuries; and that, like the king, one of these bodies was representational in nature. Drawing from Kantorowicz’s and Giesey’s studies of the rituals of monarchical power, I will argue that these rituals provided a powerful model for David,8 for, contrary to our stereotyped ideas about monarchical power, it was constantly articulated and shared by different types of social actors. The ritualistic structures persist during the revolution in spite of the revolutionary desire for a tabula rasa, a clear break from the forms and structures of the past. If David was responding to historically specific pressures, they were pressures that were building over the course of centuries. Intention, be it political or artistic, needs a broader context, because while there are conscious choices made by the artists, there are also choices and structures already determined for them. The relational form of ritual, during which the king’s sacred nature was articulated, was just the language for expressing the eternal power of “le peuple,” a power that did not reside in any specific corporal instance of that power.

Marat’s Sacred Body When Louis XV died in 1774, David was working on his fourth attempt for the Prix de Rome, entitled “Antiochus and Stratonice.” The painting is about etiology: a lovesick prince has a mysterious illness, and the king, worried for his son’s health, summons the court doctor to find the cause. The subject matter was decided for the young artists by Academicians in March of 1774. About a month after David was given permission to work on the painting that would finally win him the prix de Rome, the king himself would fall prey to a mysterious illness that baffled court doctors. When it was finally determined that Louis XV had smallpox, the king was sequestered, for fear that the pox would contaminate the entire court. The shameful death, or mors repentina, of Louis XV clouded all aspects of his funeral. His body was not subjected to the ritualistic handling and long procession to its final resting place at Saint Denis. It was quickly transported on May 10 to Saint Denis. When his body finally arrived, the heart, which would normally have been removed and preserved, was left in the king’s body (again for fear of spread of the disease).

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While Louis XV’s body was quarantined, Marat’s body was given several funerary processions. In addition to the procession in October, where David’s painting of Marat was displayed on a sarcophagus, there were two earlier funerary ceremonies. The first funeral, in which the body of Marat was carried, took place on July 16, 1793. Marat’s funeral took place about five o’clock on the afternoon of Tuesday the 16th of July. No expense was spared to make the magnificence of the ceremony worthy of the occasion. The painter David was the marshal of the obsequies. The coffin was laid upon a gorgeous bed, which was again placed on a splendid hearse raised at a considerable height above the crowd, and approached by steps. It was supported by a dozen men and surrounded by groups of children dressed in white and bearing branches of cypress in their hands. Then came the Convention, then the representatives of the National Authority, then the Commune, then the “patriotic” clubs, while bringing up the rear followed a concourse which from its magnitude might have been readily taken for the whole population of Paris. The funeral cortege, starting from Marat’s house, which, as we know, was quite near the place of interment—the garden of the Cordeliers’ Club—made a long detour. On leaving the Rue des Cordeliers it passed along the Rue de Thionville (Dauphine), across the Pont Neuf, along the Quay de la Ferraille, across the Pontau-Changes, returning by the Théâtre Français (Odeon), and then betaking itself to the Cordeliers. The cortege chanted patriotic airs, while every five minutes a salvo of artillery was fired from the Pont Neuf.9

The second funerary procession took place on July 18, 1793, which involved the transfer of Marat’s heart to the Cordeliers’ Club: Two days later, the 18th of July, the heart of Marat was transferred from the tomb to the Cordeliers’ Club. There a kind of second funeral ceremony took place, at which twenty-four members of the Convention and twelve of the Commune assisted. An order had been given to search Paris for an artist who could make a chef-d’oeuvre worthy to receive so precious a treasure. The search does not appear, however, to have been successful, and the decision lighted upon a splendid vase of agate, which, together with its covering, was cut out of one piece and enriched with the most costly precious stones. This had been one of the great crown treasures of the kings of France. It was now to enclose the heart of the most implacable enemy of kings. On this occasion also a detour was made by the procession, this time through the gardens of the Luxembourg, where tents had been raised, under which were made speeches at intervals. The vase was then carried into the nave of the church where the Cordeliers held their meetings. It was proposed to raise an altar to the heart of Marat. Here various members of the Society delivered funeral orations.10

To be sure, the handling of Marat’s body and heart was more kingly than even the handling of Louis XV’s body. But I think that the comparison between the handling of Marat’s body and the ritual for handling sacred kingly bodies is more than mere analogy. It is important to note that between the two processions described

 Marat’s Two Bodies 39 earlier and the later procession of David’s painting in October, there was the first anniversary of the overthrow of Louis XVI, a secular ceremony known as the Festival of Reunion on August 10, 1793. David’s plan for the festival was one, as Mona Ouzof notes, “in which may be seen the greatest concern to cross the space of Paris and the time of the Revolution.”11 The clearest celebration of Revolutionary time and history ended at the Place de la Révolution, because in David’s words “it is at the place where the tyrant died that it should be celebrated.”12 Around the time that David was celebrating the fall of the tyrant at the place of his demise, the graves and funerary effigies of the King at Saint Denis were being desecrated. But if, as Andrew McClellan has reminded us, the opening of the Louvre museum was “accompanied by the destruction of the royal mausoleum at Saint–Denis in which the royal bodies were exhumed, some even mutilated,” I think that the desecration of kingly bodies was also the precondition for the presentation of Marat’s bodies in kingly form.13 David was ritualistically positioning Marat as the inheritor to, and replacement for, those kingly bodies. By kingly, I do not mean the image of tyrannical, absolutist authority that we have inherited from the seventeenth century, when power was increasingly centralized in courts across Europe. Instead, I mean “kingly” as it was articulated by Kantorowicz, who described the theological basis of kingship. As Kantorowicz succinctly puts the complex theory, the king, otherwise an individual man, is in officio the type and image of the Anointed in heaven and therewith of God . . . the king is a twinned being, human and divine, just like the God-man, although the king is two-natured and geminate by grace only and within Time, and not by nature and (after the Ascension) within Eternity: the terrestrial king is not, he becomes a twin personality through his anointment and consecration.14

In other words, the terrestrial avatar becomes the king through the ritualistic handling of his body. At the time of his death, there is, in essence, no terrestrial avatar of the king. And yet, the office of the king continues to exist in the absence of a terrestrial avatar. Funerary ritual was used to symbolize an abstracted power. One of its characteristics is its capability to assert authority and power through action. The ritual itself had increasingly come to be seen as a function of the power of the state, as well as the means by which power was imagined. The theory of the king’s two bodies was about the transfer of power and, I want to emphasize here, it was articulated ritualistically. It ensured social stability in two ways: it secured the right of the heir to the throne, established by the law of primogeniture, over the course of forty days; and it helped to interpolate a wide range of actors by having them participate in the act of transferring power. Kantorowicz shows how liturgical practices were used to reinforce the analogy between the king and the twinned-nature of Christ. With St. Louis, that analogy takes on a very specific image of Christ: Christus victor. After the death of Philip Augustus in 1223, the rule of primogenitary succession had been established so that there would

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not be the struggle for the crown that occurred after Charlemagne’s death. Before this time, the sanctity of the king and his sacerdotal function had focused primarily on the king’s anointment, not on his death. But in the face of the possibility of chaotic struggles for power, there was a need to maintain the order and continuity of the eternal kingship. A relationship toward the dead king had to be established which took the form in 1223 of primogenitary succession. Increasingly, and even up to the death of Louis XIII, the focus of the king’s sanctity moves away from the ritual of anointment (and its auxiliary verbal counterparts of secular acclamation and liturgical Laudes Regiae) and toward a focus on the ritual of funerary procession. The symbolic significance of the burial becomes the theatrical site where the contestation for and confirmation of relationships of power took place. For example, in 1316, when Louis X died, he left no successor. The contest for power between Philippe le Long and his uncle Charles of Valois was played out symbolically: Philippe orchestrated an elaborate funeral service for both Louis X and his child Jean I, who died a few days after birth. Philippe’s act set a precedent. The presence of the successor to the throne at the funeral began to signify “kingliness.” The deaths of Philip VI in 1316, of Charles V in 1380, and of Charles VI in 1422 were all attended by the regents, each of whom established their power by participating in the funeral as chief mourner.15 Participation in the royal funeral was a way for the entire community to assert its relationship to the kingly body. But it was also an opportunity for the community to articulate the relationship between its members and for its members to fashion and to perform their own identities. For example, the noble judges who participate in Renaissance funerary rituals see their own power as parallel, not subservient, to the king’s power. Because “La Justice” was perpetual, just like the office of kingship, it came to seem undignified for the judges to wear the black robes of mourning at the funeral. The funeral ritual provides a way for the Presidents and counsellors of parlement to assert this view of their autonomous, perpetual existence. By 1574, they wear red robes instead of black mourning robes in order to assert, through their participation in the ceremony, the idea of Justice as perpetual and therefore autonomous from the king’s power.16 So even as increased importance is placed on the ritual of the funerary procession over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a ritual that asserts the eternal presence of the king, it also becomes an opportunity for judges to assert their autonomy and relationship to the office of the king. The first funeral procession for Marat’s body on July 16, 1793, should recall the earlier funerary processions for kings. The elaborate rituals that turned the burial of the king’s body into a communal affair were on display in the procession organized by David. Just as members of the community confirmed their relationship with each other through their active participation in the king’s funeral, so too the revolutionaries asserted their relationship to each other, occupying and displacing the symbolic roles once held by elites in relationship to a king. Clark has already argued that Marat’s body was mobilized as a symbol of “the people” by different revolutionary factions. But if we take a broader historical view, we can add another dimension to Clark’s insight: that kingly ritual provided a template, a conceptual framework in which Marat’s body

 Marat’s Two Bodies 41 could be invested with collective, symbolic authority. Marat’s body took on a double function, articulating both a specific instance of political power (Marat, leader of the people) and the power of the people who participate in the funerary ritual, who collectively embody the power that Marat represents. The studies of Kantorowicz and Giesey, focusing on kingly ritual and its role in the construction of royal authority, have highlighted the endlessly double nature of the king’s body. He is both the center of power and the empty center around which people articulate their relationships to each other; he is the historically specific embodiment of terrestrial authority and a representative instance of an eternal, persistent form of the state. And there is yet another important, if paradoxical, “doubleness” to the French king’s body. Thanks to technological developments of the early modern period, the king takes on, through funerary ritual, two symbolic roles: priestly sacrificer, and sacrificial object. Technological developments like embalming in the fourteenth century allowed the funerary ritual to extend over a longer period of time, which in turn allowed more people to participate in the funerary ritual. The embalming of the body was made easier because, since the death of Henry II in 1189, the heart and entrails of the king had been buried separately. When Philip IV died in 1314, he was traveling and away from Paris. Upon its return to Paris, the king’s body could be displayed because of new embalming techniques that allowed the king’s head and hands to be on display for the first time.17 The separation of the heart and entrails not only allowed for easier embalming technique but also reinforced the double nature of the king. For the king is not only invested with a sacerdotal function, perpetually overseeing the transfer of power; the king also represents the sacrificed because his heart and entrails have already been removed.18 David’s painting restages the symbolic presentation of Marat as both sacrificer and sacrificed. Marat’s ability to occupy both roles was the focus of the second funerary procession, held on July 18, 1793, when the heart of Marat was transferred to the Club de Cordeliers. This double, sacred function of Marat’s body is most acutely sensed in the foreground of the painting. I quote Clark’s hesitating description of the foreground: Look at the stumbled wall, I say, as it occurs in rough proximity to the triumph of objecthood in Charlotte Corday’s letter. Look at the distance traveled, in terms of the kind of attention invited to the business of illusion-making, between the grain on the surface closest to us—the face of the orange box—and that on the surface furthest away. And is “surface” the right word here? Is not the very metaphoric of distance on which my sentence pivots—of distances traveled, between front and back, near and far, arm’s length and stone’s throw—itself a way of evading the upper half ’s placelessness?19

The ambiguities that Clark traces so beautifully and so insightfully in this passage have, I think, to do with the form of spectatorial address that David establishes. For even as the painting makes a claim about historical accuracy and verisimilitude, about the event of Corday’s murderous act, it invites the viewer to participate in the cutting

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up of Marat’s body. It is a sacrificial body, and the bloody knife on the ground is an invitation to the viewer to occupy the sacerdotal function. This sacerdotal function had already been performed by the revolutionaries, and commemorated on July 18, when they transferred Marat’s heart to the Club des Cordeliers. If the separation of Marat’s heart from his body in July 1793 confirmed his “kingly” sacredness, his sacerdotal/ sacrificial natures, David’s painting and procession in October 1793, remind the viewer of Marat’s double roles. And the spatial ambiguities that the painting works so hard to establish endows the viewer with a priestly function, perpetually cutting the sacred body of Marat, as the sacred body of kings before him had also been. If new embalming procedures allowed the king’s “sacrificed” nature to be emphasized within royal funerary ritual, another important technological develop­ ment of the fifteenth century emphasized the concomitant priestly function of the king: the development of wax effigies. When Charles V died in 1380, his body was shown continuously, but his brothers were too far away to arrive in time for the funeral. Embalming techniques could not preserve the body for the king’s brothers to arrive in time.20 But in 1422, for Charles VI the problem of the limits of embalming techniques was resolved. The body was encased in lead, which led to the practice of effigies of the king being part of the funeral ritual.21 The use of the funeral effigy enabled funerary ritual to be prolonged and the transfer of power to be increasingly ritualized. Technological advances in the fifteenth century allowed the wax funerary mask to become a more permanent effigy. And in the sixteenth century, the effigy was carried separately from the body. The representation of the king’s particular countenance no longer signified the dead king; instead, it was a representation of the eternal office of the kingship and thus represented the heir who was about to take the crown after forty days. And so, with the rise of effigy representation in 1422, the king’s body did not even need to be present to signify his continued presence. At the funeral of Francis I, the body is placed in view only until the completion of the effigy. The effigy takes the place of the body, which reappears for the procession to St. Denis. This process of substitution continued until the death of Henry IV in 1610, when a wax effigy was made to stand in for the royal body itself (Figure 2.2). I want to suggest that if the presentation of the sacred body and heart of Marat represented the temporal and terrestrial instance of power in July of 1793, David’s Marat, presented to the public in October 1793, might be read as a kingly effigy. It was an effigy that invited viewers to see themselves as the embodiment of the eternal office of power, represented by Marat’s painted body. Much has been said about the incredible verisimilitude of David’s figure. While scholars have noted the use of wax figures in Revolutionary processions, and much has been made about Madame Tussaud’s wax version of Marat,22 little attention has been paid to the use of wax effigies in royal funerals. I would like to suggest that David’s Marat evokes the kingly wax effigies, like Michel Bourdin’s effigy of Henry IV (Figure 2.2). Note, especially, the yellow, waxy face. But the body itself is also insistently artificial. Marat’s right shoulder muscle is much too large, extending into and covering his bicep muscles. The weak, hyperextended left arm, on the other hand, seems like a painted sketch. The brushstrokes are feeble and hesitatingly applied, especially at the meeting of the forearm

 Marat’s Two Bodies 43

Figure 2.2  Michel Bourdin, Henri IV, King of France (1553–1610). Colored wax bust, life-size, Musée de la Ville de Paris, Musée Carnavalet. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

Figure 2.3  Le portraict du defunct roy Henry le Grand IIII du nom roy de France et de Navarre en son lict de deuil, c. 1610. © The Trustees of the British Museum. and the upper arm. These are intentional mistakes, I would argue, that were intended to highlight the difference between the waxy head, and the wooden, awkward body. These differences uncannily recall the king’s artificial body (Figure 2.3). Henry IV’s body, posed on a bed to support the wax effigy, allowed different members of the community to pay their respects to the king’s body. This jarring, artificial body is, I think, purposefully recalled in the body of David’s Marat. And it is in relationship to this “effigy” that the viewers are asked to reaffirm their relationship to Marat and the other viewers. So far, I have made several claims that are meant to support and extend the analogical meanings that Clark excavates within David’s historiated portrait of Marat. The destruction and desecration of the royal body was the necessary precondition for redeploying the theology of the king’s two bodies for the people. David’s orchestration of the festival commemorating the end of monarchical privilege on August 10, 1793, goes hand in hand with the careful presentation of Marat’s body and of his effigy to

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“le peuple.” The funerary procession of July 16 allowed revolutionaries to rehearse a relationship to Marat that previously had been articulated between community and king. The procession of July 18, in which Marat’s heart was transferred, confirmed Marat’s kingly doubleness (priestly body and sacrificial body). And I argued that David’s portrait, which received its own procession in October of 1793, reminded viewers of past kingly bodies in two ways. The painting invites viewers to participate in the priestly functions of removing Marat’s heart and entrails. And the painting also recalls the wax effigies that took the place of the king’s body. This substitution, of wax effigy for kingly body, allowed the funerary ritual to continue long after the body itself had started to decompose. David’s portrait of Marat also allowed the community to participate in a communal commemoration long after Marat’s body had decomposed. But what about the shocking circumstances of Marat’s death? Did they not make David’s claims about Marat’s kingly authority untenable?

The Shameful Death Within Clark’s account, David’s painting is remarkable for its abstraction of the background. The painting’s abstraction evinces David’s desire to literalize, to make tangible, and to give material form to the revolutionary rhetoric of transparency. This desire was as elusive in the aesthetic realms as it was in the social and political realms.23 For Clark, it is significant that the display of David’s painting happened on the same day as the execution of Marie-Antoinette. The death of Marie-Antoinette and the death of Marat highlight a problem that revolutionaries struggled with: if the virtuous transparency of “le people” was guaranteed by the supposed duplicity of the nobility, how does one define virtue, that is, transparency, when the nobility becomes less visible? And how does one know that “le people” itself is not capable of duplicity? While this synchronic reading is convincing, it can also be extended diachronically, to think about the collapsing of royal and elite identity. The medieval concept of noble identity, as an embodiment of the values of their ancestors, was deeply tied to heroic death on the battlefield.24 To die honorably on the battlefield was to embody the inherited sets of values, prestige, and honor of one’s ancestors. This is not to say that nobles always died heroic deaths. The ideology of noble death required its converse: shameful death. To die of old age and sickness was shameful, because it did not properly embody the spirit of one’s ancestors who had fought bravely and achieved valor. For the common man, sudden death meant that one was not able to receive extreme unction, and therefore his death was a sign of an anger that was shameful. The violent death on the battlefield for the noble was the proof of his worthiness, and so his death of old age was a sign of cowardice. But the model of the noble’s “good death,” which relied on battle, was a zero/sum competition that was also socially destructive. An ideology of heroic death could not be sustained over generations, and the nobility looks for new ways to define itself in death. The French nobility found in Christian death ritual a new way to think of themselves and their relationship to the state. The theory of the double-bodied king became

 Marat’s Two Bodies 45 increasingly important to a nobility whose conception of self needed to be radically transformed. The theory allowed the nobility to see itself in service to an office, to the state, to the Christian kingdom, rather than to a specific person. While this had been a political function of the theory of the persona geminata, it became increasingly urgent as the Religious wars changed the nobles’ concept of self, and their relationship to the state. That is, royal death ritual then became an increasingly important way for the nobles to establish their own legitimacy as a socially productive class. The ideology of the king’s two bodies, with its metaphorization of power, became a way to justify allegiance to an abstracted power of the King and the French state, as well as a way to metaphorize their own power. As I noted earlier, royal death ritual becomes a way to assert the eternal power of the noble judges, not just of the French Monarchy. The king’s body was consecrated through ritual, specifically through the use of anachronistic language embedded in ritual. The tricolon formation of “Christus vincit, Christus Regnat, Christus Imperat,” so central to the Laudes Regiae, comes to stand metonymically for the ritual of anointment, as well as for the theological/political formulation of the king’s double body. The liturgical, verbal acclamations stand in for a set of rituals (most notably, anointment) through which the king obtains his doublebodied nature. The verbal acclamations are deeply ensconced in and evoke the secular/ religious ritual of the king’s consecration.25 The common man could seek recourse to the liturgical incantation of “Christus vincit, . . .” to escape the shame of mors repentina, because that phrase evoked both the king’s and Christ’s victory over death. This tricolon “Christus vincit . . .” also became a popular incantation, able to protect the wearer of the coin on which it was printed or he who invoked the power of those words against violent and deadly accident. The invocation was meant to protect the common man from the shame of an unforeseen death. Because of the popular familiarity with the signs of impending death, a sudden and violent death, or mors repentina, was viewed as dreadful and unseemly.26 The exception to the rule is the “belle morte” of the noble, whose sudden, violent death on the battlefield is not only to be differentiated from the shame of the mors repentina, but is also the very definition of valor, heroism, and nobility. The distinction between sudden and violent death as shameful for one group but heroic for another is indicative of the nobles’ power.27 While the rise of new technologies created a new, triumphal form of death ritual for the king, they also created a deep crisis for the nobility. Technological advances in warfare fundamentally changed not only how people fought but also how they died. With new technologies that distanced warriors from one another, or allowed men of different ranks to do battle, the noble binary of “heroic/shameful” death on the battlefield no longer applied.28 If the rise of new technologies and availability of arms led to a crisis of self-identity for the nobility, the rise of new technologies such as embalming and effigies in the likeness of the king invested the funeral ritual with new and politically deployable meanings. But the death of Henry IV significantly changed this power of ritual funerary form to signify. In 1610, the assassination of Henry IV by the Jesuit fanatic Ravaillac was, in fact, shameful.29 Henry IV was assassinated on May 14, 1610. The ceremony continued until June 29 and 30 and was once again celebrated and remembered on the anniversary in 1611. But

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a dramatic change occurred in the funerary ritual of Henry IV, namely, a dramatic increase in the number of funerary orations that attended the occasion of his death. Before Henry IV, it was not customary, or indeed necessary, to give speeches at the funeral. Actions taken during the ritual, and the care of the king’s body, did the work of collective signification. Prior to Henry IV’s funerary ritual, there were none for Charles VIII; one for Louis XIII; three for François I; three for Charles IX; and two for Henri III. With the death of Henry IV, in addition to five descriptions of the funeral, there were forty funerary orations.30 Ritual could no longer maintain its symbolic, hierarchical, and social significances. So funerary orations did the work of calming fears and of creating the legend of Henry IV’s rule. One could not depend on the ritual action to perpetuate the theory of the king’s authority because Ravaillac had violated the sanctity and holy separateness of the king from the binary logic of heroic/shameful death. The king’s solemn Christian burial could not allay fears that there was, in fact, a broader conspiracy to the assassination of Henry IV. In order to dispel this fear, Henry IV’s orators directly challenged these suspicions, and not in ritual, to displace those fears. Funerary oration had been to a large extent panegyric and eulogistic. The new form was, in fact, much more like the ancient laudatio or praise. These orations sought to situate Henry IV’s rule as a praiseworthy one.31 In doing so, the funerary discourse entered into the discourse of shame and honor from which the figure of the king had always been removed. The praise-filled orations sought to counter the idea of the king’s shameful death. In their praise, the orators were countering a view of Henry IV’s assassination as divine punishment for the king’s tyranny. They argued that, in fact, other kings, and even Christ, had been murdered. The king, in fact, had been punished for the faults of the French, and not for his own faults. Before Henry IV’s scandalous death, the king had been exempted from the logic of shameful or heroic death. The king’s death necessarily transcended these categories of honor and shame. I would argue that David’s painting of Marat’s body, and specifically the body’s placement against the abstract background, should be seen as an attempt to exempt Marat from the categories of honor and shame, and to invest his body with a (kingly) authority that makes the shame attached to assassination seem impossible. In other words, David adopts a strategy that is markedly different from the strategy adopted by the orators, who countered the shame of Marat’s assassination with a series of praises, just as Henry IV’s orators had done. At the Club de Cordeliers on July 28, ten days after the heart of Marat had been brought to the club, Marat’s heart was brought back outside and orations were presented highlighting Marat’s virtue. It is in this context that we should understand the abstraction in the background of David’s portrait. The brushwork is described by Clark as “something abstract and unmotivated . . . something that asserts itself as the truth of picturing, but always against picturing’s best and most desperate efforts.”32 But on the other side of David’s purposeful doubt about the new structures of arbitrariness called capital, I think we should see in the “unmotivated abstraction” a demand and a protest against the discursive orations that other revolutionaries had used to shield Marat from the idea that he had suffered a “shameful death” at the hands of Charlotte Corday. David claims “la bonne morte” for Marat, the ideology of eternally honorable death that the nobility and the king had negotiated. Clark is exactly right to point out that the abstract brushwork in the background of David’s painting is meant as

 Marat’s Two Bodies 47 a semiotic counter to the deceitful words of Charlotte Corday. But we should also see in the insistently procedural application of paint an evocation of the ritualistic movement of the body that had been the basis for monarchical authority for centuries. Marat, David seems to say, is incapable of a shameful death.

Inheritance And so, I am suggesting that a diachronic account of David’s painting might open up important questions about inheritance here, in both the artistic and political senses. Clark’s assertion that Marat’s body “had somehow to be represented without . . . congealing into a new monarch” assumes David’s complete commitment to the contingent politics of 1793. It was the king, not the people, who were precluded from taking the place of the monarch. In terms of our reading of the painting, my insistence on Marat’s body brings our attention away from the painting’s “pure activity” happening in the background. Might we read the representation of Marat’s body as a

Figure 2.4 Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825). Michel Gérard, member of the Convention, with his family. Oil on canvas. Photo: Bulloz. Musée de Tesse. © RMNGrand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

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transfigured version of the king’s effigy—highly sculptural but also now excessively fleshy, rigidly posed but also somehow tangible and accessible? Clark’s reading of the painting through the lens of “closeness” seems exactly right; but I would put the question of proximity in different terms. David is attempting to strike exactly the right distance between the appropriation of kingly form and its transformation, without deforming it so much that the kingly antecedent is no longer recognizable. Artistic decisions also become a statement about history. I want to conclude my brief and broad remarks with the Anonymous family portrait that Clark discusses at the end of his chapter on David’s painting (Figure 2.4). For Clark, this painting is a true image of the historical actors of the Revolution, of the bourgeois individuals who were caught in 1793, representing the labor that they commanded. For me, it is an image of a new form of inheritance: an inheritance that looks forward to the descendants, and that stakes a great deal not in the authority of the patriarch, but in the promise of the future. This is not what inheritance meant in early modern France; inheritance was about maintaining the integrity of the ancestral line.33 Social mobility became possible because of the transformation of legal definitions of “immovable family property.” Over the course of the sixteenth through to the eighteenth centuries, the definition of inheritable things broadened from land to include money itself and even offices. The French Revolution and Napoleon completed the process of making inheritance a question of the future, not the past. Instead of transferring property back to an ancestral line, the Civil Code of 1804 crystallized a new emphasis on individual property rights that had begun with the French Revolution.34 But when David painted Marat, he was still speaking the language of ancestral lines: the people’s inheritance, teetering precariously, like paper on the edge of a box, between the past and the future. So too, I think we must think carefully about what we, as historians, want to take from the past, and what we want to leave behind.

Notes 1 Timothy J. Clark, “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,” Critical Inquiry 9, no. 1 (1982): 139–56. 2 See, for example, “Questionnaire on Impressionism and the Social History of Art,” H-France Salon 9, no. 14 (2017). https​:/​/h-​​franc​​e​.net​​/Salo​​n​/Sal​​on9no​​14Int​​roduc​​​tion.​​ pdf. Accessed October 14, 2020. 3 Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951); Meyer Schapiro, “The Social Bases of Art,” in Artists Against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists’ Congress, ed. Matthew Baigell and Julia Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986; first published 1936). 4 On Clark’s explicit Hegelianism, see Timothy J. Clark, “The Conditions of Artistic Creation,” Times Literary Supplement 24 (1974): 561–2. 5 On the long history of these Marxist debates, see the concise summary in Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 17–48.

 Marat’s Two Bodies 49 6 Timothy J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 15–54. 7 Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: Cosimo, 2008), 2. 8 Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); Ernst Kantorowicz, Laudes regiae: A Study in Liturgical Acclamations and Mediaeval Ruler Worship (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1946); Ralph E. Giesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1960). 9 Ernest Belfort Bax, Jean-Paul Marat, the People’s Friend (London: Grant Richards, 1901), 313. 10 Ibid., 316. 11 Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 154. 12 Ibid., 156. 13 Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 159. 14 Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 48. 15 Giesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony, 44–7. 16 Ibid., 60. 17 Ibid., 22. 18 Ibid., 20–4. 19 Clark, Farewell to an Idea, 46. 20 Giesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony, 44. 21 Ibid., 26. 22 Lela Graybill, “A Proximate Violence: Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture 9, no. 2 (2010). For a substantial discussion of the current debates surrounding David’s use of wax models, see Ihor Junyk, “Spectacles of Virtue: Classicism, Waxworks and the Festivals of the French Revolution,” Early Popular Visual Culture 6, no. 3 (2008): 281–304. 23 Clark, Farewell to an Idea, 15–17. 24 I rely heavily here on Hélène Germa-Romann, Du “bel mourir” au “bien mourir”: le sentiment de la mort chez les gentilhommes français (1515-1643) (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2001); and Philippe Ariès, L’homme devant la mort (Paris: Le Seuil, 1977). 25 Kantorowicz, Laudes regiae, 77. 26 Ariès, L’homme devant la mort, 18–20. 27 Germa-Romann, Du “bel mourir” au “bien mourir,” 29–52. 28 Ibid., 16–17. 29 Jacques Hennequin, Henri IV dans ses oraisons funèbres: ou, La naissance d’une légende (Paris: Klincksieck, 1977). 30 Ibid., 75. 31 Ibid., 26. 32 Clark, Farewell to an Idea, 48. 33 Ralph E. Giesey, “Rules of Inheritance and Strategies of Mobility in Prerevolutionary France,” The American Historical Review 82, no. 2 (1977): 271–89. 34 Giesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony, 286.

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3

The Anti-Heroism of Modern Life, or the Social History of Art in Standard Time André Dombrowski1

At the center of the social history of art lies a set of relationships in space rather than time. “Social (adj.),” so the Online Etymology Dictionary says, derives from “1560s as ‘living with others,’ from Middle French social (14c.) and directly from Latin socialis ‘of companionship, of allies; united, living with others; of marriage, conjugal,’ from socius ‘companion, ally,’ probably originally ‘follower.’”2 Studying a work of art sociohistorically thereby implies placing the originary creative act within its “context,” “culture,” and “historical moment,” stressing the lateral linkages between the work of art and the sociocultural developments that “surrounded” it and contributed to its creation. Such horizontal acts of translation between “text” and “context” are, of course, anything but simple and transparent, and they constitute the very ground on which the social history of art builds its theoretical edifice. As T. J. Clark, in one of the founding manifestoes of the method “On the Social History of Art” of 1973 put it: “What I want to explain are the connecting links between artistic form, the available systems of visual representation, the current theories of art, other ideologies, social classes, and more general historical structures and processes. . . . If the social history of art has a specific field of study, it is exactly this—the processes of conversion and relation, which so much art history takes for granted.”3 The language is deeply and deliberately presentist and situationist: currency trumps historicity, simultaneity wins over diachronicity, in order to ensure a unified whole of actions and conditions within which the work of art could be considered to gestate. Still, a carefully constructed sense of history underpinned the social history of art nonetheless, either understood as the social context of the present tense at which the artwork was made, or the ideological (class) formations and image traditions passed down into the precise historical moment under consideration: “Finally,” T. J. Clark continues, “there is the old familiar question of art history. What use did the artist make of pictorial tradition; what forms, what schemata, enabled the painter to see and to depict?”4 The social history of art favored a dialectical conception of time and history above others, one in which the past is co-present with the artist, in the form of aesthetic tropes contemporaneous with the creative act under consideration.5 The past, and the potential continuities it promised, thereby became suspended within an

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ever-evolving present tense that required recurrent renewal and refurbishment from specific moments in the past, but not via a historical continuum per se. Replicating this logic of dislocation and reincorporation, historical circumstances themselves marked by dramatic change and historical upheaval became the social history of art’s favored topics: the art of revolutions and iconoclastic actions, and the aesthetic shifts that accompanied regime change or times of warfare. Similarly, the social history of art esteemed those conditions in which rapid changes of taste and fast-paced consumption were discernable, as in the modern marketplace and the urban environment, with its constant cycles of changing fashions and ceaseless renewal of entertainments, spectacles, and commodities. The social history of art could detect artistic change especially well by analyzing the culturally new and untested, including the pressures they put, retroactively, on more traditional means of artistic representation. Instead of past traditions of art molding the artist’s choices in the present, it enthroned “change,” “shock,” and other modes of “crisis,” so central to commercial culture, as its key temporal frame in order to judge artistic quality and ingenuity. The social history of art’s favored mode of time and history thereby tended to match the avant-garde’s militant defense of the present against the past, and it is no wonder that the founding era of the social history of art— the period into which it first sank its teeth, testing its methodologies—was the age of modernism and avant-gardism, from Gustave Courbet (or perhaps even Jacques-Louis David two generations earlier) to the period of the Second World War and the Cold War that followed, but perhaps especially, French painting of the late nineteenth century, when Paris held sway as the global capital of commerce, tourism, and entertainment. What I am characterizing is, of course, a “past” version of the social history of art in its heyday of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, developments that have continued to change—most of all in the shifting priorities of Clark’s writings themselves—for roughly the past two or so decades. I would nonetheless hold that, by and large, the social history of art, as practiced then and still practiced today, has largely avoided making Marxist accounts of time (such as E. P. Thompson’s influential essay “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” of 1967 and its aftermath) a central vector of its analysis.6 The exceptions include a recent book by Marnin Young, Realism in the Age of Impressionism, and the studies more focused on postwar art and contemporary culture, such as Pamela Lee’s Chronophobia and Jonathan Crary’s 24/7, among a few others.7 Still, for all our frequent references to “commodities” and “commodity culture” in art history, how many fewer lines have been written mentioning Volume 1, Chapter 10, of Marx’s Capital, “The Working Day,” or chronicling the schedules of artistic practice, then and now? Some of the blame for the generalized temporal proximity between object and analysis in contextual interpretation should be put on Charles Baudelaire. Often considered the father figure of a modern aesthetic attuned to the present tense’s stylistic proclivities over those of the past, he enthroned perpetual change as a welcome, if not the only, agent of creativity. In his infamous “On the Heroism of Modern Life,” part of his review of “The Salon of 1846,” he stated: The pageant of fashionable life and the thousands of floating existences—criminals and kept women—which drift about in the underworld of a great city; the Gazette

 The Anti-Heroism of Modern Life 53 des Tribunaux and the Moniteur all prove to us that we have only to open our eyes to recognize our heroism. Suppose that a minister, baited by the opposition’s impertinent questioning, has given expression once and for all—with that proud and sovereign eloquence which is proper to him—to his scorn and disgust for all ignorant and mischief-making oppositions. The same evening you will hear the following words buzzing round you on the Boulevard des Italiens: “Were you in the Chamber today? and [sic] did you see the minister? Good Heavens, how handsome he was! I have never seen such scorn!” So there are [sic] such things as modern beauty and modern heroism! . . . All these words that fall from your lips bear witness to your belief in a new and special beauty, which is neither that of Achilles nor yet of Agamemnon.8

Here, already, is the present glorified as the true maker of meaning: Baudelaire emphasized perpetual movement (of drifting and floating) as well as the sheer newness of his sense of beauty; he heralded the daily newspaper culture, constantly hungry for more sensational news, which provided the aesthetization of the modern world already that “same evening.” Baudelaire thereby famously heroicized the present, making it a special temporality, if not the temporality, of modernity. Through him, beautification became coterminous with instantaneity. I do not have to stress how influential this temporal conditioning toward the present has been for the history of art in the past decades, and still is. What I do want to insist on in what follows are the ways in which this construction has rendered the social history of art, at moments, rather uninterested in the actual social histories of time that underpin it, especially those not marked by upheaval, reversal, and rapid transformation. The politics of slow change, stagnation, continuity, and regularity often fall outside the social historian of art’s purview, unless in the context of the domestic sphere. These temporalities need not necessarily be “conservative” in nature or retrograde by design. Throughout the modern period, people waited, contemplated, rested, and paused, or worked long monotonous hours, resisting—by their own free will or out of necessity—the new modern speeds of transit and life in the metropolis, as well as the many instant forms of consumption it had on offer. There were many long-lasting forms of regulated time-behavior that the period birthed, modern through and through, like going to school or the public library, visiting one’s doctor or lawyer, or living by the schedules of public transport and mass transit, topics from which many modern painters, for the reasons outlined earlier, tended to stay away. But these were also deeply contemporary actions, marked by repetition and slowness, as well as the psychological states that attended such stasis (like boredom, resignation, and sleepiness). I am thinking here of business and work hours including break schedules; the length of military and guard duty, or that of a doctor’s visit and a nurse’s shift; the duration of the school day with homework, and that of a parliamentary session; the establishment of regular train, bus, and ocean-liner schedules; the regularized delivery of mail; and so on. Such temporal manifestations are no less social phenomena compared to their counter-temporalities of speed and

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perpetual transition, even though they often developed more slowly and over time, remaining more unnoticed in general and not entering active consciousness as easily. These temporalities often came into being as the technologically engineered forms of bureaucratic time, standardized and thoroughly industrialized by modern means of time-management, resulting in their complete intrusion into everyday life. Speed could be recognizable as such only against the foil of its opposite, which is not exactly slow time, but standardized and regulated time (the time of the office, the factory, and the school building). In what follows, I shall propose a form of the social history of art that is a social history of (artistic) time, sensitive to the above dialectics of the modern temporal order, and excavating artists’ depiction of the complexities of such lived temporalities. Focusing on examples in which the shock of the situation became legible precisely through the attending regulation existing close by, this chapter demonstrates how aware some artists tended to be of the pictorial potential of these chronometric developments and contradictions. Remember that the scenario Baudelaire imagined as emblematic of a new modern beauty was a scornful politician, speaking in the parliamentary chamber. Yet (with few exceptions in the work of Honoré Daumier and his colleagues, and perhaps one or two paintings by Edgar Degas), we do not have many modern paintings of such scenarios, showing the tedium of the bureaucratic machinery of parliament or the modern office, and certainly not after Franz Kafka rendered them dangerously absurd. But not all artists shied away from their representation. This chapter is about two of them, two of whom I want to call “antiheroic” painters of modern life, not frequently treated by the social history of nineteenth-century art, at least not in the ways proposed here. One is the mid-nineteenth-century Bavarian painter Carl Spitzweg (1808–85), whose paintings frequently show modern-life scenes of bureaucrats and bored military guards. The social history of art has heretofore had difficulties admitting to the more hackneyed, norm-affirming, and unfashionable aspects of bourgeois existence shown in his work, and their strange, satirical appeal for modern-life painting. My second example is the work of the Impressionist painter Gustave Caillebotte (1848–94), which often shows the urban flâneur facing standardized time directly in the urban environment of the modern train station and elsewhere. The final payoff, I hope, is both a better understanding of the modern temporalities of depiction (Impressionism being only the most overt recoding of the speeds of painting in the period) and an expansion of the usual purview of the social history of art into socio-specific histories of time. In the process, I return to the core values and procedures of the social history of art, yet apply them to a set of depictions and issues (the normal, the retrograde, the slow, the scheduled) that the method has traditionally tended to avoid. My first example is that of Carl Spitzweg, Bavarian realist painter of modern-life subjects with a preference for antiheroic themes of middle-class existences, including librarians, postal workers, low-level bureaucrats, low-ranking military men and guard personnel, at times shown knitting absentmindedly at a cannon, and the like. As Baudelaire focused his attention on the flâneur, the prostitute, and the Parisienne as the archetypes of the modern order (and the new systems of “quick” representations

 The Anti-Heroism of Modern Life 55 it demanded), giving the French avant-garde its famous set of figures, themes, and imaginary oblique viewing-positions, Spitzweg turned a sarcastic eye toward the more normative, conservative, if not to say boring and uneventful, aspects of modern bourgeois being. In a set of paintings of cacti devotees—elderly gentlemen with a predilection for the prickly and slow-growing—Spitzweg captured modern antiheroes vividly. In The Cactus Enthusiast of about 1850, an aging and balding bookkeeper or archivist (the large-scale map on the wall designates the office of a mid-level county clerk, or a land and property-records manager) has got up from his desk in order to contemplate his largest cactus at the window (Figure 3.1).9 Both leaning a bit forward, and both green (the clerk wears a heavy green coat), the clerk and the cactus have clearly come to resemble each other over the years of their coexistence. The room betrays its function as an office. The foreground is blocked by stacks of bundled paper, which also fill a back corner. A desk and desk chair are half cut off by the right side of the frame, but an inkwell and a writing quill appear prominently. The protagonist’s coat and top hat hang on the wall at the left to signal that the space is not a home but a semipublic space. The partially visible map already mentioned and a handwritten motto hang on the wall. By

Figure 3.1  Carl Spitzweg, The Cactus Enthusiast (Der Kaktusliebhaber), c. 1850, oil on canvas, 39.3 × 22.8 cm. Schweinfurt: Museum Georg Schäfer. Photo Credit: HIP/Art Resource, NY.

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way of a few changes in figures and props, Spitzweg has thoroughly updated Vermeer’s precedent to the bureaucratic world of the mid-nineteenth century.10 Above these items hovers a pendulum clock suspended just below the ceiling, announcing that it is 10:42 a.m., the middle of the morning, hardly the usual time for a break or the slowing of work at day’s end. This chronometer governs all actions in the painting: it is not merely the highest item, but its weights also stretch down to connect pictorially with the figure of the clerk, while the pendulum is currently swinging far to the left, pointing directly at the cactus, connecting all three both visually and psychologically. The scene is bathed for a few minutes in the warm sunlight of the late morning, another marker of the various regular time-cycles that solemnize the scene. This, then, is a painting of one quiet, extended encounter between an office clerk and his cactus. Since no one else is present in the room and the official is seemingly alone most of the time, the picture turns us into unwelcome intruders who have not been noticed. The clerk is rather distracted, captivated by a special event, namely the cactus’ new red bloom, which has prompted him to stop his work. The color red ties all elements together: it marks the red bloom, the clerk’s red nose, the clock’s red face, as well as the desk’s red tablecloth, illustrating their interdependence. The humor of the painting derives from the clashing of two temporalities: the time of the office and its laconic schedules, carefully chronicled by the clock, as well as the slow-growing cacti on the window sill, against the time of surprise and novelty emblematized by the sprouting flower. Clearly, the bloom has the power to stop bureaucracy, but only for its short existence. It registers so starkly in the scene, both to the clerk and to the viewer, because its presence was unscheduled. This was hardly the only time that Spitzweg acknowledged the coexistence of such temporal parameters in his paintings. He repeated this theme several times, and the closest other known painting is referred to as The Cactus Friend of c. 1858, showing another botanist partial to cacti (Figure 3.2). The protagonist has stopped his tea-time and newspaper-reading, in order to get up and lift a thick, old cactus in a pot that has also just presented a small red bloom. Here, too, the humor derives from the codependence of two seemingly opposed time frames, which provide the painting with its central axis of meaning: the continuity symbolized by the slow-growing plants and the regularity implied by the meal stand interrupted by an unexpected natural surprise and burst of color. Still, other scenes depicted by Spitzweg bear out this reading. Take, for instance, one of his most curious subjects, that of The Knitting Sentinel, c. 1855, in which a guard in full military garb (apparently Spitzweg used an eighteenth-century uniform as model) stands surprised by the intrusion of the viewer, whom he faces frontally through an opening in the overgrown fort that he calls his place of work (Figure 3.3). The opening in the wall is for a cannon, into whose barrel the viewer stares directly, were it not for a bird nesting in it. What is more, the soldier seems surprised, not because we appear to him as unexpected military aggressors hovering in the unlikely position of a straight close-range shot, but because we have interfered with his knitting session. Holding in his hands the unfinished sock he has been creating, he has put his bayonet to his side, rendering him defenseless. Different time frames are once again at odds with each other, yet humorously conjoined: in this instance, it is the regulated time of

 The Anti-Heroism of Modern Life 57

Figure 3.2  Carl Spitzweg, The Cactus Friend (Der Kaktusfreund), c. 1858, oil on canvas, 54.2 × 32.4 cm. Schweinfurt: Museum Georg Schäfer. Photo Credit: bpk Bildagentur/ Museum Georg Schäfer/Art Resource, NY.

Figure 3.3  Carl Spitzweg, The Knitting Sentinel (Der strickende Wachposten), c. 1855, oil on canvas, 21.6 × 39.2 cm. Schweinfurt: Museum Georg Schäfer. Photo Credit: HIP/ Art Resource, NY.

