Style and Civilization by Linda Nochlin

Author:Linda Nochlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141937021
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 1971-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

111. Avenue de l’Opéra, 1898. Camille Pissarro

112. Boulevard, vu d’en haut, 1880. G. Caillebotte

113. Rue Montorgueil Decked out with Flags, 1878. Claude Monet

4

The Heroism of Modern Life

It was Baudelaire who used this term, not without irony, one suspects, in his Salon of 1846. And it is quite true that, hovering in the background of the Realist intention to portray ordinary, contemporary life in all its prosaicness, was the idea that there was in fact an epic side to modern life itself, a grandeur as innate to modern times as the heroism of antiquity had been to its own epoch. Indeed, from Claude Lantier to Claes Oldenburg, artists have dreamed, without any apparent sense of contradiction, of an epic art of the ordinary, works like Zola’s fictional hero’s monumental Paris, summarizing the sensuous vitality of the whole city in a grand canvas of the Seine with three splendid female bathers in a boat in its midst, or Oldenburg’s vision of a gigantic Toilet-Tank Float rising and falling with the tides of the Thames. Like the artists and writers who had preceded them, the Realists tried to find some equivalent for their sense of the heroic; yet, unlike artists of the past, they had to embody it in an imagery which would at once be convincingly truthful and unembellished, yet at the same time, create when appropriate, a sense of long-range value and importance. In certain instances, of course, the mere recording of modern reality would, in the eyes of some Realists, almost automatically result in the creation of an entirely new and appropriately modern type of literary or pictorial heroic mode. It is often the sense of immanent self-contradiction which enhances the effect of the more ambitious attempts to create pictorial equivalents for the heroic side of modern life, adding, in paintings like Brown’s Work, Courbet’s Painter’s Studio, or William Bell Scott’s Iron and Coal [114] (part of a series of eight murals describing the history of Northumberland), vibrations of meaning or expression which neither the straight allegories of the past nor the straight recording of direct experience of Realism in general could achieve. Yet on the whole, and for obvious reasons, Realist artists avoided any subjects or treatments of subjects that might implicate them in that rhetoric of grandeur which they automatically considered suspect, opposed to the Realist values of truth and sincerity. Significantly, most of the more ambitious Realist schemes for commemorating the heroism of modern life remained in the realm of speculation, like Courbet’s proposal to transform the waiting-rooms of railway stations, vast natural museums with ready-made audiences, into ‘temples of art’ by depicting on their walls the accomplishments of the various départements of France; or Manet’s fascinating project, proposed to the Prefect of the Seine in 1879, for the decoration of the new Hôtel de Ville of Paris – a series of compositions representing the ‘belly of Paris’, with murals depicting the various milieux of Parisian life – les Halles, the railroads, the bridges, the sewers, the

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