Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE AVANT-GARDE IN FASHION
In an essay on Mondrian, Meyer Schapiro pointed out that in a picture like
Degas’s At the Milliner’s (1882, Metropolitan Museum of Art), the woman trying
on a hat before a mirror “is the artist-critic of her own appearance, her object of
contemplation . . . In Degas’s pastel the woman is testing the fitness of a work of
art that is not at all a representation, yet as a part of her costume will symbolize
her individuality and taste in shape and color,” in the same way that the artist’s
handling of his visual materials may signify his. 37 Degas himself brought the two
ideas together—visual art and the fashionably dressed woman as a living work of
art—in a drawing of his friend Mary Cassatt as a well-turned-out museum visitor
(ca. 1871–80, Boston Museum of Fine Arts). The similar operation
accomplished by Beaton’s photographs has a different effect, not only because of
the scale of the paintings and the danger of decorativeness inherent in Pollock’s
abstraction but also because of their function as fashion plates rather than artworks.
The fashionable woman, whatever her Baudelairean significance as
incarnation of beauty, remains here as in the nineteenth century a male construction
and object of enjoyment. But Beaton draws Pollock’s work from the
gallery or museum into the shop window: Pollock’s male creative ambition is
made to serve the female consumer (whomever she in turn may serve). The pictures
thus link the relations of social power between the sexes to the issue of the
relation between creativity and commerce that lies at the heart of the modern
practice of art.
Despite the verbal self-assurance with which Baudelaire articulated his wish
for an art at once modern and eternal, this proved difficult to achieve. His own
lack of monetary success as a writer (not to mention the censor’s banning of his
greatest work, Les Fleurs du Mal) testifies to the gap typically experienced at first
between avant-garde art and its potential public. It is noteworthy that Baudelaire
found “the painter of modern life” in neither of the plausible candidates
among his artist friends, Courbet and Manet, but in the fashion illustrator Constantin
Guys, who has lived on in art history largely because of Baudelaire’s
essay. Although as a late Romantic Baudelaire rejected the possibility that photography
could produce works of art, it was surely a brilliant idea to locate the
specifically modern home of beauty in pictures made for mechanical reproduction
in the illustrated press.
Art and ideology
Considering the same issues nearly a century later, Clement Greenberg was less
sanguine about the relation of mass produced culture to the handmade goods of
the art trade. He recognized, as Baudelaire had, that both are produced for sale.
On the one hand (to cite a passage quoted earlier in this book), the avant-garde
37 Meyer Schapiro, “Mondrian: order and randomness in abstract painting,” in idem, Modern Art,
p. 240.
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