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guard shifts, the slow overgrowth of the fort as well as the perpetual movement of the clouds in the background, against the moment of shock and realization of the viewer’s intrusion, staged here as the central confrontation that animates the composition. Slow-time and shock-time are mutually implicated in each of these paintings whose narratives center precisely on their altercation. Spitzweg made these choices about the specific time-conflicts in his scenes at a particular moment in time-management history. It cannot be coincidental that he devised the unique iconographies—never before, nor since, selected for depiction in quite this manner—at a crucial turning point in the history of negotiations over the length of the working day. His paintings showed shifts suddenly interrupted, or a workday punctuated by the unplanned and unscheduled. These topics, in Spitzweg’s day (and ever since the Industrial Revolution’s dramatic increase in working time), were deeply meaningful and politically charged to the audiences that viewed them. The decades during which Spitzweg painted are often considered those when a more agrarian workcycle dependent on daylight gave way to a fully industrial time frame, one that was more mechanical, schematic, and unnatural by design. Moreover, as historians of German labor like Michael Schneider and others have shown, the 1850s and 1860s—the decades of Spitzweg’s paintings under discussion—were precisely the years when Germans worked the most hours in their history. As Schneider demonstrated, the average working hours per week in the German territories (though, of course, these hours varied by profession) were around sixty to seventy-two hours around 1800, sixty-six to eighty around 1820, and around eighty to eighty-five between 1830 and 1860, before dropping again to c. seventy-eight hours between 1861 and 1870.11 Spitzweg’s canvases were painted at this crucial pivoting point, when the end of an unchecked Industrial Revolution’s demand for longer working hours met a more regulated labor market that eventually provided protections like the ten-hour workday, and finally, in the twentieth century, the eighthour one. Schneider places the swing around 1860, then continues to enumerate the gradual gains achieved by workers, from protections for child labor to more extensive legislation around working hours during the later Kaiserreich period. When Spitzweg’s clerks interrupt their work to look at their cacti, or a guard gets interrupted while knitting, such scenes perform important social and ideological work in a time of change in the labor market. The painter’s curious scenarios enshrine the dichotomies between work and rest as anecdotal and situationally occasioned, occurring a bit as if naturally, rather than socially and legislatively negotiated.12 His paintings’ humor derives from the realization that routines and work-time should have limits. I am not arguing for an explicit political message in Spitzweg’s imagery, far from it, and, of course, his bourgeois bureaucratic subjects are far from the working classes most affected by industrial time-rhythms, but I want to attest to his acute understanding of the temporal mindset that his period had given rise to, which he made over into the topic of his art. For Spitzweg, the confrontations between divergent temporalities were a hallmark of the modern order and thus the perfect subject for his unusual modern-life paintings. A reading of his letters bears out this interpretation as a self-conscious pictorial strategy. Frequently, we can observe Spitzweg carefully studying the civil service culture he ended up depicting, delineating its particular turns of phrase or physical habitus. In

 The Anti-Heroism of Modern Life 59 his diary entry of September 12, 1849, after visiting the chateau of Pommersfelden and meeting a high-ranking government official in a local Bayreuth pub thereafter, he jots down the latter’s bureaucratic phrasing: “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, you are right, very right, correct, correct, correct, correct, yes, it is true, you are quite right.”13 In a letter of June 14, 1879, he then sarcastically employs the administrative tendency to over-enumerate: “Before I continue to write in the same vein 63rd and 64th (which, mercifully, I want to spare you), I will, 65th, come to a point which nearly robbed me of the pleasure of coming into possession of your lovely letter.”14 And in a letter, dated August 22, 1879, to the art critic Friedrich Pecht, who had just written a review that spoke favorably of Spitzweg, he opines: “Indeed, after detailed statistical measures I count as follows: there are 1362 exhibiting artists. Of those, 107 were mentioned by name, and of those 107, 63 fared rather well, and 44 quite well. If I subtract the mentioned 107 from 1362, there remain 1255 malcontenti [sic] who will be angry over your praise for me, therefore 1255 enemies.”15 Spitzweg’s officious and overzealously pragmatic figures of speech redound from letter to painting and back, where they dissect the modern bureaucratic condition. In a letter of September 25, 1842, Franz von Pocci, official in the court of Ludwig I, confirms that the painter’s strategy paid off, proclaiming about one of Spitzweg’s works, “could one possibly see a more complete picture of boredom.”16 Spitzweg’s incessantly mobile and internationally connected life underlines that neither the pictorial themes nor the correspondence’s tone were naive claims of a backward-looking artistic spirit; they were, instead, carefully honed creative strategies conceived for the modern viewer. Spitzweg hardly lived up to the stereotypes in his paintings but conducted a highly active life opposed to the quiet bourgeois existences he depicted. To his brother Eduard, he wrote on September 4, 1844, begging for news: “You could get the newspaper to me via carrier; I thirst for news, even via countrymessenger, whatever you have, just add it.”17 We might even think of him as an early tourist and frequent traveler, since there was hardly a year, or even a month, when Spitzweg was not on the road via modern means of transport.18 In a letter of August 16, 1856, he even accounts for the time spent walking along a country road in what was then known as “Poststunden,” or “postal hours,” a nineteenth-century Bavarian assessment of distance between postal stations measured in feet, in which one Poststunde is the equivalent of about 12,700 Bavarian feet or around 3,700 meters.19 During a trip to Leipzig and Dresden, he comports himself like a modern tourist with the requisite demands on his time, indicated in a letter to Eduard dated September 18, 1856: The day-before-yesterday evening, 9 ¼ o’clock, we arrived in Leipzig and yesterday evening at 9 o’clock in Dresden, because we put the Leipzig attractions as quickly as possible behind us. The fair has not yet begun, life is therefore still missing in the city. . . . Our stay in Dresden will also likely not last very long, because [Eduard] Schleich [the Elder] thinks we must hurry.20

As these passages indicate, Spitzweg lived by modern time standards and, by the 1840s and 1850s, had learned to manage his daily life by the rule of the quarter hour and the train schedule.

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But Spitzweg went further than other passengers of the period by wanting to know more about the new systems of transport, and in great detail, no less. After a long journey to Prague in 1849, he notes in his diary on September 17: “Train cars. The locomotive very large. Tracks: 5 sole-length of my boots & ca. 1 Zoll [sic] distance between the rails. Cars for passengers 18 feet long including the two entry steps. I. class yellow, II. class dark-green, III. class brown-red.”21 We may attribute these excesses of detail to the age of realism, but for Spitzweg, it seems, more was at stake than documenting modern life in all its new intricacies and particularities. For him, the modern time-pressures and scheduled existences that embody international travel were the flip-side of an overly bureaucratized form of life. Indeed, his paintings seem to suggest that the latter enabled the former as much as the former necessitated the latter. The age of accountability and the age of transit were one and the same to him. Since this connection was itself not always clear to see, and even more difficult to distill into painting, he depicted clerks interrupted by the sudden appearance of a cactus bloom, and guards looking up startled from their knitting, in order to create special moments of depiction that rang true to the world’s new regimes of temporal complexity. We might, of course, accuse him of never looking directly at modern time-structures and their inherent contradictions, but Spitzweg seemed certain that his viewers probably did not want to either. If we need any further proof of Spitzweg’s tongue-in-cheek diagnostics of modern time, read this letter of June 3, 1883: “‘Repetitsch orolotsch’ seems, in Dutch, the name for a repeating watch, I once heard—sounds almost like a curse—if I wanted to steal even more of your time with my scribblings, you might have the temptation to also try this curse on your valuable Amsterdam time.”22 I am sure some of the specifics of the references here are lost on us today in our age of digital time, but to Spitzweg’s contemporaries, they signaled the degree to which modern structures of time were bypassing nothing and no one. Spitzweg’s gift to the period imagination was to make these temporalities over into humorous realist art, where they proved a little less threatening to behold. My second example concerns Caillebotte, his 1870s depictions of the late-romantic figure of the urban flâneur, and his encounter with the structures of modern temporality. Generally luxuriating in his temporal freedoms, the flâneur was by that decade threatened with extinction by the emergence of an industrial, standardized, and soon “universal” time-reckoning, a process, I will claim, Caillebotte—not unlike Spitzweg—turned into the subject matter of his art. We can find flâneurial scenes shown frequently in impressionist paintings, and especially in Caillebotte’s Parisian cityscapes. Impressionism often focused on the haphazard juxtapositions typical of the urban environment, delighting in their precious randomness. The impressionist instant tends to be largely about itself, about passers-by moving in or out of frames of vision, cut off by the picture plane, positioned at odd angles, looking at things we cannot see ourselves, thus creating formal relationships on canvas more so than meaningful social relationships in urban space. Through such Haussmannian emblems as the pont de l’Europe that spans the tracks north of the Gare Saint-Lazare, the modern

 The Anti-Heroism of Modern Life 61 urban environment, in turn, created the perfect framing devices for such interactions through its spare architectural forms. The iron trusses and railings turned the urban world into so many framed pictures, ready for the flâneur’s brief inspection. If there was significance in the modern urban environment for Caillebotte, it was always lodged in the brief seconds of overlap and rupture between figures, or between figures and the built environment, with no firm base of meaning or truly extensive temporal connections and implications. Caillebotte was the master of this “instantaneous” aesthetic, with Degas, that was never as quickly painted as Monet’s paintings or those of other Impressionists, yet full of visual accidents nonetheless. As has often been said, Caillebotte planned studiously—and devoted long hours of preparation to his canvases—in order to bring the look of such accidental moments about. In Caillebotte’s paintings, the encounter between flâneur and modern time is staged in one of its most overt forms among the Impressionists, especially in a work like On the Pont de l’Europe of 1876–7 (Figure 3.4).23 Here is the flâneur of flâneurs: anonymous, face turned away from the viewer and toward the spectacle of the station with its incoming and outgoing trains, dressed in a dark uniform suit and coat, top hat on, resembling the figure leaving the picture at left, but still clearly distinguished

Figure 3.4  Gustave Caillebotte, On the Pont de l’Europe, 1876–7, oil on canvas, 105.7 × 130.8 cm. Fort Worth, TX: Kimbell Art Museum, AP 1982.01. Photo Credit: Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas/Art Resource, NY.

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from the working-class man standing behind them. What the painting shows us is the direct comparison between the two deeply modern temporalities I have been sketching: that of the flâneur (of urban accidental encounters and a delight in an unknown and unscheduled future) and that of modern transport and industry at the station, utterly regular and regulated. Caillebotte annexed the Gare Saint-Lazare, and modern transport more generally, to his aesthetic cause in order to compare his painted flâneurial moments to a different set of temporal indications that surrounded him at the station, namely the advent of industrial time. Let us look at those two-time frames separately first. By the time of Caillebotte’s depictions, the original, early nineteenth-century flâneur had, if we trust the analysis of Walter Benjamin, nearly disappeared at the hand of modern industrial clock-time and its full implementation. The literary figure of the flâneur had been invented in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—the era of the arcades rather than department stores—to make palatable an exhibitionist form of strolling and window-shopping that was not necessarily buying-oriented. As Benjamin proposed, he (and sometimes she) had vanished with the predominance of consumer capitalism including the emergence of mass spectacles and department stores, to which the flâneur’s appetite for the consumption of accidental urban sights and minor events (and not of goods) was no longer a useful trope.24 I want to add to this line of reasoning that the flâneur lost some of his cultural appeal at the hand of standardized time. Upon his literary creation, the flâneur had become the consummate figure of a willful luxuriating in time, a partisan of the idea that time wasted is time well spent. Flâneurs lingered, followed, and flowed through the urban environment at their own pace. Louis Huart, in his 1841 Physiologie du flâneur, confirms: “What makes the human the king of creation, is that he knows how to waste his time and his youth in all possible climates and seasons.”25 There is a special temporality, then, to flânerie. In Caillebotte’s On the Pont de l’Europe, we see the meeting of such a flagrantly unproductive pursuit with the industrial age’s drive to standardize time at the station (all cumulating in the 1884 recommendation to make Greenwich prime meridian and the center of “universal time”). These developments proffered one among many blows that recast the profligate temporality of the flâneur as pure loss when it once signified gain. When one looks at the illustrations of nineteenth-century flâneurs published in Huart’s text and others, it quickly becomes evident that they rarely counted a pocket watch among their typical accoutrements. These included the walking stick, top hat, a cigarette, and binoculars, instead, but a watch chain rarely dangles from a flâneur’s vest even though it had become a sign of bourgeois respectability on most other men of the period. The flâneur did not seem to need a watch, as there was no technologically sanctioned beginning or end to his actions. Flânerie did not just have no temporal limit; it also had its imaginary tempo. “In 1839,” Benjamin reminds us, “it was considered elegant to take a tortoise out walking. This gives us an idea of the tempo of flânerie in the arcades.”26 The flâneur demonstrated a willful slowness, a counter to high-capitalist speed of visual consumption. But flânerie was anything but the pure wasting of time; hardly boredom or ennui, it was full of activity including conquering urban space. In 1867, Victor Fournel added

 The Anti-Heroism of Modern Life 63 the following to our previous definitions of the flâneur: flânerie means “undertaking interminable expeditions on the streets and promenades; without worrying about going somewhere specific or hurrying; stopping at every boutique in order to look at the images on display, at every street corner to read the broadsheets, at every display to finger through second-hand books.”27 The emphasis lies on how completely, how fully, the flâneur “wasted” time. “The idleness of the flâneur is a demonstration against the division of labor,” as Benjamin once again had it, adding that “Basic to flânerie . . . is the idea that the fruits of idleness are more precious than the fruits of labor.”28 The flâneur made unproductive time productive; and even though there was no real wasted minute in flânerie, all that interminable activity of drifting did not have a real end-goal but to make of time itself a kind of freedom. Minutes, hours, even days, were celebrated in flânerie as wide, subjective, and flexible entities, entailing no concrete pursuit of meaning—the exact opposite of the times of precision the modern industrial clock invented. When Caillebotte’s flâneur has stopped on the railroad bridge, he is not just looking at the station, but at the transformation of time occurring there as well. “[I]f you would like to visit [Caillebotte] without me, at three thirty precisely [sic], he will be at home, 77 rue Miromesnil, and would be happy to receive you,” Monet wrote to his client Georges de Bellio in late December 1877, underlining the word “precise,” thereby drawing attention to the increased value his culture placed on punctuality.29 This is the first time that Monet made such an extreme request for punctuality in the letters that we have. Taking the train to and from Saint-Lazare as often as painters like Caillebotte and Monet did to go out to the suburbs shaped their temporal horizons and regulated their sense of time, including when they painted. For the Impressionists, and perhaps for no one more so than Caillebotte with his “careful” kind of Impressionism, composing began to indicate perfect timing. In Caillebotte’s paintings, the figures tend to hover above the station’s extensive site, watching its activity from afar. Still, Caillebotte painted while trains rushed by and crowds of passengers passed. We must presume that the flâneur at the center of the painting stopped to watch a train’s arrival or departure, implying that Caillebotte decided on a scene that showed his flâneur reacting directly to the industrial time schedule below. He thereby made a painting, among a group of related subjects, whose iconography and sense of painterly urgency were deeply affected by the trains’ routes in and out of Saint-Lazare. Caillebotte’s flâneur was stopped in his tracks precisely by the technological novelty of these temporal arrangements. Stopping in the middle of the pont de l’Europe, the flâneur depicted by Caillebotte stood face to face with the new fixation on being “on time” at the station, exemplified by the abundance of clocks, signals, and the establishment of a synchronized time specific to French transport in the 1870s. In that period and since, the debate over the implementation of such standard forms of time-reckoning went under the denomination of the “unification of time” or the “unification of the hour” (in French, l’unification de l’heure means both), first tested publicly in the 1870s, and realized in the subsequent decades. This phrasing signified the telegraphic synchronization of the major Parisian clocks, which began to set a time for the entirety of the French railroads and other urban nodal points on top of the various local times it did not always cancel

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out. The ideal of the “unified” time in Paris and eventually in France implied that ideally all clocks would work in networked unison and proffer exactly the same time to the inhabitants of the modern metropolis. A collective “now” began to dominate over an individual, flâneurial sense of time. In the period, such a unified French time zone stood somewhat apart from the daily usage of time that surrounded it, often by up to half an hour, at least until existing by it became law (which occurred on March 14, 1891, when France officially decreed Parisian time to be national time). Before these developments, many median local times functioned simultaneously throughout France, since each geographic area set its time in accordance with the sun’s passing over that site’s meridian line. Such measurement furnished a specific averaged local “noon,” not always exactly but close to midi vrai (or midi du soleil), the actual noon at a certain specific location. The result was that there existed a time difference of more than forty-five minutes between the local time in Brest and that in Nice, for instance. The various systems to achieve this systematization of time were based on electric time-regulators and their dependent clocks, which were stopped in their forward thrust until reaching the desired time provided by the regulator clock, which at that moment releases them back into action. The Parisian municipality established a committee of engineers to examine the possibility of urban time-synchronization in 1875. In 1876, it inaugurated a widely publicized contest among French clockmakers to build four precision clocks for the purpose of unifying Parisian time. The contest ended in 1877 when Caillebotte showed some of his Parisian paintings at the third impressionist exhibition (On the Pont de l’Europe, however, was not among them). In 1879, the committee, now including Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, received approval from the city to commission twelve so-called centres horaires placed throughout Paris, which would distribute synchronized Observatory time, while the other clocks of Paris would continue to provide their own times. These centres horaires were opened in 1880—one still exists today at the Barrière d’enfer.30 In the minds of many Parisians, “time” thereby became a product in itself, one of those regularly provided amenities of modern city-life like water, gas, and electricity. The flâneur’s favored forms of time, in turn, suffered through time’s commercialization.31 It cannot be coincidental that Caillebotte chose to focus on the brief urban moment just as time standardized around him, and when “unified time” itself became a topic of much public debate. Some of his most daring paintings resulted, like those focusing exclusively on the encounter between the modern passer-by and the modern iron architecture and train schedules that were the material evidence of time’s newfound rationality. As if to show just how completely the formal logic of painting at SaintLazare was linked to the train traffic around him, Caillebotte halted his imagery at precisely those moments when passing trains fascinated his subjects and stopped them in their forward motion. The flâneur stands briefly stilled by these events, watching the very temporality about to undo his favorite temporal pursuits. The fascination of the painting lies in this very encounter, and the clash between these two incommensurate worlds of time. Only a social history of art that practices a social history of time can begin to account for pictorial choices whose meanings otherwise remain lost to our complete and irreversible naturalizing of GMT.

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Notes 1 I thank Jonathan D. Katz for his kind assistance with this chapter, as well as Robert Slifkin and Anthony Grudin for their manifold efforts in bringing this volume to fruition. All translations from the French and German originals are mine unless otherwise indicated. 2 https://www​.etymonline​.com​/word​/social, accessed July 13, 2018. 3 T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (1973, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 12. 4 Ibid., 15. 5 Such considerations were central to the earliest formations of the social history of art in the United States and the United Kingdom, when, for instance, Ernst Gombrich and others discussed Arnold Hauser’s work, arguing especially over the intrinsic and extrinsic forms of time and history to the work of art. Michael R. Orwicz, “Critical Discourse in the Formation of a Social History of Art: Anglo-American Response to Arnold Hauser,” Oxford Art Journal 8, no. 2 (1985): 52–62, here 54–5. 6 E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present 38 (December 1967): 56–97. 7 Marnin Young, Realism in the Age of Impressionism: Painting and the Politics of Time (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015); Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); and Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London and New York: Verso, 2013). 8 Charles Baudelaire, “On the Heroism of Modern Life,” in “The Salon of 1846,” in Art in Paris, 1845-1862: Salons and Other Exhibitions, trans. Jonathan Mayne (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 118–19. 9 Nice descriptions of these works can be found in the recent Birgit Poppe, Spitzweg und seine Zeit (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 2015), 40, 85–7, 107–11. The most thorough analysis of Spitzweg’s work remains Siegfried Wichmann’s, esp. Carl Spitzweg: Verzeichnis der Werke. Gemälde und Aquarelle (Stuttgart: Belser, 2002), and Carl Spitzweg und die französischen Zeichner Daumier, Grandville, Gavarni, Doré, exh. cat. Munich: Haus der Kunst, and Herrsching: Schuler, 1985; as well as the scholarship of Jens Christian Jensen, Carl Spitzweg: Zwischen Resignation und Zeitkritik (Cologne: DuMont, 1979); and Carl Spitzweg: Gemälde und Zeichnungen im Museum Georg Schäfer Schweinfurt (Munich: Prestel, 2002), 106, 120. Some rare recent passages on Spitzweg in English can be found in Hans-Peter Wipplinger, ed., Carl Spitzweg, Erwin Wurm: Köstlich! Köstlich? Hilarious! Hilarious?, exh. cat. Vienna: Leopold Museum, and Cologne: Walther König, 2017. 10 I thank Shira Brisman for this observation. 11 This history is most succinctly summarized in Michael Schneider, “Der Kampf um die Arbeitszeitverkürzung von der Industrialisierung bis zur Gegenwart,” Gewerkschaftliche Monatshefte 2 (1984): 77–89, here 78–9, later published in book form as Michael Schneider, Streit um Arbeitszeit: Geschichte des Kampfes um Arbeitszeitverkürzung in Deutschland (Cologne: Bund-Verlag, 1984). See also Philipp Reick, “Labor Is Not a Commodity!”: The Movement to Shorten the Workday in Late-Nineteenth Century Berlin and New York (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, 2016).

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12 Compare Clark’s reading of Camille Pissarro’s Two Young Peasant Women, 1892, regarding work and leisure times, in T. J. Clark, “We Field-Women,” chapter 2 of Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 54–137, esp. 70, 105–10, 122. 13 “Ja, ja, ja, ja, ja, da haben Sie recht, sehr recht, richtig, richtig, richtig, richtig, ja, das ist wahr, da haben Sie ganz recht.” Siegfried Wichmann, ed., “Die Briefe von Carl Spitzweg,” in idem, Carl Spitzweg, 1985, 29. 14 “Bevor ich aber so fortschreibe 63tens und 64tens (was ich Ihnen gnädiglich erlassen will) komme ich 65tens auf einen Punkt der mich beinahe der Freude in den Besitz Ihres lieben Briefes zu gelangen beraubt hätte.” Ibid., 34. 15 “Ich rechne nemlich [sic] nach genauen statistischen Notizen so: 1362 Aussteller sinds. Von diesen wurden 107 namentlich besprochen, und von diesen 107 sind 63 ziemlich, 44 ganz gut weggekommen. Subtrahiere ich nun genannte 107 von 1362 so bleiben 1255 malcontenti die sich über mein Lob ärgern, also 1255 Feinde . . . ” Ibid., 34. 16 “Kann man wohl ein vollkommeneres Bild der Langweile sehen, . . .” Ibid., 27. 17 “Die Zeitung könntest Du mir durch Bothen [sic] übermachen; ich durste nach Neuigkeiten, auch den Landboten, was Du hast, tu dazu.” Ibid., 27–8. 18 Siegfried Wichmann, Spitzweg auf der Reise nach Prag mit Postkutsche, Eisenbahn und Dampfschiff (Munich: Bruckmann, 1963). 19 Wichmann, “Die Briefe von Carl Spitzweg,” 32. 20 “Vorgestern Abend, 9 ¼ Uhr in Leipzig angelangt und gestern Abend 9 Uhr in Dresden, da wir die Leipziger Sehenswürdigkeiten so schnell wie möglich abtaten. Die Messe hat noch nicht begonnen, es fehlt daher das Leben noch. . . . Der Aufenthalt in Dresden wird vermuthlich [sic] auch nicht so ganz lange dauern, da Schleich eilen zu müssen meint.” Ibid., 32. 21 “Waegen. Die Locomotive sehr gross. Geleise: 5 Sohlenlaengen meines Stieferls & ca. 1 Zoll weit zwischen den Schienen. Waegen fuer Personen 18 Schritte lang mit einbegriffen die beiden Stiegen. I Klasse gelb, II Klasse dunkelgruen, III Klasse braunroth.” Ibid., 29–30. 22 “‘Repetitsch orolotsch’ soll im Holländischen eine Repetir Uhr genannt werden hab ich einmal gehört—klingt beinahe wie ein Fluch—wenn ich Ihnen noch länger mit meinem Geschreibsel Ihre Zeit stehlen wollte könnten Sie in Versuchung kommen diesen Fluch auch zu versuchen bei Ihrer kostbaren Amsterdamer Zeit.” Ibid., 37. 23 On the painting, see, among other publications, Kirk Varnedoe, Gustave Caillebotte (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), 80–1; Mary Morton and George T. M. Shackelford, eds., Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter’s Eye, exh. cat. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2015, 124–35; and Michael Marrinan, Gustave Caillebotte: Painting the Paris of Naturalism, 1872-1887 (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2016), 102–3. 24 Walter Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” exposé of 1935, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 3–13, as well as 417. 25 “Ce qui fait de l’homme le roi de la création, c’est qu’il sait perdre son temps et sa jeunesse par tous les climats et toutes les saisons possible.” Louis Huart, Physiologie du flâneur (Paris: Aubert, Lavigne, 1841), 7. See Margaret A. Rose, ed., Flaneurs & Idlers: Louis Huart, Physiologie du flâneur (1841); Albert Smith, The Natural History of the Idler Upon Town (1848) (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2007).

 The Anti-Heroism of Modern Life 67 26 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 422. 27 “Entreprendre d’interminables expéditions à travers les rues et les promenades; . . . sans songer à aller quelque part et sans se presser, . . . ; s’arrêter à chaque boutique afin de regarder les images, à chaque coin de rue pour lire les affiches, à chaque étalage pour palper les bouquins.” Victor Fournel, Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris (Paris: E. Dentu, 1867), 270. 28 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 427, 453. 29 “[S]i vous voulez l’aller voir sans moi à 3 heures et demie précises il sera chez lui, 77, rue Miromesnil, et il sera enchanté d’avoir votre visite [Monet’s emphasis].” Monet to Georges de Bellio, December 28, 1877, in Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet: Biographie et catalogue raisonné, 5 vols. (Lausanne: La Bibliothèque des arts, 1974–1991), vol. 1 (1974), 432. See my essay “Impressionism and the Standardization of Time: Claude Monet at Gare Saint-Lazare,” The Art Bulletin 102, no. 2 (June 2020): 91–120. 30 There is a large body of scholarship in the history of technology on the emergence of standard and universal time in the period, among them Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2003), esp. 90–8; Ian R. Bartky, One Time Fits All: The Campaigns for Global Uniformity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); and on the global reception of “universal” time, see Vanessa Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time, 1870-1950 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 31 This history is told in detail in Édouard Vignes, “L’Unification de l’heure dans les grandes villes (extrait de La France, 23 et 31 octobre 1881),” Bulletin de la Société vaudoise des ingénieurs et des architectes 7 (1881): 36–41; and Guillaume Bigourdan, “Les Services horaires de l’Observatoire de Paris et le Bureau international de l’heure (B. I. H.): Histoire, description, et fonctionnement,” Bulletin astronomique: Mémoires et variétés 2 (1922): 379–408, and 3 (1923): 265–329.

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T. J. Clark, Peasant Materialism, and the End of Social Art History Anthony E. Grudin

Social art history’s prospects, T. J. Clark has warned us, are exceedingly dim, and have been for the past quarter-century. Already in 1992, Clark declared that much of his own book, The Painting of Modern Life, had failed to recognize social art history’s “core proposal,” and that, “as for what passes as ‘social art history’ in America!”—the less said, the better.1 He would reiterate this critique in 1999, bemoaning “that version of the social history of art which has images come on as tokens of a knowledge they barely inflect”—wherein “Pictures have nothing important—nothing specific or difficult—to tell us” and are, instead, treated as “dead illustration, functions of a pre-established script.”2 And by 2008, he would worry that “a program for a truly materialist art history” might be something “the social history of art failed to keep alive.”3 This chapter investigates the implications of Clark’s stern conclusions, both for his own art historical project and his approach to contemporary leftist politics. First, it attempts to reconstruct what Clark thought social art history’s goals actually were, particularly as he imagined them while working on Farewell to an Idea in the 1990s. Only a few of these ambitions—like an emphasis on “contextualism” and “close looking”—are typically acknowledged in discussions of his project. Second, it identifies some of the political discoveries that Clark’s own art history laid claim to as it pursued those goals—particularly through its emphasis on modernism’s failures to provoke or sustain a more equitable or livable world. And third, it argues that Clark’s recent work posits a post-social-art-historical moment, in which the lessons derived from its investigations into art, artists, creativity, form, ideology, and visuality might prove politically consequential beyond their narrowly art historical significance. This constellation of lessons, which might be summarized as “peasant materialism,” has formed a guiding thread in Clark’s work despite being almost completely undiscussed by his commentators. It describes a worldview that is tragic, earthly, and stubbornly resistant to promises of redemption and revolution—the oft-repeated assurances, expounded by many of the Left’s most distinguished voices, that “the communist revolution” “will come, must come.”4 If, by his own accounting, Clark’s version of social art history has failed to achieve its goals and has thus run aground, he nevertheless seems to suggest that its findings regarding this untimely peasant materialism might

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still elucidate contemporary circumstances, and perhaps even the political prospects for years to come. * * * In April 1992, Clark gave the opening address at the Association of Art Historians’ “Subversions’ Objects” conference at Leeds University. By this point, work on his magnum opus, Farewell to an Idea, was well underway: a version of the Pollock essay had already been published two years earlier, while variants of the chapters on David, Cézanne, and abstract expressionism would appear within the next three years. The Leeds paper, entitled “On the Very Idea of a Subversive Art History,” tested out arguments that would appear in Farewell’s introduction (including the memorable “modernist archeological dig” metaphor), as well as others that would be central to Clark’s papers on postmodernism, and particularly to “Art History in the Age of Image-Machines,” published sixteen years later, in 2008. The paper, which was circulated as a manuscript but never published, thus offers what ought to be a crucial perspective on the development of Clark’s critical project. As it turns out, it provides a trenchant critique both of social art history’s rivals and of its own prospects for further development. “On the Very Idea” contains what might be Clark’s most expansive definition of social art history’s core question: if capitalism is “the dominant and determinant cultural force—the cultural order—within which . . . other orders and structures,” like gender, ethnicity, geography, class, and subjectivity, “are worked and changed,” then social art history investigates this crucial question: “What has been and is the nature of capitalism’s hold on human actors?”5 In the spirit of Guy Debord’s critique of the society of the spectacle, social art history was meant to offer something like a critical phenomenology of capitalism, an investigation into the various ways in which capitalist culture visually beguiles and manipulates its subjects: “The object of the social history of art is the culture of capitalism as it intersects with certain regimes of visualization, as it spawns those regimes, producing and controlling whole protocols of visual appearance.” What’s more, to be true to its ambitions, Clark argues, social art history would need not just to acknowledge the power of capitalist culture, but also to work to find ways to oppose it, “to imagine the terms in which its appeal might be contested.”6 Here, close and sustained attention to artworks would be essential, since— considered as sedimentations of processes of experimentation, innovation, and critical thinking—they ought to offer rejoinders and alternatives to the worlds of domination and exploitation in which they were produced. The Leeds mission statement was strikingly trenchant. Social art history was posited as an explicitly and inherently critical-political discipline, whose core focus was a critique of capitalism—and a search for alternatives to it—conducted through an investigation of art and visuality. (The contrast between this position and the standard gloss of Clark’s project—as “a form of social-historical work that pays close attention to art’s field of discussion, looking for ruptures and elisions within art criticism”—is glaring.7) But, for Clark, it had failed to become either critical or practical, at least

 T. J. Clark, Peasant Materialism 71 in part, because its practitioners had mostly refused to acknowledge their own imbrication within this culture: “One of the reasons we have done so badly . . . is that we have been so unwilling to recognize the power of the regime in us.”8 The purported healers were themselves seriously infected by the disease they set out to cure. Additionally, “Subversive Art History” laid out the terms of Farewell’s consternation with the avant-garde perhaps even more baldly than they would be asserted in the book. Drawing on a range of surprising and obscure examples—including two snapshots of bathrooms, a graphic from the front page of the New York Times, and a Good Housekeeping cover—Clark compellingly demonstrated that the avant-garde strategies and styles that for so long had been expected to undermine capitalist culture had, instead, been wholeheartedly embraced by it. As a result, “the very language . . . that the avant-garde once devised as an argument with capitalist waste and capitalist rationality” is now “capitalism’s preferred idiom.”9 From this perspective, the widespread art historical assumption that art can “subvert” capitalism through irony and destabilization would then be not just misguided but also deeply complicit with what it claimed to critique. Attempts to revise and expand the canon were judged to be similarly compromised, since capitalism is already so effective at ironizing and “deconstructing” the canon on its own. Marx’s great injunction “to teach the petrified social forms to dance by singing them their own song” had been coopted and thus outmaneuvered, since “the forms sing themselves their own song. . . . The irony is the commodity.”10 Clark’s proposed remedy for this situation was bracingly complex in a way that ought to be familiar to anyone who has spent time with Farewell to an Idea. Distancing social art history from both semiotic and contextualist approaches, Clark drew on a paragraph by Karl Mannheim to which he would return in his “Image Machines” essay (but which would go uncited in Farewell itself): Whose mentality is recorded by art objects? What action, situation and tacit choices furnish the perspectives in which artists perceive and represent some aspect of reality? If works of art reflect points of view, who are the protagonists and who the antagonists? Whose reorientation is reflected in changes of style?11

But how would answers to these questions be teased out of actual objects? Mannheim’s call for an art history concentrated on politicized practices rather than stable objects led Clark to a paradox that he said “is the ‘social history of art’”: “The more we intend to totalize, the more urgent it becomes to grasp the visual particularity of the object.”12 This emphasis on particularity and materiality required “more peculiar and absolute . . . kinds of questions,” answers to which necessitated “bracketing the frame of ‘culturally’ constructed readings . . . in favor of a strange, no doubt Utopian, confrontation with the [painting] as matter.”13 The terms of this dialogue with a painting were not, for Clark, supposed to be spawned sui generis. Instead, they might be “generated out of a dialogue with the terms of the picture’s first users and abusers,” and particularly with “those moments of faltering and interruption where” interpreters “found nothing to say, or caught [themselves] saying the wrong one.” The social art

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historian believes that “at these edges or ellipses it must be the object that is somehow resisting its framing.”14 Clark’s emphasis on the work’s materiality in passages such as this is often tied to his interest in Greenbergian aesthetics, but a closer link during this period is the work of Paul de Man, which plays quiet but pivotal roles in many of Farewell’s chapters.15 Thus, the ultimate goal of this strange and intense reading ought not to be merely the truth of one viewer’s confrontation with one artwork. Instead, Clark hoped that social art history could produce “a description of the [artwork’s] being made and (mis) understood in a determinate set of circumstances” and therefore “an account of the art-object having a history.” Here, then, is social art history’s “core proposal” restated: “that we should make our object particular practices of representation as opposed to the finished product, the art-work.”16 The result would be “a real discursive shift from art-work to process of production,” “an art history of practice, of production”—a seachange in the field.17 But why? How might a better understanding of these “practices of representation” lead to a stronger resistance to capitalism? The objective, Clark urged, was to understand capitalism’s cultural power, “to imagine the terms in which its appeal might be contested,” and ultimately to use those terms for this purpose.18 Identifying the strengths and weaknesses of art’s “practices of representation” gives the social art historian access to “actual (past) and possible (imagined) modes of action and understanding.”19 What’s more, these modes of theory and practice—“as they take form in paintings” and are therefore only accessible through social art historical inquiry— might have something to teach us about disputing capitalism’s culture, breaking its hold on us, “without the talk immediately degenerating into moralizing or wishful thinking.”20 The de Manian emphasis on materiality would thus be brought back into the service of a Debordian critique of capitalist spectacle. In Farewell to an Idea, this ambitious framework was pitted against a series of case studies: David’s Death of Marat, Pissarro’s Two Young Peasant Women, Cézanne’s late Bathers, Picasso’s cubism, El Lissitzky’s propaganda board, Pollock’s drip paintings. Clark posited in the book’s opening pages that modernism had “two great wishes”: “It wanted its audience to be led toward a recognition of the social reality of the sign . . . but equally it dreamed of turning the sign back to a bedrock of World/Nature/ Sensation/Subjectivity which the to and from of capitalism had all but destroyed.”21 What provoked modernist painting’s deep and defining ambivalence between bedrock and artifice? Modernism’s basic challenge—what Clark has elsewhere called “the key concept in Farewell to an Idea”—is a modern world set adrift, a “capitalist culture characterized by . . . radical openness and lack of organization on the material and symbolic levels.”22 This is the social order that Clark describes as being ruled by contingency.23 Modernism, Clark says, tends to respond to this situation in one of two ways: either it attempts to embrace contingency as its core principle, or it endeavors to find a way past or beyond contingency to “bedrock,” something true and verifiable. As he put it in an interview, “this is the modernist dialectic . . . all modernism is . . . both attracted by the promise and the excitement of modernity, but very often, in spite of itself, trying to reassemble and re-anchor a notion of the known.”24

 T. J. Clark, Peasant Materialism 73 What were the specific conditions that bifurcated modernism and led it to such extreme and contradictory aims? Clark directly addressed this question in the previous paragraph: “Socialism was one of the forces, maybe the force, that made for the falsely polarized choice which modernism believed it had before it. . . . Socialism occupied the real ground on which modernity could be described and opposed.”25 For Clark, it was precisely the defectiveness and venality of actually existing socialism as an alternative to capitalism that pushed modernism away from the realm of the social, and rendered it so strange. A truer, less compromised version of socialism could potentially have produced a social space in which modernism’s two wishes might have been reconciled, a space where each wish could have been recognized as the truth of the other, “a world where the sign was arbitrary, because subject to endless social convolutions.”26 But, looking back on modernity, Clark bemoaned socialism’s failure to achieve this project.27 * * * Given Clark’s commitment to a political analysis of modernism, and to remarkably immersive readings of its artifacts, it might seem safe to assume that he would have championed modernism’s ability to point the way toward a better future. And yet, throughout his work, Clark has argued that most modernists failed to achieve a forceful or sustainable response to the challenges posed by modernity. Already in The Absolute Bourgeois, art is described as having “led the counter-revolution, the long march away from a sight of one’s enemies” “as usual.”28 In this respect, Clark’s art history might be described as essentially tragic in its perspective: focused on illuminating art’s foundering attempts to impact its world politically. Clark’s artistic “heroes” tend to be those who best illustrate this condition despite their intense efforts to circumvent it. And yet, in the few instances where art briefly glimpses an alternative to this impediment—in works by Courbet, Pissarro, Cézanne, and Pasolini, for example— it often does so because, in its efforts “to reassemble and re-anchor a notion of the known,” it manages to retrieve or emulate a peasant perspective—the source of the tragic materialism “without the least hint of redemption or futurity” that he will recommend to his readers in “For a Left with No Future.”29 Strikingly enough, Farewell’s story of modernism begins with a dramatic corruption of peasant energies and politics. Modernism, as Clark has emphasized, arose in response to the bourgeoisie’s deceitful self-presentations: “the presence or absence of the bourgeoisie—its positivity but deep concealment—is one of modernism’s defining, indeed constitutive, subjects.”30 Clark claims it was inaugurated on the 25 vendémiaire An Deux, when David’s La Mort de Marat was first seen in public, paraded through the streets of Paris. The artist in no way intended Marat to open up modernism’s nonrepresentational can of worms; on the contrary, he hoped the painting would give the People a stable and reliable symbol of themselves, and “conjure Marat back from the realm of the dead” (p. 48). In order to appease the peasant cult of Marat, the Jacobins needed to resuscitate their hero without seeming to have coopted him: “never before had the powers-that-be in a state been obliged to improvise a sign language

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whose very effectiveness depended on its seeming to the People a language they had made up, and that therefore represented their interests.”31 This tension infected David’s picture and made it modernist since it “enacts the contingency of claims to truth and falsehood at the moment it was made.”32 Contingency propagates in the painting’s upper half, which devolved into an absolutely abstract field, and in the letter, Marat holds out to the viewer, where “the picture’s most salient point [is] also its moment of illegibility,” as the unreliability of writing contaminated the previously stable “economy of illusion.”33 Truthfulness was thus rendered problematic in painting—a wish rather than a stipulation—because society was now based on a lie: that the People rule. But, through its grappling with and visualization of these processes, the painting manages to be self-critical rather than merely propagandistic: “It does the job—in the worst of circumstances—but it also manages to be about what doing the job of representation now involves.”34 Similar ambitions and contradictions would return in El Lissitzky’s Vitebsk propaganda board, which ostensibly attempted to mobilize a skeptical peasantry while simultaneously serving to assuage the guilt of the “exhorting classes”—in this case the Soviet leadership—by maintaining the pretense that the revolution originated not with them, but with the People. Like David’s Marat, El Lissitzky’s board is aesthetically animated by these tensions and contradictions (including the contamination of picturing by writing), which remain readable in it as a warning for future revolutionaries. In the rare cases where modernist artists managed to imagine or engage peasant life non-deceitfully, the results proved almost unreadable or unthinkable for their bourgeois audiences. Image of the People argued that Courbet’s central achievement, in his great paintings of 1851, and particularly in The Burial at Ornans, was to illuminate the disputed and controversial social origins of the bourgeoisie. All Parisian social classes were regularly being drawn from the countryside. In order to become an urban bourgeois, the rural bourgeois needed to exploit and surmount the peasantry around him, often through usury. And yet the new bourgeoisie imagined itself as “absolute” and almost universal—untouched by its actual peasant origins: “one made oneself a bourgeois, by a distinctive and conscious effort, an effort in which ambiguities of social status have no place.”35 In order to maintain this myth, the Parisian bourgeoisie needed images of the countryside that emphasized its “natural” social harmony. The real tensions and antagonisms between bourgeois and peasants had to be repressed. Courbet’s paintings failed to perform this repression, and thus forced their audiences to confront the social ambiguities and conflicts the myth of the absolute bourgeois obscured; they thus constitute “our best record of what the experience of the countryside must have been like, in the long moment before modernity took hold.”36 What’s more, Courbet’s close attention to class tensions brought about his greatest achievements as a materialist painter: “the deeper the political undertow in Courbet . . . the more completely empirical . . . his picture of matter.”37 Thus, already in David and Courbet we see the core dialectic of Clark’s modernism: under modernity’s corrupt conditions, dominated by the deceptions and delusions of the bourgeoisie, modern art would always at best be either brilliantly, vividly ironic or (less frequently) obscene. Its access to truth would typically only come from presenting

 T. J. Clark, Peasant Materialism 75 its primary (bourgeois) audience with social facts or proposals that they would find unbearable, or vividly commemorating their efforts to deceive others. Eventually, canonization would render even these works palatable and uncontroversial. The art historian’s task, on Clark’s account, was to unearth the sources of their inaugural unpleasantness or treachery. And yet, in some ways, peasant life remained irresistible to modernist artists. Their search for truth and bedrock brought them back to it again and again, to the extent that Clark occasionally flirts with describing it as modernism’s core value: “perhaps . . . there could be (and can be) no picture of . . . the qualities [that] modernism wished for itself . . . without a vision of them inhering in peasant life.” What’s more, peasant life offered an alternative to modernity’s rationalizing tendencies: it “stood in the way of modernity, and resisted the disenchantment of the world.”38 The artists’ imaginings of this life—upon which “[m]odernist values partly depended”—might be highly romanticized, “naïve,” and perhaps even “innocent” or “idiotic,” but in Clark’s view, they brought about a powerful materialism in painting.39 Pissarro is Clark’s tragic hero in this regard. For a wide variety of political, professional, personal, and aesthetic reasons, Pissarro’s search for an alternative to the rationalization of painting—its reduction to therapy or decoration—led him repeatedly back to the world of the peasant. Unlike his peers—and particularly Millet, in whose work peasant “[m]ental life . . . was wholly defined by the fact of labor”—however, Pissarro wanted a version of peasant life that refused to caricature its subject.40 Pissarro would attempt to produce a realistically exhausted peasant, but a thinking peasant nonetheless. This commitment to a balance between labor and consciousness led Pissarro to female figures, since “the world of women could be imagined as standing just a little outside, or a little apart from, the struggle with the realm of necessity.”41 Pissarro thus rebelled against what Clark calls “the [nineteenth] century’s founding myth. Its wish to have work be the true of Nature of a class.”42 Peasant life would remain repressed as long as its inventors and perpetuators were treated like mindless brutes, moving dully from one grueling task to the next. But even Pissarro remained constrained by the fundamental superficiality of his exposure to peasant life, and by the practical limitations of the dealer/gallery art system.43 Clark’s lost history of peasant life in modernist painting culminates in Cézanne’s Card Players and Smokers, from the early to mid-1890s, where the figure of the peasant and Cézanne’s peculiar approach to painting revitalized each other. Cézanne’s positivism allowed him to really see these figures, without falling prey to the era’s assumptions and stereotypes. And the peasants gave Cézanne something strange and unfamiliar to represent: “they come to portraiture from a world—from a class position—just a little outside the genre’s suppositions and implicit bargains. . . . They are awkward, resplendent, self-possessed men.”44 But this mutually invigorating interaction would be short-lived: Cézanne confronted this class almost too late, “precisely at its moment of disintegration.” The results of this disintegration, for Clark, would be devastating. Without peasants and their materialism—their “balance between inwardness and exteriority”—western painting had no materialism of its own to fall back upon: the world of the peasant wouldn’t “last long. . . . And maybe pictures—picturing—will

