Linda Nochlin, The Invention of the Avant-Garde: France, 1830-1880
Figure 1.3. Le Salut Public (The Public Welfare), an illustration for the radical press
Let us be filled with one great idea:
the well being of society ….
We, the artists, will serve as the avant-garde, for amongst all the arms at our disposal,
the power of the Arts is the swiftest and most expeditious.
When we wish to spread new ideas amongst men, we use, in turn, the lyre, ode or song, story or novel,
we inscribe these ideas on marble or canvas,
and we popularize them in poetry and in song.
Henri de St Simon, c.1825
The question, What does it mean to be “avant-garde”? has had many answers, none of them definitive. In its pre-modern usage, “avant-garde” was the French military term for soldiers sent out ahead of the army, like scouts; and it carried connotations of future-seeking resourcefulness, camaraderie, duty, and courage. In the 1820s French Utopian Socialist Henri de St. Simon (1760-1825) appropriated the term to refer to an elite corps of artists whose superior imaginations and expressive skills would show the way to a new and better society. St. Simon’s conviction that the creative individual can (and should) improve the world is a paradigm of vanguard modernism. As we saw in Marshall Berman’s essay, such Romantic utopianism was fueled by the social, political, industrial, scientific, and technological revolutions of modern Europe and the United States: transformations that instilled in many a deep faith in progress and reached every point on the globe. St. Simon provided the original meaning of “avant-garde,” but the overtly politicized aesthetic of the sort he called for is not the only artistic stance that has been considered avant-garde. Indeed, the concept has had an extraordinarily eclectic history up to our own so-called “post-avant-garde” art world.
Linda Nochlin uses “avant-garde” to signify the style and content of specific paintings, thus this 1968 essay remains among the most helpful on the topic for art history. From a comparison of the attitudes of French Realist painters, Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) and Edouard Manet (1832-1883), and observations about the significance of their formal choices, Nochlin derives a double definition of vanguard art. She traces the dynamics of the two vanguard modes of engagement and autonomy – the first following Courbet’s lead, the second, Manet’s – and makes visually explicit the tie between the paintings, the artist who made them, and the relevant contexts of modernity. The author argues persuasively that it is the formal innovations that made the paintings of Courbet and Manet the first to convey avant-garde content successfully.
Figure 1.4. Cartoon lampooning Fourierist utopianism.
Nochlin puts forward an interpretation of Courbet’s Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing up Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life (1854-55)as (among other things) a Fourierist allegory. Fourierists were followers of Charles Fourier (1772-1837), a utopian socialist and visionary who imagined a totally liberated harmonious society organized into phalansteries, communes in which basic human drives are freely expressed and cultivated. He held that all work can and must be made physically and mentally satisfying and that civilization should be measured by how much freedom women enjoy.
However attractive Fourier’s ideas were to Courbet, Nochlin admits that the artist never identified The Painter’s Studio as a Fourierist allegory. In fact, far from explaining his intentions, Courbet expected and allowed that his autobiographical magnum opus would baffle his audience. “People will have their work cut out to judge the picture,” he wrote to the critic Champfleury as the painting neared completion (see Courbet’s “Letter to Champfleury” in Chapter two of this volume). And he was right; there have been many readings of The Painter’s Studio. All agree, however, that it manifests Courbet’s vision of society and the artist’s pivotal social role. The great value of Nochlin’s reading of it in the context of the origins of the avant-garde is that her interpretation offers the large conceptual structure needed for a study of modern art. Courbet’s oeuvre is approached from other directions by Michael Fried and Meyer Schapiro in Chapter two of this volume, “Realism and Radicalism in France.” Manet is the subject of Paul Smith’s “Manet, Baudelaire and the Artist as Flaneur” in Chapter three, “The Modern City”; readings in chapter seven, “Representing the Modern Body”; and Chapter eight, “Exhibitions and the Rise of the Modern Art Market.”
