The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers

by T.J. Clark

The paintings of Manet, Degas, Seurat, and others are reproduced and examined as representations of the political, social, and physical changes characteristic of Paris, and France, in the mid-nineteenth century

Genres: Art, Art History, History, Nonfiction, France, Theory, 19th Century

338 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Timothy James Clark often known as T.J. Clark, is an art historian and writer, born in 1943 in Bristol, England.

Clark attended Bristol Grammar School. He completed his undergraduate studies at St. John's College, Cambridge University, he obtained a first-class honours degree in 1964. He received his Ph.D. in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London in 1973. He lectured at the University of Essex 1967-1969 and then at Camberwell College of Arts as a senior lecturer, 1970-1974. During this time he was also a member of the British Section of the Situationist International, from which he was expelled along with the other members of the English section. He was also involved in the group King Mob.

In 1973 he published two books based on his Ph.D. dissertation: The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851 and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848-1851. Clark returned to Britain from his position at the University of California, Los Angeles and Leeds University to be chair of the Fine Art Department in 1976. In 1980 Clark joined the Department of Fine Arts at Harvard University. Chief among his Harvard detractors was the Renaissance art historian Sydney Freedberg, with whom he had a public feud.

In 1988 he joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley where he held the George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair as Professor of Modern Art until his retirement in 2010.

In 1991 Clark was awarded the College Art Association’s Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award. Notable students include Brigid Doherty, Hollis Clayson, Thomas E. Crow, Serge Guilbaut, Margaret Werth, Nancy Locke, Christina Kiaer, Michael Kimmelman, Michael Leja, John O'Brian, Bridget Alsdorf, Matthew Jackson, Joshua Shannon, and Jonathan Weinberg.

In the early 1980s, he wrote an essay, "Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art," critical of prevailing Modernist theory, which prompted a notable and pointed exchange with Michael Fried. This exchange defined the debate between Modernist theory and the social history of art. Since that time, a mutually respectful and productive exchange of ideas between Clark and Fried has developed.

Clark's works have provided a new form of art history that take a new direction from traditional preoccupations with style and iconography. His books regard modern paintings as striving to articulate the social and political conditions of modern life.

Clark received an honorary degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2006. He is a member of Retort, a Bay Area-based collective of radical intellectuals, with whom he authored the book Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, published by Verso Books.[1]

Reviews

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is excellent for those with a love of French art and literature from 1848-1914. Those of us who love it love it because art was truly at the center of life. Politicians referred to it with all due respect (see the Flaubert trial where the judge knew good writing when he saw it).

Clark's range as a thinker is formidable. Through windows into café-concerts, the banlieues, the riverbanks of Argenteuil, through firsthand accounts from the artists themselves, hack critics, insightful ones, crackpot moralists, socialists, journalists, tourism writers (slyly referring to where the prostitutes are), an incredibly detailed picture emerges of Paris rapidly changing. You will feel like you're in the room the moment Olympia is unveiled, and if not with the same kind of shudder, you will know exactly why everyone around you is saying "would you look at how dirty she is" ("ce corps est sale"; "ne s'explique pas"). As well you will learn to see with the same eyes that painted the bourgeois in their top hats, flowing coats, wavy mustaches and ludicrously erect postures.



(Gustave Caillebotte la Place de l'Europe temps de pluie)

There were significant changes brought to people's lives living in democracies in these years. We're still having difficulty handling this redistribution of power. Clark highlights one large-scale change, noticeable through the Parisian traveler picnicking out on the suburbs on the weekend. This wasn't a leisure pursuit you would've seen much pre-1848 except among aristocrats. When the middle class all start doing something together, rest assured a trend forms, and when a middle-class trend forms, irritations rise to the surface that cannot go unobserved. Clark provides many examples of these can't-miss commentaries. Ironic posturing is as predictable as middle-class conformity. I think we all recognize the type,

"There was a struggle being waged in these decades for the right to bourgeois identity. It was fought out quite largely in the forms the new city had brought to perfection: the squares, the streets, and the spectacles: the crowds on the riverbank on Sunday afternoon, all moving about in identical dresses, all eager to be seen, were engaged in a grand redefinition of what counted as middle-class." (p. 155)

Oh the pleasures of irony and those of us who need it to reclaim our pride! THEY are all bourgeois, whereas MY irony is not! And yet the fact remains: capital is splitting ourselves off from each other, even as it provides for us ever more opportunities for intimacy. Clark shows an illustration, highlighting what was happening to the once peaceful and quiet village of Argenteuil, a few wealthy individuals are seen walking by while the peasants notice them from the fields. The caption reads, "The rich! You'd never know it to look at them, but they work as hard as we do, my poor Baptiste - doing nothing, that's their job."



