800 Words: Why Impressionism Is A Buzzkill - Part 2

Most lovers of impressionist painting would not agree the view that the purpose of impressionism is irony. Most impressionist painters, living as they did in the extremely unironic 19th century,  would probably be offended by the view that they were ironists. If we saw them as they saw themselves, the purpose of their painting was probably to express pleasure, and painting as they did during what is still the most secure period of peace and prosperity in European history, there was more pleasure than at any point in the existence of Europe. And yet among the great powers, France seemed virtually alone in containing a widespread desire among its artists to express the joys of that peace. The music of Germany and Austria grew ever louder and more violent, the literature of Russia turned inward to expose the sicknesses of the soul, the poetry of England grew ever more morbid, and in turn, the artists of these cold-climated powers began to influence each other while (obviously with exceptions) French culture stayed fundamentally lucid, balanced, and elegant. While other countries had premonitions of the sickness that would soon devour the entire continent, France alone expressed the health and hale of the era. But in taking a small fraction of the human condition, perhaps the most pleasant part, they shared quite a bit with other cultural figures of their day who began the process of atomizing human existence to its smallest divisions.

I have no idea how many experts it strikes as strange in the extreme that Manet and the poet Baudelaire were close friends, but that’s one of those facts from history that is seriously weird. Baudelaire is the great poet of sickness and depravity who celebrated necrophilia, the exhilaration of anonymous violence, prostitution, sexual fetishes, and (gasp!) lesbianism - poems whose strengths and weaknesses still confuse me, but many of which are nearly as shocking and visceral today as they were when they were written.  Manet is a painter who poeticizes pleasures of the flesh - healthy young Bohemians in their prime who would not seem out of place on The Avenue in Hampden. They might be attracted to the netherworld of Baudelaire (or David Simon), but only because it is a world from which they are completely removed; even if it’s five blocks away.

What binds artists of health like Manet with artists of sickness like Baudelaire is irony - which technically means the expression of a meaning by expressing the opposite. In Baudelaire’s case, he brings us closer to the world of depravity by emphasizing that what seems depraved within all of us is in fact perfectly natural. In Manet’s case, those healthy pleasures are viewed with a distorted, almost cruel, eye. Our bo-bo (bourgeois bohemian) ancestors from 19th century Paris look desperately bored and unhappy, with complexions that aren’t quite right and details that are beginning to become obscured. With Manet, we begin to find that detailed individuality of faces which have been so crucial since Rembrandt is beginning to disappear. Manet begins to draw the faces of his subjects so that they look more alike, ‘This one, that one, it doesn’t matter.’ In this world of Paris, the primal depravities which should repel us make us happy, while the activities of contentment bring us no happiness at all.  Could it be that Baudelaire is in fact the poet of health and Manet the painter of sickness?

Meanwhile, there’s no doubt about the enjoyment in Renoir. But there’s something sickly sweet, almost diabetic, about that enjoyment. Enjoyment to the exclusion of everything else. It’s not ironic, it’s just not very good. Technically, his paintings are magnificent. But everybody looks like they’re enjoying themselves and are completely indifferent to the thought that people outside their little circle might be suffering. In their place is kind of creepy happiness, with lots of fat women who enjoy bathing nude and little girls who seem perfectly fine when left unattended. It’s like any number of Disney movies with characters who are obnoxiously happy and the annoying people who love them because they want so desperately to believe that such a vision is the way life ought to be. It’s not ironic, it’s just a demonstration of why irony is necessary.

The next level of distortion and irony comes from Monet. The trick which all painters indulged in - that expression comes from the subject itself rather than the painter - is completely removed by Monet. In Manet, the distinctiveness of people’s faces are obscured, but in Monet, we can’t even notice a person’s individuality. To a degree we’ve barely seen since the high Renaissance, individual people don’t matter. After Monet, human expression itself need no longer be a priority. Beneath all those pleasing shades is a deeply distubing implication - that each of us no more individual than a bunch of wires and deserve no more distinct a rendering than to be part of a great wash of color in which person, place, and thing, are all a mere cog in the wheel. Had Monet taken up with a different group of painters, perhaps he’d have discovered the ascetic machine-worship of Futurism a generation before Boccioni.

And yet even Monet’s irony must take a back seat to Cezanne, Impressionism’s ultimate painter, and the culmination to which the entire movement leads. Cezanne is like the formation of a black hole; a grand cosmic event, utterly mysterious and beautiful, and leaving a vacuum of darkness in his wake. The people in his art all look vaguely like they have Down Syndrome. Every one of them is invested with Cezanne’s personal serial number, and they are all part of his attempt to bring to the canvas all those features of seeing which nobody should be expected to notice unless they look far more closely at a canvas than any viewer who values his eyesight should look. Objects in Cezanne paintings are like a triskiadekaduple exposed photograph, in which we see precisely the same objects at various points which depend on what the light shows, what our eye captures, how much it’s rotted over the course of a day, and how many layers of dust have accumulated, and all of them exaggerated to a point where every little bit of weirdness is drawn out. Nature is not nature in Cezanne, it’s a fantasy world. Cezanne’s world is a world like ours if everything were completely askew. His paintings are beyond irony, they are like the absolute zero of modern art - after looking at his paintings, it’s difficult to take any other emotion on the canvas seriously but irony.  

