More art shows.
This weekend we (Lisa and I) went to DC to check out three exhibitions at the National Gallery: the Franz van Mieris, the Cezanne in Provence and the Dada shows, the two last expensive and 'major' shows by any standards. It was rather too much for one day, and we both flagged towards the end...in the Dada show, which began to feel claustrophic.... But it was an amazing day for all that. What seeing all three together, one after another, bam, bam, bam thank you mam, did was to make us think about the coherence of the post-Renaissance art tradition.
What connected these three moments so radically different from one another?
Van Mieris was, apparently, the darling of the seventeenth-century Dutch bourgeoisie at a period when Amsterdam was the centre of global trade and finance, and in which the modern bourgeiois world is, more or less, being invented. His works are extraordinarily carefully crafted: many of them genre scenes of the kind we are familiar with from his contemporaries: girls reading love letters, a fortune teller duping a peasant crowd, courtship scenes and so on. They are small, often painted on copper (he was originally a goldsmith) and present virtuoso light and surface effects; van Mieris seems to be an expert in the painting of the skin on the human leg under brightish light...but also, again like many of his contemporaries, of velvet. But this skill is in the service of an art that seems to be under quotation marks, constantly crossing the line into kitsch: they often look more like nineteenth-century imitations of the late-Renaissance dutch style than the style itself. In fact they seem to point to the impossibility of a certain kind of privatised, bourgeois art: an art in the interests of 'I know what I like' money: an art disconnected from art-historical memories and anticipations, from Christian spirituality or doctrine, from efforts to aggrandise its patrons in the wider public sphere.....it just becomes small in the evaluative sense of the term, sentimental, wedded to familiar and the banal, a fetishisation of sheer technique...
In a sense it is all this that Cezanne is trying to resist. What's really informative about this exhibition is that it places Cezanne's work into his Provence setting (though I would have liked to learn a lot more about the Cezanne family's relation to local Provencal society: where did they get their money from?, how they were networked into the local social associations?...those kinds of questions are pretty relevant to understanding these paintings....)...but we did learn that Cezanne spent his early days in Provence living in his father's grand mansion, not having to earn money, painting, painting, painting mainly whatever was at hand. What was at hand was the landscape, and then the peasantry and ordinary household objects: all three treated with pretty much the same indifferent obejctification. Of course what interested Cezanne was not the emotions or interiority or spiritual or social value of the things and people he painted but their capacity to be represented in the interests of a particular painterly project: that is, the play between colour and geometrical line on the painted surface, a play governed by a principle of reduction: simplify the geometry of the image, reduce the palette while maximising and educating aesthetic pleasure. That project refers back to the metropolitan art world, which meant for Cezanne, Paris. In effect his technical discoveries which do indeed lead to images of a quite ravishing beauty but which have nothing to say about and no interest in the Provence he inhabited rest upon 1) his economic independence and 2) the prestige of the art-world-centre which is the real destination of his work, and which has developed its own criteria of value. In this Cezanne is operating in completely different relations to his social setting than van Mieris, who was painting for his middle-class patrons seemingly without any concept of an art-world, an avant-garde, an art-historical future, the 'advancement' of style. And whatever the wider politics of dissent that help Cezanne make the turn he did (and the show has almost nothing to say about this, except to note that his father was a conservative and that he wasnt), it does seem that the Cezanne project is energised by an effort to avoid the kind of besetting failures of which van Mieris stands as an instance.
Dada is something else again. The most famous account of the Dada revolution is Peter Burger's. He argues that you cant think of Dada as just another school from within the history of the art tradition because it is in fact a rejection of the aesthetic and of the art work. But this show reveals that Burger's account is plain wrong. Dada too is a form of art, particularly in figures like Sophie Tauber (the real revelation here), Hans Arp and Kurt Schwitters (the second revelation for me, though those who know his work already, which I didnt, wont be suprised by its carefulness and glamour). The curatorial information on the walls here analyse Dada as a reaction to World War One: a rebellious cocking of Europe's snook in the face of mechanised self-genocide. But that's not how it really quite was given that many of the elements of Dada are already apparent in Paris well before the war: I am thinking of the les incoherents movement, cubism (with its joky, anti-art, anti-patriot underpinnings) the cabarets in Montmartre. In a sense Dada can be understood as: les incoherents meets anarchism meets Nietzsche on a social scene upset and mobilised by the massified European war. And what Dada, a product of nineteenth century nihilism and individualism, looks like here is less an accomplishment than a promise: it spells out the alphabet for the styles that will dominate the art world when that world gathers itself it together and stengthens itself after this war and across the next, given that after Dada the power of the art world cannot be separated from its tendencies to negate itself from within (to be more than art, or less than art almost indifferently).
All this doesnt really help me see the three different shows under one head: they look like three different stones on a string, the string being (this is not a metaphor that is really working) the relations between art and society. What I mean to say is that the coherency of art from the seventeenth to the twentieth century is not be found in a development of painterly technique or form or even of rhetoric (a movement from theatricality to absorption or something) but in a social narrative that is external to it. What that doesn't help us understand is the kind of aesthetic ravishment Cezanne and Schwitters can provide but van Mieris cannot, but which is (I would argue) not purely aesthetic at all since it too draws upon some kind of appreciation of modern art's social emplotment.
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