Art in France 1900-1940 - Book Review

CHRISTOPHER GREEN

Art in France 1900-1940

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

321 pp.; 80 color ills., 320 b/w. $75.00

Surveys are a difficult genre. The author has somehow to contrive a text that will conduct readers, ranging from novices and amateurs to the most specialized of specialists, through a chronologically and geographically precise period of the arts (deciding on the boundaries presents additional problems, of course), and at the same time ensure that any one of these users, on dipping into the book, will find something helpful about individual artists, movements, and works of art. It is necessary, while moving at speed across a broad body of material, to be deep and thoughtful in detail. The genre gives acute expression to a familiar professional tension between context and interpretation. In short, it is a forbidding task. More credit, then, to Christopher Green's contribution to the Yale Pelican History of Art series, which offers a thoughtful model of how to go about it. Green has succeeded in writing a reflective book, aware of the complexity of its task and clear about the solutions it offers.

Green divides his book into six parts along the lines that these various purposes suggest. Part 1 sets out the history of the period from around 1900 (looking briefly back as well as forward) to 1940, introducing the major movements of the historiography: Fauvism, Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism. This section also provides an opportunity for reflection on the idea of the avant-garde, on perspectives on the art of France during these years, and on modernism, abstraction, and history. Part 2, entitled "Lives in Art," deals with individuals, primarily artists, who were instrumental in making the art of the period, including in the discussion dealers, collectors, and those who wrote on art. Green describes the institutional context in which all this happened, and how artists, foreign as well as French, women as well as men, made a success of an artistic career in France. Part 3 marks a step change, in which Green takes up the "works themselves" (p. x), concentrating not only on a formal analysis of technique but als o on the commentary artists offered on their work and methods. Green argues in this section that modernist art privileged the spectator as in some sense the co-creator of the work. This idea introduces a key organizing principle of the remainder of the book, where Green looks "more at how works could invite responses than at what artists intended them to say" (p. x). Part 4 engages the question of modernity, examining it as both experience and social fact. This section covers the role of social, intellectual, and political change in France over the period. It ranges from the impact of science and the ideas that it gave rise to in the general culture to social change as expressed in new gender roles and the growth of consumerism and advertising. Part 5, building on work in which Green has been closely involved, considers the role of tradition, its relation to the modern, and its status in French culture. The politics of "foreignness and the indigenous figure largely here. Finally, part 6 deals with "Primitivis m" and the repudiation of civilization in much of the art of this time. This section concludes the book by pondering this "counter-cultural thrust" across the whole period from 1900 to 1940 (p. 235) and completing the narrative with an analysis of Pablo Picasso's Guernica as a defense of the civilization that was otherwise under attack.

There are two sets of related struggles being worked out in this book. One is the perennial problem to which I referred earlier: how to reconcile the competing demands a survey makes, on the one hand, for a narrative history, and on the other, for interpretation in depth of individual artists and works. The second involves the tension between a persisting modernist reading of the work of art as material artifact, in some way autonomous and disconnected from history, and the idea, equally or perhaps more persistent, that art is explicable, and indeed interesting and worthy of our attention, only insofar as it expresses social, cultural, and historical circumstance and change. Occupying himself with a crucial period and the location of the modernist triumph of the early and mid-twentieth century, Green cannot help but engage with the modernist claim for the artwork. But he also feels a strong intellectual commitment to the idea of history and to its central and for him vital role within the ways art history has of understanding works of art.