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disappear with it.”45 Manet and the Impressionists had already turned their attention to the enthralling shiftiness of the petite bourgeoisie (a pursuit that mostly proved politically fruitless, according to Clark), and then, in the twentieth century, the “‘painting of modern life’” would disappear almost completely: “Because modernity no longer presented itself as a distinctive territory, a recognizable new form of space . . . the ordinary life of the ‘modern’ had become unglamorous, unspectacular, neither familiar nor unfamiliar—un-exotic. . . . Class miscegenation was a show; class apartheid was the new reality.”46 In Farewell, the vacuum caused by the absence of a truly egalitarian and humane form of socialism distorted modernism into two ideologically inflected forms, neither of which could be achieved without a truly socialist revolution: the search for epistemological bedrock and the pursuit of pure contingency. In recent work like Picasso and Truth, by contrast, the epistemological dichotomy of modernism described in Farwell has been replaced by an even more explicitly political perspective: modernism’s bifurcation is produced by its varying reactions to the catastrophic events of the twentieth century, its completely shapeless and illogical series of horrors, “formed from an unstoppable, unmappable collision of different forces.”47 Its major tendency is now described as “retrogression”: in the face of this ongoing catastrophe, modernist artists, through “their honest cowardice, or blithe self-absorption, or simple revulsion from the world around them” “retreat or regress” from the modern world.48 At their best, retrogressive modernists were sometimes able to register “the fullest recognition of what catastrophe is—how it enters and structures everyday life.” But this tended to be the extent of their political efficacy. Modernism’s minor tendency, “belie[f] in some version of modernity’s movement forward, toward rationality or transparency or full disenchantment,” by contrast, embraced modernization and attempted to produce and promote it through art. Ultimately, however, Clark finds this tendency even more troubling than its alternative, since, although it could be politically efficacious, it was “too often involved . . . in a contorted compromise with the tyrannies and duplicities” that characterized modernization more generally.49 This shift in Clark’s analysis of modernism produces at least three new important emphases: (1) Rhetorically, it abandons the lament for socialism’s failures that characterized Farewell’s analysis, as well as its hopeful hints at a future beyond capitalism. The recent work, instead, emphasizes modernization “as catastrophe in the strict sense . . . : a chaos formed from an unstoppable, unmappable criss-cross of forces,” including nationalisms, conflicts over class and race, the industrialization of war, economic pressures, and the onset of the society of the spectacle with all of its attendant technologies. From this new perspective, pining for socialism’s missed opportunities and awaiting its triumphant resurrection constitute a failure to face up to the “cycle of horror and failure” that actually characterized the period.50 Clark can no longer confidently predict, as he did in 1998, that “the moment . . . when the bourgeoisie begins to fall out of love . . . [with] its own proletarianization” “is surely not far off ” or, with the closing words of Farewell, assure his readers that, “The present is purgatory, not a permanent travesty of heaven.”51

 T. J. Clark, Peasant Materialism 77 (2) The revised analysis thus even further stresses modernism’s failures to be politically consequential in a positive way. Where Farewell’s two wishes could be (and often were) misread as exclusively epistemological in nature, concerned with questions of knowledge and representation, there is no way to avoid the centrality of real-world political circumstances in Clark’s revised scheme. These catastrophic circumstances are the reality against which modernism’s artistic responses are directly measured and found wanting. (3) Finally, Clark’s new model thus opens up the pressing need for a radical alternative to modernism’s oscillation between retrogression and collaboration. By framing modernity as catastrophe, and modernism as a choice between two inadequate responses to it, Clark abandons his previous position as “a partisan of modernism” and implicitly raises the question of what a satisfactory and effective response to catastrophic conditions would be.52 His answers are broadly political rather than artistic—he has clearly expressed skepticism regarding contemporary art’s ability to be any more politically consequential than modernism.53 But the new politics he describes retains a prominent aesthetic component, a “tone,” “key,” and “imagery,” that, it turns out, were to be derived in large part from his previous art historical investigations.54 * * * This new paradigm for thinking about modernity and modernism correlates with a shift in Clark’s work toward pre-modernist modes of resistance and creativity. If Farewell discovered a peasant perspective as the secret lingering strength behind modernism’s resistance to modernity, it nevertheless concluded that no modernist painter had actually been able to pursue this perspective faithfully or unreservedly, and it still seemed to anticipate the possibility of a resurgent socialism to come. What’s more, Clark was increasingly coming to see both of the modernist tendencies outlined in Farewell as fundamentally inadequate responses to the catastrophes of modernity. In his subsequent work, Clark thus sought stronger evidence of this tragic materialism in pre-bourgeois, pre-modernist painting, which had not been forced to reckon with the modern challenges faced by David, Courbet, Pissarro, Cézanne, and El Lissitzky. In the process, what he would call “peasant materialism” and “peasant irony” came to appear as crucial correctives to leftist utopianism. Clark’s deepest art historical inquiry into the nature of this peasant materialism takes place in his readings of Bruegel and Poussin.55 These two strikingly dissimilar and presumably non-heretical painters might at first seem a strange foundation upon which to build an account of non-utopian materialism in painting. With scant evidence to suggest any philosophical interest in materialism on the part of either artist, Clark bases his argument on their shared interest in “bipedalism” in painting, a kind of materialism-in-practice that he sees as fundamental to both of their approaches. Their earthy interest in bipedalism seems to open these artists up to other earthy interests— death, nonidentity, anti-utopianism—since it allows them to conceptualize “the ground” not as a stable given, but as “a limit condition of the human” and as “a world in itself . . . fissured, fractured, intricate.”56

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In Bruegel’s case, Clark’s interest centers predominately on the artist’s 1567 painting, The Land of Cockaigne, a theme whose origins Clark traces back to “the oral culture of the European peasantry,” and whose “cynicism and materialism—including its cynicism about materialism, at least in utopian guise . . . tell us something central . . . concerning the basic texture of that culture.”57 And it did so through its attention to “the nonexistent in what exists . . . everything in human affairs that pushes insatiably toward nonidentity.”58 This attention to nonidentity allowed Cockaigne to picture the world anew. At first glance, the painting would seem an odd place from which to derive a worldview: it is comic, lewd, lighthearted, and awkward. For Clark, however, these qualities point to its strengths: it was “a parody of Paradise . . . a desublimation of the idea of heaven . . . which only fully made sense in relation to all the other (ordinary, instituted) offers of otherworldliness circulating in late medieval culture. What it most deeply made fun of was . . . the wish for escape from mortal existence, the dream of immortality, the idea of transcendence itself.”59 Cockaigne captured and disseminated a mode of thought that might otherwise have been lost to time, a form of materialism that was radically skeptical of all utopian, otherworldly promises: “It immortalizes peasant materialism . . . if ‘immortalizes’ were not precisely the wrong word.”60 The “religious impulse” has, Clark argued, contaminated leftist thought, including traditional Marxism, which correctly predicted bourgeois society’s dissolution, but incorrectly promised that it would be replaced by “the recalibration of economics and politics, and breakthrough to an achieved modernity” rather than the catalog of horrors that made up much of the twentieth century.61 Cockaigne’s peasant materialism, by contrast, can teach the left “to look failure in the face.”62 In “For a Left with No Future,” Cockaigne predates all of Clark’s other sources for this worldview—texts by Isaac Penington, Moses Wall, William Hazlitt, Friedrich Nietzsche, William Morris, Baldwin Spencer, A. C. Bradley, Walter Benjamin—by almost a century. It seems to be Clark’s urtext for this political perspective or tone. Although Clark never makes the claim directly, it seems that aspects of the tragic materialism that Bruegel harnessed in Cockaigne were reiterated and extended in some of Poussin’s work. His Landscape with a Snake (c. 1648) provides an “account of the world” that is “bodily [and] materialist,” “about touch and balance, about the physical conditions of human movement (and immobilization) . . . these are its subjects, all of them informing the sight of death.”63 Poussin’s tragic materialism thus offers a mournful corrective to contemporary life, where, “Death is everywhere, but. . . . We can’t make it part of our lives—and therefore of our politics.”64 This inability to acknowledge death properly is hugely detrimental to Leftist politics: “there can be no true futurity in a culture . . . without a daily sense, a daily reiteration, of everything in the present that is dark and irremediable.”65 Landscape with a Snake thus offers an alternative to leftist utopianism. It points the way toward “A socialism, if that’s what we shall persist in calling it, that starts from misfortune, pain, and death.”66 This insight would be resurrected only very occasionally in modernism: in James Ensor’s best work, for instance, where “masquerade and massacre” are revealed as the “necessary two faces” of “bourgeois society,” and in Picasso’s Guernica, where “Death is not localized . . . it is everywhere and nowhere . . . , manifest—materialized—as a kind of illumination.”67

 T. J. Clark, Peasant Materialism 79 Additionally, Poussin offers a penetrating alternative to modernism’s antipathy toward language, its sense of language “as the enemy—or as some all-invasive, alldetermining human reality, which only modernism will put to flight”—a perspective Clark explored in David and El Lissitzky, among others.68 Poussin’s painting’s “nesting in the world of language”—as opposed to trying to escape or destroy it—enabled it to address language’s “limits and deficits” more deeply.69 Through this imbrication in language, these paintings “gave form to the very process of producing meaning for others—in ways that language or organized sound or dancing bodies did not.”70 What’s more, Poussin’s sacramental paintings sometimes posit a human space, “apart from the drama of grace.” The strange hybrid figure at the edge of The Sacrament of Marriage that Clark calls the femme-colonne emblematizes this achievement, becoming “one of painting’s . . . great inventions.”71 Her placement and the obstruction of her face make it impossible for anyone ever to determine conclusively whether she gives her attention to, and belongs with, the sacred event at the painting’s center, or to (and with) the profane, natural light entering through the window behind her. Through these ambiguities, Poussin creates “a sense . . . of life’s dividedness, of the body’s necessarily occupying contradictory spaces, of there always being an outsider in the room.”72 Alongside Bruegel’s attention to nonidentity, the femme-colonne thus anticipates the “nonidentity politics” that Clark describes as crucial to “a future left politics.”73 (This doubleness is reiterated in the title of “For a Left with No Future,” which either diagnoses or prescribes or both.) Here then, finally, are some of the “actual (past) and possible (imagined) modes of action and understanding” that Clark hoped social art history could unearth. In many ways, they are both past and possible: modes of thought and action that would probably have been lost were it not for art and its social historians, but which potentially offer guidance for alternate political perspectives. And, crucially, they are modes of thought that seem to be more effectively expressed in paintings than they are in words. Faced with a world in which “capitalism went into crisis but . . . its institutions stabilized themselves, and Left politics, by and large, found no resonance,” Clark asks: “What would it take . . . for a Left politics to have resonance, . . . to open towards a future that led us away from the same old options?”74 Instead of continuing to follow traditional leftist models, infected by Christianity and avant-gardism, Clark argues that an effective left will need to stare modernity in the face. Some of its best resources might be conservative voices that recognized modernism’s horrors and refused to be taken in by promises of an impending better future. Poussin and Bruegel point the way toward a more effective leftist perspective through their profound recognition of death and difference and their refusal to countenance assurances of radical change. They suggest “a politics without illusions, without the future in its bones, truly and properly pessimistic, and therefore maximalist in its demands.”75 As Clark asks rhetorically, “Where does the Left actually get its picture of the humanity that class society stifles and travesties if not, in part, from Bruegel and Poussin?”76 * * *

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Clark’s persistent emphasis on peasant life and peasant materialism raises a number of challenging issues. Depending on how they are defined, the global peasantry might be said still to be growing, and certainly to be shifting away from Europe: in 2007, the World Bank estimated that “agriculture provides employment for 1.3 billion worldwide, [with] 97 percent of them in developing countries.”77 Writing collaboratively as a member of Retort, Clark acknowledged this changing landscape in Afflicted Powers: “The collapse (or reform) of ‘actually existing socialisms’ over the past two decades produced several hundred million new peasants as the millennium drew to a close.”78 These shifts provoke a number of questions: Is Clark’s peasant materialism an almost completely extinct worldview, limited to premodern Europe, that can only be retrieved historically and art historically, if at all?79 If so, would his argument be vulnerable to some of the same accusations of eurocentrism that have met Heidegger’s interest in peasant life, despite Clark’s forceful disavowal of these elements of Heidegger’s work?80 (Eurocentrism is arguably an awkward charge to level at a project that, while focusing on Europe, has been so relentlessly condemnatory of the continent’s history and politics.) Or, alternately, might Clark’s peasant materialism still be alive and even growing in areas and populations that are almost completely ignored by art history? (Here, the work of James C. Scott—with its emphasis on “the prosaic but constant struggle between the peasantry and those who seek to extract labor, food, taxes, rents, and interest from them,” particularly in the Third World—might powerfully expand and illuminate Clark’s picture of peasant politics.)81 Could contemporary peasant culture—an arena which Clark has mostly avoided in his work—contribute to the development and dissemination of this materialism, or would Clark reject it as fatally corrupted by industrial culture? These possible lacunae intersect with another: in the light of the growing recognition of capitalism’s massively catastrophic impact on global ecology, how can the existential problem of global ecological collapse not play a part in Clark’s analysis? Peasants and their livelihood are, after all, unusually vulnerable to an increasingly inhospitable climate. One wonders whether it could be this ecologically apocalyptic perspective, never explicitly explored in Clark’s work, that instills the tone of “desuetude” and “despair” that his critics frequently find unpleasant.82 “Moments at which a particular language is opened to a further range of possibilities . . . happen infrequently,” Clark admitted in a 1999 essay on Debord, “And moments at which this opening depends on the creation of a specifically political voice . . . are truly few and far between.”83 Clark’s recent work has attempted such an invention, despite these long odds. Even in and through its possible defeat or sublation, social art history would be redeemed if it could meaningfully contribute to such a project.

Notes 1 T. J. Clark, “On the Very Idea of a Subversive Art History,” unpublished manuscript, Leeds 1992, 22–3. 2 T. J. Clark, “Preface to the Revised Edition,” The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers, rev. ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), xxvii, xxv.

 T. J. Clark, Peasant Materialism 81 3 T. J. Clark, “Art History in an Age of Image-Machines,” EurAmerica 38, no. 1 (March 2008): 5, 3; Clark had offered a slightly less negative summary in 2006, pointing out that “Rigorous and passionate work still gets done . . . on the concrete circumstances of artistic production, and the complexities of certain artworks’ dealings with those circumstances” (T. J. Clark, “The End of Left Art History?” Kritische Berichte 34, no. 3 [2006]: 6). 4 Alain Badiou, I Know There Are So Many of You, trans. Susan Spitzer (New York: Polity Press, 2018), 35. 5 Clark, “On the Very Idea,” 9, 8; emphasis original. 6 Ibid., 12. 7 Gail Day, Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 25; this is Day’s summary of conventional readings of Clark. 8 Clark, “On the Very Idea,” 12. As Clark admitted later in the essay, his focus throughout much of his work on producing “the first outlines of a theory of petitbourgeois culture” felt “urgent” to him because “[he] thought [he] was describing” his own “class position” (10). 9 Ibid., 4–5. 10 Ibid., 7–8. 11 Ibid., 13. 12 Ibid., 14. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 15. This psychoanalytically informed dimension of Clark’s methodology had already been apparent in Image of the People, where Clark, citing Jacques Lacan, proposed that just as “the unconscious is nothing but . . . its closure in the faults, silences and caesuras of normal discourse . . . , the public is nothing but . . . the points at which the rational monotone of the critic breaks, fails, falters” (T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848-1851 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999], 12 and 171 n. 8). 15 See Day, Dialectical Passions, 25–69. 16 Clark, “On the Very Idea,” 22, emphasis original. 17 Ibid, 22, 23; as he would put it in a later essay, the new focus would be on “the constructed materiality of a set of representations and their existence in a field of realworld antagonisms” (Clark, “Image-Machines,” 14, emphasis original). 18 Clark, “On the Very Idea,” 12. 19 Ibid., 21. 20 Kathryn Tuma, “T. J. Clark with Kathryn Tuma,” The Brooklyn Rail, http:​//www​.broo​ klynr​ail.o​rg/20​06/11​/art/​tj-cl​ark (accessed September 25, 2018). 21 T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 10. 22 Charles Reeve, “An Art History Without Endings: A Conversation with T. J. Clark,” Documents, vol. 18 (Fall 2000): 13. 23 Compare Andrew Sayer, The Moral Significance of Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 65: “distribution under capitalism is in large part unplanned and arbitrary, being the product of the anarchy of market forces, strategies of closure, political manipulation and symbolic domination.” 24 Jon-Ove Steihaug, “Catastrophic Modernity [Interview with T. J. Clark],” Kunstkritikk, December 7, 2010, http:​//www​.kuns​tkrit​ikk.c​om/ar​tikle​r/cat​astro​phic-​

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moder​nity-​t-j-c​lark-​on-pi​casso​s-gue​rnica​-pict​orial​-spac​e-and​-mode​rnism​/ (accessed September 25, 2018). 25 Clark, Farewell, 9. 26 Ibid., 256. 27 The best overview I have found of the relationship between modernism and politics in Clark’s work is Daniel Spaulding, “Towards an Apotropaic AvantGarde,” The Claudius App 6 (2014), http:​//www​.thec​laudi​usapp​.com/​6-spa​uldin​ g.htm​l. 28 T. J. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 30. 29 Steihaug, “Catastrophic Modernity”; T. J. Clark, Painting at Ground Level (Princeton: The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, 2002), 167; T. J. Clark, “On Bruegel,” The Threepenny Review, Spring 2010, https​://ww​w.thr​eepen​nyrev​iew.c​om/sa​mples​/clar​ k_sp1​0.htm​l (accessed September 25, 2018). 30 See T. J. Clark, “Origins of the Present Crisis,” New Left Review, vol. 2 (March–April 2000): 92–3. 31 Clark, Farewell, 28; for the peasant cult, see 30. 32 Ibid., 43. 33 Ibid., 42, 38. 34 Nicholas Addison, “In Conversation with T. J. Clark,” The Art Book 7, no. 1 (January 2000): 16. 35 Clark, Image of the People, 151. 36 Clark, “Preface,” Image of the People, 5. 37 Clark, “The Special Motion of a Hand,” London Review of Books, April 24, 2008, 6; for more on this argument, see Emily Apter, Exceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic (New York: Verso, 2018), 234–47. 38 Clark, Farewell, 71. 39 Ibid., 71, 137. 40 Ibid., 121. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 122; Pissarro’s emphatically thinking peasants might be seen to foreshadow the workers profiled by Jacques Rancière in his Proletarian Nights: The Workers Dream in Nineteenth Century France. As Rancière puts it, “the social order . . . has always been constructed on the simple idea that the vocation of workers is to work” (“Preface to the New English Edition,” Proletarian Nights, trans. John Drury [London: Verso, 2012], viii). Clark had closely engaged Rancière’s work in his discussion of café concerts in The Painting of Modern Life, although he worried it overestimated the subversiveness of these popular events, a point that continues to divide the two thinkers (280n.114, 304n.11, 307n.41, 308n.47). 43 Clark argues that these limitations continue to undermine the painting’s readability, insofar as the lighting at the Metropolitan Museum makes it difficult to grasp its core tension between sun (labor) and shade (rest and conversation) (Farewell, 64). 44 T. J. Clark, “At the Courtauld: Symptoms of Cézannoia,” London Review of Books 32, no. 23 (December 2, 2010), https​://ww​w.lrb​.co.u​k/v32​/n23/​tj-cl​ark/a​t-the​-cour​tauld​ (accessed September 25, 2018). 45 Clark, “Symptoms.” 46 T. J. Clark, “Lowry’s Other England,” in Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life, ed. T. J. Clark and Anne Wagner (London: Tate Publishing, 2013), 39, 43.

 T. J. Clark, Peasant Materialism 83 47 T. J. Clark, Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 16. This shift coincided with Clark’s immersion in Nietzsche in the years following the publication of Farewell to an Idea, an immersion that seems to have influenced his understanding of Picasso and modernism more generally. As he told an interviewer in 2010, where, “in the age of film, and in 19th-century Realism, Impressionism and in Cézanne, the whole raison d’être of art had been the search for a more complete and immediate exposure to the truth of visual experience,” Nietzsche raises the possibility that art “is ultimately the proper enemy of truth, . . . the human practice that admits that human beings live in deception, appearance, illusion and performance—that human beings could not bear the truth, even if they could attain to it.” In the 1920s, Picasso is “facing up to the idea of art as no longer a truth project, but a performance project” (Steihaug, “Catastrophic Modernity”). I wonder whether Clark’s interest in peasant life may have been bolstered by the words Nietzsche has the kings speak to Zarathustra: “Best and dearest to me today is still a healthy peasant, coarse, cunning, stubborn, enduring” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ed. Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippen, trans. Adrian Del Caro [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006], 197). 48 The description sounds damning, but it is not. As Clark puts it elsewhere, “I believe in retreat. I don’t feel it is anyone’s duty to live continually in the present—especially a present like the one we have” (“Image Machines,” 15). 49 Clark, Picasso and Truth, 19. 50 T. J. Clark, “For a Left with No Future,” New Left Review 74 (March/April 2012): 61, 73. 51 T. J. Clark, “Foreword,” in Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), x; Clark, Farewell, 407. 52 T. J. Clark, “Malevich Versus Cinema,” The Threepenny Review, Spring 2003, http:​// thr​eepen​nyrev​iew.c​om/sa​mples​/clar​k_sp0​3.htm​l (accessed September 18, 2018). 53 See Retort, “An Exchange on Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War,” October 115 (Winter 2006): 11–12. 54 Clark, “For a Left with No Future,” 59, 54. 55 This interest forms a central focus of Clark’s new book, Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come, where it is also investigated in works by Giotto, Veronese, and Picasso (London: Thames and Hudson, 2018). A revised version of “For a Left with No Future” serves as the book’s coda. 56 Clark, Ground Level, 135. Clark is careful to stipulate that, in both of his major premodern cases, the artists were probably not consciously as radical in theory as their deep commitments to painting allowed them to be in creative practice; see Ground Level, 169 and Clark, “Poussin’s Sacrament of Marriage: An Interpretation,” New Literary History 45:2 (Spring 2014): 250. 57 Clark, Ground Level, 165. 58 Ibid., 166. 59 Ibid., 167. 60 Ibid. 61 Clark, “Left with No Future,” 62. 62 Ibid., 68. 63 T. J. Clark, Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 237.

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64 Tuma, “T. J. Clark with Kathryn Tuma.” 65 Clark, Sight of Death, 239–40. 66 Ibid., 240. 67 T. J. Clark, “At the Royal Academy,” London Review of Books 38, no. 23 (December 1, 2016): 17; Clark, Picasso and Truth, 250. 68 Tuma, “T. J. Clark with Kathryn Tuma.” 69 Ibid. 70 Clark, “Poussin’s Sacrament of Marriage,” 226. 71 Ibid., 230. 72 Ibid., 250. Clark found a similar interest in Cézanne’s late bathers; see Farewell, 153–6. 73 T. J. Clark, “My Unknown Friends: A Response to Malcolm Bull,” in Nietzsche’s Negative Ecologies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 82. 74 Clark, Diet Soap Podcast, 171, February 6, 2013, https​://do​uglas​lain.​net/d​iet-s​oap-p​ odcas​t-171​-left​-futu​re/ (accessed October 22, 2018). 75 Clark, “My Unknown Friends,” 83. 76 Tuma, “T. J. Clark with Kathryn Tuma.” 77 World Bank, 2007, 77; cited in Henry Bernstein, Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change (Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press, 2010), 3; Bernstein also discusses some of the challenges involved with defining a contemporary “peasantry.” 78 Retort, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (New York: Verso, 2005), 75. 79 Susan Watkins raises similar questions in her blistering response to “No Future”: “Presentism? A Reply to T. J. Clark,” New Left Review 74 (March–April 2012): 100–1. 80 For an overview and discussion of these charges against Heidegger, see Carlos Alberto Sánchez, “On Heidegger’s ‘Thin’ Eurocentrism and the Possibility of a ‘Mexican’ Philosophy,” Radical Philosophy Review 16:3 (2013): 763–80. There are many places where Clark’s thinking since Farewell to an Idea seems to border on ideas raised in Heidegger’s Being and Time, although the latter’s work goes almost completely uncited and unmentioned. Clark has acknowledged this connection while attempting to qualify it, arguing that he can mobilize care, grounding, dwelling, belonging, and death without adopting Heidegger’s corresponding emphasis on rootedness and tradition: “I have nil sympathy with the politics informing such notions . . . and . . . I think it possible to maintain a notion of being-and inhabiting, of ‘grounded’ experience, without such a politics” (Daniel Fraser, “An Interview with T. J. Clark,” https​://da​nielj​amesf​raser​.word​press​.com/​tag/a​rt/ [accessed December 15, 2018]). 81 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 29. 82 See Addison, “In Conversation,” 15. 83 Clark, “Forward,” Debord, viii.

5

Daumier and Method Jordan M. Rose

In the seventy-eighth installment of Caricaturana (Figure 5.1), the picaresque series of 100 prints Honoré Daumier produced between 1836 and 1838, Robert Macaire, the antihero of the series, leaves his fictional world to visit the great caricaturist in his studio. The two—at last!—stand opposite one another, the highwayman-turned-entrepreneur and the lithographer who, for over a year, had been exposing the rogue’s various cons and subterfuges. Or, rather, Macaire stands, Daumier sits, his bent knees pointing to Macaire’s rubbery contrapposto—impossible, by any account, is that pose, with knee bent inwards, foot flat, hip and haunch tossed back. It is balletic, performative, struck as a matter of form; its virtuosity hardly conceals, or contains, the motivation shaping it. It recreates the curved lines of Daumier’s chair. The opposition between the two men is, in short, salient. We almost do not need the caricature’s signs of physiognomic difference—the contrast, say, between a long and narrow and saggy nose and a short, pointed, even priggish one—to understand that we are dealing with characteristics at odds. But opposition here, the contrast of point and counterpoint on which caricature’s effect so often depends, serves an additional function, too: it works as a compositional device. For inasmuch as the bodies of Macaire and Daumier appear opposed, they nevertheless seem to fit together; they fit together as drawing, almost like puzzlepieces. The space separating them, the negative space of the exchange, in turn takes on a heightened intensity. Macaire’s hands occupy this space, the left planted proprietarily on the table, the right, palm open and recessed, gesturing toward Daumier as if to lure him in, into that now activated space. (Not for nothing did Daumier decide, between the first and second states of the lithograph, to elongate the nose he gave himself, which now extends into the space between the two men, as if in response to Macaire’s retracting right hand.) This space, negative but operative, belongs to Macaire, above the table, incorporating the slab of limestone on which Daumier is drawing—it is likely he is working on Caricaturana; the figure appearing in a top hat looks just like another character from the series, Bertrand—as well as the plaster casts and painting on the wall. I am tempted to call it the space of representation, or the space of transformation. Macaire tries to coax Daumier into it:

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Figure 5.1 Honoré Daumier, Monsieur Daumier, votre série est charmante . . . , Caricaturana, plate 78. Lithograph. Le Charivari, April 8, 1838 (DR 433) (Noack Collection, www​.daumier​.org). Monsieur Daumier, your Robert Macaire series is delightful! It’s a true picture of the thievery of our times . . . a faithful portrait of the crowd of rogues we find everywhere—in business, in politics, at the bar, in finance, everywhere, everywhere! The crooks must be furious with you. . . . But you’ve gained the esteem of decent people. . . . You haven’t yet received the croix d’honneur? That’s outrageous!

The jig is up: everything, in 1838, circulates under the sign of calculating self-interest. Of course, Macaire is only telling Daumier what he already knows. * * * The generalization of economic liberalism, the coalescence of what we might call “civil society,” its principal forms and attitudes, preoccupied Daumier for much of the 1830s and 1840s. For him, indeed, the conditions it introduced, and the transfer of power it signaled, were the defining and most pressing historical developments of the period. The 100 installments of Caricaturana stand as testament to that concern. In Macaire, it has often been remarked, Daumier discovered the July Monarchy’s essential quality, its symbol. In him, the spirit of capitalism in its early phase—enamored of speculation, incorrigibly opportunistic, acquisitive—takes shape. Yet, the critical force of Caricaturana has only partly to do with the personality at its center. Its effect develops over time, as Macaire, in each successive installment, tries his hand at another bourgeois profession—here he is a banker, there a lawyer, a journalist, a doctor, a notary, a stockjobber, a minister, etc., etc. Macaire cannot be separated from the format that enables him to circulate. He matters insofar as he multiplies, because his recurrence operates as a sign for reproducibility and exchangeability, which is to say, against the exception or the ideology of “local abuse.”1 In a word, Macaire enters the world like money. He suffuses everyday life, transforms social practice. He acquires the world by colonizing it. It is Macaire’s aspiration to have the world in toto bear

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Figure 5.2  Honoré Daumier, C’est toujours de même flatteur . . . , Caricaturana, plate 76. Lithograph. Le Charivari, March 11, 1838 (DR 431) (Noack Collection, www​. daumier​.org). his image. The reproductive ambitions Macaire embodies, as Caricaturana’s seventysixth installment (Figure 5.2) makes plain—in effect, as it internalizes the tendency of the series on the whole—nevertheless include the critical response: “It’s certainly flattering to have acquired so many disciples!” Macaire exclaims to his doltish sidekick, Bertrand, his gesture du jour revealing a bevy of look-alikes, “but damn it, there are too many of them, the competition is killing business, and if it goes on like this, we’re going to go under.” Overaccumulation strikes Macaire as a tragic flaw. Self-expansion and material expansion exist in contradiction. * * * The kinds of reversal Caricaturana exemplifies have long been familiar to us. They are the bread and butter of comic satire. Too easy has it become over the years, however, to lose sight of the ambivalence that anchors their pivot. Consider, for instance, the courtroom drawing Charles Philipon, Daumier’s editor and collaborator (he wrote the captions for the Robert Macaire series), submitted on November 14, 1831 (Figure 5.3). Made up of four quick sketches, the drawing lays out a kind of pictorial progress,

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Figure 5.3 Charles Philipon, Louis-Philippe’s metamorphosis into a pear. Ink. November 14, 1831 (Cabinet des Médailles, Bibliothèque National de France, Paris, France). showing us the way in which Louis-Philippe’s visage, if modified in cumulative stages of quantitative adjustment—let the jowls sag a bit, inflate them, narrow the temples, have the crown of the head sharpen to a peak, forfeit detail—might end up looking something like a pear. What we see, in action, is the process of caricatural loading and abstractive simplification signified by the French word charger. Dashed off while on trial for offending the king’s person with a lithograph titled Le Replâtrage—too much, it seems, did this mason plastering over the slogans of the 1830 Revolution resemble Louis-Philippe—Philipon wanted these sketches to demonstrate, no doubt with tongue in cheek, that physical resemblance made for a misleading guide to identity; as such, it could not be determined juridically.2 Exonerating evidence, he wagered, would surface with the completion of the fourth sketch, which Philipon presented to the court with triumphant, albeit feigned, surprise: “It’s a pear!” By which he meant that almost anything could be held to resemble the king. This is irony, of course, but one that performs a specific operation: the four sketches draw out the distance between king and pear while, in effect, codifying their assimilation. The measure of inconsistency from one sketch to the next becomes the motor driving the final image—the pear king—beyond its fallible form. The caricature, then, emerges from a paradox: for the realization of equivalence coincides with its abolition; that is, equivalence negates itself through its opposite in order to be. The semblance of reconciliation, in turn, crystallizes as the empirical and palpable substance of impersonation. Falsehood lends the image its power. Maybe I can phrase it this way: exchange in caricature—for what is caricature’s charge if not an entering into the relations of exchange?—affirms and negates the commensurability of its forms; or better, it affirms the loss of their self-sufficiency. The possibility of quantitative shifts in appearance exposing latent qualities depends on such concurrence. Caricature therefore puts before us a peculiar kind of unity—a “peculiarly modern unity”—one without synthesis.3 Charles Baudelaire states it axiomatically: “caricature is a double thing.”4 In caricature, he observes, idea and

 Daumier and Method 89 drawing, although inseparable, remain noncoincident: the perturbations of caricature, and the laughter it incites, derive from the failure of intuition to grasp it immediately. The effect of caricature has less to do, ultimately, with the cunning of its mockery than the crisis of identity it exemplifies. Which is another way of saying caricature, although one among the comic arts, neither presupposes nor dreams of “happiness.” Pinned to the here and now of its production and consumption—imitative more than creative, in Baudelaire’s terms—it neither imagines nor images an escape from impurity, to which it bears witness. (This, one could say, is caricature’s modernity and its particular purchase on the representation of modern history. Few, to be sure, understood as well as Baudelaire that the conditions of modern life and experience might best be handled, and demonstrated, with a lithographic crayon.) For inasmuch as caricature actualizes its own doubleness, thus depriving its audience of “peace of mind,” it formulates a solution to the alienation of modern life by staging its own historicity allegorically. It prizes the jolting force of incongruity and mésalliance, relying on the arrest of dialectics, the irreconcilability of opposites—of self and other—within the totality of the image. The whole is the untrue. Caricature, I have been arguing, expresses a form of life based on the principle of equivalence. Only in caricature’s image the exchange circuit, the reciprocal transformation of one quality into another—the abstractive synthesis, as it were, that lends equivalence its apparent transparency and immediacy—falters, remains partial, incomplete. That is to say, caricature introduces an aberrant application of the principle, exposing the distance—“the real and true incommensurability”—that separates the constitutive grammar of exchange and its actualization in practice.5 In turn, it points up the contingency of this form of life, the kind of pure relationality that both produces and reproduces it. In a word, caricature stages that which can only be seen in the negative.6 Rather than breaking with the abstraction that governs social relations under a money economy, however, caricature maintains it in the extreme. The outcome appears compelling, then, precisely because it is counterfactual, a mere as if that, in effect, realizes the world as is. It enters joyously into the flight of images. * * * “Everything for me becomes allegory.”7 Baudelaire’s sense of the reorientation remains helpful. There is something conspiratorial about the allegorical mechanism. As soon as it withdraws the self-sufficiency of meaning from a given representation, it insinuates itself everywhere, rendering ineradicable the possibility, however slight or minimal, that anything can mean either itself or its opposite.8 Call it the Macaire effect, or, as Philipon did, Caricaturana. Yet caricature, at least in its satirical mode, is hardly, or seldom, indifferent to the content it figures. Its task is to illuminate with criticism, to turn the negative positive, have it be evidentiary, perceptible—a counter-imagery, maybe even an anti-imagery. To achieve this end, the play of meaning has to be controlled, its appearance limited if it is to remain desirable; the allegorical mechanism has to be useful. Otherwise, the transformations caricature introduces simply multiply, registering their consonance with the new image regime rather than doubling back to fulfill their function as determinate negations. The critical question for the

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caricaturist—perhaps for critique in general—is, then, how, or in what ways, controls might be placed.9 * * * Daumier never cared much for or approved of the allegorical dimension of caricature. As he saw it, allegories possessed “neither head nor tail.” “Listen,” he once chided his friend Théodore de Banville when the latter asked him to design the masthead for Le Corsaire, “a newspaper is not a boat and a pirate (corsaire) is not a writer; whichever way you figure it, you’ll end up with the same nonsense (ineptie): a journalist who writes with a cannon or a soldier who fights with a pen!”10 Needless to say, the quip does not amount to denial: Daumier knew full well that the distance created by allegory was vital to the comic operation—“No thank you, Lisette,” he said to Banville in the end, “we don’t eat that kind of bread in my family!”—and that in it, one might seek cover from the reprisals of the censors. What his declaration of antipathy does do, nevertheless, is give measure to a certain caution and doubt; it makes clear what was, for him, to be most feared. At the same time, it responds to the question of control by revealing its corollary: At what point does resistance to the grammar of caricature push it into another category of imagery altogether? That this exchange between Daumier and Banville should have occurred in the spring of 1848 is, perhaps, unsurprising. Everything at the moment seemed to be changing, and Daumier, hopeful that 1848 would not go the way of 1830, was about to redirect his attention to painting. Around the same time, he produced one last image of the July Monarchy and its king (Figure 5.4), a final summing up as it were of the era 1848 put to pasture. Modeled on a medallion Auguste Préault did in 1834 of the sybaritic emperor Aulus Vitellius, a relief whose accumulations of excess material assured it would not be shown at that year’s Salon, the lithograph pins the legacy of the July Monarchy to the regime’s penchant for self-indulgence and wasteful consumption, to the logic of enrichissez-vous and the rearguard actions of

Figure 5.4  Honoré Daumier, Projet d’une médaille. Lithograph. Le Charivari, March 19, 1848 (DR 1745) (Noack Collection, www​.daumier​.org).

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Figure 5.5 Honoré Daumier, Gargantua. Lithograph. December 15, 1831 (The Armand Hammer Daumier and Contemporaries Collection, Gift of Dr. Armand Hammer. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles). retour à l’ordre. Its pendant is Gargantua (Figure 5.5). Together the two lithographs frame a period during which circulation, a spatial motion that involves a shifting of places (so may yards of linen for so many coats, kings for pears), crystallized as an image of survival. “History is thorough,” Marx says, “and passes through many phases when it conveys an old form to the grave. The final phase of a world-historical form is its comedy.” “Why does history proceed this way?” he goes on to ask: “so that mankind will separate itself happily from its past.”11 The passage seems readymade for Projet d’une médaille. The coin at its center, which bears Louis-Philippe’s bloated profile and memorializes him as the “last king of the French” (of course, he was also the first), is to be struck at the national mint. Not that it will be: this coin is an ersatz good. No future exists for it, in other words, no metal future at least, no realization beyond the crayon that mocks it up and the sheet of paper that supports it. The coin, as such, appears suspended in the limbo it emblematizes. Ineptie in this (final) instance gathers to itself the force of conclusion: the value of this coin derives from its content. The view from the early 1830s was rather different. The most powerful expression of the prospect, I have intimated, is Gargantua. Here, in the infant stages of the July Monarchy, scatology and cannibalism do the work of castigating the new government for exploiting France’s national wealth—namely, for a fat king’s way of appropriating the fruits of labor and crapping them out as paper rewards and honors. All of the July Monarchy, indeed, can be found in Gargantua’s image of social metabolism, in the way the misérables, signs of a rather more immediate relation to nature, deposit their meager wealth into baskets which the gluttonous king’s venal yes-men then shuttle up into his ever-gaping, pear-shaped maw, losing hold of the surplus which showers down on their counterparts as these minions, growing ever simplified as they ascend the shovel-like plank, become turds. The spindly legged king—no way those legs can hold his girth upright—sits on a toilet-throne, all the easier, all the more efficient is this way of keeping constipation at bay. All stomach is Gargantua’s world, all lower bodily

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Figure 5.6  Honoré Daumier, Un héros de juillet, mai 1831. Lithograph. Le Charivari, December 15, 1832 (DR 23) (Noack Collection, www​.daumier​.org). stratum, all digestion and waste. The grotesque flow is, must be, continuous. It depends on the crude transformation of things into images. Gargantua is caricature at its most ferocious and elated, which is not to say caricature at its most reflective or demanding or probing, caricature as if it were aware of its own limitations and in contest with them. The critical lithograph, in this respect, is A July Hero, May 1831 (Figure 5.6), which Daumier began working on in the spring of that year and sent to the dépôt légal on June 1. For one reason or another—no one knows precisely why—Philipon chose not to publish the image straightaway. A July Hero first appeared in Le Charivari eighteen months later, on December 15, 1832. The date is (and was) significant, maybe fortuitous, certainly not accidental: on that day, one year earlier, Philipon hung Gargantua in the vitrine of La Maison Aubert. Both he and Daumier would serve time because of it. The two lithographs are linked, then. Call the one tragedy, the other comedy. * * * In May 1831, the July Monarchy was less than a year old. The images that would eventually orient it—call them, for short, the Bourse and the Arcade, the moneyform and the commodity-form—were still emergent. They had yet to subsume the Revolution that put the July Monarchy in place and gave it a name. Those first years were transitional; and the Monarchy, in the meantime, had little choice but to preserve, in appearance if not in substance, its relationship to the Three Glorious Days. Its claim to legitimacy, and modernity, depended on such recognition, would depend on it until 1834 or 1835. Acknowledging its historical origins, however, could all too easily underscore just how ineffective that claim was and how readily it could be discredited. The threat of dissolution was keenly felt: a rhetoric of betrayal and dispossession almost immediately came to dominate the discourse of the republican opposition; revolt (over wages, over politics) followed in 1831, 1832, 1833, and 1834; ministerial reshuffles occurred just as regularly, although bankers, in almost every instance, maintained their

 Daumier and Method 93 charge. Marx was not wrong when, looking back after the defeat of 1848, he likened the July Monarchy to a joint-stock company with Louis-Philippe as its director, a “Robert Macaire on the throne.”12 An uneasy tension existed between the developing forms of capital accumulation and the exigencies of restoration. Negotiating terms was, predictably, delicate and risky, a matter for the July Monarchy of establishing limits and enforcing boundaries without appearing to do either. The “turning point” marked by 1830 had to be realized and defused at the same time.13 A shadow dance, then: early on, it generally looked something like Horace Vernet’s Louis Philippe, duc d’Orléans, nommé lieutenant général du royaume, guitte à cheval le Palais Royal (1832) or Victor Schnetz’s Le combat devant l’Hôtel de Ville, le 28 juillet 1830 (1830–4). Nearly fifty pictures of the July barricades were sent to the 1831 Salon; the jury had been instructed to accept them all without exception. Some such performance, as I mentioned, was necessary: 1830 still meant something to those who fought it out, could still mean something. And so, for the time being, the July Monarchy held the image of Revolution close. It pinned a tricolor cockade to its top hat. It considered umbrellas and frockcoats sure signs of citizenship—signs, indeed, of a political reconciliation and social harmony in which “the self-made man’s idea that the Nation, now, was self-made” might be expressed.14 Louis-Philippe called himself king of the French, first among citizens, rather than King of France. He thought juste milieu stood for moderacy, and moderacy for universalism, and universalism for an end to hostilities. Liberalism—this was the promise—would reconcile the interests of the individual and those of society. This is not to say that the unification myth peddled by the July Monarchy was ever terribly convincing. It did not have to be. The official image of 1830, and the constitutionalism to which it gave form, was effective, regardless. For it rendered the affirmative image of 1830 unusable, even meaningless, for the Monarchy’s enemies on the left. It transformed commemoration into its opposite, deflated it as a modality on the basis of which counter-images might be generated, might be made to speak back to the administered image, putting its worldview in doubt. In a word, it stripped the cry of theft of its force—what after all had been stolen? These were adventitious effects: they recast 1830 as an object of history, revisable, indeed (and eventually) forgettable, even deniable. By 1834, even pictures like Schnetz’s, which refashions revolution as mere stage-drama, overly controlled as it is, composed to the point of frigidity, clean, indifferent in the way its cold finish sits us down to watch as the momentous in history gets played out before us, could begin to seem dangerous. Play-acting came too close to the truth. Still, these effects shaped the experience of defeat in the early 1830s. They signaled the true depth of the Revolution’s failure. * * * A July Hero. The lithograph shows us a veteran of the July Revolution, disabled in the course of battle, ten months later. Perched on the balustrade of the Pont de la Concorde as if on a pedestal, he recalls the statues that top triumphal columns. Only his back has been turned to us; the acts of heroism he embodies look away from us.

