Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

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SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM Figure 2.3 Édouard Manet, Bar at the Folies-Bergères (© Courtauld Institute Gallery, Somerset House, London) customer and to be looked at by him, and by us. And what is our relation to him? The picture’s famous violation of perspective allows for no resolution of this problem. His relation to her, as customer, is part of what the picture presents to us, but it is a relation into which the picture draws us. Picasso’s early sketches for the Demoiselles d’Avignon included two men along with the women: a sailor sat at the table, while a student entered the room from the left and the women turned to look at him. 12 In the picture’s final form, the women look out at the spectator. The student’s position in the sketches is now occupied by a masked, hieratic female figure, seemingly about to pull a curtain closed upon the room; the sailor has vanished, though his table remains, still bearing the sign of masculine sexuality in the porrón and the rather phallic still life. The sailor can be taken as an embodiment of physicality, specifically of male sexuality, the student as representing the powers of the mind. (The student is identified by a book he holds; in other early studies he also carries a skull, an attribute that relates this image to other pictures in which a medical man identifies a woman as an embodiment at once of sexual pleasure and of death, combined particularly, since the 12 For an exhaustive study of the sketched and painted prehistory of the Demoiselles, see Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, vol. 1 (Paris: Musée Picasso, 1988). 19
SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM seventeenth century, in the form of syphilis. 13 ) Absent from the picture these two figures are fused into one—and this person is not hard to identify: it is Picasso himself, a compound of fleshly feeling and controlling intelligence, recognizing the power of female sexuality while also mastering it, forcing it to submit to his art. But if Picasso, having dropped his symbolic disguises, is now the person to whom the Avignon filles direct their attention, the spectator’s position in relation to his picture is determined by this fact. The place of the story told in the original sketch, of men in a brothel, is now taken by the fact of our looking at the painting, and in this event we are forced to confront the fact that we are looking through Picasso’s eyes. We are offered a view of reality only as it has been shaped by Picasso’s hand, to express his sense and thoughts of it. The language it is painted in was in 1907 not a conventional or traditional one, not one viewers shared, even other artists. Today, when that language is familiar to the amateur of modern art, it still signals its original historical moment and so its inventor’s solitude and his freedom. It is a picture of women, but we must see it as “a Picasso.” Though the two men are no longer in the picture, two kinds of women make themselves seen (or perhaps three). Besides the antique beauties of the center are the masked figures to the left and right. They lack the round breasts and sexy gestures of their companions. And above all those at the right wear masks made to frighten, not please. They do not display themselves, but look out inscrutably or hostilely, while their companion to the left, looking at them, stands like a guardian of the scene. While the faces of the central figures reflect Picasso’s interest in early Iberian sculpture at the time he was working on the Demoiselles, the masks have more distant origins. It seems that Picasso had finished a version of the painting when he visited the ethnographic museum of the Trocadéro; he later spoke of the objects he saw there as not just like any other pieces of sculpture . . . They were magic things . . . intercesseurs, mediators . . . against everything . . . They were weapons. To help people avoid coming under the influence of spirits again, to help them become independent. They’re tools. If we give spirits a form, we become independent . . . I understood why I was a painter. 14 No doubt there is an important personal aspect to the spirits Picasso wished to master: his work records a lifetime of struggle with and against women. But this 13 See the discussion in William Rubin, “Picasso,” in W. Rubin (ed.), “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and Modern, vol. 1 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984), p. 254. 14 From a conversation of 1937, reported in André Malraux, Picasso’s Mask (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1976), pp. 11–13, cited in Rubin, Seckel, and Cousins, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, p. 219. 20
Page 2: ART IN ITS TIME Art writing normall
Page 5 and 6: First published 2003 by Routledge 1
Page 8: CONTENTS List of illustrations ix P
Page 12 and 13: PREFACE In writing this book I have
Page 14 and 15: 1 INTRODUCTION The ten chapters tha
Page 16 and 17: INTRODUCTION ideology, as I am atte
Page 18 and 19: INTRODUCTION process as practically
Page 20 and 21: INTRODUCTION articulation of nonver
Page 22 and 23: 2 SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM The days
Page 24 and 25: SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM which it di
Page 26 and 27: SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM chaotic mov
Page 28 and 29: SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM the faces o
Page 30 and 31: SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM Figure 2.2
Page 34 and 35: SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM private str
Page 36 and 37: SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM the artist
Page 38 and 39: ART AND MONEY action taken to turn
Page 40 and 41: ART AND MONEY Diderot’s version o
Page 42 and 43: ART AND MONEY Luxury and corruption
Page 44 and 45: ART AND MONEY financed not only by
Page 46 and 47: ART AND MONEY of Plato with whom th
Page 48 and 49: ART AND MONEY When a handful of spe
Page 50 and 51: ART AND MONEY might confuse the hon
Page 52 and 53: ART AND MONEY complaint about the r
Page 54 and 55: ART AND MONEY comparison with Kant
Page 56 and 57: ART AND MONEY experience of the bea
Page 58 and 59: ART AND MONEY worthy inheritors of
Page 60 and 61: BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME It is, we mus
Page 62 and 63: BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME strength. Cri