(Van Gogh, The Outskirts of Paris, 1886)

Here's one of the big surprises of the book: Clark doesn't have it in for everyone's favorite punching bag, the petite bourgeoisie. "What was held to be the most comical thing about him was his unpreparedness for the leisure he now enjoyed; he was a workaday creature, after all, who naturally clung to the society of his fellows and had need of fried food and regattas. He was naive and tasteless; easily elated and easily duped..." I don't want to give too much away but for a supposed Marxist critic Clark has much sympathy for this class. Why? Because they are not really middle class and they are not really poor. Because they are "shifters in class society, the connoisseurs of its edges and waste lands." It is they who are the true mirror of the artists, not the bohemians, not the avant-garde of any stripe. With this thought it suddenly dawned on me why I love Eric Rohmer's movies so much: these sort of classless individuals are exactly the women he chose as heroines for his subtle tales of Paris and the French countryside. An unapologetic Catholic, Rohmer had his admirer in the anti-capitalist Gilles Deleuze.

There's too much to say about this heavily detailed book. I'll close with one more thought. There is much worry about our surveillance society; we are monitoring each other constantly, reporting on each other's bad behavior and wrong-headed opinions; we are outing people who don't need to be outed. Everything is on the verge of hate speech. Yet all things considered it's a bit embarrassing how happy everyone is. No one is allowed to be miserable anymore. Meanwhile the government is keeping a file on our whereabouts, our shopping habits, our online ones, our vestigial selves wherever they may be. This is terrifying to many people, enough to bring a few anti-surveillance heroes out of the woodwork. We are nothing but a set of statistics the government can easily manipulate and ruin if it wants to. But this is nothing new. We have a more technologically sophisticated way of doing this; as beings we are now ruled by facts and those facts, the scientists tell us, never lie. Call these habits symbol production and control. We are constantly being exploited for the gain of others. This didn't begin with the internet age; it goes back to the years Clark is writing about. This knowledge might not save us from being coerced, but it's good to know that as democrats we've been through all this before.

[AC · Rating 4 out of 5]

(see comments - where the above is modified - I lowered this to four stars)

Let me say, first of all, that this book has not shown any of the traits that have (for good reason) scared off some readers of Clark - it is lucid to a fault.

Over the past few years, I have gotten interested in the modern world -- something I had not paid much attention to in quite a while. We are living through 'a moment', as the saying is…; history has come alive. And it is worthy of attention.

From a political point of view, the central problem of the 20th and, I believe, of the 21st cen., is fascism. The fear of communism will either be seen as a parenthesis, or will be resolved (as I believe) into a subset of fascism. If this sounds strange -- just think of Stalin's formulation of the USSR as "Socialism for one nation". National socialism. The metaphysics of Mao ('everything is a war between opposites') is identical to that of Mussolini.

In the cultural sphere, the issue is modernism -- and it is the roots of this that I barely understand and am trying to fathom -- though the two are closely linked, of course. (For this linkage of modernism with fascism, which many will find preposterous, see Modris Eksteins' The Rites of Spring; or Richard Wolin's The Seduction of Unreason. It is not preposterous at all, what I say -- though few will say it. There is much more to be said on this, of course -- but that can wait for another day.)

At any rate, Clark's book on The Painting of Modern Life is, indeed, a sustained meditation on the roots and meaning of modernism -- traced back to the Second Empire. It contains a close and very granular reading of the mentalité of the period, and proceeds by adducing and commenting on particular pictures and texts (quoted at length in translation and in the original) and many, many facts of material life -- and is absolutely captivating. In fact, it has a great deal in common with Braudel's books on Civilization and Capitalism -- though Clark's own writing is slightly more modernizing. He is a Marxist, but it is a Marxism of categories that appears, not of rhetoric. Conservatives will therefore have no difficulty with it, as they will use identical categories in their analysis - production, class, 'form'…. Indeed, what makes Marx and Freud the fundamental texts of the modern world is precisely that their opponents need to use their categories in their rejection. Something Heidegger cannot boast of.

The first chapter deals with urban planning in Paris, Haussmannization -- the origins of bourgeois leisure -- and (though Clark has not yet said this) kitsch. This picture of Degas (Au Café-Concert: La Chanson du Chien. 1875-77) says it all, in my opinion. In the pose of this woman's arms and hands, one can see (so to speak) modernity 'aborning….