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A pavé—this man’s “final resource,” the lithograph tells us—hangs around his neck like an anchor stone; the allusion to the barricade is plain. For now, with this man’s cane tucked up under his right arm, the pavé ensures balance. Across the Seine, his sole refuge from immiseration—his reward, his médaille de la Légion d’honneur—the Chamber of Deputies flies a tricolor flag, the very same symbol to which this man pledged his every possession, including his body. All that remains to him now are the pawnshop tickets with which he has patched together his frockcoat, this emblem of bourgeois subjectivity now threadbare and piecemeal, no longer capable of concealing its substance or use. An inventory of this man’s ongoing deprivation—presumably he has pawned his coat by the piece, its collar alone looks to be wool—these receipts hold out no greater promise of redemption than the Chamber of Deputies across the river. The conversion of use-value into exchange-value, the way they condition one another and the way they contradict one another, appears in this frockcoat in its ordinariness and irresistibility, as the form, and abstracting process, of value itself. That the most prominent among these pledges, the one at the small of this man’s back, replaces a frockcoat on the whole (habit) concentrates the force of the operation, locks it down as an organizing principle. Value, here, becomes the fabric of everyday life, its mode of expression; value becomes the possibility of appearance. Usefulness still has a place, then. The hero needs his paper coat. Without it, he is not fit to be seen. Only the coat, reconstituted but not quite—not really—reassembled, appears as residue, in ruin. It seems the July hero has collected these pawns not in order to take stock of what he has relinquished but to use them. His frockcoat consists in its negative objectivity. The comic effect of Daumier’s lithograph has much to do, in the end, with the identity it establishes between the Chamber of Deputies and the Mont de Piété, both of which issue “the people” of 1830 paper receipts—constitutions here, pawns there—in exchange for their sacrifices, both of which count on “the people” not to reappear. Daumier’s lithograph would be half of what it is, however, if this identity did not turn on signs of dividedness and difference: the broken body of the anonymous invalide (he is a “hero” denied recognition, an everyman alienated from self and society alike; to be sure, he has alienated himself, if I can return to that word its relation to property); the balustrade that cuts, horizontally and flatly, across the picture plane, foregrounding its function as partition and barrier (this Pont de la Concorde separates rather than unifies); the Seine we do not see and the middle-ground it fails to clarify or deliver as a pictorial site of conjuncture and hence fictive distance; the inevitable seams ensured by the combination of shoddy stitchwork and impractical materials; the partly legible inscription on each pawnshop ticket identifying the object hocked; the sole of a bandaged, soiled foot and the eternal whiteness of a classical façade, the one against the other, the one carefully drawn and slowly built up, foreshortened, and modeled, the other marked out by a few lines; the paving-stone and the tricolor flag, the one a fragment, the other a unity, the one a means, the other an end; the triumph of the past (A July Hero) and the indignity of the present (May 1831). These signs of dividedness and difference constitute a radically different kind of commemoration. Here, commemoration turns on deterioration, disenchantment, and resignation. It appears distrustful of representation and its claims to fullness, of its own function and purpose. It cannot escape the negative, nor can it resist the pull of pessimism. It seems clear to me, however, that pessimism was not what

 Daumier and Method 95 Daumier was after, that he hoped to redeem commemoration rather than invert the forms of commemoration then available. What good, I can imagine him wondering, would it do to turn this man around, clean him up, heal his body, give him a worker’s smock and a bonnet rouge, place the paving-stone in a powerful and confident hand—in other words, make this héro truly heroic, put him back in the Revolution, pretend that the Revolution was, indeed, his, even his for the taking? Daumier knew this other image well. He would use it often in the following years. But it would not do in 1831. I suspect he did not know precisely what would. Still, he reaches for the alternative, gives it the firmness and solidity of his best drawing. Yet he struggled, it seems, to find positive and enduring meaning in the result as if he sensed he could not expunge the lithograph’s negativity without compromising what it makes visible, as if, in other words, he could not decide whether negativity was its limit or its truth. The drawing had to remain as it was, an ode to a forgotten héro and an image of suicide. Unsure as Daumier might have been of the form commemoration needed to take in 1831, he seems to have known what was at stake. He seems to have known that to redress history, he had not just to transpose its key, but to take it out of key, render it flat and depleted, unpoetic. This is not to say that what came to matter to Daumier were the unvarnished “facts” of history. He might have longed for a world without mediation, a world for which representation was not becoming the new nature. But he had no illusions about present realities. The goal, ultimately, was to see history matterof-factly, to depict it matter-of-factly—that is, to see and depict it in its partiality. Remembrance might then work against history; it might undo history’s seamless continuity. The procedure, however, compelled Daumier to embrace a negativity he wished to avoid but could not. Irresolution is the burden A July Hero bears. * * * In effect, A July Hero enters into a deadlock with its constitutive substance. The matter it takes up (comic twist) determines its concrete activity. The lithograph cannot rescue its hero from abstraction. Like him, it must make do with paper, its thinness, the provisional hold it has on those parts of the world it makes active and signifiable. Pawnshop stubs and patchwork frockcoat, a 7 ¼ x 8 ½ inch sheet of low-weight stock— paper is A July Hero’s positive and its negative, its measure of quality and its conversion into quantity. It is ground and figure, the space of appearance and its mediation. That is, paper binds. It unifies. But the unity reconstituted—and this is what makes the lithograph so trenchant—appears in an emblematic state, in which its historically negated character and meaning become perceptible.15 With A July Hero—maybe this is the (tragic) point in brief—Daumier discovers the terrain of aporetic activity. Just look, for a moment, at a lithograph he did almost a decade later, in 1840 (Figure 5.7). The picture is perhaps Daumier’s most explicit, and pessimistic, response to the deadlock. Here, two bourgeois, their faces obscured by an open issue of Le Charivari, contemplate the caricature on page three. One of them, in characteristic top hat, leans in for a better look. The other, his glasses propped on a proliferating brow, prepares, or maybe speaks, his response—the first version of the lithograph did not include a caption. Doubtless, his response is to do with the

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Figure 5.7  Honoré Daumier, La Lecture. Lithograph. Le Charivari, April 1, 1840 (DR 792) (Noack Collection, www​.daumier​.org). advertisement blazoned across page four, which instructs “Messieurs, our subscribers” to renew their contracts lest they wish to experience delays in future delivery. “I shall buy this paper,” he eventually proclaims. Presumably, the caricature these gentlemen pore over looks something like the one we, the advertisement’s actual target, see before us. We look at ourselves, as it were, looking at ourselves. We laugh at ourselves. We are subject; we are object, self and other. If some defense exists for us, if we are to hold out hope that we might deflect the image’s mockery, take measure of our superiority over these men and thus secure our exemption, it is to accede to the advertisement’s call.16 Our power subsists in the power of acquisition, in the fulfillment and reproduc­ tion of the capital circuit. The contradiction, internalized, comes to be overdetermined. Inside and outside have become linked. Thinking them, of necessity, means thinking them together. All the more poignant, then, is Daumier’s understanding of his medium, and the way he turns the conditions bearing down on it to effect. The page four advertising, as it almost always does with Le Charivari’s caricatures, shows through to the other side, pointing up the flimsiness of the paper on which this image appears, the way it cannot quite hold up to lithographic and typographic printing, the way it cannot quite hold them apart. The pressure and salience of one encroach on the other, type pieces

 Daumier and Method 97 on smooth, unmarked stone. This is to say, the cant of advertising attaches itself to the image, tugs at it, dogs and hectors it. Here, Daumier permits the page four advertising to become part of his image, to share in the space of formal presentation. The effect has something palimpsestic about it. But palimpsest, the to and fro between inscription and reinscription, of ninety-degree turns and sedimentation over time, of shadow images and non-focus and literariness, does not, all the same, seem to me to capture the operation on view. Recto and verso do not compete for the space of appearance, the one working to suppress or subsume the other, to conceal it or to render it inactive. Or if they do, what we see is a play of identity and nonidentity, the one side desiring to unite with the other in order to destroy it, which is to say, in order to destroy what is already itself. Daumier gives Hegel’s “unhappy consciousness” visual form. He has it look us squarely in the face. The ultimate point, I think, is that the lithograph of 1840 actualizes the impasse of 1831, has it be caricature. Comic reversal, in it, becomes mis en abyme. Multiplicity and recursion strike a deal. Paper mediates. Infra-thin, it figures its own reification as means. That is to say, it figures totalization—its inability to get fully outside of it, its own dealings with it—by operating as the suture stitching it all together. “The Sage laughs not without trembling.”17 This is a version of materialism. It figures the universalization of deceit, a deception of itself and others, shamelessly. Daumier’s great moments of matter-of-factness, indeed, happen when the social material he works becomes intractable. The greater the possibility of fraudulence and travesty, the more fully his imagery enters into it. * * * The biggest and most unavoidable difficulty: to determine to what degree Marxism depends on capitalism itself. How many of its methods are capitalist, or at least work on capitalist conditions? Do they change capitalism by understanding it? Does the dialectic explain it or liquidate it? The dialectic thereby being capitalist in its field of application? Does it arise as capitalism’s epiphenomenon? Does it give capitalism its meaning in the first place?18

The questions, jotted down sometime in 1930, are Brecht’s. If I bring them on here, in the conclusion to an essay about Daumier and caricature, it is not to suggest that Daumier would have understood them. Not in their present form, at any rate. Brecht’s language, “vulgar” in orientation, belongs to a later stage in capitalism’s development, and Daumier, no less emphatically than Brecht, insisted on the situatedness of thought. Peel away the apparatus, however, and Brecht’s questions reveal themselves, more or less straightforwardly, to be questions about representation and its usefulness, about those ways of describing the world that figure it as being capable of transformation. They are social questions. In what tone and attitude, by what means and in which mode (tragic, comic, the two as one) can representation go on being pursued in the face of capitalism’s abstractions—that is, when abstraction no longer acts as mere cloak or fantasy or diversion but as a force operative in the world, one, moreover, that positions

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transformation at its center? A July Hero runs up against questions of this sort. Or perhaps I should say, instead, that the lithograph brings them to a standstill. It is the dialectical unrest of Brecht’s inquiry, then, that interests me most in the end; it signals a “hesitant” and “perplexed” way of proceeding;19 it admits to a certain ambivalence, not as a sign of impasse or indeterminacy, but as the willingness, as T. J. Clark once put it, “to recognize the power of [capitalism’s regime of visual appearance] in us.”20 Brecht’s questions are difficult. I think they are the right ones. At the very least, they are questions which any social accounting of the image, of the image in its relation to the world, must go on asking.

Notes 1 Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 169. My whole account of Caricaturana owes a tremendous debt to Terdiman and his chapter on Daumier in Discourse/Counter-Discourse. He leads the way from beginning to end. We disagree, however, on the adequacy of “discourse” as a framework for understanding Daumier’s imagery. “I don’t draw words,” Daumier once said, “I draw gestures and expressions.” The assertion, to me, seems decisive. 2 Sandy Petrey, In the Court of the Pear King: French Culture and the Rise of Realism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 10–12. 3 Michèle Hannoosh, Baudelaire and Caricature: From the Comic to an Art of Modernity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 5. 4 Baudelaire, “De l’essence du rire,” in Œuvres complètes, ed. Y.-G. Le Dantec (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 706. 5 Paolo Virno, “Jokes and Innovative Action: For a Logic of Change,” in Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 102–3. 6 Benjamin Noys’s The Persistence of the Negative (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010) has been especially helpful here. 7 Baudelaire, “Le Cygne,” in Œuvres complètes, 156. 8 Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method (London: Verso, 1998), 123–4. 9 Ibid., 122–3. 10 Banville, Mes Souvenirs (Paris, 1882), 166. 11 Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’: Introduction,” in Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right,” ed. Joseph O’Malley, trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 134. On the relation between capitalist development and genre, see Joshua Clover, “Genres of the Dialectic,” Critical Inquiry 43 (Winter 2017): 431–50. 12 Marx, Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850 (New York: International Publishers, 1997), 36. 13 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789-1848 (London: Abacus, 1988), 141. 14 T. J. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France 1848-1851 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 17.

 Daumier and Method 99 15 I have borrowed the phrasing here from Jeff Wall. See his “Unity and Fragmentation in Manet,” in Jeff Wall: Selected Essays and Interviews (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2007), 81–2. 16 Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse, 179. 17 Baudelaire, “De l’essence du rire,” 703. 18 Quoted in Jameson, Brecht and Method, 156. The original can be found in volume XXI of the Grosse kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, 407. 19 “Hesitant” and “perplexed” are Jameson’s terms, 155. 20 Clark, “On the Very Idea of a Subversive Art History,” unpublished conference paper, 1992, p. 12. My thanks to Anthony Grudin for sharing this paper with me.

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The Age of Social Art History Berger, Clark, Fried Alexander Nemerov

The task is to consider the present prospects of social art history. I propose to do so by looking at the phenomenon of aging, more precisely, of lives divided into stages. In looking at the work of three major art historians and critics—John Berger (died 2017), T. J. Clark, and Michael Fried—I will explore not only the coming of age of social art history (and, in Fried’s case, its nemesis) but, more precisely, the way each writer treats time, not least the relation between the different times of his career. Aside from the subjects these scholars illuminate, they also portray the history of their own writing, and in ways that allow us to glimpse historical time—the stuff of social art history—in startlingly intimate ways.1 As a template for these meditations, I will base my remarks on a painting that is not only exemplary of social art history’s concerns but also a powerful depiction of three stages of life: the Le Nain brothers’ The Card Players (Figure 6.1). Painted in Laon, France, c. 1640–5, The Card Players shows a young boy at right, a middle-aged man at left, and a gray-bearded elder in the center. To judge by their armor, the figures are soldiers, part of a common cause even as they compete against one another. They are physically close, their bodies overlapping, almost crowding upon the small plinth that makes their cramped playing surface. Yet they are also isolated from one another. Set off in darkness, their faces stand out strongly on their own, each arrested in a moment of private recognition so intense that it breaks up the group. The glassy stare of the man on the left, one of his eyes mostly concealed, suggests an interior recognition that dissolves all else. He looks at no one that we can see, and his fathomless surprise is echoed by the open-mouthed stare of a faintly visible fourth figure, perhaps a servant boy, behind him. The pensive man at the center, though he looks at the boy, seems as enclosed as the tightly wound jug whose neck he firmly grasps in his right hand. The long-haired boy himself, no less isolated, recoils as he looks up at the light that brightens his face. The game has reached a moment of truth.

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Figure 6.1  Le Nain Brothers, The Card Players, c. 1640–45, Musée Granet, Aix-enProvence, France. Photo Credit: White Images/Scala/Art Resource, NY. Though the players pursue the same career and the same pastime, there is no evident unity between the ages. * * * The Card Players was on view in the exhibition The Brothers Le Nain, Painters of 17th-Century France, when John Berger died at age ninety on January 2, 2017.2 The coincidence made me reflect on the stages of Berger’s career—of the young and older Berger sitting at the same table, engaged in some cross fire of recognition and estrangement. Would they recognize one another, and, if so, what are the implications of this recognition (or lack of it) for the social art history that this eminent writer helped popularize? Berger’s career seems continuous. His extraordinary number of publications— my university library lists ninety-one—indicates the organic integrity of his writing, a constancy that ties the earliest and latest works together, from his first book of art essays Permanent Red, published in 1960, to later ones such as I Send You This Cadmium Red (2000) and onward. Berger’s landmark book Ways of Seeing (1972) is another constant: still in print, an ever-durable guide to imagery’s complicity in the workings of power, it apparently never goes out of style. For me, the book evokes the

 The Age of Social Art History 103 many photographic portraits of Berger, from the time of the pendant BBC television programs accompanying Ways of Seeing to pictures taken of him as a gray-haired sage in this millennium. His handsome good looks tiding him over, Berger in these later photographs seems little changed except in a Hollywood way—as if makeup artists had sprayed his hair gray and daubed in some wrinkles but otherwise left him the same as he had been as a young man. Maybe it was his empathic outrage that kept Berger young. His first experience of working-class life, while on military assignment as a teenager in Belfast during the Second World War, gave this son of the upper-middle class a grievous sense of social inequality that never grew old. Berger’s sense of time was folkloric—a counter to the rational temporality of industrial modernity that in his view degraded human beings. The narrator of his novel Lilac and Flag (1990), for instance, is an old village woman who recounts the bygone deeds of people who lived long before. As a type of historian, the old woman provides a “haunting bridge” back into the past, Berger told an interviewer. Recounting stories of old, she “receives the experiences of the protagonists without witnessing them, and she receives them in an incredibly compassionate way.”3 Across the social disparities made by capital, a reminiscent narration of kindness and gentleness is more than nostalgia, more than frozen memory. It becomes a living byway along which the narrator “receives”—like a medium—the lore of the past. The narrator in Lilac and Flag is a fit type for Berger himself, underscoring the saving unities of memory in his own life. The old woman’s “prescience,” he told the interviewer, “reminds me of all those proverbs my mother would drop like aspirins into my despair. What always impressed me was not only their uncanny contemporaneity but also the fact that she had so many in store. For each new experience which to me seemed beyond her reach, there was yet another proverb, and it always seemed to come from a place which I didn’t know of.”4 As a model of history, Berger’s reminiscence says a lot. Remote historical experiences blend together via familial proverbs and prescient narrations to make an “uncanny contemporaneity.” People of different eras sit around the same table. This organicism extends to Berger’s theory of art, including (briefly) the Le Nains. The brothers from Laon make surprisingly few appearances in his writings—none, for example, in Ways of Seeing. But he does mention Louis Le Nain in Art and Revolution, a 1971 book on the little-known Soviet sculptor Ernst Neizvestny. Berger writes there that the Le Nains were part of a long history of anti-academicism in France—that they drew inspiration “from what had not been achieved, from what was not yet art.” This made them artists committed to the future—to a time, unlike their own, that would recognize the power of their work. This is exactly what happened with the Le Nains— although Berger does not say so explicitly—when around 1848, two hundred years after the deaths of Antoine and Louis, their work was rediscovered and celebrated by critics and artists such as Gustave Courbet who saw them as hallmarks of the contemporary realism they sought to create. Berger’s sense of time plays out accordingly. In many eras and places, the antiacademic artist anticipates the future. In Art and Revolution, Neizvestny makes such premonitory work—“keeping open the spaces of future ideas.” Berger writes that his art is a stage along the way—imperfect, rushed, parochial—but nonetheless a sure

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sign, held in reserve for the future, of the collapse of western imperialism. It does not matter that now the sculptures look something like a cross between Henry Moore and A Clockwork Orange, a blend of Jean Arp and Yuri Gagarin. Berger felt they held something in store. And within that promise was a sense of messianic time, liquid in life, the past holding the future. This organicism of time extends to Berger’s conception of an artist’s career, Neizvestny’s, for example. “Since 1956 his development has been logical and unbroken,” Berger writes. “This is perhaps because he was already formed and mature as a personality (aged about thirty) when he was first able to work by himself, perhaps also because his mind is a naturally philosophic one. As an artist, he knows where he is going. And so it seems to me that we can nevertheless trace the formation of the essential Neizvestny in such a way that no future development is likely to contradict it.” The leaguing of anti-academic artists such as the Le Nains and Neizvestny underscores a temporal difference, however. If The Card Players is any indication, the poignancy of the Le Nains is that they do not know where they are going; time disrupts the genealogies. They cannot anticipate a temporal conclusion—the advent of realism and a more democratic century—and they cannot take for granted even the “essential” relation of one part of life to another, for this, too, treated as an essential matter, is the stuff of academic formulas (conventional pictures of the stages of life) that the brothers knew they must reject in their brilliantly anti-academic commitment to doubt. Berger is hardly the only art historian to instrumentalize an artist’s work—to see it as prefiguring a historical development that in retrospect seems inevitable. But the Le Nains’ gift for aporias—their portrayal of the amnesiac shocks and jumps that, at least as much as smooth folkloric recitation, constitute historical awareness—makes the present case particularly acute. Like the card players, the brothers cannot know what hand history will deal with. Berger’s illustrious career—united at each point by a common noble goal— nevertheless did not admit much of the temporal doubt that constitutes one important medium of historical realization. Because he breathlessly relied on atemporal formulas— regarding the hell panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights as “prophetic” of omnipotent global capital in the twenty-first century, for instance5—Berger’s passionate polemics left him high and dry in those moments when it came time to see, as the Le Nains saw so well, that even figures of great closeness and undoubted common purpose realize one another best when they fail to recognize one another. If the older version of John Berger had sat down with earlier versions of himself, they would have seen eye to eye—seen each other, as it were, too well, without the blindness that helps comprise not only the historical past but also the historian’s relation to his own career. What is this self-blindness? The historian looks back on his writings with a certain estrangement. The essays of an earlier stage might look like those of another person. The gaps between who the writer was and who the writer is, rather than suggesting the simplified formula of a career treated in stages—early and late work, etc.—suggest a mysterious blank wherein the forces we call “history” most intensively gather. If these forces were figures in a mythology, if they were a Greek chorus of sorts, we could call them The Interstices. As a chorus, they would sing of not-knowing, of the historical

 The Age of Social Art History 105 awareness that comes to the person who feels around in the dark for what is not there and, for that reason, sometimes makes memorable contact with what he still cannot see. Berger lacked this faculty. * * * T. J. Clark mentions the Le Nains in his early and rightly celebrated book Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848-1851, published in 1973. The brothers appear in a discussion of the influences at work in Courbet’s After Dinner at Ornans, of 1848–9. From the Le Nains, Courbet took the reality effect of their awkward figure juxtapositions. As the critic Champfleury put it in 1862, in words quoted by Clark, the Le Nains “sought reality even in their clumsy way of putting isolated figures in the middle of the canvas; in this, they are the fathers of our presentday experiments, and their reputation can only grow.”6 With its three close but solitary figures, The Card Players is one such compellingly clumsy arrangement—the kind that Courbet seized upon as a special sign of modernity. Culling from Rembrandt, Velázquez, and Zurbaran, the French painter looked to the Le Nains for a way to show the shocks and jumps and alienation of modern life—the gaps and failures—that slick crowd-pleasing paintings and bourgeois false consciousness scrupulously avoided. The young Clark of Image of the People and its pendant volume, The Absolute Bourgeois, is often held up as the most heroic—the one whose fine-grained, archivally based analyses, coupled with a fluid writing style and exceptional visual sensitivity, exposed just how lethally weak formalist art history had become by the 1970s. Even the few sentences devoted to the Le Nains in Image of the People (and a briefer mention in The Absolute Bourgeois) make the brothers from Laon far more interesting than Jacques Thuillier’s entire 374-page catalog to the 1978–9 show of eighty-eight Le Nain paintings at the Grand Palais—a catalog and a show devoted entirely to conjecturing which brother, Antoine, Louis, or Mathieu, painted which picture. Likewise, Clark’s lapidary remarks excel next to Anthony Blunt’s review of the Le Nain exhibition, itself devoted almost entirely to questions of attribution.7 In the world of British art history in the 1970s, the distinction between the two Marxists— the silver-haired amoral aristocrat Blunt and the maverick petty-bourgeois Clark—is still one of the great bad guy–good guy counterpoints of recent academe. The young Clark does not grow old. But Clark’s later works—notably, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (1984), Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999), and The Sight of Death (2006)—are often held to mark a departure from the polemically clear historical authority of the first two books. Although Clark’s entire career draws on an ongoing animosity toward capitalist culture and the society of the spectacle,8 his critics have noted how the later books frequently praise great works of art—a departure from the heady days of the 1970s. Scorning Clark’s admiration for Manet, Pollock, and Poussin—painters of among the last “luminous concreteness” he feels the world still has to offer9—various academics have found the later Clark to be an elitist auteur out of touch with the Marxist basis of his work. O. K. Werckmeister,

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a principal detractor, faults Farewell to an Idea, for example, as “a remnant of, or a relapse into, an earlier stage of writing on modern art informed by noncontestable aesthetic preferences, single-minded ideological convictions, and summary rejections of contrary views.” Noting the departure from the earlier books, Werckmeister laments that “this is the author who a quarter of a century ago had started his career with a compelling renewal of Marxist art-historical scholarship. If he will now dispose of Marxist art history” by celebrating elitist oil paintings, then conservative audiences must rejoice at the surrender.10 Mapping the change in Clark’s career onto The Card Players is an absurdly ahistorical idea, out of league with Clark’s questions at any point in his writing, except for one thing. It keeps faith with Clark’s feeling that historical consciousness is manifest most clearly in breaks, rather than in continuities. As he puts it in Farewell to an Idea: “Not being able to make a previous moment of high achievement part of the past—not to lose it and mourn it and, if necessary, revile it—is, for art in modernist circumstances, more or less synonymous with not being able to make art at all.”11 The writer of history, it follows, must himself mourn “a previous moment of high achievement” for that moment to become visible. The isolated figures in The Card Players, each summoned out of nowhere, each caught in his own world, suggest these staggered epochs. With their preference for gaps and staccato jumps—the cheats and deceits and uncertainties that cause mutual but independent surprise—the Le Nains imagined that the relation between one person at three stages of life makes for the most estranged kind of intimacy. Whether or not this is a function of modernity—the kind that the Le Nains were so good at blindly prefiguring—is an open question. Maybe the times are always out of joint. But the changes that buffet Clark’s career outpace even his own gloomy prognostications, as he acknowledges. The depressed contempt for “Y2K” that opens The Sight of Death, Clark is well aware, immediately looked out of date upon the book’s publication in 2006. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, made his grumpiness about the new millennium (back when he wrote the book in 2000–1) seem like “a message from a lost past.”12 He grants that the quickened pace of disasters and uncertainties blows apart the continuities of his writing—were those continuities even desirable in the first place. Beyond the ordinary and even genteel rates at which changing social realities predictably play into the variable nature of an author’s prose, the shocks between 1968 and 2018 arguably constitute an uproar that continually throws Clark’s ever-topical illuminations back into a kind of self-producing shade. Far from a demerit, this aggrieved poetics of obsolescence is a worthy hallmark of Clark’s writing. On the page, his sentences are like sayings chiseled on stones: they await the inevitable erosion but trust that the fierceness of their wisdom will make them legible even in ruins. This temporal awareness is maybe the most inexhaustible feature of Clark’s writerly materialism. By a kind of proud insistency, his writing always erects itself as the sandcastle at the shore’s edge, with the author standing back in melancholy satisfaction to watch the battle of turret and tide. * * *

 The Age of Social Art History 107 Michael Fried discusses Louis Le Nain (“the most important by far” of the brothers) in his book Manet’s Modernism (1996). The discussion significantly takes place in the chapter “Manet’s Sources 1859-1869”—significant because the chapter is itself an allegory of Fried’s multiphased career.13 Originally published as a lengthy essay in Artforum in 1969, when Fried was just out of graduate school, “Manet’s Sources: Aspects of His Art, 1859-1865” (the original title) explores the question of just why so many of Manet’s paintings from the early 1860s include more or less obvious references to the Old Masters, including Louis Le Nain. The answer, in part, is that Manet sought to identify himself with a historical school of French art then becoming more widely known and appreciated. The claim, although sensible enough, met strong resistance among established Manet scholars who, in time-honored academic fashion, rebuked the newcomer. The rebuke ultimately led to “Manet’s Sources,” appearing again in print nearly thirty years later. Feeling that the essay had never got its just due, Fried decided to reprint it “almost exactly as it first appeared in Artforum” as the first chapter in Manet’s Modernism. There he follows it with a chapter, “’Manet’s Sources’ Reconsidered,’” in which he acknowledges the weaknesses of the 1969 essay but argues that it is correct all the same. In this way, Fried has the last word with himself—“correcting, refining, amplifying, and enriching [the earlier essay] in ways that were altogether beyond the scope of my understanding twenty-five years ago.”14 The temporal implications of the gesture are clear enough. The writer brings back one of his earlier essays to stop time. Dorian Gray-like, the essay looks “almost exactly as it first appeared” twenty-seven years earlier. As he would do in 1998, when he reprinted his 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood” in a volume of collected criticism bearing the same title, Fried creates a bridge between his earlier self and the still-more authoritative scholar he had become.15 More than that, in the Manet essay he creates a proper unity of his whole career by noting that what he only partly understood back in 1969—the concept of absorptive beholding—he later came to theorize at length in books such as Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980). Understood in these terms, Fried’s life of writing is a unity about a unity. The long tradition of absorptive pictures that ends with the “facingness” of Manet’s paintings is the organic lineage to which Fried devotes his own career. Fried would not recognize the different phases of his life as a critic and historian in the split figures of the Le Nain Card Players. Or would he? The distinctively Caravaggesque tenor of the Le Nain painting calls up Fried’s idea of the “moment”—the spectacular instant at which a painting announces itself as finished. It is at that point that the painter’s absorptive process of painting— making one mark after another, quietly, obsessively, over time, almost unthinkingly— abruptly breaks off and leaves a finished object. This at any rate is Caravaggio’s own “moment,” according to Fried, the moment when a shocked figure (such as Medusa staring at Perseus) portrays the artist’s own sudden and painful awareness that the painting is no longer an immersive extension of his consciousness but now a frozen thing separate from himself. Caravaggio’s followers pursue the conceit (process versus product) in similar ways.16

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Fried does not discuss the Le Nains in his two books on this topic—one on Caravaggio and the other on artists inspired by him. But his account is suggestive in relation to The Card Players. In their sharp and frozen reactions, all three main figures (and the spectral fourth) suggest the artist’s shocked recognition that the work is finished. Fried allows us to imagine one of the Le Nains painting these figures over days, perhaps weeks, but always with an eye to the impending moment when he would leave them. That is why the card players react as if at a martyrdom or miracle or some other sudden spectacle of pain or amazement. If they cannot quite believe that their maker is deserting them—the central figure looks to the boy as if not quite realizing yet what is happening—their combined sense of misfortune is nothing compared to that of the painter whose shock they portray. The figures’ “excessive” embodiment, to use another of Fried’s terms, is equally momentary. As in the work of fellow French painter Valentin de Boulogne, whose Caravaggesque work inspired the Le Nains, The Card Players shows figures who vibrate with physical intensity.17 The thick coarse wrinkled sleeve of the leftmost and nearest man, for example, is almost dizzyingly at odds with the thin paper cards he holds in each hand—a mesmerizing contrast that somehow intensifies the instant as much as his shocked expression. The central figure’s muted recognition is likewise excessive— the strong grasp of the wicker jug, the inverted triangle of his open coat front, and the downward weight of his breastplate emphasize his strange immediacy. The young boy’s thick red-brown sleeves, wispy hair, and sensuous mouth—open like those of his companions—give him an equally hyperbolic bearing. In these terms, the background servant is almost like a remnant of the picture’s energies, an afterthought on whom the artist could not muster any more excessiveness since he had spent everything he had on the three principal figures. All of these factors make the card players present, and the painting exerts that presentness—Fried’s greatest term of critical approbation—to this day. In this explosion of the moment—the perpetual Now—the different ages of the soldiers turn out to be irrelevant, paling before the ageless instant they all incarnate. The painting so apparently devoted to changing times—youth to old age—turns out chronophobic after all.18 The near side of the makeshift stone card table reveals a low relief carving, a relic of antiquity derived also from Valentin, who emphasized such repurposed objects from the past, but even this token of crumbling age cannot detract from the essential immediacy of the card players’ interaction. For Fried, art history and art alike deal in such moments— the delivery of shocks of sudden awareness to both reader and viewer. Those shocks suspend time and, at a remove, confer an imaginary immortality not only on the artist but also on the critic himself, whose own “moment” comparably endures. * * * In the late nineteenth century, Paul Cézanne would go to visit The Card Players at the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence. He was presumably thinking of the brothers’ portrayals of humble life, of their subtle and memorable dislocations, when he told his friend Émile Bernard, “That is how I would like to paint.’”19 One of Cézanne’s

 The Age of Social Art History 109

Figure 6.2  Paul Cézanne, The Card Players, c. 1890–92, oil on canvas 25 ¾ x 32 ¼ (65.4 x 81.9 cm). Bequest of Stephen C. Clark, 1960. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY. own inscrutable card-player paintings, of c. 1890–2, suggests the kinship (Figure 6.2). But this common theme aside, it is less Cézanne’s Card Players than the well-known demarcation of his career into early, middle, and late periods on which I would like to close. Cézanne’s early works are notoriously grisly and violent. Paintings such as The Murder, of c. 1868–9, show the nameless, purposeless brutality that characterizes modernity. As the art historian André Dombrowski points out, the naturalist universe of these scenes is subject to grim psychophysiological laws—passions and madness overmaster people. The murderer is a paradigmatically modern individual because he acts compulsively, without control, “provoked by stimuli and unchangeable hereditary facts.” The painter’s abandonment of these dark works for the palette and concerns of impressionism and post-impressionism, as in The Card Players, is one mainstay of Cézanne criticism. Yet Dombrowski notes that this “neat periodization” is too simple. The art of the older Cézanne channels the earlier violence and disruption, no longer portraying it in narrative but formal terms. “The subject was now the landscape’s mood and turbulence,

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not ours,” Dombrowski writes. “Instantaneity, flatness, abbreviation, and cropping— and not narration—had become the stuff of a new, and newly positivist, art.”20 Despite the radical dissimilarities between early, mid-period, and late works—Dombrowski acknowledges that The Card Players, for example, is far from the claustrophobic grimness of the early paintings21 Cézanne pursued versions of the same question throughout his whole career. Pursuing a lifelong question is different from the other continuities I have discussed in this chapter. It is different from Berger’s aim to make all topics relate to a common goal of social justice because—as a goal—the destination of Berger’s studies was not a question but an answer. It is different also from Berger’s conception of art as prophecy, insofar as such prophetic art, for him, cannily predicts the ends toward which it gestures. It is also different from Fried’s omnipresence, because in that model, great works of art bespeak a common preoccupation and consequently evince a timelessness across time, manifest in punctual moments of extravagant immediacy that take history’s breath away. It is different, too, from Clark’s restive race with historical change, where he consents to date his work in grim token that the magnificent edifice of a beautiful book outside of time would be, for him, a hubristic contradiction in terms. Pursuing a lifelong question, by contrast, is a weird way of acknowledging that we write forward—that our writing accumulates as a gathering of various present moments no one of which ever quite “sees” the answer toward which it strives. This contingency and failure is, however, no loss but the splendor of an individual scholarly contribution conceived in such forward terms. There is something “luminously concrete” in each separate phase of the pursuit. The necessary cost of that brightness, however, is that it blinds the illuminator himself, who in Nietzschean fashion is at a loss to see because of the light of his own rays. Nor can the historian describe except in normative historiographic terms exactly how or why any one of these illuminations links up with another or how they make an organic totality called a career. The forward model of history is something like a series of bursts, each one of which expires like a flare. Historians, including the author himself, may come upon the scene and draw convincing constellations among these lights. This one is a cup and that one is a scorpion and this one is a tiger. Authors may even prefigure the firing of the flares by drawing up the constellations beforehand, submitting the career to a preordained design. But in the truest sense, each phase of a writer’s career—and even each piece—is a shock to any of the others. Yet it is their similarity that is most shocking of all. I look once again at the Le Nain painting. The phases of a single life—suddenly made plain to one another—are not nearly so startlingly different there as might appear. The shock of the players is possibly even a mutual recognition—an amazement that such different people could all be one. The result is no comfortable unity, no reunion. Nor is it a roundabout return to simple periodization, as in a joke: three phases of a career walk into a bar. Three phases of a career sit down for a game of cards. Instead, it is the young person’s startled awareness that this is who I will be, and the older ones’ realization that this is who they have been, and the recognition, for all three, that the driving question has been the same throughout, that it has never gone away, and that not one of them knows what it is.

 The Age of Social Art History 111 The most stunning thing about the painting is that it portrays this feeling in bodily terms. The Card Players suggests that at moments of acutest realization—the moments when a person feels most that he is pulled along by the mysterious unifying question— he feels a weird sense of himself as a body. Like one of Fried’s “excessive” figures, he comes to feel that his “own physicality, indeed his own mindedness, were not wholly transparent to him, something to be taken for granted—to be simply ‘lived’—but rather were assumed by him as a burden of some mysterious sort.”22 A writer lives life forward in the recognition that the very direction of his life makes an accumulation whose significance he can never know. Beyond any metrics or measures of what he had done, who he was or will be, he therefore acknowledges an obtuseness, even a stupidity, something like that of the Le Nain figures. The realization manifests as physical bafflement—a shocked expression, a hand extended, a hand withheld, the gestures acquiring an extraordinary, strange density. Clark’s “luminous concreteness” combines with Fried’s “burden of some mysterious sort.” In such a mythical gathering of oneself as this wise painting allows him to consider, the historian becomes momentarily aware—as a physical fact—that there is a past and that there is a future and that both these unthinkable worlds reside in him.

Notes 1 The reader will note right away that my three art historians are all white men; my choice owes to their particular engagement with the issues traced in this chapter, as perceived from the blind spot of my own connection to their work. My views, partial as they are, exist as encouragement for others to take the terms imagined here and trace them, or refute them, in relation to art historians unlike the ones discussed here. 2 This was during the splendid exhibition at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, The Brothers Le Nain: Painters of Seventeenth-Century France. See the catalog: C. D. Dickerson III and Esther Bell, The Brothers Le Nain: Painters of Seventeenth-Century France (Fort Worth, Texas, and San Francisco: Kimbell Art Museum and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2016). Dickerson and Bell tentatively attribute The Card Players to Antoine Le Nain. 3 “John Berger: An Interview by Nikos Papastergiadis,” The American Poetry Review 22 (July/August 1993): 12. 4 “John Berger: An Interview by Nikos Papastergiadis,” 12. 5 John Berger, Portraits: John Berger on Artists, ed. Tom Overton (London: Verso, 2015), 35–40. 6 Champfleury (Jules Husson), Nouvelles recherches sur la vie et l’oeuvre des Frères Le Nain (Laon, 1862), quoted in T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848-1851 (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society Ltd., 1973), 73. 7 Anthony Blunt, “The Le Nain Exhibition at the Grand Palais, Paris: ‘Le Nain Problems,’” The Burlington Magazine 120 (December 1978): 870, 872, 875, 877.

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8 See for example Gregory Seltzer, “Situationism and the Writings of T. J. Clark,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 4 (Spring 2010): 121–39; and James A. van Dyke, “Modernist Poussin,” Oxford Art Journal 31 (2008): 285–92. 9 T. J. Clark, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 5. 10 O. K. Werckmeister, “A Critique of T. J. Clark’s Farewell to an Idea,” Critical Inquiry 28 (Summer 2002): 858, 866. 11 T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes in a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 371. 12 Clark, The Sight of Death, 1, vii. 13 Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism: Or, the Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 30–2, 62–8. 14 Ibid., 4, 19. 15 Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Art and Objecthood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 148–72. See also in the same volume “An Introduction to My Art Criticism,” which contextualizes and defends “Art and Objecthood” (see especially pp. 40–7). 16 See Michael Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), and Michael Fried, After Caravaggio (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). 17 See Fried, After Caravaggio, 42. 18 See Pamela Lee’s account of Fried’s “chronophobia,” in Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 19 Cézanne, quoted in Cézanne’s Card Players (London: Paul Holberton, 2010), in The Brothers Le Nain, 330. 20 André Dombrowski, Cézanne, Murder, and Modern Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 232–3, 246, 234. 21 Ibid., 234. 22 Fried, After Caravaggio, 42.

7

A Secret History of Martin Wong Marci Kwon

In 1984, Martin Wong painted a picture of his first residence in New York City (Figure 7.1). Glimpsed through two windows, the modest room contains a bed, a steamer trunk, a suitcase, and a wooden dresser stacked with books. Paintings by Wong line the walls, transforming the picture into an archive of the artist’s early years in the city. After nearly three decades in the Bay Area, Wong moved to New York in 1978 and took up residence at the Meyers Hotel, a decrepit waterfront dive that he speculated had inspired Elia Kazan’s 1954 film On the Waterfront.1 After completing his shift as the hotel’s night porter, Wong would lock himself in this room to spend countless solitary hours honing his painting practice. Although he earned a degree in ceramics at Humboldt State University, he did not dedicate himself to painting until this moment. “To me, that was like heaven,” he recalled of this monastic existence.2 My Secret World, 1978-81 commemorates this transformative period in block letters chiseled in paint across the building’s lintels. Wong’s words declare the precise dates and location of his residence—1978–81, Room 33 of the Meyers Hotel at 117 South Street, New York—and proclaim, “IT WAS IN THIS ROOM THAT THE WORLDS [sic] FIRST PAINTINGS FOR THE HEARING IMPAIRED CAME INTO BEING.” The subject of this hyperbolic declaration, Psychiatrists Testify: Demon Dog Drives Man to Murder, hangs above Wong’s steamer trunk, and was, indeed, the first work to include the artist’s signature fingerspelling motif.3 The lurid grandeur of this phrase, which Wong took from the supermarket tabloid World Weekly News, ironizes his claim of significance, transforming art history’s estimation of firsts and figures into sensationalist prattle. Despite My Secret World’s pretension to factual verisimilitude, the painting withholds its most vital secrets. Although we can see into Wong’s room, the trunk, suitcase, and dresser drawers remain shut. The opaque brick panel that bisects the composition blocks a full view of the room: we are on the outside looking in. This play of clarity and opacity is given spatial form in the two windows, rendered in perspectival depth on the left and planar frontality on the right. My Secret World’s skepticism toward historical fact would seem to align with contemporaneous critiques of representation enacted by artists such as Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince. Indeed, Wong was a notorious fabulist, embellishing truths and

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Figure 7.1  Martin Wong, My Secret World, 1978–81, 1984. Acrylic on canvas, 48 × 68 inches, Collection of KAWS, New York. Courtesy of the Estate of Martin Wong and P. P. O. W., New York. fictionalizing anecdotes in his biography, even on his own “Resumé de Consumé.”4 This fabulation extends to his paintings, which abound with trompe l’oeil passages of brick, wood, and cement rendered in acrylic, which the artist described as “fake oil [paint].”5 For art historian Craig Owens, such critiques of the “tyranny of the signifier” lie at the heart of postmodernism’s emancipatory potential.6 Yet Wong’s paintings share none of the cool detachment of his contemporaries, and he took pains to distinguish himself from their example. What Wong sought to convey in his paintings was not a fashionable skepticism toward history as such, but the secret histories occluded from official view. In this, Wong’s painting offers a crucial lesson for art historians. Rather than grand historical events and overarching art historical narratives that one might associate with the period in which Wong worked—Postmodernism, Reaganism, Multiculturalism—Wong was concerned, instead, with the minutiae of the material world: the rust on a storefront grail, the luscious texture of a brick wall, the shine of a metal clasp. If Wong had a subject, it was the secret histories expressed by such seemingly inconsequential details. The books that line his dresser in My Secret World, on subjects including UFOs, magic, pirates, electromagnetism, Bruce Lee, and professional hockey, attest to the artist’s determination to take seriously all that would seem to fall outside the boundaries of respectable scholarly inquiry. Wong’s paintings invite us to question which secrets are worthy of consideration, or put differently, what constitutes proper historical fact.

 A Secret History of Martin Wong 115 As Wong himself scrawled in an undated diary entry, “Let me reiterate, this is not a simulation. . . . This is the real thing.”7 Take Wong’s paintings of San Francisco Chinatown, where he spent the first decades of his life. These works pose a particularly fraught interpretive challenge for their seeming willingness to traffic in ethnic stereotypes. Even art historian Lydia Yee, who grew up in Detroit Chinatown, describes Wong’s Chinatown paintings as “selforientalizing” attempts to deconstruct gender and ethnic identities.8 Here, Yee draws on the work of Edward Said to critique what Gayatri Spivak famously described as the “epistemic violence” of the colonial project, and, specifically, the construction of the “Other” and the “Orient” as inferior counterpoints to the “Self ” and the “West.”9 There is an irony in Yee’s application of these consequential theoretical insights onto something as singular as Wong’s paintings. Such a reading elevates the very structures Said seeks to critique—the constructed division between the Western Self and the subaltern Other—as the primary interpretive framework through which these works can be understood. There are histories hidden in plain sight within Wong’s paintings of Chinatown that the ascription of “self-orientalist”—and the critique of orientalism—cannot fully account for. In these works, Wong presents history as imagination not to discredit either category, but to realize the lived experiences that fall out of grand historical narratives. His approach accords with recent work in critical race studies that understand fictionality, evanescence, and opacity as strategies to counter the epistemic violence of historical positivism and archival silence.10 By examining Wong’s Chinatown paintings from the perspective of the secret, imagined, histories that they express, something new comes into view.11 That something new is, dare I say it, a richer and more complex truth, which accounts for the particular texture of life for a queer Chinese-American artist who lived on both coasts. The secret of My Secret World, and its lesson for art historians, is this: the small, overlooked details of a life can express a more profound historical truth than any distant account ever could. * * * In a 1996 interview, Wong claimed it took him twenty years to acquire the skills and source material to paint San Francisco Chinatown.12 Although he made two works based on scenes from Peking Opera after moving into the Meyers Hotel, he soon shifted his attention to the novel urban environment of New York City.13 Over the next decade, he painted his childhood neighborhood only intermittently before finally embarking on a series of Chinatown paintings in 1991. If we take Wong at his word, he had been trying to capture San Francisco Chinatown in paint from the age of eighteen. What did he discover in the intervening decades that finally allowed him to do so? Two paintings of the same subject, created eight years apart, provide a clue. Quong Sang Chong Company Sky Ship (1982, Figure 7.2) shows three buildings on Waverly Place, between Clay and Sacramento Street in San Francisco. Wong based this work on a collage of photographs he took of the Bing Gung Building, the Wong Family Benevolent Association, and the Ning Yung Benevolent

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Figure 7.2  Martin Wong, Quong Sang Chong Co. Sky Ship, 1982. Acrylic on canvas, 30 × 42 inches, Collection of John P. Axelrod. Courtesy of the Estate of Martin Wong and P. P. O. W. Association. Wong straightens the photocollage’s distorted perspective into a standard architectural view, whose rectilinear lines emphasize the buildings’ ornate facades and the three American flags protruding stiffly from their roofs. Only the looming blimp undercuts the painting’s pretension to straightforward representation. More stone than air, this impossible floating monument gestures at Wong’s secret connection to this particular scene, this particular place. When Wong returned to paint this same cluster of buildings in 1990, he was not so timid (Figure 7.3). Every color has been pushed to a higher key, from the goldenrod yellow and powdery pink of the buildings, to the royal blue sky. Green and gold characters adorn the side of the blimp, spelling out the name of a San Jose company that launched airships from nearby Moffett Field. Wong’s signature golden constellations stud the sky, echoing the cluster of stars cradled in the central building’s parapet. Such fantastical flourishes infuse the painting with an air of subjective memory, a feeling underscored by Wong’s decision to title the work Wong Family Benevolent Association, the charitable organization that shared his family name, and which he visited as a child. Together with the blimp, the painting pieces together a patchwork of Wong’s childhood memories of Chinatown.14 Wong’s willingness to revel in his subjective experiences of San Francisco Chinatown provides fresh insight into the neighborhood’s buildings. As historian Philip Choy has noted, the neighborhood’s distinctive architecture emerged in response to

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Figure 7.3  Wong Family Benevolent Association, 1990. Acrylic on canvas, 74 × 60 inches, Private Collection. Courtesy of the Estate of Martin Wong and P. P. O. W. the city’s rebuilding plans after the 1906 earthquake.15 In the five decades since its establishment in 1848, the growth of downtown San Francisco rendered Chinatown’s previously undesirable location exceedingly valuable, and there was talk of moving the neighborhood to far-off Hunters Point. Even before the earthquake, a group of wealthy Chinese merchants had proposed transforming the modest neighborhood into an “Oriental City,” which they described as “veritable fairy places filled with treasures of the Orient.”16 Citing the potential touristic appeal of this plan, the San Francisco Real Estate Board allowed Chinatown to remain in its original location, directing that it be rebuilt with “fronts of Oriental and artistic appearance.”17 Practically, this meant architectural flourishes culled from the visual grammar of Chinese pagodas and temples: curled eaves, tiled roofs, latticed balconies, and strings of lanterns. Such adornments formed an artificial skin over the otherwise typical concrete and steel commercial constructions. It was only by costuming itself in a style that might be described as pagoda pastiche—external signs of difference that signaled the economic power of a willingness to be consumed—that Chinatown could lay permanent claim to the site it had occupied for the past fifty years. Such artifice coated not only San Francisco Chinatown but also contemporaneous “Asiatic” landmarks such as Grauman’s Chinese Theater, which opened in 1927.