The tension this confrontation induces arises from debates about the nature and methodology of art history that flourished between the 1970s and 1990s. At the core of those debates was a prolonged attack from a number of perspectives on the integrity of the artwork, particularly in the reified form that the claims of "formalist" styles of interpretation associated with the modernist period itself seemed to support. What came in to replace this idea of the artwork has recently been summed up as "the understanding of art as a social, material and expressive practice determined by specific forms of production and reception." In detail this means "social history, institutional critique, the cultural analysis of Raymond Williams and Pierre Bourdieu, and varieties of reception theory and ethnography," all of which contribute "to the study of the visual within the broader anthropological formulation of culture as a 'whole way of life.'" (1) This approach notably pays little attention to the specificities of works of art. Eschewing any interest in the material qualities of paintings or sculpture or in their aesthetics, it concentrates instead on the extension of the work into social practice. All that counts is the production of social meaning through the whole repertoire of a society's signifying systems. Within this context, painting and the other arts are treated as if they have no expressive or aesthetic dimension; instead, they have become simply documents within a larger cultural history, a "visual culture" in which the whole of the visual production and consumption of a society can be subsumed. Although Green has made his career at the Courtauld Institute, which, during the period when the battle between this approach and older models of art history was raging most feverishly, was firmly identified with established methodologies, he in fact adheres pretty much to the program set out by the social history of art. This effectively demonstrates that, stripped of the rhetoric that often accompanied the open warfare of the 1970s and 1980s, both sides sought to interpret the artifact or object from within the historical and social context. The "old" art history, with its emphasis on the archive, inherited from 19th-century Kullurgeschichte an approach that located the object within history as thoroughly as anything the "new" art historians could offer. Once the "war" subsided, the two sides found in this enough in common to enable them to settle down together to business as usual.

Unsurprisingly, then, Green forthrightly states that "my approach throughout gives priority to history" (p. x), and that "my conviction is that all art in France in the period-- including the art usually wrapped up in modern movements--is most richly approached as an integral part of a political and social as well as a cultural history" (p. 35). The volume accordingly opens with the central claim that it will enable the reader to encounter a history in which "artists and works of art" are to be "looked at individually" but are not set "against" history as they are in the much-criticized parallel histories of art and the social that marked "traditional" art historical method (p. ix). Instead, they are located "in a much wider social landscape, one actively shaped by politics and social change interacting with the eruption and movement of ideas" (p. ix). Introducing the section of part 3 that deals with the technical processes and material nature of works of modernism, Green details how he wishes to manage this :

Many modernist works of art were predicated upon "formalist" ideals: the conviction that the "what" and the "how" are one and the same, that meaning at its most profound resides in the formal properties of the work, in how it is put together. Such a conviction, of course, fixes works of art in an autonomous aesthetic sphere, separate from society. ... In fact, modernist as much as non-modernist works of art were caught up in the major social, political and cultural conflicts of the period. (p. 82)

One might ask whether such a position does any more than perpetuate the division put in place by the modernist conviction that the how of works of art is somehow disconnected from history. This is a central question about the book, and I will return to it below. For now, I want to note that the effect of Green's belief in the identity of modernism and the social is to structure "a major concern" of the second half of the book (p. 82), where the argument that modernism privileges the spectator allows reception and hence the social to be reintroduced to the "autonomous" modernist work. Green provides, for instance, an institutional and social explanation for the triumph of modernism: "the dynamism of the dealers was the engine of modernism. It was the art market that provided the thrust behind the eventual ascendency of the moderns over the painters and sculptors of the Artistes francais and the Nationale," the seats of state patronage (p. 52). Its corollary holds that independent artists, however clear their o wn sense of themselves as living against the bourgeois grain, in practice depended for their way of life on the profits of "a buoyant art market" (p. 59). The making of art, its consumption, and the dealership system were closely "enmeshed together" (p. 59). Successful modernist artists such as Henri Matisse and Picasso experienced "the competing demands of their art and their pursuit of market success" (p. 73). "Both stood for total engagement as artists and yet at the same time for a worldly and highly effective engagement with the realities of the market place" (p. 73). This is one way of demystifying modernism and its claims for autonomy, universal truth, and an authority derived from a position outside the means-end rationale of bourgeois society. Modernist art, whatever its rhetoric, is revealed" as socially invested, the outcome of the culture to which it denies it is connected. (2)

Taking this perspective, Green seeks throughout to link the historical with the interpretation of art and to disable modernist arguments for art as located outside or beyond the social:

