THE PAINTING OF MODERN LIFE: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers

by T.J. Clark ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 31, 1984

Scholarship, imagination, and doctrine keep uneasy company here--but the result is often intellectually exciting and never less than visually stimulating. Clark is a Britisher, now teaching at Harvard, trained in history and art history and the author of a noteworthy pair of books on the failure of the 1848 revolution in France to produce a revolutionary art, save prospectively in the work of Courbet (The Absolute Bourgeois, The Image of the People, both 1973). The present volume, about Impressionism and Paris, is a near-parallel: ""I wish to show that the circumstances of modernism were not modern, and only became so by being given the form called 'spectacle'. . . Are we to take Impressionism's repertoire of subjects and devices as merely complicit in the spectacle--lending it consistency or even charm--or as somehow disclosing it as farce or tragedy?"" Ultimately, Clark will conclude that only Seurat, clearly distinguishing and mixing social classes in La Grande Jatte, in a mode at once uniform and comic, exposed modern freedom and alienation. In the main, Manet and his followers ""lacked identification with the interests and values of other classes in capitalist society."" But this Marxist formula, disappointing in someone of Clark's pinpoint knowledge and leaps of thought, comes only after absorbing exploration of key motifs. ""The View from Notre Dame"" applies to Haussmann's rebuilt, monumental Paris--and the replacement of one identity by another, the depiction in painting of a new, superimposed image: ""a separate something made to be looked at."" ""Olympia's Choice"" refers of course to Manet's famous picture of a prostitute. Clark examines the state of Parisian prostitution, the general portraiture of prostitutes and female nudes--and, pronouncing upon Olympia's ""inconsistencies,"" deems nakedness her only sign of class. Another focus, which expands in Clark's treatment, is ""The Environs of Paris"": ""the factories have to be kept still, as if that were the guarantee of their belonging to the landscape. . ."" There is in this kind of inference much to dispute--but what we have, exceptionally, is a running argument about art-and-politics, by an expert, with the pictures in evidence page-by-page.

Pub Date: Jan. 31, 1984

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1984

Categories: NONFICTION