As you read, question how (according to Nochlin) revolutionary attitudes and artistic goals come together in the work of Courbet. Why does Nochlin claim that Dominque Papéty’s Dream of Happiness (Rêve de bonheur) is a conservative work compared with Courbet’s Studio even though both convey essentially the same progressive utopian message? Compare Courbet’s avant-gardism to Manet’s. Why is Manet’s Bar at the Folies Bergère “the most poignant image of alienation ever painted”? How can Manet’s ironic blague and his posture of alienation and autonomy be avant-garde when they are missing in Courbet?
Our selection is from Linda Nochlin, The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1989). “The Invention of the Avant-Garde” was first published in 1968, the year of international student protests that launched an era marked by a resurgence of Marxist political and cultural criticism in academe. During the next two decades of feminist, anti-colonialist, and anti-formalist critique, art historians debated the meaning and value of avant-garde modernism while they built a loose consensus that Western culture was no longer modern or avant-garde in the same way.
For Further Reading:
Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translated from the German by Michael Shaw. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1982.
Egbert, D.D. “The Idea of the Avant-garde in Art and Politics,” American Historical Review 73, 1967.
Poggioli, Renato. The Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translated from the Italian by Gerald
Fitzgerald. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968.
Figure 1.5. Gustave Courbet. A Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory, 1855. Oil on canvas, 11’ 10 ¼” x 19’ 7 ½” (361 x 598 cm). Muséed’Orsay, Paris.
“Art changes only through strong convictions, convictions strong enough to change society at the same time." So proclaimed Théophile Thoré, quarante-huitard critic[*] […] an art historian who discovered Vermeer and one of the spokesmen for a new, more democratic art, in 1855, in exile from Louis Napoleon's imperial France. Whether or not one agrees with Thoré's assertion, it is certainly typical in its equation of revolutionary art and revolutionary politics of progressive thought in the visual arts at the middle of the nineteenth century. Seven years earlier, in the euphoric days following the 1848 Revolution, a new dawn for art had been seriously predicated upon the progressive ideals of the February uprising. At that time the most important art journal of France, L 'Artiste, in its issue of March 12, 1848, extolled the "genius of liberty" which had revived "the eternal flames of art." […] César Daly, editor of the Révue genérale de l'architecture, used a similar military term, éclaireur, or "scout," in the 1840s, when he said that the journal must "fulfill an active mission of 'scouting the path of the future." […]
Certainly the painter who best embodies the dual implications – both artistically and politically progressive – of the original usage of the term "avant-garde" is Gustave Courbet and his militantly radical Realism. "Realism," Courbet declared flatly, "is democracy in art." He saw his destiny as a continual vanguard action against the forces of academicism in art and conservatism in society. His summarizing masterpiece, The Painter's Studio (Figure 1.5), is a crucial statement of the most progressive political views in the most advanced formal and iconographic terms available in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Courbet quite naturally expected the radical artist to be at war with the ruling forces of society and at times quite overtly, belligerently, and with obvious relish challenged the Establishment to a head-on confrontation. The idea of the artist as an outcast from society, rejected and misunderstood by a philistine, bourgeois social order was of course not a novelty by the middle of the nineteenth century. The advanced, independent artist as a martyr of society was a standard fixture of Romantic hagiography.
Figure 1.6. Eugène Delacroix. Liberty Leading the People at the Barricades, 1830. Oil on canvas, 102 ½” x 128” (260 x 325 cm). Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Figure 1.7. Phillipe Auguste Jeanron. The Little Patriots: A Souvenir of July 1830.