[image error]

Let me close with a quote from the Goncourt brothers (Mémoires 1:835), describing their views on Haussmann: "Notre Paris, le Paris où nous sommes nés, le Paris des moeurs de 1830 à 1848, s'en va ['it has gone':]. Et il ne s'en va pas par le materiel, il s'en va par le moral. La vie sociale y fait une grande évolution, qui commence. Je vois des femmes, des enfants, des ménages, des familles dans ce café. L'intérieur s'en va. La vie retourne à devenir publique…."

Life, 'moral', has turned inside out; what was once interior, is now 'publique'. Therein lies the problem of modern life…

[Joy · Rating 4 out of 5]

It strikes me that T.J. Clark’s book seems to revolve around the metaphor of image-as-commodity; specifically, of image-as-fetishized-commodity. In Clark’s account, the rise of consumer culture in concert with Haussmannization in Paris resulted in the destruction of the "quartier" economic system. Trades whose methods of production had previously been concentrated into one small area became spread out through the city as a result of Haussmannization, and the means of production shifted from the purview of individual workers to many workers coordinating to produce commodities more quickly and with higher volumes. As a result, the city ceased to be “readable.” Haussmann’s redesign of Paris wrested away the system of signs that had governed Parisian understanding of their city, and had provided a new one in its place: “It has now become a mass of edges now, overlapping and interfering with one another (48).” Haussmann created an image of modern Paris—one that was tidy, efficient, and well-ordered. And yet, far from being an urban utopia, many seemed to feel alienated by the new forms of control and organization it entailed. Instead of being “plural, something produced in a series of neighborhoods, made and remade in social practice” the city became “a single, separate entity, passively consumed (67).” This new entity was formulated primarily in visual terms, insofar as Paris became a “spectacle,” though Clark emphasizes that many interpretations of “Paris” co-existed in the “battlefield” of representation. Clark situates Impressionism in the context of this emerging visual culture that sought to come to terms with the experience of displacement and reorganization, both physical and symbolic.

Specifically, the new Paris opened up spaces for lower class individuals to occupy the same space as those of the upper class, and this begged the question of how to demarcate class, if not by space? According to Clark “The world of leisure was thus a great symbolic field in which the battle for bourgeois identity was fought (204).” This explains the subject matter of many Impressionist paintings. Specifically, a retreat to nature had previously been considered particularly genteel, so Impressionist painters often sought to represent such scenes. However, these beautiful representations of nature on the outskirts of Paris often contain some jarring elements, like smokestacks and railroads. Clark seems to be suggesting that some Impressionist painters were attempting to be funny or ironic by mocking the image or expectations of the experience of “nature” among the lower class by revealing its obviously non-natural elements. The outskirts of Paris ceased to constitute “real” nature, because it had become invaded by petit-bourgeois, who seemed to bring the city with them. Moreover, Impressionist painters such as Seurat painted scenes of mixed class individuals performing leisure as a marker of class belonging. I had long wondered why I’d found Seurat’s paintings so…uncomfortable! Indeed, Clark suggests that Seurat’s painting “Un Dimanche après-midi…”[housed at the Chicago Art Institute, I might add] might have been interpreted as quite amusing in its seriousness.

Clark concludes by stating “that modernist painting accepted and re-worked a myth of modernity in which the modern equaled the marginal (259).” I’m not entirely sure what this means, frankly. However, my best guess would be that because the symbol or image of Paris, as with all symbols, became defined dialectically with respect to nature or country, the representations of ever-shifting borderline cases became particularly meaningful in new ways. If this is what he means, I’m not sure that making this a very general claim is warranted by his research. Despite occasionally obscure conclusions like this, my only real complaint with Clark’s book has to do with how he garners evidence from paintings. For example, regarding Van Gogh: “The atmosphere of dissolution and misuse seems unmistakable, and the suggestion strong that the modern may add up to not much more than the vague misappropriation of things (30).” This strikes me as pretty dubious.

However, I give this four stars because it made me think about Impressionism in a totally new way, and for that reason is completely worth reading.

[kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clark's chapter about Manet's Olympia scandal and the tradition of the female nude is probably my all-time favorite piece of art historical writing. For me, it carries the other chapters, which otherwise become repetitive, to a degree - its subject matter is distinct, yet sufficiently related to his larger Marxist project. I'd perhaps argue that he ignores some larger gender issues in the service of class/commodity analyses, but that's more a product of academia's self-contained, annoyingly exclusive critical lenses than anything. "Nature of the beast," as they say.