The social and political effects of dominant middle-class attitudes--rationalist, individualist, conservative--and a slow decline towards stagnation, nostalgia and division are central themes in any history of the Third Republic.... How extraordinary, then, that openness to innovation and sustained dynamic activity should be dominant themes in most historical analyses of art in France during those years, especially since art was so largely the preserve of the middle classes. Fundamentally, the cultural is not separable from the social and political even in such a case, but it is simple enough to see how the first historians of art in France in the early twentieth century could have told their stories as if art had its own separate history of triumph, utterly separate from a history that otherwise ended in defeat. (p. 11)

This methodology bears its best fruit in the accounts of the role of tradition and traditionalism and of Surrealism as primitivizing and negating modernism. But the connections imagined in these cases are somewhat at odds with the idea of an integrated relation between forms of representation and the social and historical. In the discussion of Primitivism we learn that the "avant-garde work that continues to impress, excite and disturb at the turn of the millennium" was "originally given its edge against the grain of a still traditionalist society increasingly in danger of stagnation, whose institutions and representatives consistently held France up as the model of civilization" (p. 235). Guernica, in its "openness to the most negative responses, becomes "one of many works that can seem to anticipate the German defeat of France in 1940" (p. 290). At this point the complexity of the connections between art and society that are announced at the beginning of the book have to some extent melted away. The opposit ional model of avant-garde activity repeated in this observation takes us far from the sophisticated connections between the cultural and the historical Green earlier seems to posit. We end up, on the final pages, with models of history and the role of art within it that are far more straightforward and less convincing than those promised by the analysis inaugurating the book.

Green, however, offers an assessment of this perspective. Whatever the "revolutionary" (p. 138) potential of French avant-garde art and what Green calls "visual culture" (p. 138 and passim), the "dominant liberal and conservative values were not seriously undermined" (p. 138), and the negation of the avant-garde eventually, at the end of the period covered by Green's book, was subject to the "new fascisized Right's revenge" on both the Third Republic and the revolution of the Surrealists (p. 138). This narrative is situated in a larger one. As I have noted, Green argues that modernism produced a "shift from artist to viewer" (p. 138). Modernist paintings by Matisse or Pierre Bonnard "are invitations to active looking," instantiations of an "open-ended, exploratory process of making" (p. 91). The type of creative looking that the modernists obliged their spectators to engage in is, importantly, "finally ... emphatically individualist," dependent on "intensely personal 'sensation' "experienced by both "the arti st and the spectator" (p. 91). The emergence of this new relationship for the spectator thus can be seen as "in a real sense ... a function of a major shift that occurred between the products of capitalist industry and its consumers" (p. 138). A discussion of Louis Aragon's "personality of choice" shows it to be "an analogue of the advertiser's realization in the period that to choose any commodity.. . was to make a personal statement, to confirm an individual identity by forming and activating desires" (p. 138). The question of the "challenge" posed by avant-garde, negating art, positioned within this reading of the social environment, thus provides the idea of an "oppositional" art working "against the grain" with a credibility within the argument of the book as a whole.

In Green's survey, the argument that art, whether conceived as autonomous or not, in fact forms a part of its social and historical conditions has as its most important consequence a totally separate section for his discussion of the technical and formal aspects of works. Paradoxically, this artificial situation arises directly from Green's unwillingness to consider the works of art as in any sense separable from "history." In practice, that inseparability means that discussion in the body of the text focuses on the historical and social at the expense of any substantial consideration of the aesthetic or material qualities of the works of art. Yet Green's awareness of the need to provide detailed readings of individual works, an awareness that does him credit, obliges him to undertake that task separately, in a discrete section of the book. The resulting part 3 offers an informed and judicious discussion of the technical and physical aspects of the objects. Unfortunately, the section and its discussion serve to reinforce the perception of a parallel history of works of art, homologous with the political, social, and cultural narratives but distinct and, at a fundamental level, disconnected from them-a concept that was a principal target of the revision of methodologies.