It is not until seven years after the 1848 Revolution that the advanced social ideals of the mid-nineteenth century are given expression in appropriately advanced pictorial and iconographic form, in Courbet's The Painter's Studio. Its truly innovating qualities are perhaps best revealed by comparison with the "revolutionary" painting of the uprising of 1830, Eugène Delacroix's Liberty at the Barricades (Figure 1.6), a work conservative in both the political and the esthetic sense – that is to say, nostalgically Bonapartist in its ideology and heavily dependent upon mythological prototypes for its iconography and composition. On the other hand, democratic and humanitarian passions seem to have been no more a guarantee of pictorial originality in the case of the Revolution of 1830 than they were to be in that of 1848. Although Philippe-Auguste Jeanron was far more politically radical than Delacroix, his The Little Patriots: A Souvenir of July 1830 (Figure 1.7), which appeared in the 1831 Salon, is obviously a watered-own,sugar-coated reworking of Delacroix's romantic, Molochistic[†] allegory Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi (Figure 1.8), which had been exhibited at the Musée Colbert in Paris in 1829 and 1830. Jeanron, a close friend of Thoré, was later named director of the National Museums under the 1848 Revolutionary Government, and he accomplished miracles of reorganization and democratization during his brief incumbency. Yet, as is so often the case, good intentions are no guarantee of innovating, or even memorable, imagery. Despite contemporary and localizing references in The Little Patriots, such as the dome of the Panthéon in the background or the paving-stone barricade to the left, the pall of the academic poncif[‡] hangs heavier over the painting than the smoke of revolutionary fervor; one is made all too aware, in the pose of the little patriot in the center – reminiscent of that of Donatello's David (Figure 1.9), and so appropriate in its iconographic implications – that Jeanron was an art historian as well as an artist.
Figure 1.8. Eugène Delacroix. Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi, 1826. Oil on canvas 82 ¼” x 58” (209 x 147 cm). Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux.
Figure 1.9. Donatello. David, 1430. Bronze, 72 ¾” (185 cm). Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence.
Certainly, there had been no dearth of paintings with socially significant, reformist, or even programmatically socialist themes in the years between the Revolution of 1830 and that of 1848. One of these socially progressive artists working prior to 1848 is worth examining more closely, if only to lend higher relief to the truly advanced qualities of Courbet's postrevolutionary Studio: this is the little-known Dominique Papéty (1815-1849), dismissed by Baudelaire in his 1846 Salon under the rubric "On Some Doubters," as "serious-minded and full of great goodwill," hence, "deserving of pity." What is interesting about Papéty is that he was a Fourierist, and Courbet's Studio is among other things a Fourierist as well as a Realist allegory. Yet in the difference in conception, composition, and attitude between Papéty's allegory and that of Courbet lies the enormous gap between painting which is advanced in subject but conventional in every other way and that which is truly of its time, or even in advance of it (to use the term "avant-garde" in its most literal sense) and hence, a pictorial paradigm of the most adventurous attitudes of its era. Papéty's Fourierist convictions were stated in a language so banal that his Rêve de bonheur (Figure 1.10), although Fourierist in inspiration, looks almost exactly like Ingres's apolitical Golden Age (Figure 1.11) or Puvis de Chavannes's Bois sacré (Figure 1.12); the elements identifying it with contemporary social thought are completely extraneous to the basic composition. While a critic of 1843 saw "a club, a people's bank or a phalanstery" in "this dream of the gardens of Academe," and noted the unusual amalgamation of Horace's Odes and Plato's Dialogues with the steamship and the telegraph, the expendability of these contemporary elements is revealed when L'Artiste announces that Papéty, on the basis of critical advice, has replaced his steamboat with a Greek temple, "which," remarks the anonymous critic, with unconscious irony, "is perhaps more ordinary but also more severe than socialism in painting."
Figure 1.10. Papety. The Dream of Happiness (Rêve de Bonheur), 1843. Oil on canvas, 12’ 1 ¾” x 20’ 8” (270 x 635 cm). Musée National de Palais de Compiegne, Paris.
Figure 1.11. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. The Golden Age. 1862. Oil on canvas. Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Figure 1.12. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. The Sacred Wook (Le bois sacré), 1883. Oil on canvas, 15 ½” x 25 ¾” (39 x 65 cm). Clemens-Sels-Museum, Neuss.
The link – and the gap – between Courbet and Papéty is most clearly revealed by comparing the Studio with Papéty's ambitious plan for a truly, doctrinaire Fourierist painting, The Last Evening of Slavery, executed about 1848 for a fellow Harmonian, François Sabatier, of Montpellier, a friend and supporter of Courbet and a close associate of the latter's patron, Alfred Bruyas, himself an apostle of the New (Fourierist) Harmony. Courbet's Studio may be seen in part as a translation into contemporary, concrete, personal terms of the Fourierist generalizations written in red letters beneath the sketch itself, of Papéty's grandiose but never completed project. Courbet doubtless had become familiar with Papéty's sketch during the course of his visit of 1854 to Bruyas, an eccentric who envisioned himself as a "salesman of the New Harmony" and actually went so far as to publish an abortive Fourierist tract, Notes d'Harmonie.
