Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

where genitals are exposed neoclassical convention is upheld: no pubic hair. But
their visages are parodies of antiquity, exaggerating the stereotypical character of
the classical ideal; the classicizing gesture is countered by the distortion of form
in body and face. They are, after all, not goddesses, but whores.
And the whore, beauty for sale, is, according to Baudelaire, “a perfect image
of the savagery that lurks in the heart of civilization.” 11 In the Demoiselles the savagery
is spelled out not just in the masks of the figures at right and left but in the
violence with which the bodies, and their environment, are cut up into sharpedged
pieces and then reassembled. That is, savagery is not just the subject but
is also the method of the painting; it is not something we contemplate but something
we are confronted with. Unlike Derain’s women, Picasso’s are not figures
seen against a ground. Instead the area around them, taking form as curtain
folds, forms together with them a fabric that both conveys a sense of threedimensionality
and thrusts it forward. Note, for example, the way the area to the
left of the squatting woman comes forward like a folded solid, as does the gray
shape in the center of the cut-out space within her right arm. At the same time
the table, with its aggressive prow echoing the pointed melon and the porrón,
pushes up into as well as against the image. Not only is the women’s sexuality
directed at us, we are drawn into their space.
This pictorial destabilization of the relation of the spectator to the image can
be taken as another token of the modernity of the experience of looking at it. It
calls a convention into question: that the picture represents a view of a reality
passively awaiting a viewer, a reality (whether that of classical mythology or
Bible story, or of physical nature) fixed and eternal. On the one hand it makes it
clear that what we are looking at is a painting, not a window on reality. On the
other, it suggests a reality that is uncertain, within which one cannot be sure
what is what and where one is in relation to it.
This effect is implicit in a Romantic picture like Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus
(1821–8, Musée du Louvre; see Figure 4.2), in which the perspectival
inconsistency of the pictured space allows it to present an image which can be
thought of as both the picture we are looking at and the vision of the royal aesthete
for whose benefit the display and destruction of feminine beauty is
arranged. Perspectival paradox operates to analogous effect in Édouard Manet’s
Bar at the Folies-Bergères (1881–2, Courtauld Institute; Figure 2.3). This picture can
be seen as an exploration of varieties of looking: the mirror behind the bar shows
the spectators of the evening’s entertainment, one with binoculars, as well as a
customer looking at the barmaid, who in turn looks out at him and us. And we
look at all of it, front and back, thanks to the mirror in a painting that is here
clearly shown not to be the mirror of reality earlier writers on art compared it to.
These various lookers have different social positions: the spectators in the distance
are being entertained; the barmaid is working behind the bar, to serve the
11 Baudelaire, “Painter,” p. 36.
SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM
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