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Film theorist Homay King has described this building as embodying orientalism’s “enigmatic signifier,” its ostensibly exotic architectural flourishes embodying the unknowable object of difference.18 Within Wong Family Benevolent Association, such ornaments are rendered with familiarity and warmth rather than detachment. For Chinatown’s thousands of residents, Martin Wong included, the elaborate orientalizing skin that enveloped the neighborhood after its rebuilding was simply where they slept, shopped, socialized, and dreamed. What did it feel like to live in this world of paint and ethnic artifice, to make a life in someone else’s fantasy of your culture? Wong’s reworked painting asks this question, and in doing so offers a pointed rejoinder to the thousands of documentary photographs taken of Chinatown by nonresidents such as Isaiah West Taber.19 Another pair of paintings, created in the years between Quong Sang Chong Company Sky Ship and Wong Family Benevolent Association, show Wong exploring the distance between these ethnographic depictions of San Francisco Chinatown and his own experience of the neighborhood. Painted in 1984, Harry Chong Laundry (Figure 7.4) shows a Chinese coin laundromat at 30 Charles Street in New York City. Stacks of laundered clothes wrapped in brown paper rise behind the store’s impassive proprietor, captured in a moment of enigmatic reverie. The painting’s distinctive red and green color palette and the laundry’s location on a West Village corner unmistakably recall Edward Hopper’s iconic Nighthawks (1942), based in part on a location just two blocks away.20 In place of Hopper’s deliberate smoothing over of identifying detail, as if to prevent his work from being “trapped in the amber of historical details,” as Alexander Nemerov has observed, Wong offers a surfeit of texture and identifying information.21 The laundry’s address is emblazoned both on the shop window and on the curb beneath the door. The result is an excess of specificity, a rejoinder of “this particular place, this specific face” to Hopper’s platonic scene of urban alienation. Although one could read Wong’s reworking of Hopper’s composition as a commentary on the racialized labor of the laundry industry, the artist vehemently objected to such interpretations. As he wrote in an undated diary entry, “To the exceedingly dull and lifeless politically correct academe who attempted to decipher my paintings, I would clarify one point: namely this: I was never an outsider to anything. . . . Needless to say. I am not now nor would I ever be caught dead being an Asian American.”22 The facetious invitation he extends to “visit my family’s pagoda at 75 Waverly Street in San Francisco” clarifies Wong’s point. The emergent narratives of Asian American activism at this moment of multiculturalism awareness could not account for Wong’s lived experience of San Francisco Chinatown. Wong’s participation in exhibitions at the activist Asian American Arts Center should rebut any notion that the artist was indifferent to the struggles of ethnic minorities.23 Rather, the comment points to his skepticism that such abstract narratives, even if they accorded with his political convictions, could account for the precise texture of his particular experience. This idea is made explicit in another painting of a Chinese laundry, completed four years after Harry Chong Laundry. Portrait of the Artist’s Parents (1987, Figure 7.5) condenses the cherry-red facade of the prior work into a single set of doors, which

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Figure 7.4  Martin Wong, Harry Chong Laundry, 1984. Acrylic on canvas, 48 × 48 inches, Private Collection. Courtesy of the Estate of Martin Wong and P. P. O. W. frames the beaming faces of the artist’s parents. The bundles of laundry, now adorned with cheerful pink, yellow, and baby blue labels, set off the laundry’s luminous green interior, which seems to glow with its own internal light. As Wong noted in a 1991 lecture, an “Internal Security” agent once told him that Chinese laundry labels remained consistent across the country: “I used to be H47. If you move to another town, it’s like once you’re H47 you’re always H47 in the Chinese laundry. So they actually use that to track missing people.”24 While not entirely accurate, the statement captures a deeper truth about the Chinese laundries that dotted the United States: rather than shorthand stereotypes or the butt of a crude ethnic joke, these places formed alternative geographies of immigrant labor and community.25 The text beneath the laundry’s doorway, which reads “Portrait of the Artist’s Parents Who Met at Rita’s Laundrette on Union Street in San Francisco,” makes this point explicit. Here, Wong insists that the laundry was a real place, where real people met and fell in love. That the building depicted in the painting was not Rita’s Laundrette, but another Chinese laundry at 347 E. 5th Street in New York’s East Village, augments this point. Just as Wong imagined laundry labels tracking errant husbands across the country, so too does the laundry connect his lives in New York and San Francisco. The golden highlights brushed across the laundry’s window gild this place, signaling its sacredness.

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Figure 7.5  Martin Wong, Portrait of the Artist’s Parents, 1984. Private Collection. Courtesy of the Estate of Martin Wong and P. P. O. W. Wong took this lesson back to the familiar cluster of buildings on Waverly Place. His pointed addition of constellations, golden patterns that create meaning from ostensibly random clusters of stars, echoes the coded symbols of the Freemasons who resided within the yellow Bing Gung Building. A plaque on the building’s facade explicitly declares this association. Such symbols, hidden in plain view, compel us to ask what other secrets are contained within this painting. Wong’s decision to replace the trompe l’oeil wooden frame with a brick one provides one answer. For him, brick was never simply brick, but flesh. His paintings of “brick dicks,” and his rendering of Heaven as a delicate masonry circle punctuated by a single transcendent anus, make this abundantly clear. By rimming Wong Family Benevolent Association in brick as flesh, and covering the facade of the Ning Yung Benevolent Association in the same material, Wong places his body in the painting. The presence of his body in the frame, as frame, shows that these buildings were more than simply ornamental surfaces to be gazed upon by nonresidents, but were penetrated by the people who lived secret lives behind their opaque facades. Here then the historical—and personal—truth of this painting. * * *

 A Secret History of Martin Wong 121 By 1991, Wong was ready to revel in these secret histories. His Chinatown series (1991–2) is a remarkable formal achievement, characterized by playful approaches to perspectival depth and bursting with details accumulated in photographs, objects, and memories. Grant Avenue (1992, Figure 7.6) depicts a bustling street scene at the corner of California Street and Grant Avenue, crowned by a hovering blimp and carmine sky. Although Wong based the composition on his own photograph, he might well have used one of the thousands of images taken at this exact location by tourists. The corner offers a view of three Chinatown landmarks, Sing Fat, Sing Chung, and a chinoiserie street lamp, making it a popular visual synecdoche for the neighborhood. Each element in the scene carries its own distinctive history. The Sing Chung building was designed by the San Francisco architects Ross & Burgen, who added the distinctive pagoda-style roofs to match the neighborhood’s architectural style.26 The ornate streetlamp was one of forty placed in the neighborhood in 1925 as part of the city’s Diamond Jubilee Celebration.27 To mark this event, 327 street lamps were installed across San Francisco, linking Chinatown with the Civic Center and Market Street’s “Path of Gold.” The project was overseen by William D’Arcy Ryan, director of Illuminating Engineering for General Electric, and the architect of the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition’s famed electric floodlights and “Tower of Jewels,” a beaming structure adorned with 102,000 pieces of cut glass which the fair’s electric lights into a dazzling display of modernity.28 The Diamond Jubilee Committee directed that all the city’s streetlights be “highly ornamental,” which meant “classic urns and cauldrons” for the area around the Civic Center.29 Chinatown received bronze streetlights of “Oriental design” along Grant Avenue.30 As Wong’s painting shows, the lamps were adorned with two dragons curling around the base and a pointed lid whose curves mimic the pagoda-pastiche rooflines of the neighborhood. By the mid-1940s, Chinatown’s residents claimed these orientalizing landmarks as part of their visual identity, even using the lamp as the logo for the Chinese Digest, the neighborhood’s English-language newspaper.

Figure 7.6  Martin Wong, Grant Avenue, San Francisco, 1992. Acrylic on linen, 108 × 42 inches, Private Collection. Courtesy of the Estate of Martin Wong and P. P. O. W.

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If electric illumination was a central aspect of the city’s modernization, dating back to Frederick Law Olmstead’s 1893 “City Beautiful” campaign, such lights took on racialized connotations in Chinatown.31 Mid-nineteenth-century accounts characterized the neighborhood as crowded, dirty, and, above all, dark, emphasizing Chinatown’s foreignness and the perceived backwardness of its inhabitants.32 Wong’s vibrant street scene offers a rejoinder to these descriptions. In this picture, the lamp’s corona of light provides more than a spark of modernity to the scene. Its golden illumination diffuses into the atmosphere, lending the sky an orange tint, and consolidating into the outlines of the figures who congregated on Chinatown’s streets and inside its buildings. If San Francisco’s “Path of Gold” refers to the natural commodity that drove people to the city and launched thousands of immigrants from the Guangdong Province to California’s “Golden Mountain,” Wong’s painting creates an alternative golden route. His gleaming outlines weave Chinatown’s residents into a single tapestry, a continuous social fabric, united by ornament. This idea is made explicit in Chinese Telephone Exchange (1992, Figure 7.7). The painting revels in the building’s opulent interior, rendered in shining wood and lavish scrolls. Three women at the switchboard seem to melt into the scene, the golden embroidery of their garments flowing into the trim around the switchboard, the thick ornament adorning the room’s wooden panels, and the dials of the two rotary telephones that frame the composition. These phones impart the scene with spatial

Figure 7.7  Martin Wong, Chinese Telephone Exchange, 1992. Acrylic on linen, 46 × 60 inches, Private Collection. Courtesy of the Estate of Martin Wong and P. P. O. W.

 A Secret History of Martin Wong 123 perspective while also thematizing the picture’s sense of connection. Indeed, it was the telephone operators themselves who were the main draw for the many tourists who visited this building. As Choy recounts, by the 1930s, twenty-four operators handled upward of fourteen thousand calls per day, which came at a rapid pace in multiple Cantonese dialects.33 The room’s adornment makes this connection tangible, golden filaments that seem to glow with the voices they carry. Despite Wong’s claims that he painted the San Francisco Chinatown paintings from memory, he never witnessed this scene: the Chinese Telephone Exchange closed in 1948 when the artist was just a year old. The painting is not a memory but a work of historical imagination, recasting exoticizing ornament as a form of connection rather than alienation. Grant Avenue’s most profound secret remains hidden in plain sight. Rather than undifferentiated hordes in a dark neighborhood, the painting shows men and boys turning around to look at a beautiful woman dressed in an ornate blue and gold cheongsam. Her arresting beauty is emphasized by the glowing red traffic lights, and the men who disobey the official directive of “no stopping anytime” on the street sign attached to the lamppost. The sign’s weathered patina owes more to the exquisite texture of urban decay captured in Wong’s New York paintings than Chinatown’s smooth, polished surfaces. The sign’s rule does not apply here, for life goes on. And life does go on, in the tiny vignettes glimpsed through the window of the Sing Chung Bazaar. The upper scene shows people gathered around a white table, and just below two figures are locked in a tender embrace. Other works from the series, including Mei Lan Fang and Saturday Night (Figure 7.8), pare away Grant Avenue’s exterior views to focus, instead, on these hidden rooms. It is no coincidence that these intimate

Figure 7.8  Martin Wong, Saturday Night, 1992. Acrylic on linen, 30 × 45 ½ inches, Private Collection. Courtesy of the Estate of Martin Wong and P. P. O. W.

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scenes depict moments of queer intimacy, from the Peking Opera star famed for his performance of women’s roles, to two nude women embracing in a bathtub. These rooms are strikingly bare, as if the presence of the bodies was adornment enough. Such exquisite moments of lust, joy, love, and queerness remain invisible to the shadowed figures in Grant Avenue’s trolley car, who glide by to gaze upon the quarter’s “exotic” architecture, ignorant of the secrets concealed behind Chinatown’s surfaces. * * * There are additional histories to be gleaned from these paintings. The woman who walks down the street in Grant Avenue is Wong’s Aunt Nora, a glamorous beauty who was named Chinatown’s Miss Firecracker Queen in 1940.34 Nora appears as a sinuous odalisque in another intimate painting, Ms. Chinatown (1992) (Figure 7.9). The picture reverses My Secret World’s exterior perspective: now we are inside, looking out. A jolly Buddha, crawling with tiny figures signaling his fecundity, sits in front of the round window, bridging the space between interior and exterior. Tucked behind Nora’s right shoulder is Martin himself, who gazes out from behind the blunt bangs of his boyhood bowl cut. Wong based the Buddha in this painting on several figures in his vast collection of objects, which included porcelain figurines purchased from shops in San Francisco and New York Chinatown, Disney memorabilia, lunchboxes, Japanese prints, ceramic cow creamers, and graffiti, among other things.35 Upon moving back to his mother’s home after his 1994 AIDS diagnosis, Wong arranged this vast trove into distinctive constellations. These overflowing shelves would seem to evoke the flavor of 1960s Chinatown, which boasted dozens of antique shops selling nineteenth-century goods rather than the mass manufactured wares sold in the neighborhood today. Robert O’Brien’s 1948 account captures the neighborhood’s eclectic material splendor: “Store windows confront you with Buddhas and back scratchers, vases of the sheerest porcelain and tawdry nude statuettes, teakwood chests and brass candle snuffers, mandarin robes stiff with gold brocade, dime store tops, jade goddesses and table radios in model galleons, and ash

Figure 7.9  Martin Wong, Ms. Chinatown, 1992. Acrylic on canvas, 48 × 96 inches, Collection Cynthia Thi-My-Huyen Nguyen. Courtesy of the Estate of Martin Wong and P. P. O. W.

 A Secret History of Martin Wong 125 trays made in Japan, elephant bells and cinnabar boxes and plastic teacups.”36 It was among these objects that Wong began to hone his distinctive eye. Wong was a connoisseur in the traditional sense of the word, although he exercised his discerning eye in junk shops rather than painting galleries.37 He exercised impeccable discernment when acquiring objects, for example, assembling among the earliest and most distinguished collections of graffiti.38 And like many connoisseurs, Wong valued his subjective impressions as containing their own special insight. Another diary entry recalls a vexing dinner conversation after the Rembrandt Research Project cast doubt on the authenticity of the Frick’s Polish Rider. Wong’s patrician companions declared they had always had a “funny feeling” about the picture. Yet Wong doubted that they had ever really looked at the painting. “Who has ever seen such tragic resignment [sic] in the eye of a horse,” he wrote. “That look alone—in itself Rembrandt.”39 That Wong’s instinct proved correct is irrelevant to the deeper wisdom on display in this anecdote. For Wong, such impressions were their own form of art historical knowledge, which he followed assiduously in the acquisition and organization of his collection. Take the shelves displaying Wong’s collection of Chinese porcelain plates (Figure 7.10). Wong has sorted them loosely by style and object type, allowing formal commonalities to emerge among the display. Above a shelf holding miniature plates

Figure 7.10  Heinz Peter Knes and Dahn Vo, photograph of Martin Wong’s Collection at the Wong Fie Residence in San Francisco.

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and tea paraphernalia, Wong arranged several decorative Buddha statues, including two examples of the multifigure-type he painted in Ms. Chinatown. Below them are three smiling Buddhas of varying sizes with tiny figures at their feet, demonstrating the permutations of this particular motif. On the top shelf, nestled next to glasses filled with Wong’s paintbrushes, a single exquisite bodhisattva is framed in a cardboard dedication that reads “Happy Mother’s Day, to the little lady who always has her hands full” (Figure 7.11). This cheeky reference to the bodhisattva’s multiple arms encircles the figure in a halo of sentiment, embodying the affective and connoisseurial bonds that held together Wong’s constellations of objects. That Wong’s collection survives intact is thanks to the efforts of his mother, Florence Fie, as well as artists Julie Ault and Dahn Vo, who purchased Wong’s collection for his 2012 Guggenheim installation IMUUR2. That Vo’s purchase funded the later years of Florence Fie’s elder care infuses the installation with an additional layer of sentiment. In her essay “Fateful Attachments,” Rey Chow considers a 1944 story by the Chinese author Lao She, which describes the author’s attachment to his collection. As Chow writes, “the nostalgia for owning the past that is embedded in collecting is, arguably, inseparable from a utopian sense of anticipation, of looking forward to a future that is not entirely known or knowable.”40 Collecting is both retrospective and prospective. To acquire an object is to acknowledge both its past and its future, unknowable life. For his part, Wong likely had little expectation that his private collection would ever enter into public view. Yet, the formal acuity, historical specificity, and personal sentiment, of Wong’s collection suggests that such qualities need not be opposed. The forwardlooking nostalgia Chow locates in Lao She’s work is, in Wong’s collection, an invitation

Figure 7.11  Heinz Peter Knes and Dahn Vo, photograph of Martin Wong’s Collection at the Wong Fie Residence in San Francisco.

 A Secret History of Martin Wong 127 to create novel constellations of meaning that do not merely reflect existing historical discourse, but make history anew. * * * One final painting. Wong worked on Chinese New Year (1992–4, Figure 7.12) for two years following the Chinatown series. Wong hoped that this phantasmagoric composition would enact a drama “as eternal as it is ancient.”41 The picture shows San Francisco Chinatown’s famed parade through the eyes of Martin’s childhood self. He stands with his back to the viewer, engulfed in a psychedelic vision of fiery dragons and shadowy Cantonese opera stars. The painting evokes another memory, of an unidentified performance featuring cardboard and glitter sets, perhaps by San Francisco’s famed queer performance troupes the Cockettes or the Angels of Light. As Wong recalled of seeing this performance, Like whenever an alien (we called them Americans) would see the shows they’d just focus on all the seams in the cardboard. . . . But then the light would hit it. . . . The whole shimmer and blur and we’d just go “Oh God!” The unearthly flashes of color and the living glow of an eternal radiance which we truly believed could light the world. Such was the power of art.42

Figure 7.12  Martin Wong, Chinese New Year’s Parade, 1992–4. Acrylic on canvas, 84 × 120 ½ inches, Collection SFMOMA Purchase, by exchange, through a fractional gift of Shirley Ross Davis. Courtesy of the Estate of Martin Wong and P. P. O. W.

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And, one is tempted to add, of the secret histories carried by art’s illusions. A paradox lies at the heart of this chapter. By revealing the hidden histories of Wong’s paintings, am I not spoiling his secrets? I can only take comfort in my sense that Wong thought carefully about what he revealed, and what he chose to keep for himself. What is the expression on Wong’s face as he gazes out at the fantastic scene before him? Is he excited? Terrified? Both? No matter how long I stare at this work, the back of Wong’s head remains as opaque as the brick panel that bisects My Secret World. Martin holds fast to his secrets.

Acknowledgments I’d like to thank Mark Dean Johnson for his generous feedback on this chapter, Viv Liu for our many conversations about Martin Wong, and Yechen Zhao for his assistance with images. Portions of this research were presented at Princeton’s American Studies Workshop, and the Berkeley Art Museum, and I am indebted to the feedback I received at both.

Notes 1 Martin Wong, “It’s Easier to Paint a Store If It’s Closed,” transcript of lecture given on February 20, 1991, at the San Francisco Art Institute. Reprinted in My Trip to America by Martin Wong, 98. 2 Wong, “It’s Easier to Paint a Store If It’s Closed,” 100. 3 John Yau, “All the World’s a Stage: The Art of Martin Wong,” in Martin Wong: Human Instamatic, ed. Antonio Sergio Bessa (New York: Bronx Museum of the Arts, 2015), 37. 4 Reprinted in Caitlin Burkhart and Julian Myers-Szupinska (eds.), My Trip to America by Martin Wong (San Francisco: California College of the Arts, 2015), 26. 5 Wong, “It’s Easier to Paint a Store If It’s Closed,” 92. 6 As Owens writes, “Not only does postmodernist work claim no such authority, it actively seeks to undermine all such claims; hence, its generally deconstructive thrust.” Here, Owens describes postmodernism’s demystification of the signifier as antiauthoritarian. This alignment of critique and political agency remains one of the enduring legacies of this lineage of art historical criticism. Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (New York: The New Press, 1998), 67. 7 Martin Wong, undated note, Series IV, Box 7, Folder 54, Martin Wong Papers, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University. 8 Yee’s emphasis on Wong’s destabilizing of essential identity categories also serves as a useful shorthand for the way political agency has been assigned to minoritarian artists within much art historical discourse. Lydia Yee, “Martin Wong’s Picture Perfect Chinatown,” in Sweet Oblivion: The Urban Landscape of Martin Wong, ed. Amy Scholder (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998), 53–5.

 A Secret History of Martin Wong 129 9 Of course, postcolonial theory, and particularly the work of these early thinkers, have had an important effect in art historical discourse. 10 Key texts include Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997); Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (June 2008); and Ashon T. Crawley, Blackpentacostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). 11 Rey Chow, “Sacrifice, Mimesis, and the Theorizing of Victimhood,” in Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 81–106; Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “The University and the Undercommons,” in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 22–43. 12 Yasmin Ramirz, “Chino-Latino: The Loisaida Interview,” in Martin Wong: Human Instamatic, 119. 13 For more on these works, as well as Wong’s early years in New York, see Doryun Chong and Cosmic Costinas (eds.), Taiping Tianguo: A History of Possible Encounters (Berlin: Para Site, Sternberg Press, 2015). 14 I am grateful to Mark Dean Johnson and Gary Ware for answering my questions about possible sources for Wong’s blimps. 15 Philip P. Choy, San Francisco Chinatown: A Guide to Its History and Architecture (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2012), 43–6. 16 Quoted in Ibid., 43. 17 Quoted in Ibid., 44. 18 Homay King, Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 19 For more on photography by non-Chinatown residents, see Anthony Lee, Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 20 Carter E. Foster (ed.), Hopper Drawing (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2013). 21 Alexander Nemerov, “Ground Swell: Edward Hopper in 1939,” American Art 22, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 50. 22 Martin Wong, undated notebook, Series II, Box 1, Folder 9, Martin Wong Papers, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University. 23 I am grateful to Viv Liu for drawing my attention to this exhibition. 24 Wong, “It’s Easier to Paint a Store If It’s Closed,” 98. 25 For more on this subject, see John Jung, Chinese Laundries: Tickets to Survival on Gold Mountain (Yin & Yang Press, 2007). 26 Choy, San Francisco Chinatown, 113–15. 27 California’s Diamond Jubilee: Celebrated at San Francisco September 5-12, 1925 (San Francisco: E. C. Brown, 1927). 28 Laura A. Ackley, “Gem of the Golden Age of World’s Fairs,” in Jewel City: Art from San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition, ed. James A. Ganz (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2015), 43–9. 29 California’s Diamond Jubilee, 47–51. 30 See also Choy, San Francisco Chinatown, 124. 31 For more on the City Beautiful Movement in turn-of-the-century San Francisco, see Alexander Nemerov, “The Dark Cat: Arthur Putnam and a Fragment of Night,” American Art 16, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 36–59.

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32 See, for example, B. E. Lloyd, Lights and Shades in San Francisco (San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft, 1876). 33 Choy, San Francisco Chinatown, 142. 34 Yee, “Martin Wong’s Picture Perfect Chinatown,” 60–1. 35 For a meticulous documentation of Wong’s collection, see Julie Ault, Heinz Peter Knes, Dahn Vo, Christopher Müller, and Daniel Buchholz (eds.), IMUUR2 (Berlin and Köln: Galerie Buchholz, 2013). 36 Robert O’Brien, This Is San Francisco (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1948), 82. 37 I’m grateful to Antonia Pocock for our discussions on appropriation and connoisseurship in postwar art. 38 Wong had hoped to create a museum dedicated to graffiti in New York. When these plans fell through, he donated the collection to the Museum of the City of New York. Susan Henshaw Jones (ed.), City as Canvas: New York City Graffiti from the Martin Wong Collection (New York: Museum of the City of New York, 2013). 39 Martin Wong, undated note, Series IV, Box 7, Folder 54, Martin Wong Papers, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University. 40 Rey Chow, “Fateful Attachments: On Collecting, Fidelity, and Lao She,” in Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking About Capture, 61. 41 Martin Wong, “Project Proposal,” Series IV, Box 7, Folder 58A, Martin Wong Papers, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University. 42 Martin Wong, untitled note, Series IV, Box 7, Folder 35, Martin Wong Papers, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University.

8

Vernacular Modernism All Over the Deep South Our Literal Speed 

Absorption and Theatricality Spotting the pickup, Harrison and I take off, angling for the payload—buck? razorback? bobcat?—but a good look informs us that all that’s in there are buckets. “What happened boys?” Aunt Vivian says, tossing open the screen door for Daddy and Uncle Billy, “Bunny hunt turn into a bucket hunt?” Shaking her off, Uncle Billy says, “The hunt was on, honey, full stop. Only, up along that river nothing was moving, except every single thing in the water. Scooped the blue gill out. No line required.” Aunt Vivian’s not pleased. Touching fish is too much for her, much less tasting it, and she’s been feeling poorly all day anyway, so she leaves the cooking to Sally and lumbers upstairs. Reflecting on those buckets, Harrison and I remember what Sally’d said: “Fish and ice cream’ll kill you.” Not a brag or threat, just one of those things she’d declare of an afternoon, no wherefores or therefores attached. Soon enough we get back to Tad and Eucie Watson’s back porch. They’re cavorting with Fireball, their turtle, feeding him milk-sopped bread and apple bits, imitating his slack-jawed chewing and turning him upside down every now and then just to watch those webby little feet pump to no discernible effect. Harrison says, “See that neck? That’s the way dinosaurs chewed. Slooooow. They made good and certain they sucked every bit of nutrient out of their food.” I get in, “What if we cooked up them apple bits?” “Ain’t got no matches for that, boy,” Tad says. “Get two sticks,” Harrison says, “Rub em together.” Tad goes, “Don’t work in real life.” “See if we can do up one of them,” Eucie’s pointing at three squirrels scampering over the gutters, “Put one of them in a hole with that cooter. That’d toughen that sucker up.” “For that,” Harrison says, counting on his thumb and fingers, “You need a box and a stick and a rope and some bait.” Tad says, “Gah, boy, we ain’t got none of that neither.”

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Figure 8.1  OLS First performance in Greenville, South Carolina, September 26, 2015. Grabbing up Fireball, Tad leads the way. Eucie carries a lidded mason jar with a red bandana inside. We hop two fences, cross the cow pastures until we’re down alongside the tracks. The Dixie Flyer comes by at 5:15 and you can already make out its high-pitched whine, a species of inhuman whistling. We cross over and come up into the Guthries’ backyard. A tall, fourteen-year-old, face full of acne, Luke Guthrie is barefoot, beating out old window panes with a rusty steel rod, smashing out chips of residual glass with loud, hollow whacks. Luke Guthrie stops, “Got something?” Tad lifts Fireball up. Luke shakes his head, “That? That ain’t for shit.” Eucie’s ear’s down low on the track. He yells, “Hitting the ten mile.” Luke Guthrie bends into a pen next to a broken down lean-to, lifts a black turtle out, cradles it, shoves the shell down against his hip, hauls the snapper out over the rail fence, and deposits it on the edge of the slag pile subtending the rail ties. He’s named Goliath though he’s hardly bigger than Fireball. His head and legs are retracted inside his shell until he hits the ground, then five little protuberances start moving. An aroma of tar and creosote circulates around the tracks and in the breeze this mixture is rendered pungent. “Go to it,” Luke Guthrie says. Setting Fireball down next to Goliath, Tad says, “Bait em, Euce.”

 Vernacular Modernism All Over the Deep South 133 Eucie peers up track, spins open the mason jar and a noxious, gagging smell lubricates our evening. Eucie waves the smelly bandana side to side, swooning the turtles. They nose their heads up, churning through the slag till they bump into the first infinity of track. Goliath gets out front, flopping his body onto the metal. Endeavoring to hoist himself, Fireball displays deficient technique. Eucie dangles the rag right over his face, but the reptile keeps churning, not rising. A long drag on the horn up track means the D. F.’s about four miles out. Eucie and I are hollering, pulling for Fireball, but Luke Guthrie doesn’t care, and from the looks of it, neither does Goliath. The snapper’s strolling through the no man’s land between the tracks, his legs putting on a miniature exhibition of something like bestial grandeur. After sundry mistrials and embarrassing flailing, Fireball finally gets himself over the track’s cantilever, deploys his back webs, and thrusts himself down into the valley between the rail columns. There’re two quick toots on the horn—which means clear the right of way—Tad jumps the tracks over to our side. On the other, Luke Guthrie’s wearing a half smile, arms crossed. What happens next means the whole world. Some beeline for the second row, some hunker down in the neutral hollow, letting danger go by. Today, Fireball gets a righteous second wind, barrels by Goliath on inertia, slaps a front leg on the lower register of far track, verging on catapulting himself up. Eucie and I are screaming him on, but Tad and Harrison go quiet. If Fireball senses the violence teeming in that heap of vibrating steel and recoils, he’ll be just fine; if his internal wiring kicks in, he’ll duck the hulk and crawl out a minute later no worse for wear, but if that escalating, clanging, viral buzz gets inside his cortex, jacking him up beyond all belief, if it gets him going two bits for shit. . . . Fireball cocks his oblong, oval head, but the rest is lost in the Sturm und Drang of the D. F.’s tremor-laden pass-by. * * * Back at the Wades, Sally’s dumped the blue gill in the sink, peeled the skins away with a long, bending blade and buttermilk battered a lopsided stack that resembles a pile of corrugated cardboard. When we get back up there, they got plates out for everybody, even for Eucie and Tad. From the head of the table, Uncle Billy intones, “They need not depart; give ye them to eat.” Aunt Vivian’s nowhere to be seen. Sally tells Harrison to let his momma rest, says, “It’s gonna be a man’s table tonight.” Everybody gets two headless blue gill, butter beans, hush puppies, and a glass of ice tea. Daddy tells us to watch about getting bones caught in our throats, says he knew a fella named Bobby Jenkins who had to have three separate surgeries just to extract a wedge out of his craw. Harrison explains what’d transpired down by the Guthries to Daddy and Uncle Billy. Away from adults, the rest of us felt superior to Harrison, but around them, things changed. That noisome trait of his, his penchant for irrelevant, know-it-all mouthiness, impressed Daddy and Uncle Billy. Later, I figure they must’ve been wise to a raconteur’s burgeoning talents and who am I to disagree. Maybe that was happening, and true to form, this night Harrison’s holding forth about the day’s events, explaining how they confirm his own pet theory about cooter tracking.

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Harrison says what you got to get straight about a cooter track is—despite appearances—“It ain’t a race.” He says, “It’s about the whole idea of cooter tracking in the first place. If you don’t have some kind of idea about it, some rules, some expectations, how you gonna even know if the turtle’s doing it right?” Harrison says that if the turtle ignores the goading, if the cooter seems totally absorbed in what he’s doing, watching that coot gives you an amazing feeling. The turtleness of the turtle—the slowness and hiding that makes a turtle a turtle—gets down there inside your bloodstream. Like a ray of God’s grace, it invades the soul. But if the turtle gets excited by that odiferous bandana, paying mind to all that spectatorial hooraw and hoobash, if the coot starts showing off its racing acumen—that is, performing for the crowd—then he’s paving the way to herpetological theatricality. Or, the way Harrison puts it, “A cooter track degenerates when it approaches theater,” and once that kind of degeneracy kicks in, there’s a damned good chance that little snap’ll end up getting himself exploded into a thousand shreds of flesh by five thousand tons of rolling stock. Sally swings through the kitchen door delivering a silver tray freighted with baby blue soup bowls. If we ever get dessert, it’s some variation on Fizz Cracker, a mix of cane sugar, carbonated water, and crushed graham cracker that dates back to the war years. Everybody’s laughing too cause Sally’s bunched her hair up during the cooking, flaunting corkscrew sprigs going all directions, looking like a Martian. We’re about to dig in and Harrison won’t let up. Now he’s talking up how “During a cooter track, Goliath’s just like a painting, cause he—” when from inside Harrison a scream erupts: “Stop! Stop! Everybody! Stop!” Harrison even snatches at my spoon arm, sending a glob of white fishtailing through the air. Every eye goes to Harrison. That’s when I realize Sally must’ve churned out some handmade. Sally sticks her head in, goes, “Oh Hare! Child, none of that’s real. I was just booger jiving you.” On principle, Harrison doesn’t consume any ice cream, or say another word, while the rest of us lick our bowls clean. Twilight hanging heavy, Tad and Eucie head home, me giving good chase after. Harrison doesn’t tag along. He tears off upstairs, not gifting us so much as a goodbye. Tad and Eucie call him a crybaby and a momma’s boy for acting like that, but I wouldn’t go that far. During the war Harrison had to spend a lot of time comforting his momma and that made him sensitive to a fault. She was what you’d call overly possessive while Uncle Billy served. They call it getting a case of the war nerves and Aunt Vivian got it bad. Harrison raps knuckles on the bedroom door, checking to see if his momma’s awake, but gets no reply. She likes to read Jules Verne stories in bed until she gets drowsy, even if the stories are for kids. Sometimes she’ll read the books to Harrison and me and most of the time she can hold the pictures up and tell us the story word for word without reading from anything. Harrison wanders down the hall, peeks into the bathroom and laundry, returns to the door, creaks it open. He can hear us outside whooping it up again. Maybe his momma’s had another spell of feeling hot all over, he thinks. Her attacks happen not infrequently these days. She’d patiently narrate the passage of otherworldly sensations all over her body, while Harrison’d pose diagnostic queries. It feel like when you spin around ten times? It feel like when you ride on a bus backward? It feel like standing on your head?

 Vernacular Modernism All Over the Deep South 135 He tiptoes to the bed. Balancing upright with his left hand wrapped around one of the four posts, he lifts the covers, pulling the sheet up under her nose, the way he’d learned so that it’d wake her up without her recognizing the source. He hops back. She doesn’t stir this time, which happens sometimes with her naps. She sleeps better through the afternoons than she ever does late at night. Turning to go, he studies her eyes: no flickers in the eyelids, no skin bunching up in the middle of her forehead, nothing. He eases the door shut, descends the stairs, rejoins our hijinks.

Farewell to an Idea A wholesaler, Uncle Billy stuck to a less competitive circuit of general stores, the ones a step down from Woolworth’s and two big strides below the department stores in Tuscaloosa or Montgomery. Billy pitched it all: fancy letter openers, glow-in-thedark thermometers, speed reading manuals. Pulling in shop keeps required immense imaginative skill. He had to set their minds on fire. Billy wasn’t showing up to distribute another gross of toilet paper or value canisters of rock salt. Getting a quick beat on desire was a mainstay of Billy’s docket. If he took the mark right, if he hit him square and went all in, he’d roll the mark so deep in the set up around the nut that Billy could even change the nut and the mark’d still go for it. If you get the mark bumped up about reading fifteen pages a minute, if that nurtures a buyerly cast of mind—spring your ancillaries: souped-up reading glasses, bendable plastic book props, the works. Billy’d cast his line as far as he could into the pond of the mark’s self-regard and see what’d dredge back. One thing was for one hundred percent: Billy never bothered detailing how his products would assure a store a profit, because to Uncle Billy supply and demand were entries in a textbook he had no intention of cracking open. Black or white, young or old, man or woman, Jew or Gentile, Uncle Billy’d tell you, you never know who’ll bite, but some always will. Guiding spotting rounds, calling in fire for effects, forward observer “Billy Sunday” Wade made his way with the artillery across Algeria, Tunisia, Sicily, and up the Boot until Easter Sunday of ’44 when his femur got busted to hell and back by a shell at Monte Cassino. When Billy rotated back to Alabama, back to Harrison and Aunt Vivian, he was surly, incontinent and hobbling like an angry bastard behind a walker. Harrison’s first big memory of his momma and daddy together was seeing devastation leaping out of his momma’s face when she first laid eyes on Billy, but to Harrison, for somebody who’d been wrangling with atom bombs and gas chambers, Billy looked pretty good. From then on, though, Harrison got an earful. His momma said more than once, “He’s not the same man,” and she was right. After the war, Billy’d done lost The Knock. When you got The Knock, you can sell anything to anybody, and when you don’t got it, you’re a miserable S. O. B. Two autumns after Billy gets back, Harrison’s momma starts taking to her bed. Modern medicine would’ve declared her fatigue a symptom of Stage IV ovarian cancer, but back then she was just “feeling poorly.” Losing his wife one child into their family, the mini-depression that emptied everybody’s bank accounts in 1948, and the solitary

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contemplation of his leg propelled Billy out of Alabama and on to cross-country railroad gigs. Better short ordering on The California Zephyr than sharecropping in Hale County, Alabama. Billy said, “The railroad’s the last place on this Earth where a working man can live with class,” and that meant a whole lot to Uncle Billy. Starched shirts played a dominant role in his conception of self. From then on, Harrison lives with his Aunt Charlotte, his dead momma’s older sister, and his Uncle Cecil, my Grandmomma and Pawpaw. Even though my grandparents had already raised two grown children—my daddy and my Aunt Kitty—they accepted Harrison eagerly, like a Christmas gift after New Year’s. Twenty-two years older than Harrison, my daddy still treats the boy as his equal, inquires about Harrison’s opinion on serious matters, even if Harrison’s only my age. Summers, Harrison comes with us (with me, daddy, my momma and my younger sisters, Josephine and Esther) to the river, to the Indian village at Moundville, to my momma’s family’s farm. Harrison is as much family as anybody during those years. And Harrison takes to his new role as second-cousin/older brother/best friend. Maybe because of that, he doesn’t get known for that moody, melancholic selfishness that infects only children and orphans. The times, too, are propitious to salve Harrison’s misfortune. The novelty of rapid rural travel makes any reason whatsoever good enough to knock off a fifty-mile jaunt over mud, gravel, and single lane asphalt to visit relatives, even to commune with kin of widely acknowledged low estate. Families across the South never spend as much time together as they do in the early fifties, and that’s even before they get to pitching the first stakes for the Interstate. Around my tenth, Harrison and I go out bike riding through the neck-high sawgrass along Spring Creek, when a bunch of girls and boys hurl themselves out of the underbrush. About the same age as us, Harrison figures they must know me, since they’re hooting and hollering, laughing, yelling at me to stop. I hit the brakes, and one of the bigger boys comes over and grabs my bike and he won’t let go. Smiling, the boy says, “Let’s race for the bike.” “That boy can’t beat you!” cries a younger girl. The boy cuts her off, he says, “Kiss my bits.” I hazard no claim that I can beat the boy in any race. The boy repeats, “Let’s race for it.” He’s there rigid, the middle of the handlebars under his thumbs, the front wheel between his legs, while I straddle the frame in front of the seat, arms at my sides. We’re separated by about two feet. The boy says, “Let’s see who can win it. Think you can win it?” He’s smiling the whole time. I say nothing. I look over at Harrison, who frowns. I can tell that Harrison can’t tell if it’s a game or not, and neither can I. We can’t tell whether the boy’s just a little bit weird, or impaired in some way. It’s all funny, or fun, or funning, but maybe it’s not, and to tell the truth, the other kids probably don’t know either. About that time a man’s voice yells for them to get up to the house and the squadron sulks off. The boy glares up the hill. His smile’s gone. He’s the last to leave. He lets the bike collapse into my body without another word. Harrison and I push off. Over before it begins, really, but decades later Harrison and I can retrace the contours of that random meeting. Like some young wild animal that didn’t know yet to be skittish, the boy didn’t recognize the danger of intruding into the lives of whites, even young ones, and this definitely made him memorable to us. The boy acted in a

 Vernacular Modernism All Over the Deep South 137 way hard to describe: not friendly, but still amicable in his own way. To this day I’m not sure what he aimed to do: was he probing some unconventional path toward playing with us? The boy must have wondered what it would take to get on our bikes. Family too poor to own one, he knew he couldn’t just walk up to us and ask to ride, and even though he could’ve taken the bike, he didn’t want to steal. He was thinking fast, trying to come up with some strategy to share what he could not have. His crime was being too human in an inhuman place. My momma looked after me, my sisters, and, a lot of the time, Harrison too, since Grandmomma was getting up in years. A darling woman who viewed others’ achievements as her own so implicitly, so intently, Momma made you wonder if she considered anything a personal possession; for Momma, the personal was a void, a hole filled by family comings and goings, a place from which clothes meandered, as if transported by some rural magic, from hamper to washing machine to dresser drawer to bedspread, eager to be borne on to the next church service or school day. Momma desired an absence of friction in all things, and to live through mid-century Alabama without friction meant not really living in mid-century Alabama at all. Honestly, I can’t remember Momma saying anything I’d call substantive, public or private, during those years. She watched it all—the boycotts, the marches, the German shepherds, the firehoses, the federal marshals—like she was tracking the zigzag of a tornado spotted somewhere on the far side of the fields, dread and fascination guiding the lilt of her gaze. I deduce that her unspoken approach to school integration went something like this: “Tom, honey, you know what’s gonna happen? All the schools the Negroes have are gonna close, and when they do, all the memories, the traditions, all the things they built up for themselves over all those years are gonna be gone for good. I don’t think that’s fair. It’s not fair to close their schools. It treats them like everything they’ve ever done has no value, but it has value, Tom. Everything has value.” My sisters identified this as a great failing on momma’s part: no empathy, personal disgrace in a time of ultimate moral decision, but I think I understood. Holding on to your self, not getting mixed up in something even worse than having insufficient moral courage, is not a foregone conclusion in morally challenging times. Under the best of circumstances holding on to that self isn’t a given—and those years? They sucked the worst out of you and put it on public display every day, spinning off hate and self-pity like rice at a preacher’s wedding. We can debate what was being destroyed and who was destroying it back then, but only a fool would argue that destruction wasn’t taking place.

The Legacy of Jackson Pollock Harrison tells me about the mandatory drawing, painting, and sculpture courses. Choosing is tough on Harrison. Choosing something to make, something to depict. It floors him, never can get a handle on choosing. Everything feels artificial, arbitrary, the sum total of nothing ventured, nothing gained. Reading the assignments, he falls off a cliff.

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“Use charcoal and newspaper. Render an inanimate object.” Why render an ironing board instead of a coffee cup? A log cabin instead of a B-52? He needs a reason, a good reason, but he can’t ever find one. By mentality and skill, he’s not a maker. He’s a born observer. So Harrison starts delving into the Greeks, but I don’t think he gets much out of it. Same story for medievals. Makes it through Alberti’s On Painting. Reads every page of Gombrich’s Story of Art and wants to talk with me about it. Takes a stab at Panofsky’s Meaning in the Visual Arts, but gives up. Page turns through most of John Ruskin’s Stones of Venice, and then for his visual appreciation class he tears through Joshua Taylor’s Learning to Look, John Dewey’s Art and Experience, Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and Tolstoy’s What Is Art? on one long November Saturday. He even gets a copy of Robert Motherwell’s The Dada Painters and Poets, but I’m not sure he ever gets to that one. Next thing I know, Harrison’s plowing himself into reading art criticism: Art in America, ARTnews, The Burlington Magazine, whatever books on modern art he finds on the shelves, but most of the art writing leaves him unmoved, until he runs into this one article that reads like science fiction; it predicts the future of art; it predicts that in the sixties, artists will “discover out of ordinary things the meaning of ordinariness. They will not try to make them extraordinary but only state their real meaning. But out of nothing they will devise the extraordinary and then maybe nothingness as well.” Up until he comes across that article, Harrison had seen art criticism as cultivating the eye, catching out special details, pretty much like collecting baseball cards. But after reading that, the whole idea that anybody makes art at all seemed funny. I mean when you come into this world there’re ways of expressing yourself. You get no choice in that. Nobody asks you what kind of breath you’d like inside your lungs. You just are, and when you start to think about that, that’s when art stops being something you make. You’re made and art’s just a way of trying to make sense of that, to feel that, to put that fact on the table for some kind of deliberate contemplation. I’ll be honest, all this sounds like doubletalk when I first hear it, but Harrison keeps going down the same road. When you get down to it, he says, art might be a test, maybe the ultimate test of trust between human beings, and the more improbable the site of their proposed agreement—that is, their agreement over the fact that something is art—the more advanced the civilization. Maybe words make art, not hands, that’s what Harrison is saying, and at the time I can’t think up any words to dispute the claim. * * * Two weeks after reading that science fiction-y article, the day after Thanksgiving, Daddy rousts up Pawpaw, Bobby Jenkins, and E. R. Hatcher, who chefs the Dixie Diner in town, plus me and Harrison. Everybody gets moving before dawn to meet up at Pawpaw’s. Even so, by the time anyone hits the kitchen, Grandmomma and Sally have already fried up a monstrosity of bacon in a vat of off-white lard and baked up two trays of biscuits. The morning turns out cold. Our two Chevy pickups meet up with Josh Crawford’s aqua blue Rambler, then we all head south a dozen miles till we turn onto a dirt road, a

 Vernacular Modernism All Over the Deep South 139 few bends later, we hike the trucks up on the bank above a dried out creek bed, and fan out to the deer stands. Harrison says for he and I to hang back with Josh. A deep trapper, a fella who spends a whole lot more time with coons and possums than he ever does with humans, Josh, all in all, prefers the company of the coons and possums, and he doesn’t do a whole helluva lot to hide that fact. A complicated scar sculpts out a chunk of Josh’s cheek. Harrison never achieves the gumption to find out how he got it, though we wonder if it’s a war wound or an on-the-job accident or the residue of something more local or sinister. Josh’s job is to dress any deer that we might end up with. Most of the time we get nothing, so Josh just camps out on the hood of the Rambler, waiting, whittling, whistling, tuning in the radio, doing whatever a man temporarily deprived of his liberty does in a modern pine forest. Harrison wants to stick with Josh as some kind of Zen exercise in appreciating the ordinariness of the ordinary. I see what he’s getting at. We’ll sit with Josh and we’ll wait. Harrison’d been fooling around with an experimental theater class and I see he’s going for some kind of Waiting for Godot effect. We’re gonna sit with Josh and out of nothing we’ll devise the extraordinary while we wait for the deer that’s bound never to arrive. For the moment, at least, I’m curious enough about Harrison’s ideas, so I play along. Josh likes to bow hunt. “Tastes better,” Josh says, but before we can lose ourselves in Josh’s ordinariness, we hear something from the far deer stand. Pop-pop-pop. Bobby Jenkins is hollering. A few minutes later, E. R. comes out of the trees, “Ain’t gonna believe this: Bobby done brought down a ten point. Josh, you wanna help us get that done up in here?” Josh pops open the Rambler’s trunk, extracts two serrated hunting knives, three metal buckets, and a red and white checkered tablecloth that he unfurls on the hood. It’s ten minutes through the pine trees out to Bobby’s stand. E. R. calls to Bobby Jenkins, “What you got there?” Nothing back from Bobby Jenkins. E. R. and Josh hit a knee to examine the deer. It’s a medium-sized male with one crushed antler and a white tail. Bobby Jenkins isn’t what you’d call triumphant. It happens like that sometimes, sadness grabs you, and that’s what Bobby Jenkins seems to be wrestling with, a bout of postcoital depression of the killing kind. E. R. says, “Hey there, Bobbsey Twins, give us a hand.” Harrison and I go over, Josh cradles the deer’s head, swings it high in the air, throws it over his shoulder, then indicates with a nod, that we need to lift the hind quarters. We trip and slip, trying to keep up with Josh’s doubletime gait. At the Rambler, Josh lifts the deer’s body off the hood, probes the chest wound like he’s a veterinarian, then starts making a hacking incision. Black fluid oozes. Bobby Jenkins comes up. “Josh, you do that un up real nice, ok?” Josh nods. Bobby Jenkins and E. R. trot off toward Pawpaw and Daddy on the far side of the field. The deer’s eyes resemble Marilyn Monroe’s at Madame Tussaud’s, spacy, unreal. It’s impossible to believe this creature jumped through bushes a few minutes ago. The body’s design seems too contrived to have ever achieved anything in this physical world. Large, dead animals possess a raw dignity, an extinguished vitality, you might say, that I’ve never perceived in a corpse. There’s just something primitive that kicks in when you get close, an unconscious evolutionary awe, I suppose.