There is nothing wrong with irony. Like every other sentiment, it is perfectly fine when mixed with other emotions. But when kept to itself the expression of irony becomes too disturbing for prolonged contemplation (I’m getting antsy just writing this article). All one has to do is look at the variegated expression of their great predecessor, Gustave Courbet, to see the diversity of vision they lack. Courbet is called a ‘realist’, but if realism means capturing so much of the world’s complexity - tragedy and comedy, rich people and poor people, realism and surrealism, then sign me up for more realism to the end of time. And if you think irony and surrealism are precluded in a realist approach, all you have to do is look at his painting of ‘The Origin of the World’ to see something that can still make you laugh (hint: it’s a hoohah).

When going to the Musee d’Orsay, I found myself returning again and again to the Van Gogh rooms. Van Gogh is very much an artist who believed in individual expression, and perhaps he believed in it more fervently than any other great artist in history. He came to the Impressionist circles looking for a means to express more i, but he was handed the tools to destroy expression. In his paintings we see a soul who only knows how to be hyper-expressive. What is used by the impressionists to express irony is used by Van Gogh to express absolutes of horror and ecstasy. The Church at Auvers looks like it could be a standin for the mansion next to the Bates Motel. The sunrise in The Sower looks bright enough to dissolve the world in ash. Whereas Monet and Cezanne used anonymous faces to express the insignificance of people, Van Gogh used it to express horror that a human being’s individuality could be so crushed. And in perhaps his most painful painting, all we see of a human face is an old man’s bald forehead, his head buried in his hands in the Sorrowing Old Man ‘At Eternity’s Gate’ as he sits next to a collection of singlar red brushstrokes meant to convey fire (is it a taste of hell’s flames?). The entirety of the corpus of works by Van Gogh which the world loves (basically the last four years of his life) can be seen as a howl of protest against the very people who gave him the techniques he required to protest against them. Is it too fanciful to speculate that this particular contradiction was ultimately what drove him insane? Van Gogh saw nothing but vacuous, unfulfilling, unecstatic pleasure - pleasure which as an hallucinatory manic-depressive he could neither partake in nor would it give him enjoyment if he could. Therefore he used the tools at his disposal to sound a warning against the inhuman direction to which this unalloyed pleasure was leading - it was a warning taken up in different places and different artforms by Mahler, by Dostoevsky, by Yeats, by Kafka, by Carl Nielsen. The very tools of modernism were being used as a warning against it, as a clarion call to mind what happens when we disregard the human in one another.

(there will definitely be a part 3...)

800 Words: Why Impressionism Is A Buzzkill - Part 1

I saw a stunning, absolutely stunning, play at Everyman Theatre called Heroes. It was by a French playwright I’ve never heard of, and translated by Tom Stoppard. Lest anybody be intimidated by the S-word, the play is not nearly so highbrow as the credential suggests – and for someone who tackles such highbrow subjects as Stoppard, I’m invariably surprised by how much entertainment mileage he gets out of subjects so dry. Like all work that bears repeated viewings (I’m definitely going again before it closes next Sunday…anybody up for Thursday night?), this is a tragicomedy about life – two hours of three old French men bickering while they watch themselves grow old and hope against hope that they can reverse the ageing process by ever so slight increments. No description of the play can do justice to how funny it is, or how disturbing.

But as I left the theater last night, I found that it wasn’t the play about which I thought. It was the first stirring of nostalgia for France since my return to the States three months ago. I think it was the trees in the background scenery – those hazy impressionist trees right out of a late Monet at Giverny (or a Bob Ross 'Happy Tree'). It was that French countryside, with that amazingly comfortable dry heat, and that shade of green on the trees which you can never find in any other place in the world, and the Nicois cuisine, and all those legs….

I didn’t much care for Paris. Looking at contemporary Paris is like looking at a failed Washington (moreso). From Western capital to capital – Athens to Rome to Venice to London to Vienna to Paris to Berlin to DC – the neoclassical architecture just gets bigger along with the ambitions of the leader who commissions it. And yet the only people impressed by those boulevards of government are the faceless functionaries who work inside and fancy themselves powerful because they have an office in a big building. For a city so renowned for its beauty, there are large swaths of the center city that are unbelievably faceless. It’s sometimes been said that the French are ‘Germans with better food’, nowhere is that more true than in the boulevards of Paris.