If Green falls, as I have suggested, into a sort of modernist flattening of the cultural meanings of the works he engages, it may be because we are still in thrall to much of the modernists' mythology. To use the division of the how of artworks and their history as an organizing principle may necessarily mean renouncing the possibility of offering an analysis that gives full measure to both. Perhaps it is impossible, given the current state of art history and of its thinking about the connections we can profitably imagine between the work of art and the histories it shares, to get much further than this, or to imagine a rich relation between work and history in terms other than these. For, however vigorous the attacks on modernism's aesthetics over the last two decades, it can be argued that no one has come up with a better account of the specificity of artworks. It remains important to draw attention to the "ineluctable flatness of the support," even as the "fundamental...condition" toward which modernism "o rientated itself...as it did to nothing else," not because Clement Greenberg's view of modernism is necessarily correct but because the observation that works of art are physical and material artifacts before they are anything else seems to be a necessary precondition of an effective art history. (3) A good argument can be made for saying that if art history truly wishes to describe the connections it so ardently desires to exist between the work and the history, then it is to that materiality and physical existence that it must attend. For if a painting has historical or social meaning, then that meaning can arise only from the signifying potentialities of the material substance that forms its irreducible or "ineluctable" conditions of existence. Materiality is the medium through which it must signify. This, no doubt, accounts for the reemergence of an interest in updated varieties of formalism evident in the work of Yve-Alain Bois and others as well as for the promise, barely fulfilled, of a visual semiotic s. (4) It may also account for the interest in materiality within "visual culture," a term Green periodically invokes in his discussion hut fails to develop. Until these questions are taken up and moved forward, art history risks being hound into the modernist duality of work versus history, in which context and interpretation appear as distinct and opposed ideas. The challenge is to achieve a language and mode of inquiry that is sensitive to the visual characteristics of works of art, as well as a methodology that can place those characteristics within the history of which they are a part. The specificity of art objects needs to be placed back into history, not separated from it.

This brings us back to the demands of the survey form. Green's is a thoughtful and in many ways elegant solution to the competing demands of the genre, but it is not a value-free one. Moving consideration of the specificity of works of art into a separate section and delving into the detail of the work there and only there make it possible for him to give the claims of "history" their due elsewhere in the text, unimpeded by the need to spend extensive analytic time on close readings of individual works. This is handy for both author and user. But as the result of this solution perpetuates a division that modernist aesthetics imposed, convenience comes at too high a price. The most urgent task now for scholars of modernism must be to find a way of reconceptualizing the materiality of the work of art that gives critical purchase on modernism rather than capitulating to its myths and self-serving rhetoric. Green puts modernism at a distance, but he also finds himself ghettoizing the work itself as a consequence.

I need to conclude by making it clear that Green's book is an impressive and useful one. French art of this period has an enormous historiography, as a glance at the notes or at the very serviceable and extremely rigorously selected bibliography reveals, and Green's book summarizes and extends a great deal of recent scholarship. Moreover, the text offers a cogent and deeply researched account of French art over a substantial chronological period. Users, from students taking a survey course to their professors, will encounter valuable and usable material either by dipping into the narrative through the index or by reading through any of the sections. As a survey of current approaches and a judicious account of the current scholarship, which also, within that context, has much that is original to say in the shape and detail of the argument, it is most helpful. If it also marks a moment at which scholarship urgently needs to press forward with a reconceptualization of the work of art that is free of the continui ng glamour of modernism's version, then that, too, makes its appearance very welcome.

Notes

(1.) The Block Reader in Visual Culture, edited by the Block Editorial Board (London: Routledge, 1996), xiii.

(2.) See Robert Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Finde-Siecle Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); and Michael C. Fitzgerald, Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth-Century Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

(3.) Clement Greenberg, "Modernist Painting" (1961), reprinted in Art in Theory 1900-1939: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ad. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwells, 1992), 756.

(4.) Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995).

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