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Josh says, “Get up on the legs and we’ll get er up on the tree.” The deer slides back off the Rambler into our arms. This time the carcass feels a lot heavier cause of onset rigor mortis. The three of us haul it up with effort so that it half-squats on its hind legs below a muscular oak branch. Josh ties off a rope around the animal’s neck, then tosses the rope over the branch. His index finger checks the deer’s throat for tightness, then he gathers himself up tall and strong and pulls with all he’s got. He doesn’t ask for any help. He draws down heavy for a few seconds, grunting, and with the rigid creature rising in the air, Josh hunkers backward, like he’s flying a kite drunk, stumbling, until he can tie the rope off to the Rambler’s front fender. The deer spins under the branch like an obscene Christmas ornament. Josh approaches the deer the way you’d come up on a lover. Nothing brusque. He steadies the dangling form, gently taps the tip of the long blade through the base of the stomach just above the groin, then slides the blade up and under the tender membrane, parting the skin steadily upward toward the sky. He reaches over for a bucket, pulls back the deerskin with his left hand like it’s a veil, while his ungloved right disappears into the murk of exposed intestines. He slides the knife further inside and his right hand returns with a fist-sized fleshy sack of yellow liquid. He tosses it over his shoulder. It bounces and splashes on the pine needles. He goes on to extract a handful of congealed goo, deposits it in the receptacle. The whole while he murmurs; it’s not clear to whom, or why, but he’s murmuring away. He slides a different bucket over, cleaves the bigger knife straight through the deer’s chest cavity; out comes a giant wad of organs that get slopped into the pail: heart, lungs, kidneys, liver. All of this happens so fast that in five more minutes, Josh’s already hacked off all four hooves and he’s peeling back the skin like it’s mildewed wallpaper. Another five. He’s done. After sponging down the pink, headless, hoofless side of meat, Josh hauls the carcass and the severed head around back to the trunk, instructing us to comb through the buckets to look real good for any bone chips or splinters. After a few minutes of diligent sifting, I go to tell Josh that the buckets look good and clean. When I come around the corner of the Rambler, there’s a slight commotion. Josh meets my gaze and points to the ground, but he’s standing with his mid-section pushed up against the deer’s severed head, like he’s trying to manhandle the deer’s body back into the vehicle. I drop the buckets fast, hup my way back to Harrison, and until now I’ve never told anybody what I saw: in that split second coming around the Rambler, Josh pulled his penis out of the deer’s hollowed out eye socket. A few minutes later he closes up the trunk, gives a goodbye in our general direction, and the Rambler hauls off through the trees, delivering its goods to the Dixie Diner’s commercial freezer. * * * A few days after that, the art critic Harold Rosenberg shows up at the college in a foul mood. When The South Wind chugs into Cairo, Illinois, Rosenberg witnesses the black travelers being ejected from his car so the carriage can be made nearly empty and lily white, ready for the South. The conductor even does a long, slow double-take

 Vernacular Modernism All Over the Deep South 141 on Rosenberg’s olive skin and bushy eyebrows. A tall man named Clayton Hobson, a foreman habituated to double shifts at Chicago’s Continental Can factory, has to quit his conversation with Rosenberg to participate in this mandatory divvying up of the colors. Rosenberg sits there speechless, amazed by the ordinariness of it all. This happens everyday in the United States of America? Conductor gone, Rosenberg seizes a spot next to Hobson in the black car. Hobson’s family’s still back in Birmingham, but he has plans to move the whole shebang North. Rosenberg says he’ll be passing through town too. He tells Hobson to come to his lecture at the college. Hobson cocks his head, and after a long interval, Hobson says, “Well, if The Lord is willing and the creek don’t rise, yeah, I’ll come.” “Bring your family,” Rosenberg says. A year before, Rosenberg had met Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Institute of Chicago, and it was Benton who convinced Rosenberg to go down South. And Rosenberg sincerely wanted to see the art of the South, but, so far, he’s depressed by everything he sees. Earlier in the day he’d been led around by two well-meaning local painters to inspect a WPA mural in a county court house, a postbellum equestrian statue in a town square, and a ghastly little municipal art museum that smelled of cigarettes and pork rinds (about which he’s told with magnanimous pride, “Colored visitors are welcome on Saturday mornings”). By that afternoon, holed up in the college’s guesthouse, he’s got so fed up, he marches a telegram over to Western Union. It reads as follows: 12.04.58 THOMAS HART BENTON 20 WHITTAKER STREET KANSAS CITY MO SOUTH PROVINCIAL IN WORST SENSE STOP WITHOUT EVEN REDEEMING QUALITY OF VIBRANT LOCAL COLOR ROSENBERG Striding into the college auditorium that night, holding his head high and upright with the support of an ebony cane, Rosenberg looks hell bent to strangle someone. Matching violet bags accent dispirited eyes as he strains to see over the heads of the audience. Finally, his vision seizes on what it’d been seeking: two faces attached to rigid bodies plastered against the room’s back wall, a father and his teenaged daughter dressed in their church clothes. Rosenberg exits the podium, circles with great physical determination around the audience, greets the pair and ushers them to the front row, seating them next to the president of the college. From Bar Harbor to Sacramento, to every lecture, Harold Rosenberg drags along two top of the line Agfa projectors housed in burlap-covered cases. He calls them “his kids.” During his lectures, he’ll feed The Kids tray after tray of color-saturated slides. This night, when he calls for downing the lights, The Kids fire up and Rosenberg stands in slack contraposto for the next thirty minutes, one painting after another flashing

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across the flimsy projector screens at twenty-second intervals. Once in a while, he interjects a sonorous, duosyllabic “Gottlieb” “Rothko” “Pollock,” but that’s about it. When he’s finished with the slides, Rosenberg exhales into his finale, In the end we’re all packaged like products. For us, the factory is society-at-large, its demands, its expectations, its prohibitions. We’re all being fed constantly into this machinery, stamped, marked, sorted, sent out into the world, but there is a natural irreconcilability of the human being and this social machine. And art? Well, art’s just our way of making that irreconcilability reconcilable. Art’s the way we try to become what we were before we became anything at all.

9

Note to Self On the Blurring of Art and Life Jo Applin

In her 1966 essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” American critic Joan Didion observed that “however dutifully we record what we see about us,” the keeping of a notebook is always, ultimately, about ourselves and the “implacable, inescapable ‘I.’”1 While we might imagine our notebooks are really about other things, and other people, they are always, in the end, more a portrait of their author than of their times. And yet, as Didion continued, “The point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing, or thinking.”2 In what follows I focus on the notebook-keeping strategies employed by abstract painter and conceptual artist Lee Lozano in a series of detailed notebooks she began to keep in the late 1960s. In these, art and life—the “inescapable ‘I’”—the private and public, the social and the psychically charged, interweave and overlap to extreme and disastrous ends. The final result was less a creative blending or “blurring” of Lozano’s art and life, to invoke the language of her peers, than a disastrous buckling of the two under the pressure of attempting such a seamless combination, with the one no longer able to support the other. Lozano recorded her thoughts and plans across a series of notebooks, written statements, scribbled jottings, and loose-leaf sheets. These ranged from reflections on heady topics pertaining to her personal life, to more prosaic issues relating to the preparation and execution of her drawings, paintings, and conceptual language-based works. It was in Lozano’s written conceptual “pieces,” details of which cram the pages of her notebooks, that she sought to enact her own attempt at a full-blown “blurring” of art and life, pushing herself, her body, and the conceptual processes at her disposal to their limit. In 1969, in the midst of conducting Grass Piece, during which the artist documented her activities over a period while smoking large quantities of grass, Lozano wrote: “Seek the extremes. That’s where the action is.”3 The same year, in a public statement read aloud alongside those of other artists at the inaugural “Open Hearing” of the newly formed Art Workers’ Coalition, Lozano, in similarly bombastic terms, called not only for an “art revolution” but for a “total revolution” that was “simultaneously personal and public.”4

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Lozano’s notebooks bear comparison with those of two contemporaries who were also working in the United States at that time: the abstract sculptors Eva Hesse and Anne Truitt. Each sought in very different ways to account for the entanglement of personal life and art-making within her broader social, political, and cultural milieu. In fact, 1966, the year Didion published “On Keeping a Notebook,” was a significant year professionally for all three artists. That November Lozano’s first solo exhibition of abstract-geometric paintings opened at the Bianchini Gallery in New York to positive reviews, while for Hesse, 1966 marked a decisive move away from the colorful wall relief sculptures she had been making, toward the large-scale monochromatic abstract pieces for which she is now best known. Truitt—a generation older than Lozano and Hesse—was selected that Spring for inclusion in “Primary Structures,” a major group exhibition of new “minimalist” sculpture, held at the Jewish Museum in New York. As an example of the kinds of casual as well as institutional sexism to which women artists were subjected, the critic Clement Greenberg’s description of Truitt’s large, wooden, monolithic forms as utterly distinct from, rather than connected to, the minimalist “primary structure,” is especially telling. This was due, Greenberg wrote, to Truitt’s use of color, which betrayed the work’s “feminine sensibility.”5 Like Truitt and Hesse, Lozano’s notebooks show an artist attuned acutely to the expectations and limitations of her times, not only as a woman but also as an artist working within but increasingly against the art world. Her notebooks were as bound up in the politics of the period as they were critical of them. For this reason it is imperative that we approach Lozano’s writings—for all that they are piecemeal, contradictory, often written retrospectively, or left undated—in an equally self-aware manner. Lozano is perhaps best known today for her 1970 decision to drop out of the art world and, shortly afterward, to stop talking to other women for good. Both gestures were conceived and presented as extreme examples of the artist’s concurrent art-life conceptual works, which she dubbed, respectively, Dropout Piece, and “boycott of women” (although the “boycott” was never quite titled as a bona fide art work by Lozano, it was nonetheless a serious conceptual, lived undertaking by Lozano, which she attempted to maintain for the rest of her life). Lozano’s life and career prompts consideration of the particular problems that accompany using any artist’s notebooks as evidence, and the kinds of reflexive writing, and thinking, they demand of us in the reconstruction, or deconstruction, of that artist’s life—or, better put, their selfpresentation of that life. For, as Didion made clear, such a performance of self is, in fact, going on in all notebooks and journals, whether the author is conscious of it or not.

Writing the Self Writing is a negotiation between one’s public and private senses of self, or selves. This point was readily acknowledged by Lozano’s careful preservation of the eleven “Private Books” she kept assiduously between 1967 and 1971, which contain a delicious muddle of personal information, art-world gossip, and detailed analysis of the world, herself, and her work, although not necessarily in that order. In early 1972, well into her dropout

 Note to Self 145 and boycott of women, when Lozano’s financial as well as personal circumstances were in dire straits, she made plans to leave her Grand Street loft. Just before moving out, Lozano made a number of careful edits and redactions to the notebooks, before handing them to a friend for safekeeping, along with various paintings and drawings then still in her possession, in a self-conscious act of preservation and future safeguarding. Each “Private Book” comprised a small, spiral-bound notebook, named and numbered by hand on the front cover in thick marker pen (Private Book 1, Private Book 2, Private Book 3, and so on) (Figure 9.1). Lozano wrote exclusively in upper case, and the rhythms of her daily life are laid bare in the dramatic shifts in neatness, scale, and speed of her handwriting. Truitt’s journals by contrast were produced with all of the benefits of hindsight unavailable to Lozano. They were written some twenty years after the fact, as the older artist reflected back on her earlier career as a recently widowed mother struggling to make ends meet in the 1960s. Unlike the measured prose that has assured for Truitt’s trio of published memoirs Daybook (1982), Turn (1986), and Prospect (1996), the status of modern classics, Lozano’s notebooks detail a disjointed cacophony of activities, statements, thoughts, and lists from which her voice rings loud and true, by turns strident and angry, indignant and observant, funny and foul-mouthed. In the case of Hesse, the diaries had a rather more problematic route into the public eye. In the immediate aftermath of her untimely death in 1970, her diaries were drawn upon by critics keen to sift their pages for biographical material to back up a narrative of the young artist as a tragic figure. It wasn’t until later that feminist art historians sought to rectify this impulse.6 For all that Truitt, Hesse, and Lozano’s writings are filled with fascinating glimpses into the contemporary art world and their authors’ working conditions and interpersonal relationships, the point is not to merely comb them for historical evidence or “proof.” As any scholar who has worked in close proximity to an artist’s private archive can attest, such information tends to captivate, and potentially distract, from the critical task at hand. The aim must be to develop, and retain, attention to the complexity of the relationship between the work of art and the artists’ narration of their lives, as parallel, and frequently contradictory, sources. One does not account for the other. This tension between renewed attention to biography, particularly women’s biographies, as an emancipatory discourse, and the rejection of such narratives as blind to broader social, cultural, or economic factors, and unduly prioritizing unhelpful notions of individual artistic creativity, has also, of course, been one of the crucial tensions upon which the social history of art founded itself. In fact, in Lozano’s case, the artist sought to braid together art and life in such a way that to attempt to disentangle the two proves as impossible a task as it is an undesirable one. For it is the staging of self, and the process by which Lozano’s work not only mined and mimicked but in the end ultimately subsumed, her life, which makes her case exemplary. What an artist (or for that matter, any of us) says and what he or she does rarely add up to the same thing. Often opposing statements and contradictory actions and claims sit side by side in interviews, statements, and, especially, notebooks and diaries. For instance, Lozano’s declaration that she had “dropped out” of the art world in April 1970 is directly challenged by the fact that she continued to work on the final paintings

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Figure 9.1  Lee Lozano, “Private Book 1,” c. 1968 © The Estate of Lee Lozano. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

 Note to Self 147 in her “Wave Series” over the following eight months. She also produced several new conceptual art-life pieces well into her official “dropout” period. Consider, too, Hesse, in the period spanning 1964 and 1965, as she describes herself as anxious, stuck, and unable to work during what in the end turned out to be one of her most productive and creatively fruitful periods. Or Truitt who, in 1973, for all her declared reticence and anxieties about doing so, was seduced by the invitation from a publisher to write a journal for public consumption on the eve of the opening of her major career-defining retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, and at the Corcoran Gallery, in Washington, D.C. Truitt understood from the outset that the challenge she had been set was to write her version of her life for others as much as for herself. Of the writing process, Truitt wrote: “I once watched a snake shed his skin. Discomfort apparently alternating with relief, he stretched and contracted, stretched and contracted, and slowly, slowly pushed himself out the front end of himself. His skin lay behind him, transparent. The writing of these notebooks has been like that for me.”7 The space—or transparent skin—that exists between writing and making, thinking and doing, planning and participating, could not, for Truitt, be straightforwardly bridged: “The works stand as I stand; they keep me company.”8 Anne Wagner has noted the strange equivalence Truitt drew between her work and her life, for “Truitt’s reflections on her work play a quite distinct part in her writing; art and life are asked to fit the same template, to move between the natural and the abstract, articulating a tension that eases and tightens but in any case always defines her understanding of her identity as an artist.”9 Truitt’s understanding of her large sculptural forms as analogues or partners to her self-identity is of a different order to Hesse’s acknowledgment, in May 1966, of the ways in which life gets in the way of art, or, rather, how the two become, literally in this textual fragment, tangled within one another: “I worked hard. Defrosted ice box, cooked a dinner, called for tickets for friends—finished my 2 last pieces—one today one the other day.”10 My point in highlighting such instances is not to invoke the old sexist chestnut that women are somehow better attuned to juggling or “multitasking” than men, and that rearranging domestic affairs in their notebooks is nothing more than expedient or the sensible thing to do, shopping lists on one side, plans for making art on the other. For all that it may seem that way, this is simply a convention, a generic, gendered assumption, and far from lived reality. Notebooks, diaries, and lives are neither as straightforward and linear nor as neat and contained as all that. In 1979 Lucy Lippard wrote about the problems women faced when attempting to manage the little time available to them. She recorded the various to-do lists the working mother must typically negotiate to often exhausting, and competing, results.11 As a case in point, we might consider artist Ida Applebroog, who came of age in the 1970s as a member of the New York Heresies feminist collective, describing the experience of arriving at the studio and trying to focus on her work by blocking out the endless stream of other tasks, assignments, expectations, and demands weighing her down. “All this stuff on my back,” Applebroog remarked, “how the postman looked at me that morning, what happened in my personal life, what did my dealer say to me, what did my friend say on the telephone—all the different things that go on in your mind.

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What do I have to do? What appointments do I have?”12 Applebroog’s frustration has been shared by many artists, mainly women—Truitt, Hesse, and Lozano included— for whom the question of how to manage the incessant collapsing of one’s public and private, domestic and professional, interior and exterior lives when in the studio and attempting to get down to work has been an urgent concern.

The Blurring of Art and Life I want to propose that the “blurring” of the line between the personal and political, between the social, psychic, and lived experiences of artists who are women, was, and is, a feminist issue. In doing so, I take my cue from Wagner’s groundbreaking 1996 book Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O’Keeffe—a landmark publication for its challenge to the lingering perception that the relationship between women’s art and lives is straightforwardly parceled, with the life explaining, or otherwise providing the bedrock for the artwork’s interpretative framework. Rather, Wagner insisted that we consider the “gap” between art and life in terms of a “disjuncture” between an artist’s written words and his or her lived experiences—a disjuncture, which, while shared no doubt with many male artists, for Wagner, “is more likely to occur when the artist is female.”13 And yet, while none of these artists claimed it for herself, feminism—or what Betty Friedan memorably dubbed the “problem that had no name” in her popular 1963 book The Feminine Mystique—nonetheless guided each woman’s understanding of herself, her art, and the place of each in the world in which she worked.14 Truitt, Hesse, and Lozano all flat-out refused the label “feminist,” as did many women in the early, tumultuous years of the Women’s Movements, although this is not the same thing as denying that each artist was, in her own way, nonetheless shaped by the movement’s politics, even if, in Lozano’s case, negatively, through her vocal rejection of feminism and, later, boycott of other women. For what is the keeping of a notebook, if not a means of giving shape to one’s life, or as Wagner put it, of “easing and tightening” its contours in relation to the world within which one exists?15 The same year Didion wrote “On Keeping a Notebook,” Allan Kaprow’s book Assemblages, Environments and Happenings was published in New York. In it, Kaprow proposed that “the line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible.”16 Kaprow’s examples ranged from his own, earlier “happenings” of the late 1950s, to recent forays into installation and immersive, participatory environments during the early 1960s by artists including Yayoi Kusama and Jim Dine, and his call for an art that blurred the boundaries between art and life echoed that of his contemporary Robert Rauschenberg, who famously stated in 1959 that “Painting relates to both art and life. . . . (I try to work in that gap between the two).”17 While “happenings” were loosely scripted participatory events, accompanied by various assembled “props” and assemblage sculptures with which viewers were encouraged to interact and engage (a number of Rauschenberg’s “Combine” painting-sculpture hybrids fit this description), Kaprow’s definition of the “blurring of art and life” expanded over the course of the 1960s. Between 1971 and 1974 Kaprow published three essays titled “Education of the

 Note to Self 149 Un-Artist.” Together they offer a detailed manifesto for how to become an “un-artist” whose practice is defined by the definitive overriding or blurring of the gap between the professional sphere of art-making and that of everyday life. “What is essential now,” Kaprow stated of the un-artist, “to understand the value of the new activities on any level, is not to pigeonhole exactly but to look regularly for these ties to the ‘real’ world, rather than the art world.”18 Kaprow considered that breaching of the gap between the “real world” of lived experience and that of “the art world” as a liberating gesture defined by leisure and play, not profit and professionalism. There was, undoubtedly, a politics to Kaprow’s clarion call for rethinking the bounds of the art work and the art world, although we should note that such freedoms were hard-won, even unavailable, for many. For it is notable, first, that only five of his thirty-five examples of contemporary “un-artists” were women, and second, that the publication of his much-lauded three-part essay on the “un-artist” spanned almost exactly the development of the Women’s Movement in the United States. While I don’t mean to make a straw man of Kaprow, I do want to underscore the simple fact that the much-vaunted avant-garde call for the blurring of art and life as a freeing, necessary gesture toward the democratization of the art world sits less comfortably alongside the realities of many women artists struggling at that time to find a space in the world—whether the “real world,” or the “art world”—at all. The blurring of art and life was a far from straightforward proposition for most women artists, many of whom acknowledged the problems they experienced in carving out the necessary opportunities to work, and for whom the ring-fencing of time away from domestic chores and familial expectations and demands in order to make art was a pressing priority. Substitute “private” and “public,” the classic binary by which women’s lives, and work, have been organized since at least the nineteenth century, for “art” and “life,” and we get closer to recognizing the extent to which such a division is, as Griselda Pollock argued in her important work on Impressionist painters Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, always gendered.19 Here is Hesse, in 1965, worrying about how to bridge the gap between being a wife and being an artist, while married to an established artist who showed little support for her work: “Resentments enter more precisely if I need to be cooking, washing, or doing dishes while he sits King of the Roost reading,” Hesse wrote.20 The blurring of art and life here sounds like less of a blessing than a burden. The very next day Hesse copied down a handful of quotations from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, the last one of which read: “What woman essentially lacks today for doing great things is forgetfulness of herself; but to forget oneself it is first of all necessary to be firmly assured that now and for the future one has found oneself.”21 And here is Truitt, reflecting years later on the relationship between her earlier self and her work: “It slowly dawned on me that the more visible my work became, the less visible I grew to myself.”22

Lee Lozano’s Art-Life Experiment While in the early to mid-1960s Lozano established herself as a painter—a practice she maintained until the end of her ten-year career—by 1969 she was increasingly seeking to frame her everyday activities as conceptual “pieces,” the culmination of which

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was her 1970 Dropout Piece. On occasion Lozano would transcribe by hand a predetermined action or set of activities that she had recently undertaken on a sheet of paper (she mainly produced the “write-ups” for exhibition or sale purposes). At other times, as noted, Lozano used her notebooks to test out ideas for potential pieces, many of which, such as Dropout Piece never, in fact, left their pages to become official “write-up” sheets. Lozano’s signature “art-life” conceptual works involved a selfexplanatory title, either retrospectively described as such after the fact, such as her 1967 Spend Every Night for Three Weeks at Max’s Piece, or, more usually, in advance of the event or action taking place. Included in this category are her 1969 General Strike Piece, which announced her intention to go on strike from all art-world events for a period of time—although the notebooks reveal Lozano, in fact, broke her strike on several occasions—and her proposed Sex Piece, of which she wrote, “I sure am looking forward to this one!”23 If Lozano’s conceptual pieces suggest an artist struggling to straddle art and life, it was, I suggest, through her abstract painting practice that the question of how to blur, or perhaps reconcile (or not) the art and the life, the social and psychic, the lived and the recorded, came to the fore in their most complex and surprising form. I want to propose that Lozano’s “Wave Paintings,” the series of eleven abstract canvases Lozano completed over the three-year period from 1967 to 1970—that is, the period coterminous with her notebook keeping—should be considered not only as a formal exercise Lozano used to explore the gap between art and life but also as an abstract test run for her final and definitive Dropout Piece. For the “Wave Paintings” were predicated on Lozano’s lived actions, experiences, and decisions every bit as much as her conceptual pieces. Each painting in the series is identical in size, and coated in two tones of metal-based, earthy-colored paint that runs in rhythmic “waves” the length of the vertical canvas (Figure 9.2). However, while each painting clearly belongs to the same series, as Lozano’s notebook entries detail, they were actually made according to very specific physical and psychological conditions—hungry, drunk, tired, horny, and so on—she experienced or in which she placed herself deliberately for the duration

Figure 9.2  Lee Lozano, 12 Wave, 1969. Oil on cotton duck, 243.8. 106.7 cm. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. Gift from the Collection of Milton Brutten and Helen Herrick, 1991.131. © The Estate of Lee Lozano. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

 Note to Self 151 of their production. And, once begun, Lozano didn’t stop until the painting was completed: the more densely packed together the waves, the longer they took to make, with some demanding many hours of arduous and stressful labor. Art and life did not so much intersect as threaten to disrupt entirely the “Wave Painting” series. And not simply because of the physical pressure Lozano placed herself under in their production. She began to experience something of an existential crisis over the course of 1970 as the end of the series, and Lozano’s time in the art world, drew to a close. The question of why, or whether, to paint at all became a serious enough issue over the course of the series’ creation that Lozano raised it in interviews with critics, as well in her private notebooks. She would explain that she was working with a since-discontinued line of paints, and wondered which would expire first, the paint supplies or the “Wave” series. Lozano would also point out in an annotated press release for the exhibition, that the final work in the series, the eleventh painting, was far from finished, or even planned, just two weeks before the show was scheduled to open at the Whitney Museum of Art. Of this final work Lozano wrote: “With the last one in the series I didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t use that oil paint on it.”24 It was a powerful statement of refusal given that it might have been simpler to simply edit the work out of the series in the first place. One way to make sense of this very public presentation of what Lozano perceived as a failure of both art and life is to think about the “Wave Paintings” as a laboratory or holding environment, in which she tested and pushed against the limits of how to mediate between the pairing of art and life, and her own ability to sustain that painting process given the physical constraints she set herself while undertaking the task, such as the three days straight she spent working on the tenth painting in the series. Unlike other self-regulatory systems then being explored by any number of Lozano’s contemporary conceptual art peers, the “Wave Paintings” turned out to be an altogether more limiting, more exhausting rather than exhaustive, art-life experiment. Hobbled at turns by questions of what, or how, or under which conditions to paint, and by financial concerns about whether she’d be able to sell them as a set (her preferred approach) or piecemeal for the cash, the “Wave Paintings” became something of a blockage, or an impasse, that Lozano hit both aesthetically and personally. Not least of all because while their production slowed over the course of 1970, the final painting was not made until November, over seven months after Lozano had declared in her notebooks that she was dropping out. It is no small wonder perhaps that Lozano elected not to paint but draw the 192 waves for the eleventh in the series. On the same page of one notebook we see Lozano planning which color to paint 12-Wave, and the statement “I AM NOT A FEMINIST” written in her trademark capital letters. Abstraction and feminism—art and life—were not, then, in some kind of binary opposition or pairing for Lozano but, rather, they were intimately, ordinarily, critically, bound up, one within the other.

The Politics of Experience The “Wave Paintings” did not simply tackle the problem of how an artist might blur the line between art and life, underscored most dramatically in this instance through

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Lozano’s commitment to figuring abstractly her physical gestures and emotional state. They also pose the question of what the cost might be—to the practice, to the reception of the work, to the life lived—of such an action. “I’m having a schizoid (politics of) experience,” Lozano wrote in 1969, acknowledging the popular contemporary antipsychiatry writings of R. D. Laing, namely his 1967 book The Politics of Experience.25 Laing’s experimental treatments during the 1960s advocated an approach to the treatment of psychosis as a psychedelic experience only as mad as the world in which the schizoid subject lived, and the book detailed the different kinds of experiences open to the subject, and psychiatrist. “Us and Them” is the title of one chapter, while another, on “The Schizophrenic Experience,” attempts to make sense of the analysand’s interior and exterior worlds, as less distinct and more porous than clinical analysis had previously allowed. Around the same time she embarked upon Dropout Piece, Lozano added a note to the written-up account of her General Strike Piece, which had ended in the summer of 1969, while still in the middle of Dialogue Piece—a work in which Lozano substituted conversation for the making of art works—acknowledging how “schiz symptoms were beginning to appear.”26 She added “me in here versus them out there,” dutifully borrowing Laing’s terminology to diagnose her growing sense of unease at the kinds of experiences her art-life undertakings were beginning to produce.27 According to Laing, such experiences should be read as a form of “evidence” that takes seriously the behavior, and actions, of the subject, even in the face of that behavior and what the subject says being at odds. As Laing continued: “perception, imagination, phantasy, reverie, dreams, memory, are simply different modalities of experience, none more ‘inner’ or ‘outer’ than any others.”28 I don’t want to simply cast the production of the “Wave Paintings” as early warnings either of a looming breakdown on Lozano’s part (or “different modality of experience” in Laing’s terms), or of her imminent dropout. Nor do I want to inadvertently hold them up as an instance of that melancholic “saying goodbye” that Lozano conjectured might be the outcome of Dialogue Piece.29 Instead, I want to keep the specificity of the series in play; for, in formal, material, and conceptual terms, the “Wave Paintings” are different in almost every way from Lozano’s other “conceptual” works. Yet, what they do share is a mode of experimentation tied intimately to a mode of finding yourself stuck—at an impasse—even as you attempt to carry on and get by. Her experiments in going on strike, her proposed “sex piece,” and her boycott of other women, each sought to shake up the status quo in a way Lozano hoped would prove productive to her relationship not only to art but also to others. “People (in some ways) are more important than art,” she wrote in 1969.30 Lozano’s two most extreme art-life actions, Dropout Piece and “boycott of women,” muddied the water between art and life in far-reaching and contradictory ways, not least of all for their effective erasure of Lozano from subsequent accounts of the period. At the time, Lozano described her decision to “drop out” as the “hardest work I have ever done,” suggesting something of the careful planning and tortuous deliberation that went into its execution (Figure 9.3).31 The same holds true for the boycott of women, only ever intended as a six-month experiment, most likely as a

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Figure 9.3  Lee Lozano, “Private Book 8,” April 5, 1970, p. 114. © The Estate of Lee Lozano. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. result of her growing awareness, and wariness, of the Women’s Movement, although in the end Lozano maintained the boycott until the end of her life. The attempt at living out the implications of her conceptual art-life pieces resulted in a blurring that, while it was hard work, did not in the end pay off as Lozano hoped. As a woman working increasingly against the tide of the contemporary art world, the material and psychological blurring of her life and work came at a considerable cost. The result was less a seamless melding of art and life than something closer to a disintegration of the two, and Lozano’s paradox is that while they remain her best-known works, both Dropout Piece and the subsequent “boycott of women” were ultimately disasters, both personally and professionally.32 That the blurring of the gap between art and life was a personal, political, and contrarily feminist position for Lozano I take as read. In terms of extrapolating from this to consider other cases, and other women artists then similarly struggling to bridge the domestic and professional spheres, we must though exercise caution. As Wagner pointed out, while a personal history (call it a “biography”) is also, in a very real sense, a social history, providing the terms, means and boundaries of “self ” at any one given time, it also demands a specificity and careful attention to detail. This is crucial if we are to render fully the ideological construction of that “self,” and to avoid flattening or generalizing at the cost of making sense of individual experiences. And, as Pollock also argued, the perspective of the art historian, or viewer of the work of art, “is neither abstract nor exclusively personal, but ideologically and historically construed.”33 It is, moreover, the art historian’s job “to re-create it—since it cannot ensure its recognition outside its historical moment.”34 For Wagner, it is necessary that the art historian endeavor to identify the gaps that exist in the historical account of his or her chosen subject’s life—not just evidential or biographical gaps, but also conceptual gaps—so that they might get that account to fit, or not, the dominant modernist narrative, replete as it is with “social hierarchy and order, relationship and difference.”35 By its very construction, that narrative is designed to give shape to a specifically patriarchal, male perspective. The necessity to write women’s lives stems, Wagner argued, “not from the fact of womanhood, but from the social and cultural circumstances of female life—from the circumstances of sexual

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differences” that are, she notes, as did Lozano, both bodily and psychic.36 “How are we to fill in the blanks?” Wagner asks.37 Lozano used the forum of her notebooks not as a private repository documenting her life, and artistic practice, but as a dynamic arena in which she plotted, staged, enacted, and dissected a conceptual—and literal—blurring of her art and life. In so doing Lozano was able to successfully elevate the status of the private notebooks and artist statement to the level of a work of art, albeit importantly a body of work rife with deliberate inaccuracies and determined self-fashioning, that Lozano sought to give shape to, to forge that “implacable ‘I.’” The results were extensive, as Lozano’s career ended in financial, personal, and professional catastrophe. The stakes were, in the end, too high, and when Lozano recused herself entirely—if chaotically—from the art-world community in which she had been so thoroughly immersed since 1961, she fell off the radar for many years to come.38 Lozano continued to work and exhibit for a while after announcing Dropout Piece, yet over the course of the next year or two, she gradually removed herself from the art world, abandoning her increasingly successful career as a conceptual artist, as well as her circle of peers, friends, and supporters, many of whom would not hear from her again. Certainly, it marked the end of her standing in the art world and art histories of the period for many years, to the detriment of her critical and historical standing. Less a celebrated “un-artist” then, than, for a significant period of time, barely recognized as an artist at all. It wasn’t until after her death in 1999 that critical and curatorial interest in Lozano began to gather pace, with a number of exhibitions and publications that by the mid-2000s had reaffirmed Lozano’s historical and aesthetic contribution and her status as “the major female figure” of New York conceptualism.39 “Don’t believe anything you hear about me,” Lozano wrote to her friend, the gallerist Richard Bellamy in 1969, by way of an apology for an earlier episode. “I apologize for my bad behavior but it had to be,” Lozano wrote, “Going through violent changes” (Figure 9.4). Her point was as strategic as it was poignant. Aware no doubt of art-world gossip about her increasingly erratic behavior, Lozano was warning Bellamy not to be influenced by what others said, nor by what she said, either about herself, or her work. It is a warning that historians would do well to heed, too; recall Didion’s observation that accuracy is never the end goal of the notebook keeper. So, too in Lucy Lippard’s important book on Hesse, published in 1976, just a few years after the artist’s death and drawing extensively on Hesse’s diaries, Lippard cautioned that the writer must necessarily “tread a fine and dangerous line between the art and the life.” Or, as Lozano put it, between “me in here versus them out there.”40 Lippard chose, she wrote, to stick closely in her account to what Hesse described as “the ‘edge’ between the two.”41 It was an interesting turn of phrase. For edges are not gaps. Rather, they are sharp. They don’t need blurring but watching, carefully. Less than twenty years after Lozano fell from view, and almost a decade before her work would begin to resurface, Griselda Pollock pointed out that the social, political, economic and sexual “configuration” which had “shaped the work of Cassatt and Morisot still defines our world.”42 Pollock was writing at the height of a feminist art history in the UK that tackled precisely these issues in the context of the so-called New

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Figure 9.4  Lee Lozano, No title, 1969. Pen on paper, 28. 21.5 cm. Private collection, New York. © The Estate of Lee Lozano. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Art History, a much contested catch-all term used, briefly, and belatedly, to describe the discipline’s turn away from a connoisseurial model toward an explicitly political, theoretical, and social engagement with art and its histories. Pollock was writing as one of a number of feminist art historians working in the UK who had trained in the fields of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art, including Lisa Tickner, Tamar Garb, Rozsika Parker, and Lynda Nead, who insisted on the contemporary relevance, and urgency, of this historical work. As Pollock stated: “It is relevant then to develop feminist analyses of the founding moments of modernity and modernism, to discern its sexualized structures, to discover past resistances and differences, to examine how women producers developed alternative models for negotiating modernity and the spaces of femininity.”43 Or, as Wagner subsequently put it in her feminist study of three mid-century women artists, “these [are] peculiarly modern questions.”44 It remains as critical now, as then, to develop such alternative models. These must encompass both those women who might appear more “typical” in their experiences of “the problem that has no name” and the blurring of art and life, the social and psychic, the public and private, such as Hesse and Truitt, and those more atypical, even eccentric or aberrant figures whose narratives are less amenable to being “explained” by the social and historical context of their times, and who, instead, rubbed deliberately

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against the grain. Lozano did not fit the “alternative model” of living offered by the nascent Women’s Movement, nor did the “sexualised structures” of the New York art-world suit her one bit. While Kaprow saw only the positive in making that leap from art to life, with statements such as “what can the un-artist do when art is left behind? Imitate life as before. Jump right in. Show others how,” things were not so clear-cut or productive for Lozano.45 Her career, instead, charts the consequences of what happened when a woman artist elected to break the rules, and refused to try to resolve the tension between art and life by blurring the boundaries in extreme, and very real, ways. Lozano did not so much tread that “fine and dangerous line” between art and life, as ride roughshod over its sharp-edged contours, giving way less to a gap than a yawning abyss. For Lozano, in the final telling, art and life did not so much blur as catastrophically fall apart at the seams.

Notes 1 Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook” (1966) in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), 113–22, p. 115. 2 Ibid., 115. 3 Lee Lozano, Grass Piece, 1969. 4 Lee Lozano, “Public Statement, Open Hearing, April 10, 1969.” 5 Clement Greenberg, “Changer: Ann Truitt” (originally published in Vogue in May 1968), in The Collected Essays and Criticism: Modernism with a Vengeance 1957-1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 288–91, p. 290. For an important account of Truitt’s work, see Miguel de Baca, Memory Work: Anne Truitt and Sculpture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). 6 On the early treatment of Hesse’s diaries, see Anne M. Wagner, “Another Hesse,” particularly the section “Art and Life,” in Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O’Keeffe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 191–283. 7 Anne Truitt, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist (1982) (New York: Scriber, 2013), 174. 8 Ibid., 37. 9 Anne M. Wagner, “The Threshold: Language and Vision in the Work of Anne Truitt,” in Anne Truitt (Matthew Marks catalog), 7–21, p. 8. 10 Eva Hesse, May 1966, in Eva Hesse Diaries, ed. Barry Rosen (Hauser and Wirth and Yale University Press, 2017), 577. 11 Lucy R. Lippard, “New York Times IV” (1979) reprinted in The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Essays on Art (New York: The New Press, 1995), 192–203, p. 196. 12 Ida Applebroog, “Power, Feminism and Art,” PBS Art: 21, 2005. On Applebroog’s feminism, see my “Generational Objects: Ida Applebroog’s History of Feminism,” Oxford Art Journal 40, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 133–51. 13 Wagner, “Sex Differences,” in Three Artists (Three Women), 1–29, p. 6. 14 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963). 15 As Wagner argued, “These issues involve the social and personal experience of women who make art as well as the forms their art takes, they require both public and private negotiation for the roles of woman and wife, as well as that of artist; they

 Note to Self 157 shape the various means used to claim authorship or voice or identity in a work of art.” Wagner, Three Artists (Three Women), 1–2. 16 Allan Kaprow, Assemblages, Environments and Happenings (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1966), 188. 17 Robert Rauschenberg, “Untitled Statement,” in Sixteen Americans, ed. Dorothy C. Miller (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959), 58. 18 Allan Kaprow, “The Education of the Un-Artist Part III” (1971), as reprinted in Allan Kaprow: The Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelly (Berkeley: University of California Press), 130–48, p. 131. 19 Pollock offered a powerful critique of a recent social history of art that revealed itself blind to the realities of gender to, instead, privilege only class in its reading of the public, and private, spaces of modernity. Pollock’s point holds true for my subjects here, one hundred or so years later, this time transferred from the metropolis of Paris to that of New York, a point she was keen to make when she first wrote of these women in relation to the social and political conditions of modernity in Britain during the 1980s. For there continued to exist a fundamental “asymmetry,” or difference, “socially, economically, subjectively” between the figure of the male and that of the female subject. Griselda Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” Vision and Difference: Feminism and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988), 70–128, p. 55. 20 Hesse, as cited in Lucy R. Lippard, Eva Hesse (1976) (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), 26. 21 Eva Hesse, November 22, 1964, in Eva Hesse Diaries, p. 411. Hesse cites de Beauvoir on p. 392. Underline in the original. 22 Anne Truitt, Daybook, xi–xii. 23 Lee Lozano, “Private Book 2,” May 1969, 49. 24 Lee Lozano, “Artist’s Statement,” in Maurice Poirier and Jane Necol (eds.), “The ’60s in Abstract: 13 Statements and an Essay,” Art in America 71, no. 9 (October 1983): 122–37, 135, p. 135. 25 Lee Lozano, “Private Book 5,” undated (probably written sometime in January 1970), 34. 26 Lee Lozano, General Strike Piece, April 10, 1969. 27 Ibid. 28 R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience and the Birds of Paradise (London: Penguin, 1967), 18. 29 Lee Lozano, “Private Book 2,” July 3, 1969, 88. 30 Lee Lozano, “Private Book 4,” September 23, 1969, 43. 31 Lee Lozano, “Private Book 8,” April 5, 1970. 32 For more on Lozano’s ten-year-long career, see my Lee Lozano: Not Working (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018). The current essay develops ideas first outlined in the conclusion to this book. 33 Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” 66. 34 Ibid., 66. 35 Wagner, Three Artists (Three Women), 286. 36 Ibid., 285. 37 Ibid., 284. 38 On Lozano’s life post-dropout, see Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, Lee Lozano: Dropout Piece (London: Afterall Books, 2014) and Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, Joint Dialogue Book: Lozano/Graham/Kaltenbach, exh. cat. (Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles, 2010). See

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also Jo Applin, “Hard Work: Lee Lozano’s Dropouts,” October, no. 156 (Spring 2016): 75–99. 39 Lucy R. Lippard, “Escape Attempts,” in Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, ed. Lucy R. Lippard (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1973), vii–xxii, p. xii. The “Wave Paintings” and a selection of Lozano’s artlife pieces were exhibited in “Lee Lozano/Matrix 135” in 1998, curated by James Rondeau at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT. Lozano was included in the exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, which opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 2007 and travelled to the P. S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, in 2008. Further solo shows were held in 2017 at Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, and the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, in 2018. See Katy Siegel, “Market Index: Lee Lozano,” Artforum, “Art and Its Markets” issue, vol. 46, no. 8 (April 2008), 330–3 and p. 391–2. 40 Lee Lozano, General Strike Piece, April 10, 1969. 41 Lucy R. Lippard, Eva Hesse, 6. 42 Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” 89–90, p. 89. 43 Ibid., 89–90, p. 90. Despite the much disputed status of the “New Art History,” in the UK, from where I write, and work, a number of publications have sought to shape, and critique, the changing nature of the discipline since the late 1970s, as a broadly “social history of art” began to eclipse earlier, conservative approaches to the History of Art that continued to hold sway until at least that time. This period of critical art history, beginning in the mid- to late 1970s, and mirroring the expansion of the discipline in art schools and new universities, was also the period in which a number of UK-based journals, oriented toward more explicitly political forms of art history first emerged, foremost among them Block, Art History, and Oxford Art Journal. See Jonathan Harris, The New Art History: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2001). See, too, The New Art History, ed. A. L. Rees and Frances Borzello (London: Camden Press, 1986), a collection of essays which, along with The Block Reader in Visual Culture, ed. George Robertson and Melinda Mash (London: Routledge, 1996), were foundational to my early training as an undergraduate student in the History of Art at University College London in the mid-1990s. See, in particular, Adrian Rifkin’s essay in The New Art History for a critique of the term. 44 Wagner, Three Artists (Three Women), 2. 45 Kaprow, “The Education of the Un-Artist Part II” (1972), as reprinted in Allan Kaprow: The Blurring of Art and Life, 110–26, p. 110.