Pedantic complaint: Clark has this weird tendency to provide a passage from some relevant primary source and, before delving into whatever critical point it serves, explaining to us readers what a stylistic travesty said passage is. (Examples: "Manet put the simple title Jésus insulté par les soldats in the salon catalogue, but underneath Olympia he added five lines of unforgivable verse by Zacharie Astruc..." or "It is hard to decide which is the more tedious, the titles themselves or the journalists' high moral tone.") Okay, so these only crop up once in a while, but they're odd for a critic whose purposes are sociohistoric and -economic; the majority of the time, his aesthetic analyses are less proclamations about "good" and "bad" painting than they are about mining cultural artifacts of a given time. My point is that these unforgivable (IRONYALERT) statements don't fit with the whole. And they're annoying. My translation of such passages: "Despite my self-professed liberalism and revaluation of tradition, I just can't shake my hoity-toity tendency to see myself as superior to those practitioners I seek to criticize. God forbid any lay-reader mistake my analytical use of a primary source for implicit appreciation of a text that the academic community does not deem worthy of praise. Clearly he/she wouldn't be able to tell the difference." Or something along those lines.

"...And I insist on quoting long passages in French, after which I state that a translation just wouldn't do them justice, because I simply enjoy thumbing my nose at non-multilingual, and therefore less worthy readers. By the way, I'm kind of an asshole."

Perhaps a bit harsh for a four-star review, but I really mean what I said about Olympia. Quintessential reading for 19th century art enthusiasts.

[Dvora Treisman · Rating 1 out of 5]

This isn't a bad book; it just isn't a book for me. It seemed to set out as a Marxist analysis of Impressionism. That was OK with me, in fact, I thought it would be interesting.

But I didn't find it interesting. I found it went on and on and I really couldn't concentrate. I suppose I don't really care about critiques of paintings. In fact, I rather dislike art criticism. What I do enjoy is learning about the people, the history, and the culture of the times. There wasn't enough of that in this book for me. Of if it was there, I couldn't find it, being bogged down by too much academic discussion.

[Bee · Rating 3 out of 5]

So I didn't "finish" this book in the sense that I read all the pages BUT I figured out Clark's argument style and read the important parts. This was a school project so I also have a semi-massive review that I will super summarize here:

Plot: Haussmann destroys and rebuilds Paris. Every Parisian is pissed off. No one knows what to do with themselves and CLASS STRUGGLE. Capitalism drains Paris' personality.
Conclusion: Paris is for tourists. Everything and everyone is FALSE or pretended. Impressionists create "blurry" and "unfinished" paintings because they see everything around them as being so. Modern life is defined by images that are FLAT and difficult to understand.

Recommend? Not unless you are super interested in the socio-economics of 1850s Paris or want to read an interpretation of Manet's paintings that doesn't get much better than "flat".
That being said, the history was very interesting (backed up with good evidence) and Clark made a story out of it by the end.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

More "academic" thoughts on the book here:
Method: Clark constructed a historical background and social context for the Impressionist artwork created in Paris during Haussmannization (1850-70). He then worked through a timeline of Paris' reconstruction and class struggle to come to the conclusion that the Impressionists’ concept of modernity was defined by the uncertainty of everything happening in the world around them.
Take-aways: After reading The Painting of Modern Life, I came away with a larger and more complicated idea of Paris during Haussmannization. I have a better understanding of the complexity of social life and class struggle within Paris at that time. I especially liked when Clark wrote that Paris had turned into a “mass of edges, overlapping and interfering with one another” because that put the city into an Impressionist painting (Clark, 47). What I understood was that Parisians suddenly had trouble finding their identities and places on the social ladder, and their uncertainty translated directly into Impressionist art. Manet’s and other Impressionists’ paintings did not clearly define their subjects with bold outlines or sharp edges but instead captured a blur of color and light. Their work represented single moments in time and suggested impermanence. The figures in Impressionist paintings were not clear because they were shifting through different identities trying to find a place for themselves in Haussmann’s Paris. I learned just how much Capitalism was shaping the new city and what a shock that was to its inhabitants. Haussmann allowed Capitalism to turn Paris into a “marketable mass of images” (Clark, 49). Class did not matter as long as you looked like you could afford to participate in the consumption of Paris. Impressionists painted the middle and lower classes because those people were artists in their own right, play-acting at belonging to whatever class they wanted. Modernity became synonymous with falsity. Manet flattened the subjects of his paintings to reflect this movement of reality losing its realness. Or, at least, that is how Clark wanted me to understand it.
Problem: Clark’s argument only became more difficult to grasp as the book went on. It felt as if Clark was more interested in the social context than in the artworks so he gave more history than he needed to. The number of articles and outside sources became distracting when I could not always connect how they related to Clark’s stance. It was also not helpful that Clark included a lot of passages and vocabulary words in French without providing a translation or sometimes even explanation.
More Problems: The amount of information Clark provided was overwhelming but I would have appreciated more words directly from or about the Impressionist artists he discussed. He very clearly explained Manet’s intentions behind each painting and provided a larger history that seemed to validate his claims, but there were very few statements in this book from Manet himself. For me, that was a very noticeable lack in Clark’s evidence.
Opinion: This book was way too long. I needed to know French to read it all. Clark listed off way too many points he was going to make and could have kept it so much simpler. Not enough Monet or van Gogh OR Renoir. In fact, he was a bit salty towards Renoir and I would fight him.