Figure 1.14. . Gustave Courbet. Burial at Ornans, 1849-50. Oil on canvas, 10’ 3 ½” x 21’ 9” (314 x 663 cm). Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
During the summer of 1854 Courbet visited Sabatier on his estate at Tour de Farges
Figure 1.13 Gustave Courbet. The Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair, Ornans, 1850-55. Oil on canvas, 81 ½” x 109 ½” (206 x 275 cm). Musée des Beaux-Arts, Besançon.
near Montpellier, where he drew Sabatier's portrait in black pencil. Sabatier, while highly appreciative of Papéty's works, had already written a eulogistic account of Courbet's Burial at Ornans (Figure 1.13) and Peasants of Flagey (Figure 1.14) in his Salon of 1851, praising their truthfulness, dignity, and democratic spirit. Sabatier – poet, linguist, translator, and knowledgeable amateur of music and the theater – was married to Caroline Ungher, one of the great singers of the epoch. A warm friend of the arts, he was also deeply concerned with the lot of the poor and the humble; as a partisan supporter of the 1848 revolution he was forced to flee Paris during the terrible days of June, when the forces of reaction took their revenge. [See map of European revolutions of 1848] He practiced the doctrines of Fourierist "Association" mainly by his support and encouragement of Papéty. On his family estate, he cultivated his vineyards or drew up plans for phalansteries. No doubt, the ambitious sketch executed by Papéty was at least in part suggested to him by his Harmonian patron, who in turn showed the drawing to Courbet and discussed the ideas with him. Courbet himself was certainly a staunch partisan of socialist thought, partly because of his close association with the anarchist revolutionary P. J. Proudhon, who had been deeply influenced by Fourier as a young man and had supervised the printing of one of Fourier's books. More specifically, in his fragmentary autobiography of 1866 Courbet notes that by 1840 he had left behind his youthful training in order to follow the socialists of all sects, and that "once arrived in Paris, he was a Fourierist." In 1850, he had represented the Fourierist missionary Jean Journet going off to spread the gospel of Universal Harmony. In a sense, then, one might say that Papéty's mediocre and pedantic drawing offered Courbet a challenge: whether he could translate Papéty's academic classroom into a pictorial language of his own time derived from personal experience.
Art historians have always been hard-pressed to explain both the inspiration and specific implications of Courbet's Studio. It seems to me that a Fourierist interpretation, in conjunction with Papéty's drawing, while it in no sense completely "explains" Courbet's allegory, at least helps to elucidate some of its otherwise inexplicable aspects: for example, just why Courbet chose to include the figures he did in his vast composition. Papéty's sketch stipulates the depiction of "Scholars who have made the hour of Harmony [the final stage of Fourierist evolution] advance" and "Artists and poets swept up by the enthusiasm [a specifically Fourierist term]"; the entire right-hand side of Courbet's painting consists of artists, critics, and philosophers who, in his opinion, have played an important role in the formulation of the new world. Papéty mentions a "Great strong man"; Courbet depicts a doughy athlete. Papéty specifies a crowd of workers; Courbet, with greater economy, gives us a laborer and his wife. Papéty mentions a "sick, worn-out worker"; Courbet has depicted "a poor, weather-beaten old man" in his left-hand group. Papéty presents religious figures in a derogatory light; for Courbet, the rabbi and the priest in the Studio are personifications of self-satisfaction and hypocrisy. Papéty had planned to represent "an aristocratic group surveying the scene"; Courbet placed two elegantly dressed visitors or spectators in the foreground. The Harmonian Leader, who has to have occupied the center of Papéty's composition, is of course Courbet himself, the artist, busily engaged in creating a landscape in the center of his painting.[§]