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The Role of Form in the Social History of Art Joshua Shannon

The social history of art now dominates most fields in our discipline.1 It has been an enormously productive method, yielding thousands of nuanced accounts of the cultural and political functions of art, from Roman monumental sculpture to feminist performance art. But what is the role of form in this current methodological quasiconsensus? Does today’s social art history take adequate account of form? In this chapter, I argue for an expressly formalist brand of social art history. I believe that it is only through the reintroduction of form into the center of the social history of art that our discipline can make its full and proper contribution to history and the humanities. This chapter outlines how a formalist version of social art history can deepen the value of our work, giving it a purchase, for example, that neither social history nor cultural history—as now commonly practiced in history departments— can offer. I am concerned that much of today’s social art history focuses, almost exclusively, on the content of representations in works of art: here is a picture that demonstrates the relative position of patrons and clergy, here is one that demonstrates concerns about industrialization, and so on. I do not wish to argue against such observations, which are foundationally important to any social history of art, and which, furthermore, are often quite subtle about agency, complicity, and the workings of power. I do worry, however, that such readings—what we might call the social history of content—run the risk of telling histories that are equally available to us outside the realm of art— in legal, institutional, and political history, as well as, most obviously, in social or cultural history tout court. What I think we have not done enough of as a discipline is to supplement this level of social-historical interpretation with a robust social history of form. We need more art history that identifies the form of representations and seeks to understand the social roles and meanings of those forms, together with the content of representations. An art history of this kind can tell us not only about political and social events and trends but also about the very frames by which social reality has been constructed. But what is form? In advocating a formalist social art history, I do not mean simply that we ought to look more closely at pictures, to supplement our social readings with attention to composition, color, and so on (though, again, I think this kind of work is

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indispensable). What I mean to advocate, beyond this, is an attention to the structures and habits through which works of art are made, viewed, and taken seriously.2 By form, that is, I mean to denote such structures of making as medium, genre, movement, style, and mood, as well as many others that are not so familiarly categorized. The medium of oil-on-canvas painting is a form. Black-and-white photography is a form, as are video art, marble carving, the stained glass window, the comic book, and countless others. Genres are also forms, such as the portrait, the novel, the photo-essay, the sit-com, and so on. Movements—romanticism, magical realism, neo-concretism, etc.—are forms as well. Each of these forms has a history of rising and falling viability, and those histories in every case are connected, in complicated ways, with the changing conditions of society. And there are many other kinds of forms, too, including modes such as realism, melodrama, and parody. Cuteness is a form, as are artistic interests in light effects, surfaces, the passage of time, emptiness, and so on.3 In all these cases, form is structural; it transcends any specific representation or work of art. I want to stress, however, that what I mean by form is in no sense Platonic, transhistorical, or keyed to any idea of art’s autonomy. On the contrary, what I am advocating is precisely a critical history of forms, whether that history be short (Funk Art flourished for two or three years in the 1960s) or long (oil painting is half a millennium old and still viable). So far, I have been speaking only of aesthetic forms. But a formalist mode of social art history requires thinking about the relationships between aesthetic forms and social ones. Such relationships between the aesthetic and the social are, needless to say, always complicated, as long debates within the Frankfurt School and elsewhere have demonstrated.4 There is certainly no reliable map for doing this kind of thinking, and in any case there is hardly any clean distinction between aesthetic activities and social ones. At least two fundamental points, however, merit emphasis. First, aesthetic forms are never entirely isomorphic with the social forms they depend upon and inflect: a romantic utterance does not necessarily belong to a romantic society, nor a rationalistic one to a rational society, etc. Second, the relationship between the social and the aesthetic cannot be accurately characterized in terms of base and superstructure, where the one determines the other. Artistic agency is willful and complicated, and societies are anyway always a palimpsest of mutually contradictory social structures and beliefs. There is little that is mechanistic, inevitable, or teleological about the development of forms, aesthetic or social. On the contrary, I wish to advocate a method that keeps its eye forever on the historically shifting dynamics affecting the formal relationships between the aesthetic and the social.5 And what counts as a social form? Here again, the gamut is wide: democracy is a social form, as are the postwar suburb, the Shinto temple, and the armed forces. Race and gender are social forms. So are conference calls and family reunions. And, of course, even aesthetic forms are social forms—art-making is a series of conventional activities of a society. (The sheer variety of phenomena that we can call forms is intimidating, but not so much as to render the category useless: there is great benefit in thinking about them together, as forms.) All forms, whether we call them aesthetic or social, experience histories of rising and falling viability—consider institutions

 The Role of Form in the Social History of Art 161 ranging from the epic poem to bullfighting to colonialism. Forms both build and belong to constellations of belief about what the world is like, and about how it might be changed.

Formalism Formalism has become something of a bad word in art history in recent decades, especially in the United States, where it remains indelibly associated with Clement Greenberg and especially with a reading of Greenberg as committed to art’s autonomy and to its quasi-determinist, teleological development. But such a view forgets not only that formalism, before Greenberg, often took explicit interest in the social but also that a lively and influential alternative formalism persists in our discipline today—in the poststructuralist scholarship associated especially with the journal October. Let us first briefly consider each of these strands of formalism within art history. Certainly the most influential early formalists in art history, Heinrich Wölfflin and Alois Riegl postulated theories of art’s historical evolution that today seem largely indefensible (including the phylogeny-as-ontogeny hypothesis that art’s inevitable historical development is like that of a growing child). And the diagnostic binaries of formal analysis proposed by Wölfflin in his Principles of Art History (1915)—closed versus open, unified versus multiple, etc.—are untenably rigid and prescriptive. However, Wölfflin and Riegl also wished to promote the practice of art history as a means of helping to unlock and clarify human history as a whole. They wished to see the alignments between artistic change and cultural change at large.6 During the heyday of Greenberg’s influence in the 1960s, the literary and cultural critic Roland Barthes declared with frustration, “it is remarkable how often one hears it stubbornly repeated that formalism is congenitally antipathetic to history. . . . [The disciplines of history and sociology lead us to] the improper reduction of history to the history of referents. There is a history of forms, structures, writings, which has its own particular time—or, rather, times.”7 Yve-Alain Bois, a student of Barthes’s and today’s preeminent formalist historian of modern art, has followed his teacher in writing against scholarship that would “limit the relations between art and the sociopolitical to a mere question of the thematic,” asserting, instead, that form, properly considered, is both historical and structural. Asserting a materialist formalism against Greenberg’s Platonic idealism, Bois cites Sergei Eisenstein’s observation that “form is always ideological,” and Medvedev/Bakhtin’s remark, apropos Riegl and others, that “European formalism not only did not deny content, did not make content a conditional and detachable element of the work, but, on the contrary, strove to attribute deep ideological meaning to form itself.”8 (For his part, Bois characterizes Wölfflin as a structural but asocial formalist and Riegl as a social-historical one.)9 To some extent, then, the argument I am making is a familiar one: the history of form can be every bit as revealing for the history of social reality (the constructs of what is real and possible) as any history of social content or referents. It strikes me, however, that even Bois and his colleagues on the editorial board of October—

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though certainly critically attuned to the relationship of form to the social—have never exactly practiced the social history of art. Indeed, for all the political ambition of their structural-formal analyses, modernist scholars of this stripe have shunned both the finely detailed local histories and the close readings of individual referents that have, in the past fifty years, defined social art history. October’s intellectual inheritance comes not so much from either the social art historian Arnold Hauser or the formalist Alois Riegl as from structuralist and poststructuralist cultural critics including Barthes, Theodor Adorno, and Michel Foucault. These modernist formalists deliberately eschew some of the practices of the social history of art. Certainly Hal Foster has good reason to bemoan the piling on of pointlessly contextualizing facts, as does Yve-Alain Bois to worry about the pre­determined simplification of some social-historical interpretations.10 Social art history can, indeed, become pointlessly fastidious and blind to larger social structures, and it sometimes ends up effectively illustrating work already published by social historians. At times, however, modernist art historians working in this poststructuralist-formalist mode have tended to be almost iconophobic about social content—as, for example, in interpretations of Robert Rauschenberg’s combine paintings, where attention to a new structure of assemblage has sometimes dislodged even the most passing interest in the specific historical meanings of the assembled things, as if such questions were simply shallow or irrelevant.11 On the whole, too, this school of art history has been similarly uninterested in artists’ biographies or in any personal motivations for making individual works of art. To some degree, what I am advocating is a method that blends the strengths of October’s poststructuralist formalism with those of art history’s current socialhistorical mainstream. I want to advance an approach that excels both at excavating complicated local histories and at narrating the evolution of the forms by which social realities are understood. I hope that formalism will come to seem not an alternative to social art history (as it now often does, at least to many scholars in the field) but, rather, an indispensable element of it. Such inquiries, I furthermore hope, can dispense with the habit, sometimes exhibited by formalists under the influence of Adorno, to draw clean lines separating utopian-critical avant-gardism from the ideologically complicit culture industry. Instead, a history of art that is attuned to both the long and the short, both the structural and the local, can articulate the ways in which artworks reveal a culture’s clashing structures of belief.

A Formalist Social History of Art If formalism has hardly been altogether blind to social history, the social history of art has likewise not entirely ignored form. This was especially true of the more structurally determinist versions of the social history of art practiced in the first half of the twentieth century: Frederick Antal linked the rise and fall of realism as a fifteenth-century form to the changing status of the bourgeoisie, and Arnold Hauser applied a similar kind of art-form/social-form thinking to the history of Western art as a whole.12 What I

 The Role of Form in the Social History of Art 163 am advocating here, however, is closest to the formalist version of the social history of art practiced by T. J. Clark. In his 1984 book The Painting of Modern Life, Clark understands impressionism as, among other things, a conflicted representation of the unsettling transformation of social class during the modernization of Paris in the 1860s through to the 1880s.13 In Clark’s reading, these transformations are figured not only in particular landscapes and facial expressions but also in the mode of painting itself. Flatness, in particular—long cited as a style communicating immediacy or a modernist attention to medium—is, in Clark’s account, a form that communicates both the new experience of modern spectacle in Paris and the lack of sensible embodied coordinates for navigating that experience. While this book, and Clark’s work generally, have been both popular and influential, the mainstream of social art history today remains relatively unengaged with the social history of forms. A brief analysis of Clark’s method in this book may be clarifying. There is plenty of “content” in The Painting of Modern Life: the polluted Seine, the uncomfortable body language of the petite bourgeoisie, the calculatedly affectless look of women coerced into prostitution and other constraining circumstances, the uncertainty of everyone’s costume, and so on. But it is also form, and especially flatness, that defines Clark’s book and his effort to shed light on modern life. It has been widely acknowledged, Clark writes in his introduction, that flatness was thematized in Impressionist and Postimpressionist painting, that it was “again and again recovered as a striking fact by painters after Courbet.” “But,” he insists, flatness was not simply an inevitable artifact of the stylistic evolution of painting: “I think the question we should be asking in this case is why that literal presence of surface went on being interesting for art.”14 Clark’s answer to this question has to do with the various meanings—all attached to things outside art as well as within it—that flatness carried: “If the fact of flatness was compelling and tractable for art—in the way it was for Manet and Cézanne, for example—that must have been because it was made to stand for something: some particular and substantial set of qualities which took their place in a picture of the world.” Clark’s subsequent phrasing makes clear that the flatness itself does as much representational work, in his view, as whatever else we can see in the pictures. Flatness, he writes, could serve as “some kind of analogue of the ‘Popular,’ . . . could signify modernity, . . . [could] represent the simple fact of Art.” “And finally,” Clark adds, “unbrokenness of surface could be seen—by Cézanne par excellence—as standing for the evenness of seeing itself, the actual form of our knowledge of things.”15 Consider the ten-page passage of the book that Clark dedicates to Edouard Manet’s 1874 painting Argenteuil, les canotiers (Figure 10.1). Clark writes: “[T]he first impression, as so often with Manet, is of a great, flat, clarity of form—clearness of edge, and plain abbreviation of surface within those edges.” “Of course,” he adds, “the viewer soon sees that these qualities coexist with others,” but the overall effect remains one of “an order that is simplified and flat.” Clark then calls on specific details to identify the flatness he is discussing: “[the man’s] tunic and torso are kept in touch with the surface, flattened out,” “the mast . . . never quite manages to be modeled,” and the woman wears a “floating, tilted, improbable . . . hat, . . . a black straw oval, hardly

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Figure 10.1  Edouard Manet, Argenteuil, les canotiers, 1874. Oil on canvas. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Tournai. seeming to belong to the head underneath it.”16 In the case of the hat, Clark observes, the flatness was literally given in the world that Manet observed: “For hats themselves were two-dimensional in 1874: they were tilted forward and tied up behind, real pieces of fashionable machinery.”17 This quality of flatness in Manet’s painting was, among other things, “a metaphor of paint and painting,” Clark concedes, but it was also far more than that. “I shall say it again and again [:] . . . Manet found flatness rather than invented it; he saw it around him in the world he knew.”18 Clark then names other characteristics of the painting, affiliated with flatness, that likewise represent the petit-bourgeois’s experience of modernity. He notes the “deadpan” of the two figures, the fact that “[t]heir faces go blank, . . . [and their] eyes look out levelly.” The couple embodies “‘the cover of restraints’ which spreads, more and more evenly, over action and affect in modern times.”19 Clark concludes: “What Manet was painting was the look of a new form of life—a placid form, a modest form, but one with a claim to pleasure. The careful selfconsciousness of the woman, her guarded attention to us, the levelness of her gaze: these are the best metaphors of the moment.”20 In offering this quick retrospective analysis of Clark’s scholarship on Manet, I am trying to draw attention to a claim that Clark himself does not explicitly name: a social history of art attentive to form will be more deeply revealing than one that considers only people, events, and movements. Modern France was not only new industries, new streets, new modes of transit, and a new economy. It was also a new frame or structure for understanding the world—one defined in part by planarity and dedifferentiation. It seems to me, furthermore, that Clark is implicitly arguing for formalism when he writes, “[I] hate . . . that version of the social history of art which has images as tokens of a knowledge they barely inflect.”21 The aim is not to connect the dots between paintings and social history, but, rather, to allow artworks to reshape our understanding of the basic constraints of social imagination. * * *

 The Role of Form in the Social History of Art 165 Despite the lasting popularity of Clark’s example, art history as a whole has done relatively little over the past three decades to continue or develop the role of form in the social history of art. A number of exceptional scholars, however, have been writing in modes that do ask social-historical questions of form. Here I turn to look briefly at a few books from the field of American art history, in order to consider the ongoing potential of such methods.22 Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw, for example, in her 2004 book Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker, considers Walker’s now iconic cut-out silhouette works as a means for thinking about the history of American slavery and its racist legacies.23 Shaw depends, however, not only on the iconographic decoding of these complicated works (with their many references to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Gone with the Wind) but also on a historicized understanding of the form of the silhouette itself. She discusses the silhouette as a long-standing aesthetic and social form that, despite its pretensions to neutrality, has a history of involvement with objectification and exploitation. Similarly, Michael Gaudio, in his 2008 book Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization, argues that the form of engraving itself was crucial to the European construct of the American “savage” in the early colonial period. Gaudio understands the technology of engraving—at least as much as any of the figures, poses, and situations in the art of colonial contact—as the fulcrum on which period notions of humanity and of civilization pivoted. Working in an analogous mode, Jason Weems considers bird’seye views and images of flight in his 2015 book Barnstorming the Prairies: How Aerial Vision Shaped the Midwest. Weems depends less on explicating the figures or motifs of his chosen images than on diagnosing the social and cognitive form of aeriality itself. Powered human flight brought with it a new visual and conceptual frame for perceiving the economy and the rural individual’s relationship to modernity.24 I turn now to consider three further books on American art in slightly greater detail. By gently unpacking the method in these relatively recent books—by Michael Leja, Jennifer Roberts, and Jennifer Raab, respectively—I hope to show how form’s relationship to history is now being conceived. Michael Leja’s 2004 book Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp discusses the tensions between vision and other forms of knowledgeacquisition in the United States around 1900. Leja, that is, examines a modern chapter in the long history of the problem of appearance and its troubled relationship with reality, one he sets in the age of P. T. Barnum, the department store, and the X-ray. His chapter on the trompe l’oeil paintings of William Harnett declines to offer a more conventional kind of reading of these hyperrealistic pictures—one that would read the individual depicted objects (matches, horseshoes, books, newspaper clippings, etc.) for the meanings each brings to the composition.25 Leja is interested, instead, in the form of trompe l’oeil itself, and especially in its pursuit of illusions that are very nearly, but never totally, convincing.26 Harnett’s trompe l’oeil paintings reveal for us, Leja argues, a salient aspect of the American experience of modernity around 1900—the problem of failing to square what is seen with what is felt. Leja concludes that Harnett’s paintings “induced psychic states and feelings suited to the object relations characteristic of the modern consumer economy.” As such, the paintings help us to better understand “the

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experience of life in a culture of consumerism and commercial visual spectacle. One is subject to a deception even while unmasking it, scratching at the newspaper clipping even while knowing it is painted.” To look at these quasi-deceptive paintings, Leja argues, is to slowly reenact a basic perceptual conundrum of modern capitalism: the credulous/skeptical glance he refers to in the book’s title.27 In 2014, Jennifer L. Roberts published Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America, a book dedicated to uncovering the deep, structuring effect that size and distance—and especially the profound difficulty of travel—had on American art in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.28 In a mode similar to those I have just been discussing, Roberts builds this history not on representations of trains or of landscapes themselves but, rather, by seeing the ways in which various sizes and distances, as lived social forms, shaped art-making. In her chapter on John James Audubon’s gigantic ornithological book The Birds of America, for example, Roberts emphasizes, especially, the size of the book, which, in its time, seems to have been the largest book ever published. Audubon’s ungainly format was necessary because he insisted on drawing (and printing) every bird to correspond measurably in 1:1 scale to the bird it depicted. In order to accommodate birds such as the American Flamingo, even with its neck craned so as to bring its head to its toes, all the printed pages in the book had to be forty inches tall (Figure 10.2). Because of Audubon’s further insistence that every part of each bird also be measurably accurate, his birds ended up unforeshortened, locked in an awkwardly shallow pictorial space. Audubon’s painstaking compulsion—he stored his drawings in 100-pound metal boxes which he carted over mountains, down rivers, and through city streets—was a compensatory act, Roberts argues: a wedge against the threatening immateriality of other forms of representation in the period. Audubon had been deeply affected by the unreliability of the many paper currencies circulating on the American frontier in the early nineteenth century. Paper money, issued by countless local banks, fluctuated in value with its distance from the point of issue. The resulting confusion had helped to cause the Panic of 1819, in which Audubon’s own career as a frontier merchant had been destroyed. In his life-size drawings, Audubon worked against the social threat posed by the mismatch between modern representations and the things they stood for. Roberts’s attention to life-size representation as a form enables her to make observations that neither a conventional art history nor a conventional cultural history could. She is invested in demonstrating, for example, that “[t]he Panic of 1819 was not merely a financial panic. It also reflected anxieties about geography, circulation, scale, and representation.”29 Social reality is structured by historically fluctuating forms. Or consider finally Jennifer Raab’s recent book, Frederic Church: The Art and Science of Detail (2015).30 Raab reads Church’s landscape paintings within a broader mid-nineteenth-century uncertainty over the relative importance of details and of wholes in accurately perceiving the world. The question of how much to subordinate details to wholes troubled not only Church but also Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, and, most significantly, Charles Darwin. Raab takes detail itself as a cultural form, understanding it as “a defining object of American culture.”31

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Figure 10.2 Robert Havell, Jr., after John James Audubon, American Flamingo, Phoenicopterus ruber, 1838, The Birds of America no. 431, 1824–38. Hand-colored etching and aquatint on Whatman paper, 39 ⅞ × 26 ⅞ in. (101.3 × 68.3 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, gift of Mrs. Walter B. James, 1945.8.431. Key to the book is Raab’s argument contrasting Church’s coherently synthesized painting The Andes of Ecuador of 1855 against The Heart of the Andes (Figure 10.3), which he painted four years later. Raab contends that the second painting, despite Church’s opposite intentions, demonstrates a Darwinian bewilderment before nature’s variety, complexity, and lack of coherent order. “The Heart of the Andes has no declarative focal point,” Raab writes, and the footpath leading the viewer’s eye into the canvas does not culminate in a viewpoint but, rather, “stops in a verdant mass of trees and climbing vines.”32 Raab matches her close visual analysis with quotations from Church’s first critics (and even a Philadelphia preacher) worrying over the relationship between this painting’s details and its overall effect. She argues that Heart of the Andes straddles the threshold of a modern culture losing confidence in the divine coherence of the universe. The painting represents a world structured only by the laws of physics and natural selection. By working in this formal-historical mode, Raab reveals the contours of everyday knowledge as they shift under the pressures of modern science. The rise of the incommensurable detail was endemic to the Victorian reconception of nature.

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Figure 10.3  Frederic Edwin Church, The Heart of the Andes, 1859. Oil on canvas, 66 ⅛ × 199 ¼ in. (168 × 303 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, bequest of Margaret E. Dows, 1909, 09.95. Raab’s work offers a valuably complicated case within this recent body of scholarship. Her book, after all, is not clearly an instance of the social history of art. Raab writes explicitly that she wishes to interpret Church’s paintings in terms not of “the political and ideological,” but, rather, of “the visual and epistemological.”33 Indeed, she does not address the history of power or injustice per se but, rather, seeks to narrate the evolving construction of frames for perceiving reality, both natural and social. To varying degrees, the other books I have been discussing similarly prioritize epistemic history over narrowly social questions, and some such prioritization is, I think, inherent to the mode I am advocating.34 It seems clear to me, however, that this bargain is made in favor of a broader social-historical project. The forms we have just considered—the silhouette, the engraving, the aerial view, the skeptical glance, actualsize representation, and the detail—all of these are frames for knowledge, forms that can fundamentally constrain or enable what a society can imagine. * * * Here I conclude with a consideration of how a formalist version of the social history of art might interpret photorealist painting, an important modernist movement largely neglected by art history. Photorealism, which enjoyed a period of limited art-world success in the years after 1968, involves making paintings on canvas by copying photographs, sometimes with the help of a projector. Because its subjects include stores, restaurants, and cars, photorealism lends itself to social-historical interpretation. However, the leading scholarly accounts—few and brief as they have been—are formal as well as social in orientation, taking less interest in commodities

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Figure 10.4 Robert Bechtle, Foster’s Freeze, Escalon, 1975. Oil on canvas, 40 ¾ × 58 ¾ in. (103.5 × 149.2 cm). Tucson Museum of Art, gift of Ivan and Zoya Gerhath. 2001.50.1. and streets themselves than in cultural forms such as the glossy, the artificial, and the phony.35 Here I sketch an interpretation of one photorealist painting, Robert Bechtle’s Foster’s Freeze, Escalon (1975), in order to offer an explicitly methodological commentary about the possibilities opened by interpreting art through a social history of form (Figure 10.4). How, to begin with, might a standard (i.e., non-formalist) social history of art approach this painting? Such an approach would likely, and rightly, begin with the built environment, the represented architecture and infrastructure. We see a roadside restaurant, a prefabricated building made cheaply from glass and sheet-metal, surrounded by a slab of poured concrete. It is oriented to its parking lot, and, indeed, the whole category of commerce on view is predicated on freeway culture. (Escalon is a town on California State Route 120, one of the highways connecting the San Francisco Bay Area to the mountains of the Sierra Nevada.) The pictured institution is a chain fast-food restaurant, one franchise among many Foster’s Freeze locations in California—and Foster’s Freeze itself is, of course, just one of many similar burger and ice-cream chains. The commercial seriality of the institution is emphasized and echoed in many small details as well, from the standard sheet-metal ventilation grates in the exterior wall to the mass-produced garbage can and pickup truck in the background. It is a painting about one family’s place in mass-tourism, mass-production, and massconsumption.

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Brought on to ground and inflect this reading of Foster’s Freeze, Escalon would be some relevant short histories—histories of franchise restaurants, of freeway construction and car ownership, of product names and advertising. These would help us to understand Bechtle’s expression of a certain place and time, his representation of a recent phase in the history of modernity. This kind of reading might be supplemented with some attention to the social history of family, since the pictured figures are the artist’s first wife, Nancy, and their kids, Anne and Max. Nancy’s ambiguous expression beside her children might be understood in light of American feminism in the period, especially given the artist’s own position as (just-)absent from the scene. I do not wish to denigrate the kind of interpretation I am outlining here. Such applications of now-conventional social art history would be, I think, both accurate and rewarding, giving us a finely textured understanding both of the painting and of some of the social-historical conditions it represents and seeks to comprehend. This mode of the social history of art does, however, run the risk of telling us primarily things we already know: that postwar California was defined in part by a rising dependence on automobiles, by an increasingly industrial and modular consumer economy, by a new questioning of traditional gender roles, and so on. What if we were to hybridize this socially contextualizing reading of motifs and themes with a capacious and socially minded analysis of the aesthetic and social forms structuring the painting? We might begin by considering the form of snapshot photography, that modern amateur mode of recording experience in which a passing instant is captured as if in ice or amber. One might continue to the form of photorealist painting itself, which mounts the odd experiment of injecting the awkwardness and instantaneousness of snapshots into the body of the oil-on-canvas tableau, conjoining the automatic with the handmade. And one could then focus on the painting’s preoccupation with surfaces—the reflective gloss of tile, metal, glass, and even table (the last of which reflects the seated figures almost like water)—or the way the bright sun whitens and flattens the pages of the central magazine and the flesh of Nancy’s arm. We might continue by considering the ordinary as a form. This scene’s architecture and furniture are simple and modest. The site seems defined by its averageness: the restaurant is neither neglected nor grand. The background man in hat and overalls seems to emphasize that this place is frequented not only by middle-class tourists such as Bechtle’s own family but also by working-class locals. One could go further to identify a form of equality, even of democracy: the purse gets as much attention from Bechtle as the figures, the cracks in the wood as much as the shapes of the faces.36 One might even go on to read the whole of Bechtle’s oeuvre as an effort to understand the cluster of forms structuring America’s postwar dream of democracy—forms such as superficiality, contingency, and averageness, as well as technology and administration. Scholarship in this mode—at once social and formal—can draw revealing connections between the history of freeway culture and consumerism, on the one hand, and the history of social imagining, on the other. A social-formal history, that is, would see in photorealism a representation not only of changes in social practices but also of changes in the underlying conditions of social consciousness. All societies are clusters of forms, and these forms shape art-making just as they do all other kinds of

 The Role of Form in the Social History of Art 171 behavior. To read form is to read the means by which a society understands the world and understands itself. A good formalist social history of art can help us to understand reality as a construct that can, bit by bit, be changed.

Acknowledgments I am grateful to Jason Weems, for the many useful conversations we had related to form and history while writing our coauthored article, “A Conversation Missed: Toward a Historical Understanding of the Americanist-Modernist Divide,” Blackwell Companion to American Art, ed. John Davis, Jennifer Greenhill, and Jason LaFountain (Oxford: Blackwell, 2015), 17–33. I am grateful also to Jennifer L. Roberts, whose revealing published response to that essay productively jarred my thinking on these topics: “Response: Setting the Roundtable, or, Prospects for Dialogue between Americanists and Modernists,” A Companion to American Art, 34–48. My sincere thanks also to the editors of this volume.

Notes 1 Charlotte Klonk and Michael Hatt write that the social history of art, in its various forms, “might well be the most widely practiced approach to art history today”: Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk, “Formalism: Heinrich Wölfflin and Alois Riegl,” Art History: A Critical Introduction to Its Methods (Machester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 134. Thomas Crow goes still further, writing, “From its beginnings as a minority—and immediately embattled—position, the so-called social history of art has grown in the meantime to constitute something of a new default function for the field: virtually every contribution to the Art Bulletin (seen as the scholarly journal of record) represents a variation on this approach, even when these components are not explicitly acknowledged”: Thomas Crow, “The Practice of Art History in America,” Daedalus 135, no. 2 (spring 2006), 86. See also Craig Clunas, “Social History of Art,” in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 465. I extend thanks to Alan Wallach for pointing me to Clunas and Crow on this matter. 2 Yve-Alain Bois distinguishes helpfully between a mere “morphological” formalism concerned with composition and a “structural” formalism concerned with the history and politics inherent to modes of art-making: Bois, “Formalism and Structuralism,” in Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, 2nd ed., ed.,Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Hal Foster, and Rosalind Krauss and David Joselit, vol. 2 (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2011), 33. 3 See Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 4 Consider, just to name some of the most influential examples, the works of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Georg Lukács, and Fredric Jameson.

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For an important and especially relevant new entry in this literature, see Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). 5 I am grateful to André Dombrowski and Marnin Young for their questions to me on the matter of form as an anti-historical construct, and to Jonathan Katz for his judicious remarks to me regarding the variety of audiences within any culture. 6 Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art (orig. 1915), trans. M. D. Hottinger (London: George Bell, 1932). As Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk have pointed out, Wölfflin, in the Principles, also wrote of seeking to tell a “history of vision” with episodes that “contain the bases of the whole world picture of peoples.” Promoting a proto-Foucaultian interest in the history of modes or frames for knowledge of reality, Wölfflin maintained that various cultural modes of vision were both “conditioned and conditioning.” Wölfflin, quoted in Hatt and Klonk, Art History: A Critical Introduction to its Methods, 66. Craig Clunas further points out that Wölfflin has even been characterized as a practitioner of the social history of art: Clunas, “The Social History of Art,” 466. 7 Roland Barthes (1967), cited in Yve-Alain Bois, “Resisting Blackmail” (introduction), Painting as Model, October Books (Cambridge, MA: M. I. T. Press, 1990), xxii. 8 Bois, “Resisting Blackmail,” xxiii, xix; Sergei Eisenstein (1932) cited in Bois, “Resisting Blackmail,” xxi; P. N. Medvedev/M. M. Bakhtin (1928) cited in Bois, “Resisting Blackmail,” xviii. (Bois points out that the relevant work, published under the name Medvedev, may well have been written by Bakhtin). 9 Yve-Alain Bois, “Formalism and Structuralism,” 34. 10 In his book The First Pop Age, Foster writes, “I aim not to historicize Pop in relation to its social context so much as to periodize it, through its paradigms of painting and subjectivity, in relation to capitalist modernity”: Hal Foster, The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012), 13 (see also n. 32, p. 259). Bois writes in the introduction to his book Painting as Model that one will not find direct “sociopolitical” analysis in his work: Bois, “Resisting Blackmail,” xxiii. 11 See my discussion of the literature on Rauschenberg’s combines in Joshua Shannon, “Black Market: Rauschenberg” (chapter 3), The Disappearance of Objects: New York Art and the Rise of the Postmodern City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 93–148. 12 Frederick Antal, Florentine Painting and Its Social Background (London: Kegan Paul, 1948); Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art (orig. 1951) (new ed.) (London: Routledge, 1962). 13 T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (orig. 1984), rev. ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 14 Ibid., 12. 15 Ibid., 13. 16 Ibid., 164. 17 Ibid., 165. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 168, 169. “The cover of restraints” is a citation from Norbert Elias. 20 Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, 172–3.

 The Role of Form in the Social History of Art 173 21 Ibid., xxvii. 22 Certainly one could write similar explorations regarding other branches of art history. I choose Americanist art history both because I know it well and because it is one of the areas of the field now most dominated by the social history of art. 23 Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 24 Michael Gaudio, Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Jason Weems, Barnstorming the Prairies: How Aerial Vision Shaped the Midwest (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 25 Leja is explicit about his aim to understand the social form of the modern trompe l’oeil rather than to read its symbolic elements: “While nostalgia and vanitas certainly figure in many of Harnett’s paintings, the feelings of loss and melancholy they elicit issue principally from a more general feature: the powerful presence in them of things literally absent. . . . This sense of loss stems not only from the material objects so tantalizingly rendered, but from the dense human presence seemingly just out of sight”; Leja, Looking Askance, 144. 26 He closely considers form in a morphological sense as well, considering passages of impasto as key to the contradictory complexity of the trompe l’oeil form. 27 Leja, Looking Askance, 152. 28 Jennifer L. Roberts, Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014). 29 Roberts, Transporting Visions, 110. 30 Jennifer Raab, Frederic Church: The Art and Science of Detail (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). 31 Raab, Frederic Church, 14. Raab builds on other scholars’ considerations of Church in relationship to Humboldt and Darwin, including Stephen Jay Gould, “Church, Humboldt, and Darwin: The Tension and Harmony of Art and Science,” in Frederic Edwin Church, ed. Franklin Kelly (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1989), 94–107. 32 Raab, Frederic Church, 55. 33 Ibid., 10. This word epistemological is crucial. Raab, like all the scholars I have just been discussing, is indebted to Michel Foucault’s practice of epistemic history, especially as modeled in his flawed but influential 1966 book The Order of Things. (In this book, Foucault seeks to reveal the evolving structures of knowledge, or épistémès, by which European cultures have perceived reality over the last several centuries.) I would submit that Foucault’s influence over art history as a whole has been extremely important but rather underrecognized. Direct references to Foucault, even in the books I have been discussing here, are rather sparse. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (orig. 1966) (New York: Pantheon, 1970). 34 I think the same is true of T. J. Clark’s work; it is certainly true of my own. 35 I recently published my own formal-social history of photorealism: Joshua Shannon, “Surface: Photorealist Painting” (chapter 3), The Recording Machine: Art and Fact During the Cold War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 107–47. See also Donald Kuspit, “The Real in Photorealism,” Artnet Magazine (2009), www. a​​rtnet​​.com/​​magaz​​ineus​​/auth​​ors​/k​​uspit​​.asp;​ Dieter Roelstraete, “Modernism, Postmodernism and Gleam: On the Photorealist Work Ethic,” Afterall 24 (summer

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2010), http://www​.afterall​.org; and, especially, David M. Lubin, “Blank Art: Deadpan Realism in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Picturing America: Photorealism in the 1970s, ed. Valerie L. Hillings (Berlin: Deutsche Guggenheim, 2009), 44–64. 36 Some scholars have suggested this kind of thinking. See, for example, Joshua Shirkey, “Roses,” in Robert Bechtle: A Retrospective, ed. Janet Bishop (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2005), text previous to plate 25.

11

Abject Art History Robert Slifkin

How is it that the social history of art, a methodology that has been closely associated with Marxism, has become, as one critical account on the discipline has suggested, “the most widely practiced approach to art history today”?1 This question seems especially enigmatic considering what most observers would agree to be the faded critical fortunes typically granted to Marxist thought within the academy—not to mention the wider culture—in the past thirty years. Is the rise of social art history a function of its growing extrication from the tenets of orthodox Marxism? Was its hegemony purchased by exchanging its radical politics of class struggle for a more moderate commitment to historical specificity? In his recent polemic against what he calls the “contextualist/historicist paradigm” that has largely engaged the academic study of literature since the 1980s, Joseph North makes this claim, arguing that the rise of post-Marxist social-historical approaches, along with their related skepticism toward formalist practices of “close reading,” represents the left’s accommodation to a neoliberal global hegemony, so that according to his account, what started out in the 1970s as a radical critique of universalist conceptions of aesthetic value and its attendant ideological formations became over time a liberal proclivity to produce an array of equally valid, if undoubtedly contestable, historically specific interpretations.2 While the underlying political repercussions of North’s analysis are debatable— which in many ways is the point of his polemical provocation (and, one might argue, is inherent to any sort of argument that seeks to understand the emergence of a phenomenon in terms of contextual factors as North’s analysis paradoxically does)— his larger assertion of the dominance of the historicist/contextual paradigm within what are still sometimes called “the humanities” at colleges and universities seems undeniable, as much in the field of art history as in literary studies. One need only pick up a recent issue of Art Bulletin or even more theoretically committed journals like October or, for that matter, visit an exhibition at a museum to see that Fredric Jameson’s influential imperative to “always historicize” still largely governs the most visible realms of the discipline.3 As a scholar who was powerfully influenced by Jameson’s mantra when I first encountered it as a graduate student, I have for the most part enthusiastically associated myself with the practice of social art history and its principles of materialism and

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historical specificity and, arguably more essential to its ethos, its critique of capitalism and its commitment to class struggle. However much I may offer a series of mitigating provisos in an attempt to distinguish and specify my personal understanding of what a historically sensitive or materialist approach to art history entails, “Social Art History” typically serves as my shorthand response to that awkward question that is occasionally posed by colleagues, students, and fellowship committees concerning one’s methodology. Yet, despite my generally unreserved affiliation with the methods of social art history there are times when I feel a little uncomfortable with its apparent hegemony as well as what I sometimes feel to be the unwieldiness and even tendentiousness of its contextualized correlations between art and life. If the former reservations likely arise from a personal predisposition—and political commitment informed by Marxist critiques of ideology—to root for the underdog and to look askance at anything that becomes too readily accommodated into the mainstream, the latter are no doubt products of my academic training, which emphasized the importance of producing research whose results are verifiable and transmissible within a community of scholars. In this regard, the ascendancy of contextualist approaches seems especially paradoxical considering what could be described as their non-formulaic character, since each new, historically specific interpretation—especially those more recent iterations that eschew the scientistic, teleological doctrines of classical Marxism— inherently refutes the sort of universal, or at least overriding, paradigms that enable the unified analysis of a larger corpus of work. Contextualist readings seem particularly ill-equipped to produce paradigmatic concepts or terminology that can be applied to other case studies. Consequently, one might ask if the hegemony of social art history in its current, post-Marxist contextualist form is somehow constitutive of the avowedly postmodern end of “grand narratives” and the increasing atomization of society diagnosed by numerous cultural critics.4 Or perhaps it could be argued that the rise of social art history reflects and responds to changes in the discipline and in recent developments in contemporary art in which questions of genre and medium, and even the contested ideal of aesthetic autonomy, seem no longer crucial if at all credible. As canons are deconstructed and the ontological basis of art is questioned, any method that proposes a general theory of art or aesthetics seems quixotic if not fundamentally misguided. Indeed, it seems quite plausible that the noted pluralism of contemporary art historical practice that is frequently advocated in graduate seminars on methodology is crucially informed by postmodern theories of cultural and historical relativity. Of course, claiming that the rise of social art history has something to do with its affinities to larger cultural factors would be a pretty standard, if dangerously vague and “zeitgeisty” social-historical interpretation. What follows, though, is not so much an inquiry into the social basis for social art history’s contemporary dominance or an analysis of its dissolution from the tenets of Marxism so much as an assessment of its very identity as an art historical practice. The specific challenges social art history poses as a distinct academic discipline, I want to argue, can be found not in its characteristic relativity, which is to say its commitment to historicism, but in what could be its

 Abject Art History 177 relationality, the way that it correlates art and life, forging connections between a work of art and something external to it. Because of its essential incorporation of ostensibly non-art historical (i.e., contextual) evidence, social art history entails a fundamental supplementary structure (which may also be understood in more academic terms as an interdisciplinarity) that compromises its identity as a discrete and coherent method. While this hypothesis might suggest an overgeneralized definition for what constitutes the practice of social art history (aligning it with methods such as iconology, visual culture, and psychoanalytic approaches which all to a certain extent take into account external, nonartistic information), I would like to propose that this expansive, allconsuming, if ultimately abysmal, relationality can be considered its definitive trait, albeit one that paradoxically comprises its identity as a coherent methodology. This relationality between the various markers of “life” that social art history attempts to align with its study of “art” entails a fundamental contingency, in terms of both the work of art as it is conceived by social art history and its social-historical analysis. Unlike other art historical methodologies that seek to govern and temper the unruly contingencies of history and thus formulate an analytic discipline, social art history makes these contingencies and relations constitutive of its approach. Ultimately, I will argue that these dynamics of governance and temperance—in a word, discipline—which define conventional (i.e., non-socially oriented) art historical methods can be understood in terms of the concept of abjection, which describes how identity is formed through a process of partition and exclusion and, as a corollary, how the medium of photography, with its ineluctable referential relation to the external world of things provides a potent model for an approach to art history that is able to incorporate the abject referentiality that these more conventional approaches to the discipline must suppress.

Form and Grace As its very name suggests, the study of art history examines the relationship between art and history. Yet, the precise contours of the relation between the work of art and its position in time cannot be securely delineated. While history in one form or another has been a nearly constant factor in the study of art since its development as an academic discipline in the late nineteenth century, just what is understood by the word “history” in “art history” has been quite variable, ranging from a chronological account of an artist’s career to more theoretically informed models of stylistic development and periodization, to the interpretation of art’s place within broader social factors at specific moments in time. That is to say that the discipline of art history has generated an array of methods that can account for both the intrinsic history of art—the events and actors related to the production of works of art—and art’s relationship to historical events that are ostensibly extrinsic to matters related to art and aesthetics. What distinguishes the practice of social art history, then, is what could be described as its extrinsically oriented or even elliptical and centrifugal relationship to its object of study. No matter how much the social art historian might avowedly privilege the work of art as a vessel of critical resistance or unrivaled complexity and intelligence,

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a social-historical approach typically demands research and analysis of concepts and events that are not directly related to artistic practice or aesthetic theories and often yields insights that shed significant light on broader historical and cultural forces. This tendency to make the work of art contingent to external factors is frequently cited as both a great strength and a weakness of social art history. Social art history’s practice of contextualization allows its interpretations to transcend what is often considered to be a formalist purity that too narrowly engages with issues surrounding the work’s aesthetic autonomy or, perhaps a little more broadly, questions of materials, processes, and artistic influences. Yet, it also carries the danger of positioning the work of art as a mere supplement to—or illustration of—historical factors which then become “the main event” of the interpretation. History in this regard becomes a problem for art history in that it makes the formalized—which is to say academic—study of objects contingent and thus not easily transmissible across time and space. History, one might say, makes the discipline of art history unsystematic, awkward, and unwieldy. History is what must be isolated or bracketed in order for art history to maintain its identity as an academic discipline. In a word, history is the abjection of art history. In the way it typically seeks to contextualize artistic production and reception, social art history can be understood as a methodology that ultimately reveals something categorically not art historical. Indeed, a frequent criticism waged against social art history is that it is not definitively art history, but something else: cultural history or visual culture or maybe just history. E. H. Gombrich, an early practitioner of such culturally attuned art history (who nonetheless asserted the need for “firmly established” disciplinary boundaries in order to establish its scholarly credentials), would recount how a colleague once described his identity as being at once both “less and more than an art historian,” (a description he embraced). While Gombrich’s approach was less concerned with questions related to technique, authentication, and chronology, which were central to what he described as more “mainstream” approaches to art history, his work’s wide-ranging research into social practices took it into territory that was conventionally associated with other disciplines such as history, sociology, and anthropology.5 If this multidisciplinary facet of social art history has traditionally been aligned with Marxist stances that foreground the economic basis of modern societies, Gombrich’s “cultural history,” as well as more recent variations often classified as the “new historicism,” has considered artistic practices in terms of a variety of contextual frameworks from theological rituals and the science of perception and the history of technology to the social construction of identity (whether national, postcolonial, or individual). While categorizing these various cases under the sign of social art history might seem overgeneralizing, it brings to the fore the way that their respective commitments to perceiving the work as a “piece of history,” as Svetlana Alpers put it in an early consideration of the “the new art history” in 1977, has become central to most contemporary approaches to the discipline.6 In fact, by positioning the work of art as a node within a network of external discourses that extend to an almost infinite array of possible informing factors, the methods of social art history contain what could be considered a supplemental logic that suggests its deep-seated affinities within

 Abject Art History 179 the broader philosophical concepts associated with postmodernism that sought to “decenter” anthropocentric and humanistic models of knowledge.7 These postmodern, pluralistic attributes have made social art history, as Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk have noted, “a broad church indeed.”8 The reasons for what might be described as the discipline’s apparent embrace of its supplemental structure—if not its inherent interdisciplinarity—are numerous and complex. Certainly, the long-standing conceptual antithesis famously articulated in Gotthold Lessing’s Laocoon (1766) between literature’s intrinsically temporal and diegetic structure and visual art’s punctual and mimetic basis goes a long way to explain why art, understood as a material representation of a discrete moment of time, would require some sort of expansive historical addendum in its reception, so that the singular event presented in the work of art could be positioned within a broader chronological matrix, whether in terms of surrounding historical events or a genealogy of influence or a temporality more internal to the work itself, such as the process of creation or its phenomenological reception. (These more internal temporal modes became increasingly prevalent with the rise of abstraction in the twentieth century.) Moreover, because art objects have been generally understood as unique material entities rather than reproducible texts (like novels or musical scores), the question of the art object’s physical existence in space and time has played a much larger role in the study of visual art than in other humanistic disciplines. Conventionally identified as physical “monuments” rather than linguistic “texts” or ephemeral performances, works of visual art—even professed postmodern and dematerialized instances—are often considered as exhibiting indexical registrations of the physical and visual passage of time, pointing to the world in which they were created and the constantly changing world within which they continue to exist. While the rise of nonmimetic models of art and the breakdown of discrete media have largely discredited approaches such as Lessing’s and the increased prevalence of reproducible (and, notably, indexical) media like print, cast sculpture, and, most significantly, photography have diminished the auratic presence of the unique work of art, the tendency to see the art object as somehow wicking its external conditions and “marking time” in an almost monumental manner remains a popular way of beholding art and continues to inform the study of art history (and, one should note, is imperative to the art market which has long operated as a crucial stimulus for the discipline). Because of its artifactual characteristics, visual art does, indeed, seem to be, as the old Hegelian saying goes, a “thing of the past,” and these various temporal distances that separate the “now time” of viewing the work from the moment of its creation—as well as the infinite moments between these two points—engender not only its aura but also the inevitable contextual caesuras and aporias that invite if not necessitate historical reconstruction.9 Moreover, because the work of art’s material relation to the past is progressively inaccessible, the account that the discipline of art history has produced is inherently fragmentary and largely contestable (which in this regard makes it similar to the discipline of history). Many art historical methods, from old school connoisseurship to high modernist formalism to poststructural semiotics, have bracketed these problems of contextualization by establishing internal temporal frameworks or conceptual

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paradigms that isolate the work from the contingencies of history. In fact, contextualist approaches were frequently eschewed by many of the discipline’s earliest practitioners for whom the questions of historical development were typically aligned to subjects internal to artistic practice, whether understood in terms of biography or stylistic development. These approaches, epitomized for generations of art history students by Heinrich Wölfflin’s famous stylistic dichotomies or, to cite a later manifestation of aesthetic formalism, Clement Greenberg’s theory of “medium specificity,” focused on what it took to be a discrete realm of artistic practice such as form, materials, and technique that was independent from external social factors, producing what Kurt Forster identified as a “compensatory” history, in which the “bloody struggle and chaotic events of [social and political] history” are replaced by art history’s “decontaminated change of formal patterns.”10 In fact, it could be argued that the academic institutionalization of the discipline in the early twentieth century was predicated on such “decontaminated” models which not only presented the study of art as something discrete but, equally important, also utilized analytic techniques that were focused on internal qualities of the work. The literary critic Paul de Man would call these methodological strategies instances of “aesthetic formalization” in which technical terminology is developed to describe the sensuous and largely subjective effects of art. Aesthetic formations like Wölfflin’s malerisch or Greenberg’s “flatness” allowed for an ostensibly empirical and repeatable analysis of artistic phenomenon that did not have to contend with the contingencies of external history except in a highly generalized fashion (so that, in the case of Greenbergian modernism, the duplicity and manipulative force of capitalist mass culture compels art to address its unique characteristics). This aesthetic distillation and formalization, according to de Man, “makes teaching possible” by establishing objective criteria and measurable terms (i.e., the sort of “formal patterns” mentioned by Forster) to analyze the subjective and embodied creations classified as art.11 Drawing upon Wilhelm von Kleist’s 1802 short story “On the Marionette Theater,” which presents a series of vignettes concerning the disparities between human ingenuity and the seeming perfection of such nonhuman entities as machines, animals, and puppets, de Man seeks to show in his essay how every attempt at aesthetic formalization, in its aspiration to excise the contingencies of bodily experience and human self-consciousness and consequently seize—and thus formalize—the sensuous grace produced by the aesthetic gesture, entails a crucial paradox. Since any sort of grace or purity can only be humanly achieved (and, equally important, transmitted across time and space) through some mode of formalization that translates the work’s sensuous immediacy into quantifiable systems that can exist outside of the contingencies of space of time, the sensuous experience that prompted the initial act of formalization is inherently compromised. Following the critic’s deconstructive logic, this dynamic of formalization always falls behind its idealized model and the gap between graceful ideal and informed analysis creates an unconsummated desire that is at once impossible and unavoidable. For de Man, aesthetic theory and art history are examples of a romantic compulsion to rationalize and formalize the inherently incomplete and oftentimes irrational experiences engendered by works of art.