[Zo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great combination of history, sociology, and artistic criticism. Clark uses the paintings he focuses on to reveal the character of the times. The result is a penetrating analysis of what is a crucial cultural moment in the beginning of modernity, that opens up classic impressionist paintings into a new world of meaning and significance. Clark clearly comes from a Marxist/Frankfurt school background, and his overriding concerns are unsurprisingly class-based. But even with his ideological framework and corresponding writing style he moves naturally between a number of different angles of analysis, and has insightful things to say wherever he ventures. I really enjoyed the way he uses the art criticism of the time to show how our understanding of these now canonical works has transformed over the years. His conclusions can sometimes feel a touch too "everything is contradictory and ambiguous," but he does a great job of laying the groundwork for why he gets too such a place, and by and large I found myself in agreement with most of his takeaways. Clark turns a very academic style and approach into engaging and informative writing - I definitely plan to read his other works.

[Curtis Anthony Bozif · Rating 4 out of 5]

I began reading Clark's Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. After the first chapter—in which Clark claims that modernism begins with the French Revolution, Jacques-Louis David and his painting, The Death of Marat—he skips over Manet and the Impressionists. He explains this omission by simply saying he covered all that in his earlier book: The Painting of Modern Life. So I put down Fairwell to an Idea to read The Painting of Modern life as if it were the second chapter of the other book. Can't imagine reading these two texts any other way. Eager to pickup the story with Camille Pissarro and the Post-Impressionsists.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5-4 stars

this wasn't a bad book by far-- it was just hard for me to get through. i think it offered compelling and interesting arguments and gave a really enlightening viewpoint of 19th century impressionism, but at times i felt like the chapters were unnecessarily long and arguments were kind of confusing to follow. i enjoyed the section that discussed monet's works and the effects of places like argentuil vs. the paris.

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had to read this for an art course and I don't remember much since it's been like 4 years since I took that course but I think it was a weird viewing of impressionist art from mostly a Marxist view. Anyway, I'll give it a 1 star fuck it who cares.

[Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author attempts to place the work of Manet and his followers within the context of the modernization of Paris and the beginning of the middle class.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is more than an art history book. The text contains social history and materialist dialectic. It doesn't mean it is boring. Quite the opposite.

[nicols · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just yapping I loved it

[Wyatt Browdy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential Paris reading

[andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

yapping

[Kes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extraordinarily detailed book on art history during the 19th century; I particularly enjoyed how he contextualised French society - Haussmanisation, with historical parts of the city being torn down and rebuilt; the departmental stores and mass produced goods; the resulting change in society, and the increasing mobility of the social class.

[Adrienne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did not read all of this, as I didn't have to, but I'd like to finish it sometime... Great information on Manet, his paintings, and his society, but it's a little overly complicated (and overly informative), including large French passages that aren't translated. Luckily, we can stumble through them, but when someone's talking about prostitution in France, well, we just didn't cover some of those terms in high school for some reason.

[Lynne]

Inspired by my recent visit to the Musee d'Orsay and time spent with my art history professor friend Liz. I've been neglecting my education long enough.

[Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Social and intellectual effects of industrial revolution

[Egor xS · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clark makes you look at paintings anew and really see the impact of modernism during its nascence.

[amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marxist critique of post-Haussmann Paris as painted. Super clear and readable, even without an art history background. (Architecture, though)