Page 64 and 65: BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME In Rousseau
Page 66 and 67: BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME two centuries
Page 68 and 69: BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME exemplified b
Page 70 and 71: BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME Figure 4.1 Jo
Page 72 and 73: BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME “beautiful
Page 74 and 75: BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME and political
Page 76 and 77: BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME The paintings
Page 78 and 79: BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME In this pictu
Page 80 and 81: world will be long in freeing itsel
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69 Figure 4.2 Eugène Delacroix, De
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BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME always has a
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the sublime and the beautiful—cal
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THE RATIONALIZATION OF ART “Spiri
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THE RATIONALIZATION OF ART als, wit
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THE RATIONALIZATION OF ART The dist
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THE RATIONALIZATION OF ART members
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THE RATIONALIZATION OF ART image, e
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THE RATIONALIZATION OF ART which de
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6 MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION IN THE AG
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MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION Almost none
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MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION models were
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MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION But we are
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MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION They repres
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MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION have alread
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MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION And they pr
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MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION It is evide
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MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION order of be
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MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION triumph as
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PORK AND PORCELAIN extent not only
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PORK AND PORCELAIN support of the B
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PORK AND PORCELAIN for the distinct
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PORK AND PORCELAIN of the very rich
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PORK AND PORCELAIN ment censorship
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PORK AND PORCELAIN private foundati
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8 THE AESTHETICS OF ANTI-AESTHETICS
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THE AESTHETICS OF ANTI-AESTHETICS o
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THE AESTHETICS OF ANTI-AESTHETICS
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THE AESTHETICS OF ANTI-AESTHETICS p
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THE AESTHETICS OF ANTI-AESTHETICS p
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THE AESTHETICS OF ANTI-AESTHETICS O
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THE AESTHETICS OF ANTI-AESTHETICS r
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THE AESTHETICS OF ANTI-AESTHETICS C
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THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL Warho
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THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL readi
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THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL print
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THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL and E
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THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL 1989
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THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL found
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THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL ident
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Buchloh sees the political limitati
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THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL conte
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THE AVANT-GARDE IN FASHION Figure 1
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THE AVANT-GARDE IN FASHION recast a
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Such a view is more plausible in re
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THE AVANT-GARDE IN FASHION “strip
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THE AVANT-GARDE IN FASHION the unif
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THE AVANT-GARDE IN FASHION long con
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THE AVANT-GARDE IN FASHION had its
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THE AVANT-GARDE IN FASHION wrong. A
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THE AVANT-GARDE IN FASHION One can
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CLASSLESS TASTE home or being aroun
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CLASSLESS TASTE Burning call “aca
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CLASSLESS TASTE It would be pervers
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CLASSLESS TASTE ing, as the boundar
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Adams, Abigail 48 Adorno, Theodor 5
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play 41ff Pocock, J. G. A. 28 n. 16
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Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

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