 Abject Art History 181 The process of aesthetic formalization has been essential to the discipline of art history’s academic identity, distinguishing its practices from belletristic criticism and demonstrating its scientistic rigor and scholarly credentials. Moreover, in the way that the formalist “close reading” of individual works could serve as a model for an engaged citizenship or “critical thinking,” these practices of aesthetic formalization seem to posit an ethical basis for this pedagogical model. By determining various formal categories and identifying rhetorical tropes or theoretical paradigms (for instance, Wölfflin’s contrasts, Greenbergian flatness, or Bataillian informe), sensuous and irrational experiences are translated into concepts. What was an individual experience occurring at a discrete time and space is externalized through language and invested with a certain degree of rigor or repeatability, thus allowing analytic paradigms based on collective, if not universal, agreement upon what are seen to be the relevant evaluative criteria. Translating the unstudied “grace” of embodied experience with a rational self-awareness, aesthetic formalization offers a decorous and distilled surrogate for its idealized object. Like academic disciplines themselves, aesthetically formalized analyses in this regard seek an autonomous integrity commensurate with the avowed autonomy they typically posit for the work of art. Both art work and analysis are bracketed from the contingencies of history so that their principles are accessible and intelligible across the vagaries of time and space. By incorporating into its analysis extra-artistic entities—the contingencies of life rather than the categorically conventional precepts of art—social art history differs from such models of aesthetic formalization. Its findings, based on the set of correlations between art and the world beyond the work of art can never be definitive. Forged by the individual scholar, these relations, moreover, entail a fundamental degree of subjectivity. They often rely on a figural logic in which the work of art serves as a synecdoche for some larger event of idea, or as Walter Benjamin might posit, allegorically presents a promise of some messianic redemption.12 Social art history’s commitment to interpretation and contextualization compromises aesthetic formalization through the contamination of historical contingency. By acknowledging the inevitable mediation and contingency of works of art, which is to say their fundamental lack of autonomy, social art history produces interpretations that are as contingent as their objects of study.

Photography as Model Is it possible to understand social art history’s unsystematic contingency as a strength rather than a weakness? Does its incorporation of non-art historical evidence, the “other” of the discipline’s formalized identity, compromise its academic bona fides, marking it as too expansive and heterodox—and arguably too laborious—in its interdisciplinary reach to be “teachable” (even as the amount of scholarship produced under the sign of social art history continues to expand)? As a concluding gesture, I would like to consider how these questions about social art history’s unstable identity as a coherent method and its referential contingency suggest compelling parallels with

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the concept of abjection and the medium of photography and, in particular, its vexed relationship to the established conventions of art history. The concept of the abject enjoyed something of a vogue in the art criticism of the last decades of the previous millennium. Drawing chiefly upon the work of Julia Kristeva, whose 1980 book Powers of Horror evocatively explored the concept in psychoanalytic terms, numerous artists and writers began to explore manifestly gross and unsettling subjects such as excrement and wounded bodies which, according to Kristeva’s theorizations, blur the distinctions between interior and exterior states, and more generally unsettle conventional notions of subjecthood and the self ’s relationship to the world. According to Kristeva, abjection can be understood as the process in which a subject expels something in order to produce and maintain a coherent sense of self. The abject—feces for instance—is that which “disturbs identity, system, order” and which must be excised in order for the entity to secure identity.13 As Hal Foster argued in an essay that considered the trend of abject art, these invocations of the abject, epitomized in Cindy Sherman’s photographic portrayals of festering wounds and flayed bodies from the late 1980s, provided a means of accessing a sense of the traumatic real, providing a glimpse into a mode of perception unadulterated by societal norms and cultural taboos.14 Social art history’s long affinity with vulgar and marginalized subjects—one can think of Bruegel’s peasants and Courbet’s stonebreakers as cardinal examples—might seem to suggest the deep-seated affinities between its materialist and Marxist methods and its sustained attention to themes of abjection in which the social “other,” typically excluded from established accounts, is granted representational significance and political importance. Yet, rather than focusing on ostensibly abject subject matter— which as the vogue for abject art in the 1990s demonstrates, does not automatically entail social-historical let alone Marxist interpretation—I would like to consider how the process of abjection has shaped the conventional discipline of art history. If the graceless contingencies of history which had to be excluded from the formulas of art history in order for the discipline to become systematic and teachable can be considered the abjection of art history then social art history’s incorporation of external evidence beyond the pale of established art discourse and its commitment to interpreting the work of art as signifying something beyond the realm of art itself suggest how it can be understood as an abject art history, one that has made the referential refuse of conventional art history into the cornerstone of its practice. This commitment to the contingencies of history, which can be understood as a commitment to the referential prerequisite of the work of art, suggests a meaningful correspondence to the medium of photography, which itself has long been excluded from mainstream art historical discourse. As numerous scholars have noted, photography, unlike traditional artistic media like painting and sculpture, exists—and in many ways flourishes—in numerous non-aesthetic manifestations. Because of what Christopher Pinney has described as its “complex social life,” its multiple existences in both aesthetic and non-aesthetic realms, photography exhibits a fundamental contingency in terms of its identity that compromises any claims for its aesthetic autonomy and makes any possible meanings or functions ascribed to a photographic

 Abject Art History 183 image relative to its context.15 For instance, the very same photographic portrait can serve as a form of state-sanctioned identification, a vivid memorial for a deceased family member, a piece of documentary evidence for journalistic reportage or legal forensics, or, when placed within aesthetic formalized institutions like the museum, a work of art. Moreover, and more significant in terms of photography’s relation to social art history, the medium exhibits a referential prerequisite that makes its relationship to external reality essential, thus establishing another even more fundamental degree of contingency. In the way that an actual pepper is needed to produce a photograph of a pepper and that there are no photographs—or at least unaltered photographs—of unicorns, photography is a mode of representation that requires the presence of its subject matter, or, to invoke the semiotic terms often used in the academic discourse on the medium, the photographic sign necessitates the physical presence of its referent. This has led numerous commentators to emphasize the indexical quality of the medium, the way that the photographic image is predicated on a certain direct imprint from reality. If social art history is a method that, because of its materialist commitment to interpreting art’s relationship to history, ultimately articulates something external to art, something categorically not about art, then one might argue that the paradigmatic medium to understand this dynamic is photography, a medium that Roland Barthes declared (in notably abject terms), is “carnal” because of its “umbilical” relationship to its referent.16 One could say that both social art history and photography are fundamentally referential in a notably externally oriented way. In order to enter the discipline of art history, photography has had to disavow these externally oriented and referentially grounded tendencies through what could be described as a process of abjection.17 The historian of photography Stephen Pinson has noted this inner-directed tendency of the field, describing how “scholars and critics have continuously looked inward, rather than outward; they have extolled photography’s virtues as an art form in and of itself, traced its technical pedigree as a revolutionary innovation distinct from other visual arts, interrogated its discursive spaces, and analyzed its etiology, meaning, and medium specificity.”18 If for Pinson, photography’s status as a distinct artistic medium was largely established by abjuring its relationship to other aesthetic practices, it was likewise predicated on focusing on matters intrinsic to its technical constitution. In other words, photography’s identity as art necessitated an act of abjection in which the functional and even referential facets of the medium were subsumed to more internal issues. (This in many ways is Jeff Wall’s influential argument which posits that photography established itself as a modern art “through the dynamics of autocritique” by downplaying the medium’s depictive properties.)19 In order to become part of art history, the history of photography had to largely discount its referential contingency, the way every photograph marks time and documents a discrete moment in history, and, instead, focus on internal issues and relations within established aesthetic boundaries that were formulated in terms of conventional artistic media like painting and sculpture. The cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer repeatedly explored the way that photography’s referential contingency distinguished it from other forms of visual representation,

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describing the medium in his 1960 book Theory of Film as an “art with a difference.” According to Kracauer, the “difference” of photography was located precisely in the medium’s apparent supplementary structure in relation to traditional artistic media like painting and sculpture. Photography and film are, according to Kracauer, “the only art which exhibits its raw material.”20 Using language that drew upon Antonin Artaud’s description of cinema’s “raw material” as “the outer skin of things, the epidermis of reality,” Kracauer describes how traditional art forms accentuate formal coherence over materialist contingency.21 He writes: To the extent that painting, literature, the theater, etc. involve nature at all, they do not really represent it. Rather, they use it as raw material from which to build works which lay claim to autonomy. In the work of art, nothing remains of the raw material itself, or, to be precise, all that remains of it is so molded that it implements the intentions conveyed through it. In a sense, the real-life material disappears in the artist’s intentions.

This separation from reality allows the artist working in traditional media to create “a significant whole” that could not exist in everyday reality, thus generating the aesthetic autonomy so prized in western aesthetics.22 (Indeed, one might go so far as to argue that this ideal of aesthetic autonomy was a function of the technical preconditions of media like painting, which inherently separates the artistic representation from its external referent.) Or, to put it in terms of the process of abjection, in traditional artistic media, “raw” external reality is obscured and suppressed in the objective of artistic autonomy and formal grace. In its ambition to make the raw material of art signify beyond its discrete aesthetic or art historical boundaries, one might argue that social art history treats all works of art like photographs, not only by generating interpretations that convey something extrinsic to the actual work which is often neither intentional nor self-evident, but also that they are unrivaled in revealing aspects of the world that cannot be discerned through more direct modes of interrogation. (Kracauer would use the figure of Perseus’s shield to describe this obliquely reflective capacity of film to reflect the traumatic and repressed figures of history.) If this makes social art history not quite art history, the way photography is not quite art, it nonetheless indicates both practices’ capacity for expanding the respective definitions of art and art history. Just as Matthew Witkovski has argued that “photography as a field of inquiry” exists in a state of “productive disunity” in which it is “bastard history that counts most,” social art history’s expansive reach has fundamentally altered the boundaries of the discipline at large, making art history’s nominal hybrid status as both art and history a constitutive element of its identity.23 Kracauer would expand upon his insights concerning photography’s distinctive attachment to physical reality in his posthumously published study of historiography, which in certain ways can be considered a pendant to his Theory of Film. In it Kracauer identifies “significant analogies” between the practice of history and that of photography (as well as cinema), noting the parallel emergence of “modern

 Abject Art History 185 historiography,” announced in Leopold von Ranke’s 1824 book Geschichte der romantischen und germansichen Voelker von 1494 bis 1514 and the public declaration of the first successful photographic images fifteen years later. Because, according to Kracauer, both “historical reality” and “photographic reality” deal with material that “eludes the grasp of systematic thought,” they “share their inherently provisional character with the material they record, explore and penetrate.” In this regard, he argues, the historian’s craft is much like the photographer’s art in that both must render the inherently indeterminate facts of physical reality into coherent and significant unities that are ultimately authorized only by the selection and arrangement of the individual scholar/artist, or as he puts it, the “formative impulses” necessary to construct a coherent historical account must be governed by the “realistic intentions” articulated in the material facts at the historian’s disposal.24 If this sense of contingency and provisionality is fundamental to the materialist politics of Marxism in which, as Jacques Derrida has argued, every analytic gesture must also acknowledge its “intrinsically irreducible historicity” and even its “own possible ‘ageing,’” it has also been recognized as a central virtue of social art history.25 In one of his earliest statements about the practice of social art history, T. J. Clark would recognize its particular claim to an unsystematic approach, describing his chosen method as “the place where the questions have to be asked, and where they cannot be asked in the old way.”26 If the inherent contingency of the social-historical approach always entails the possibility that its discoveries will be provisional and subject to be disproven, it also suggests a model for a discipline that can change with new discoveries and new cultural priorities, new matters of concern. In these terms, the function of social art history paradoxically returns to disciplinary concerns, becoming a privileged site to question its conventional corpus and evaluative criteria even as its claims may always be vulnerable to future obsolescence as new knowledge and new concerns develop. Returning to my original question regarding the apparent ubiquity of social art history within the discipline, perhaps it is this self-reflexivity that explains its current hegemonic status. As such social art history’s capacity to incorporate all other methods enacts a sort of detournement of the discipline’s abjection of history, marshaling these formulas in the name of interpretations that ultimately reach beyond the confines of art and aesthetics. If this self-reflexivity suggests social art history’s fundamental modernism, it also, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, indicates its avant-gardist ethos whose ultimate telos would be the end of art history as a distinct discipline.

Notes 1 Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk, Art History: A Critical Introduction to Its Methods (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 134. 2 Joseph North, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 1. 3 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Durham: Duke University Press, 1981), 9. Thomas Crow diagnosed the rise of social

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art history as “something of a new default function of the field,” in his insightful survey of the discipline, “The Practice of Art History in America,” Daedalus 135 (Spring 2006): 86. 4 See, for instance, Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art, trans. Christopher Wood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 5 E. H. Gombrich, “Erasmus Prize Acceptance Speech,” Simiolus 8 (1975-96), 48; Gombrich, audio recording from 1993, from Dixi Stewart and Paul Kobrak, “The Story of E. H. Gombrich,” BBC Radio 4 https​://ww​w.bbc​.co.u​k/pro​gramm​es/b0​bcdd8​j. Accessed August 2, 2018. 6 Svetlana Alpers, “Is Art History?” Deadalus (Summer 1977): 1. 7 On the act of decentering, see Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 278–94. 8 Hatt and Klonk, Art History: A Critical Introduction to Its Methods, 134. 9 For a recent attempt to deprioritize the original moment of creation and consider the multiple moments of historical reception of a work of art, see Christopher Wood and Alexander Nagel, Anachronic Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2010). 10 Kurt W. Forster, “Critical History of Art, or Transfiguration of Values?,” New Literary History 3 (Spring 1972): 460. 11 Paul de Man, “Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 272. 12 Walter Benjamin, “The Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott and others (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 391, 390. 13 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 2. This interest in the abject was considered in the exhibition Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American art, Selections from the Permanent Collection, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993). 14 Hal Foster, “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” October 78 (Fall 1996): 107–24. 15 Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 10. 16 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 80. 17 In fact, Geoffrey Batchen has described the vast array of vernacular practices that have been largely ignored within conventional histories of the medium as “the abject photographies for which an appropriate history must now be written.” See Batchen, “Vernacular Photographies,” in Each Wild Idea: Writing Photography History (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 57. 18 Stephen C. Pinson, “Omphaloskeptical: On Daguerre, Smoke Drawings, Finger Painting, and Photography,” in Photography and Its Origins, ed. Tayna Sheehan and Andrés Mario Zervignon (New York: Routledge, 2015), 42. 19 Jeff Wall, “Marks of Indifference: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art,” in Jeff Wall: Selected Essays and Interviews (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2007), 143. 20 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 300, 302. 21 Antonin Artaud, “The Shell and the Clergyman,” Transition 20 (June 1930): 65. Kracauer cites this passage on page 189 of Theory of Film, notably misidentifying its

 Abject Art History 187 source as Louis Aragon’s essay, Louis Aragon, “Painting and Reality: A Discussion,” Transition 25 (Fall 1936). 22 Kracauer, Theory of Film, 300, 301. 23 Matthew Witkovsky, “Photography as Model,” October 158 (Fall 2016): 11, 13. 24 Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last Things Before the Last (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 1995), 49, 191, 57. Kracauer is not alone in recognizing the powerful affinities between photography and history. For an extended, and notably Benjaminian, consideration of this subject, see Edward Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 25 Jacques Derrida, “Spectres of Marx,” New Left Review 205 (May/June 1994): 32. 26 T. J. Clark, “The Conditions of Artistic Creation,” Times Literary Supplement (May 24, 1974), reprinted in Eric Fernie, ed. Art History and Its Methods: A Critical Anthology (London: Phaidon, 1998), 251.

188 

Contributors Jo Applin teaches at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. She is the author of Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture in 1960s America, Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field, and, most recently, Lee Lozano: Not Working. She is currently writing a book about art, aging, and feminism in the 1960s. Since 2014 she has been a member of the Editorial Group of Oxford Art Journal. André Dombrowski is Frances Shapiro-Weitzenhoffer Associate Professor of nineteenth-century European Art at the University of Pennsylvania, where his research centers on the arts and material cultures of France and Germany in the nineteenth century. He has written on such crucial artists of the period as Paul Cézanne, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Adolf von Menzel, to name but a few. Winner of the Phillips Book Prize, he is the author of Cézanne, Murder, and Modern Life (2013), a book that analyzes Cézanne’s early oeuvre through the lens of pre-Freudian definitions of desire and instinct. He is currently completing a second book, tentatively entitled Monet’s Minutes: Impressionism and the Industrialization of Time, which studies the relation between the impressionist “instant” and the global histories of latenineteenth-century time-keeping. Anthony E. Grudin received his PhD in art history from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2008. He is the author of Warhol’s Working Class (2017), and Animal Warhol (forthcoming). His essays have appeared in Oxford Art Journal, October, and Criticism. He has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, California College of the Arts, and the University of Vermont. Marci Kwon is Assistant Professor of Art & Art History at Stanford University. Her book, Enchantments: Joseph Cornell and American Modernism, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press in 2021. Elizabeth Mansfield specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art and art historiography. Her publications include the books The Perfect Foil: FrançoisAndré Vincent and the Revolution in French Painting and Too Beautiful to Picture: Zeuxis, Myth, and Mimesis. The latter was awarded the Charles Rufus Morey book prize by the College Art Association in 2008. She has also edited or coedited several anthologies, including Art History and Its Institutions, Making Art History, and Seeing Satire. She is a member of the faculty at Penn State, where she is also Head of the Department of Art History.

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Alexander Nemerov is the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Stanford University, where he is also the Chair of the Art and Art History Department. His new book, Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York, is forthcoming from Penguin in 2021. Our Literal Speed is a text and art undertaking located in Selma, Alabama, since 2006. Hector Reyes is Associate Professor (Teaching) at the University of Southern California. His main research interests include history painting and the legacy of Nicolas Poussin during the long eighteenth century. Jordan M. Rose is Assistant Professor of Art History in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. He is currently working on a book titled The Spell of the Barricade: Art and Politics in France, 1830-1852. Joshua Shannon is Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland. His scholarship and teaching focus on art’s relationships to political and cultural history during and since the Cold War period, with special interests in architecture, cities, landscape, and ecology. His previous publications include The Recording Machine: Art and Fact During the Cold War (2017) and The Disappearance of Objects: New York Art and the Rise of the Postmodern City (2009). His coedited volume Humans is forthcoming in the series Terra Foundation Essays. Robert Slifkin is an Associate Professor of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. He is the author of The New Monuments and the End of Man: U.S. Sculpture between War and Peace, 1945-1975 (2019) and Out of Time: Philip Guston and the Refiguration of Postwar American Art (2013).

Index Note: Page numbers in italics refers to figures. abjection  8, 175–7 Absolute Bourgeois, The (Clark)  1, 73, 105 Absorption and Theatricality (Fried)  107 absorptive beholding  107 Adorno, T.  162, 171 n.4 aesthetic autonomy  184 aesthetic formalization, significance of  180–1 aesthetic forms, significance of  160 aesthetic sensitivity  14 Afflicted Powers (Clark)  80 After Dinner at Ornans (Courbet) (painting)  105 agency, individual  15, 24 Alberti, L. B.  15 Alberto Sánchez, C.  84 n.80 allegory  7, 89–90, 107, 181 Alpers, S.  2, 25–6, 178 ancient art  13–14 and social systems  20 Andes of Ecuador, The (Church) (painting)  167 Antal, F.  1, 19, 162 Antiochus and Stratonice (David) (painting)  37 Applebroog, I.  147–8 Applin, J.  157 n.32, 158 n.38 Aragon, L.  187 n.21 Argenteuil, les canotiers (Manet) (painting)  163, 164 Ariès, P.  49 n.24 art. See also individual entries for art’s sake  20 globalization and  27 Hauser on  19–21 as ideological form  1 ideology and  21–2, 26 as index of historical change  2

and life, blurring of  148–9, 153 market studies  28 n.2, 30–1 n.44 quasi-autonomous quality of  21 synthetic approach to  24 Taine on  16 transcendence and  16, 27 “Art and Objecthood” (Fried)  107 Art and Revolution (Berger)  103 Artaud, A.  184, 186 n.21 Art Bulletin (journal)  171 n.1, 175 art historians  35, 72, 114, 115, 162 abject art history and  177, 178 art and life and  145, 153, 155 significance of  1, 8, 75 social art history and  7, 12, 18–19, 22, 24, 25, 101, 104, 109, 111 n.1 “Art History in the Age of ImageMachines” (Clark)  70, 71 Art in the Modern State (Dilke)  18 Art of Describing, The (Alpers)  25 Art Workers’ Coalition  143 Assemblages, Environments and Happenings (Kaprow)  148 Association of Art Historians  70 Audubon, J. J.  166, 167 Aulinger, B.  27 n.1 Ault, J.  126, 130 n.35 avant-garde  22, 34, 52, 55, 71, 149 Babbitt, I.  29 n.22 Banville, T.  90 Barnstorming the Prairies (Weems)  165 Barthes, R.  161, 162, 183 Bartky, I. R.  67 n.30 Batchen, G.  186 n.17 Bathers (Cézanne)  72 Baudelaire, C.  52–3, 88–9 Baxandall, M.  24 Bechtle, R.  169, 170

192 Bellamy, R.  154 Benjamin, W.  34, 62, 63, 78, 171 n.4, 181 Berger, J.  6, 101–3 time sense of  103–4 uncanny contemporaneity and  103 Bigourdan, G.  67 n.31 Birds of America, The (Audubon)  166, 167 Blunt, A.  105 Boime, A.  30 n.38 Bois, Y.-A.  161, 162, 171 n.2, 172 nn.8, 10 Borzello, F.  158 n.43 Bosch, H.  104 Boulogne, V.  108 Bourdieu, P.  25 Bourdin, M.  42, 43 Bradley, A. C.  78 Brecht, B.  97, 98 Bredekamp, H.  9 n.16 Brothers Le Nain, Painters of 17th-Century France (exhibition)  102 Bruegel, P.  77, 78, 79, 182 Buchholz, D.  130 n.35 Burckhardt, J.  15–16 Burial at Ornans, The (Courbet) (painting)  22, 23, 74 Cactus Enthusiast, The (Spitzweg) (painting)  5, 55 description of  55–6 Cactus Friend, The (Spitzweg) (painting)  57 description of  56 Cadava, E.  188 n.24 Caillebotte, G.  5, 54, 60 on urban flâneur and modern time  60–4 Capital (Marx)  52 capitalism  70, 97 distribution under  81 n.23 practices of representation and  72 Card Players (Cézanne) (painting)  75, 109 Dombrowski on  110

Index Card Players, The (Le Nain) (painting)  6, 102, 111 Berger on  102–5 Clark on  105–6 description of  101–2, 106 Fried on  107–8 Caricaturana (Daumier)  5, 85–6 C’est toujours de même flatteur…  87 Monsieur Daumier, votre série est charmante…  86 reversals in  87–8 caricature  92 allegory and  89–90 aporetic activity and  95–6 Baudelaire on  88–9 dividedness and difference and  94–5 doubleness of  88–9 equivalence and  89 exchange in  88 modernity of  89 from paradox  88 significance of  85, 88 Cassatt, M.  149, 154 Cézanne, P.  72, 75, 77, 108–9, 163 Champfleury  105 Chinatown  117–22 San Francisco, significance of  117–18, 127 Chinese New Year (Wong) (painting)  127 Chinese Telephone Exchange (Wong) (painting)  122–3, 122 Chong, D.  129 n.13 Chow, R.  126 Choy, P.  116, 123 Chronophobia (Lee)  52 Church, F. D.  168 City Beautiful Movement  129 n.31 Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (Burckhardt)  15 Clark, T. J.  33, 66 n.12, 99 n.20, 185. See also individual entries on abstraction of painting  44, 46 on Art  22 on artistic subject and object  35 on bourgeoisie and intellectual history  34

 Index 193 on capitalism  70 practices of representation and  72 on flatness  163–4 Hegelianism of  48 n.4 on historical consciousness  106 on impressionism  163 on Le Nains  105 on Left politics  79 on Marat’s sacred body  40–, 43 on modernism  72–3 history of  36–7 shift in analysis of  76–7 on particularity and materiality  71–2 peasant materialism and  81 nn.3, 8, 14, 17, 82 n.43, 83 nn.47–8, 55–6 social art history and  1, 4, 6, 8, 9 nn.17–18, 21–2, 24, 26, 27, 28 n.6, 29 n.31 on socialism  73 on sovereignty claims  36–7 on text and context  51 temporal awareness and  106 Clover, J.  98 n.11 Clunas, C.  27 n.1, 30 n.36, 171 n.1, 172 n.6 College Art Association  12, 28 n.2 Comte, A.  16, 29 n.19 cooter tracking, significance of  134 Corday, C.  35, 41, 46, 47 Costa, G.  28 n.7 Costinas, C.  129 n.13 Courbet, G.  21, 22, 23, 34, 52, 73, 74, 77, 103, 182 Crary, J.  52 Crawley, A. T.  129 n.10 critical art history  158 n.43 Crow, T.  26, 171 n.1, 185–6 n.3 cultural heritage  9 n.12 cultural history  178 Dabydeen, D.  30 n.38 Darwin, C.  166, 173 n.31 Daumier, H.  5, 21, 54, 85. See also individual entries Gargantua  91–2, 91 July Hero, May 1831, A  92, 93–5, 98

La Lecture  95–6, 96 Projet d’une médaille  90, 91 David, J.-L.  5, 35, 36, 47, 77, 79 Marat’s sacred body and  39–44 Day, G.  1, 81 n.3 Daybook (Truitt)  145 Death of Marat (David) (painting)  5, 35, 36, 42, 72, 73 de Baca, M.  156 n.5 de Beauvoir, S.  149 de Bellio, G.  63 Debord, G.  70, 80 Degas, E.  54, 61 de Man, P.  72, 180 Derrida, J.  185 Destutt de Tracy, A.-L.-C.  29 n.26 diachronic analysis  47 Dialogue Piece (Lozano)  152 Didion, J.  143, 144, 148, 154 Dilke, E.  18, 19 Dine, J.  148 Dombrowski, A.  5, 67 n.29, 109–10 double-bodied king, idea of  5, 37, 39, 41, 43–5 tricolon ritual and  45 Dropout Piece (Lozano)  144, 150, 152, 153, 154 “Education of the Un-Artist” (Kaprow)  148–9 Eisenstein, S.  161 empiricism, definition of  17 Engels, F.  18 Engraving the Savage (Gaudio)  165 Ensor, J.  78 epistemic history, significance of  168, 173 n.33 Eurocentrism  80 Farewell to an Idea (Clark)  69–72, 76, 77, 105, 106 “Fateful Attachments” (Chow)  126 Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan)  148 feudal archaisms  34 First Pop Age, The (Foster)  172 n.10 Flâneur definition of  63

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and modern time  60–4 significance of  62 flatness, significance of  163–4, 180 “For a Left with No Future” (Clark)  73, 78, 79, 83 n.55 form  159 actual-size representation of  163 aerial  165 aesthetic  160 of engraving  165 formalism and  161–2 social history of art and  162–4 life-size representation as  166 morphological  173 n.26 ordinary as  170 photorealism and  168–70 significance of  159–60 of silhouette  165 skeptical glance and  166 social  160 as structural  160 trompe l’oeil paintings and  165–6 formalism  2, 7–8, 105, 159–60, 168, 175, 178–81 morphological and structural  171 n.2 significance of  161–2 social history of art and  162–4 Forster, K.  180 Foster, H.  162, 172 n.10, 182 Foster’s Freeze, Escalon (Bechtle)  169 significance of  169–70 Foucault, M.  125, 162, 173 n.33 Fournel, V.  62–3 Fraser, D.  84 n.80 Frederic Church (Raab)  166–7 Fried, M.  6, 101, 107, 112 n.18 on moment  107, 108 Friedan, B.  148 funerary oration, significance of  46 funerary ritual/procession  38 abstracted power and  39 of Henry IV  45–6 kingliness and  40 kingly doubleness and  44 power and  40 significance of  38, 40 technological developments and  41, 42

Galison, P.  67 n.30 Garb, T.  155 Garden of Earthly Delights (Bosch)  104 Gaudio, M.  165 General Strike Piece (Lozano)  150, 152 Gérard, M.  47 Germa-Romann, H.  49 n.24 Geschichte der romantischen und germansichen Voelker von 1494 bis 1514 (von Ranke)  185 Giesey, R. E.  37, 41 Glissant, E.  129 n.10 Gombrich, E. H.  65 n.5, 178 Gould, S. J.  173 n.31 Grant Avenue (Wong) (painting)  121, 123–4 Grass Piece (Lozano)  143 Grauman’s Chinese Theater  117–18 Graybill, L.  49 n.22 Greenberg, C.  3, 7, 33, 144, 156 n.5, 161, 180 Guernica (Picasso) (painting)  78 Guilbaut, S.  48 n.5 Hadjinicolaou, N.  30 n.31 Harnett, W.  165, 173 n.25 Harris, J.  158 n.43 Harry Chong Laundry (Wong) (painting)  118, 119 Hartman, S.  129 n.10 Haskell, F.  24 Hatt, M.  171 n.1, 172 n.6, 179 Hauser, A.  1, 11, 19–21, 24, 33, 65 n.5, 162 Havell Jr., R.  167 Hazlitt, W.  78 Heart of the Andes, The (Church) (painting)  167 Heaven on Earth (Clark)  83 n.55 Heidegger, M.  84 n.80 Henry IV, death of  45–6 wax effigy and  42, 43 Hesse, E.  144, 145, 149, 154, 155, 156 n.6 on writing process  147 History of Ancient Art (Winckelmann)  13, 15, 17, 27 History of English Literature (Taine)  16 history of ideas  33–4

 Index 195 Hopper, E.  118 Horkheimer, M.  171 n.4 Huart, L.  62 Humboldt, A.  173 n.31 ideology political and artistic  34 significance of  21–2, 26, 29 n.26 Image of the People (Clark)  1, 21, 34, 74, 81 n.14, 105 impressionism  8, 76, 83 n.47, 109, 149, 163 social history of art in standard time and  54, 60–1, 63, 64 inheritance, significance of  47–8 intellectual history  33–4 International Art Market Studies Association  28 n.2 I Send You This Cadmium Red (Berger)  102 Jameson, F.  171 n.4, 175, 185 n.3 Jensen, J. C.  65 n.9 Jones, S. H.  130 n.38 Joselit, D.  9 n.12 July Hero, A (Daumier)  5 July Monarchy significance of  90–3 unification myth of  93 Jung, J.  129 n.25 Junyk, I.  49 n.22 Kafka, F.  54 Kahn, S.  29 n.23 Kantorowicz, E.  37, 39, 41 Kaprow, A.  148–9, 156 Kazan, E.  113 King, H.  118 kingly ritual and royal authority  41–2 kingship, theological basis of  39, 40 Klonk, C.  171 n.1, 172 n.6, 179 Knes, H. P.  126, 130 n.35 Knitting Sentinel, The (Spitzweg) (painting)  5, 57 description of  56 Kracauer, S.  183–5, 186–7 n.21, 187 n.24 Krauss, R.  9 n.13 Kristeva, J.  182, 186 n.13

Kusama, Y.  148 Kuspit, D.  173 n.35 Lacan, J.  81 n.14 Laing, R. D.  152 Land of Cockaigne, The (Bruegel) (painting)  78 Landscape with a Snake (Poussin) (painting)  78 Laocoon (Lessing)  179 Lao She  126 “la race”  16 Le Brun, C.  18 Le combat devant l’Hôtel de Ville, le 28 juillet 1830 (Schnetz) (painting)  93 Lee, P.  52, 112 n.18 Lehrer-Graiwer, S.  157 n.38 Leja, M.  165–6, 173 nn.25–6 “le milieu”  16, 17 “le moment”  16, 17 Le Nain, L.  6, 107 Lessing, G.  179 Levine, C.  172 n.4 Lilac and Flag (Berger)  103 Lilti, A.  9 n.16 Lippard, L.  147, 154, 158 n.39 Lissitzky, E.  72, 74, 77, 79 liturgical practices, significance of  39 Looking Askance (Leja)  165 Louis-Philippe  88, 93 Louis Philippe (Vernet) (painting)  93 Louis XV, body of  37–8 Lozano, L.  7, 143–4, 152, 155, 156 art and life blurring by  154 art-life experiment of  149–51 boycott of women by  152–3 contradictory statements and  145–6 life, post-drop-out  157–8 n.38 “Private Books” of  144–5, 146, 153 Lubin, D. M.  174 n.35 Lukács, G.  171 n.4 Macaire, R.  85–7 McClellan, A.  39 McWilliam, N.  27 n.1 Maid Asleep, A (Vermeer) (painting)  23 Manet, E.  76, 163–4, 164

196 Manet’s Modernism (Fried)  107 Mannheim, K.  71 Marat, M.  35, 46 sacred body of  37–44 as both sacrificer and sacrificed  41 funerary processions  38, 44 sacerdotal function  40, 42 as symbol of “the people”  40 Marie-Antoinette, death of  44 Marrinan, M.  66 n.23 Marx, K.  17, 18, 36, 91 Marxist social history  1–5, 33, 48 n.5, 52, 78, 105–6, 175–6, 178, 182, 185 social art history and  11, 13, 17–25, 27, 30 n.31 Mash, M.  158 n.43 medium specificity, idea of  180 Mei Lan Fang (Wong) (painting)  123 Melville, H.  166 methodology  11, 22 discipline and  12 history, phases of  1–2 microhistory  11–12 historical analysis reorientation and  12 Middlemore, S. G. C.  29 n.15 Millet, J.-F.  75 modernism  72–3 history of  36–7 peasant materialism and  73–9 shift in analysis of  76–7 modernity  53, 121, 122, 155, 157 n.19 of caricature  89 form and  163–5, 170, 172 n.10 July Monarchy and  92 peasant materialism and  72–9 social art history age and  103, 105, 106, 109 monarchical power, significance of  37 Monet, C.  61, 63 Morisot, B.  149, 154 Morris, W.  17, 78 Morton, M.  66 n.23 Mourning Athena  20 Ms. Chinatown (Wong) (painting)  124–5, 124

Index Müller, C.  130 n.35 Murder, The (Cézanne) (painting)  109 My Secret World, 1978-81 (Wong) (painting)  113, 114 Nagel, A.  9 n.13, 186 n.9 Nead, L.  155 Neizvestny, E.  103 Nemerov, A.  118, 129 n.31 New Art History  2–3, 154–5, 158 n.43, 178 Nietzsche, F.  78, 83 n.47 Nighthawks (Hopper) (painting)  118 Nisbet, R.  28 n.7 Nochlin, L.  25, 30 n.38 North, J.  175 notebook-keeping strategies  143. See also Lozano, L. and art and life blurring  148–9, 153, 156 art-life experiment of Lozano and  149–51 writing of self and  144–8 O’Brien, R.  124 October (journal)  8, 26, 161, 162, 175 Ogle, V.  67 n.30 Olmstead, F.  122 “On Keeping a Notebook” (Didion)  143, 144, 148 “On the Heroism of Modern Life” (Baudelaire)  52 “On the Marionette Theater” (von Kleist)  180 On the Pont de l’Europe (Caillebotte)  5, 61 description of  61–3 “On the Very Idea of a Subversive Art History” (Clark)  70, 71 On the Waterfront (film)  113 “Open Hearing” (Art Workers’ Coalition)  143 Order of Things, The (Foucault)  173 n.33 ordinariness of ordinary, significance of  138, 139, 141 Orwicz, M. R.  65 n.5 Our Literal Speed (OLS)  7, 131 performance  132

 Index 197 Ouzof, M.  39 Owens, C.  114, 128 n.6 Painting and Experience in FifteenthCentury Italy (Baxandall)  24 Painting as Model (Bois)  172 n.10 Painting of Modern Life, The (Clark)  8, 69, 82 n.42, 105, 163 Parker, R.  155 Pasolini, P. P.  73 peasant materialism  6, 69–70 modernism and  73–9 tragic materialism and  73, 77, 78 Pecht, F.  59 Penington, I.  78 “period eye”  24 Permanent Red (Berger)  102 perpetual movement, significance of  52–3 Philipon, C.  87–8, 88 photography  182–5 as art  183 parallel with history  184–5 referential contingency of  183–4 and social art compared  183 photorealism  173 n.35 and painting  168–70 Physiologie du flâneur (Huart)  62 Picasso, P.  83 n.47 Picasso and Truth (Clark)  76 Pinney, C.  182 Pinson, S.  183 Pissarro, C.  66 n.12, 72, 73, 75, 77, 82 n.42 Plekhanov, G.  1 Polish Rider (Frick) (painting)  125 Politics of Experience, The (Laing)  152 Pollock, J.  72, 105 Pollock, G.  149, 153–5, 157 n.19, 158 n.43 Poppe, B.  65 n.9 Portrait of the Artist’s Parents (Wong) (painting)  118–19, 120 postcolonial theory  129 n.9 postmodernism  70, 114, 128 n.6, 176, 179 social art history and  2–3, 6, 25

poststructuralism  8, 25, 26, 161, 162, 179 Poulot, D.  9 n.16 Poussin, N.  77–9 Powers of Horror (Kristeva)  182 Préault, A.  90 “Present Prospect of American Painting, The” (Greenberg)  3 Prince, R.  113 Principles of Art History (Wölfflin)  161 Proletarian Nights (Rancière)  82 n.42 Prospect (Truitt)  145 Proudhon, P.-J.  17 Quong Sang Chong Company Sky Ship (Wong) (painting)  115–16, 116 Raab, J.  165, 166, 173 nn.31, 33 Rancière, J.  82 n.42 Raphael, M.  1 Rauschenberg, R.  148, 162, 172 n.11 Realism in the Age of Impressionism (Young)  52 Rees, A. L.  158 n.43 reflexive historiography  12–13 Reick, P.  65 n.11 Rembrandt  105, 125 Riegl, A.  161, 162 Rifkin, A.  158 n.43 Roberts, J.  165, 166 Robertson, G.  158 n.43 Ruskin, J.  17, 18, 29 nn.24–5 Ryan, W. D.  121 sacerdotal function of king  40, 41 significance of  42 Sacrament of Marriage, The (Poussin) (painting)  79 Said, E.  115 Salomon, M.  29 n.22 Saturday Night (Wong) (painting)  123 Sayer, A.  81 n.23 Schapiro, M.  33 Schneider, M.  58, 65 n.11 Schnetz, V.  93 Scott, J. C.  80

198 Second Sex, The (de Beauvoir)  149 Seeing the Unspeakable (Shaw)  165 Sex Piece (Lozano)  150 Shackelford, G. T. M.  66 n.23 Shannon, J.  172 n.11, 173 n.35 Shaw, G. D.  165 Sherman, C.  113, 182 Shirkey, J.  174 n.36 Siegel, K.  158 n.39 Sight of Death, The (Clark)  105, 106 Simons, P.  30 n.38 Smokers (Cézanne) (painting)  75 social art history. See also individual entries capitalism and  70 challenges to  176–7 definition of  11 empirical turn and  12 formalist  162–4 historical circumstances and upheaval and  52 modernism and  52 particularity and materiality and  71–2 phases of  1–2 and photography compared  183 Pollock on  157 n.19 practices of representation and  72 significance of  1, 11, 13, 177, 185 and social history compared  11, 12 synchronic analysis and  35 tendencies in  13 Marxist  17–24 positivist  13–17 subjective  24–7 text and context and  51 social forces, as agents of cultural change  15 social-formal history  170 social forms, significance of  160 social history, origin and significance of  11 Social History of Art, The (Hauser)  11, 19, 24 socialism  17, 73, 76–8, 80 Solomon-Godeau, A.  30 n.38 Spaulding, D.  9 n.18, 82 n.27

Index Spencer, B.  78 Spend Every Night for Three Weeks at Max’s Piece (Lozano)  150 Spitzweg, C.  5, 54 in capturing modern antiheroes  55–6 on modern temporality  58–60 on work and rest dichotomy  58 Spivak, G.  115 Steinberg, L.  3 synchronic analysis  35, 36 Taber, I. W.  118 Taine, H.  16–17, 29 nn.19–20, 23 temporality. See time/temporality Terdiman, R.  98 n.1 Theory of Film (Kracauer)  184, 186–7 n.21 Thompson, E. P.  52 Thoreau, H. D.  166 Three Artists (Three Women) (Wagner)  148 Thuillier, J.  105 Tickner, L.  155 time/temporality significance of  52–4 systematization of  64 “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” (Thompson)  52 Times Literary Supplement  22 tragic materialism  73, 77, 78 Transporting Visions (Roberts)  166 trompe l’oeil paintings  114, 165–6, 173 nn.25–6 Truitt, A.  144, 145, 149, 155 on writing process  147 Turn (Truitt)  145 24/7 (Crary)  52 Two Young Peasant Women (Pissarro)  72 un-artist, significance of  149, 154 “unified time”, ideal of  63–4 universal time, significance of  60, 62, 67 n.30 Varnedoe, K.  66 n.23 Vasari, G.  13 Velázquez, D.  105

 Index 199 Vermeer, J.  22, 23 vernacular modernism  139–42 absorption and theatricality and  131–5 farewell to idea and  135–7 Jackson Pollock legacy and  137–8 Vernet, H.  93 Vignes, E.  67 n.31 da Vinci, Leonardo  15 Viollet-le-Duc, E.  64 visual art, significance of  179 visual culture  11, 12, 15, 178 art market studies as alternative to  30–1 n.44 questionnaire  26 significance of  25–7 Vo, D.  126, 130 n.35 von Kleist, W.  180 von Pocci, F.  59 von Ranke, L.  185 Wagner, A.  147, 148, 153, 155, 156 n.6, 156–7 n.15 Wall, J.  99 n.15, 183 Wall, M.  78 Wallach, A.  1, 2 Warnke, M.  9 n.16 Watkins, S.  84 n.79 “Wave Series” (Lozano) (painting)  147, 150–2, 150 wax effigies  42–4, 43

Ways of Seeing (Berger)  102–3 Weems, J.  165 Weinberg, J.  30 n.38 Werckmeister, O. K.  30 n.36, 105–6 “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (Nochlin)  25 Wichmann, S.  65 n.9 Winckelmann, J. J.  12–17, 27, 28 n.7 Wipplinger, H.-P.  65 n.9 Witkovski, M.  184 Wölfflin, H.  161, 172 n.6, 180 Wong, M.  6, 113–14 brick as flesh for  120 Chinatown depictions of  117–23 Chinese porcelain plates collection of  125–6, 125 discerning eye of  125 electric illumination effect of  121–2 laundry and effect on  118–19 San Francisco Chinatown paintings of  115 Wong Family Benevolent Association (Wong) (painting)  116, 117, 118, 120 Wood, C.  9 n.13, 186 n.9 Wright, A.  29 n.31 Yee, L.  115, 128 n.8 Young, M.  52 Zurbaran, F.  105

200