 (Paris, it’s like a city designed by Saint-Saens)

I much, much prefer England to France, but nowhere is that more true than in how much I prefer London to Paris. Contemporary Paris is like a city trapped in a fake vision from a Toulouse-Latrec painting showed in a Simon Schama documentary then disseminated on PBS and uploaded from a VCR taping onto youtube. The city seems so far removed from everything which used to make it a vital city and so weighed down by its past glories that there is no present Paris of which I can speak. I spent ten full days in Paris and there was not a single day in which I felt I was experiencing anything about the city except for what Nicolas Sarkozy wanted tourists to see. And believe me, I tried. How many French novelists, composers, songwriters, filmmakers, showrunners, contemporary artists, playwrights, worthy of the name can you come up with? I can name worthwhile past figures by the dozens and hundreds, but today almost all I can think of is a bunch of intellectual quacks who write the kind of pseudo-philosophical junk that gets American professors tenure if they pretend to like that sort of thing. In ten days, the most contemporary, ‘vital’ thing I saw was a jazz show in Marais with a saxophonist which sounded like he belonged with Miles Davis circa Filles de Kilimanjaro. And the saxophonist was Israeli!

 I suspect the real Paris, the ‘interesting’ Paris, is all at least three or four-hundred years old, and Baron Haussmann ploughed over it to make the anonymous capital we now call the World’s Great City. I know…I know… Paris anonymous? Sacre Saint Sebastian! But over and over again, I found that the most interesting things in Paris, perhaps in France generally, hailed from the Middle Ages. Nothing I saw in France was more impressive than the Cathedral on a Cathedral on a Cathedral on a Cathedral on a Cathedral at Chartres, or the oooollld streets of Avignon – which my travelling mate described as the perfect city to have a fairy-tale wedding during the day then murder your in-laws at night. You look at all those medieval paintings and you see a very different country from the effete aesthetics of later centuries – all those religious and classical figures rendered in disturbingly violent and obscene poses beyond your imagination. This is not the medieval art wing you pass over in American museums – when it comes to the Middle Ages, Europe kept pretty much all the good stuff for itself. This was an animally violent, sexual, religious, deeply divided culture – fascinated by barbarism and enacting that fascination in every way it could imagine. Those paintings are the sex and violence action flicks of their time, and clearly those Middle Ages were a lot closer to the spirit of our time than they were to the eras that followed. Not since the Middle Ages have we encountered a century that dreamed up so many inventive ways to kill and maim as the one which just finished, and not since the Middle Ages has the gap of knowledge between the educated and the ignorant been so vast.

But it was to the French countryside, to those trees and ponds near Avignon and Chartres to which those painters escaped so that they might capture a new vision – a vision not enamored of perfect pictures and ideal forms. It was the century of Napoleon, and the power and glory that was France’s allowed for new explorations. What is the purpose of greater power and influence if you only want to capture that which has already been captured?

And there began a school of painting that depicted warm climates coldly, and took infinitely painstaking technique to express a distorted result. In was art whose only reason for existing is to express the confidence that it is absolutely unnecessary – no longer are there expressions of the religious ecstasy you find in Michelangelo, or the humanist pride you find in Rembrandt, or the bearing witness to despair and evil you find in Goya. These are the first paintings that feel so confident in themselves that the only thing they express is a middle finger in your direction. ‘Wait. You think this peach is orange? Fuck you you’ll never figure out which colors it is!’ ‘What, you think those lily pads look like brush strokes? Fuck you your eyes don’t even notice a lily pad unless we make it look weird!’

At this epochal moment in art history, just as painting surrendered its dominance over all the world’s visual art to photography and just before the emergence of moving photos, came the most important expression of irony the world had ever (and still has ever) seen (except Seinfeld?). There is nothing sincere about impressionism, and nobody cared enough to jail the painters for being insincere. The only thing remaining is the paintings itself, and the weird notion that nobody needs painting anymore, so it doesn't have to express anything but what the painter wills the canvas to express. If you like what he expresses, so much the better. If you don’t like it, fuck you. It is a world with no reason for existing, and we all live in it. And because we have no reason for living, we all sit around and pass our time as best we can with unnecessary work, unnecessary hobbies, unnecessary love, unnecessary sex, and unnecessary blog posts. If we can get some pleasure out of our lives, so much the better for it, but what does it matter even if we can’t?

And that’s why I found something deeply, deeply depressing about the Musee d’Orsay – it was like looking into yet another vision of the past and seeing yourself reflected back. If the Petit Palais in Avignon was like looking straight into the heart of American barbarism (Red America?), then the Musee d’Orsay was like looking straight into the heart of American over-privilege (Blue America?). If Medieval Art is like an Iowa evangelical church where unmarried teenagers have violent sex after being worked into a frenzy by worship sessions, then Impressionist Art is like a CBGB punk show in New York where everybody’s either moshing the shit out of each other or silently nodding their heads.

So there you have it – the three basic camps of France, which also happen to be the three basic camps of America – superstition, imperialism, and decadence. If you belong to the mores of any one of the three, you will never feel anything but at home. But if you’re not a natural fit in any of the three, you’re kinda screwed.