That these were contradictory positions was in no way lost on Baudelaire; they were the contradictions that modern life imposed on the artist who would be its observer and interpreter. Perhaps his best attempt to combine the two sides was an entry in his diary My Heart Laid Bare: “On the vaporization and centralization of the Self [Moi]. Everything is here.” Being a modern artist required a twofold operation like the one through which water is distilled of its impurities, first heating up the ego to the point of evaporation, so that it expands into the world of objects and takes on their shape, then a cooling return that allows it to give stable expression to what it encountered in moments of self-loss. Baudelaire’s attempts to be such an artist have much in common with the impressionist pictures we considered a moment ago. In both, the exploration of modernity and of the imaginative life for which it provided new spaces went hand in hand, so that modern art, as he put it, was “a suggestive magic containing at once the object and the subject, the world outside the artist and the artist himself.” It was just this combination that many later modernists and vanguard artists would seek to dismantle, in order to give freer rein to imaginative energies by themselves, released from the constraints imposed by both material conditions and by the kind of continuing commitment to formal perfection Baudelaire maintained.30
The paradigmatic example of this more radical stance was the program of visionary poetics imagined by the young Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud saw Baudelaire as his principal predecessor, and nurtured his prodigious talent in part on the older poet’s work, but he sought to free himself from the limits Baudelaire had imposed on imagination through what Rimbaud called his “small-minded (mesquine)” attachment to form. In a famous pair of letters written in the spring of 1871 (but published only on the eve of World War I), Rimbaud offered a tortured intensification of the Baudelairean-bohemian “cult of multiplied sensation,” reporting that “I’m degrading myself as much as possible now. Why? I want to be a poet, and I am working to make myself a seer [voyant] … To arrive at the unknown through the derangement of all the senses, that’s the point.” Elaborating his aim in the second letter he explained that “The poet makes himself a seer by a long, immense and methodical disordering of all his senses.” The instruments of this dérèglement were “all the forms of love, suffering and madness” plus “all the poisons” (like Baudelaire he turned to alcohol and drugs to stoke his imaginative fires); the result was an “ineffable torture” that required deep faith and superhuman force to survive. What was merely personal turned to vapor at this temperature, overcome by universal powers and forces whose presence showed that (in a famous revolt against grammar) “je est un autre” – the “I” is other to itself.
The visionary who was to emerge from this tormenting baptism was no mere scribbler of verses; his vocation was to renew life. A new Promethean “thief of fire,” the poet would give humanity access to visions and powers unknown before, revitalizing existence. Everything would grow new under the sun of his imagination – even love would be “re-invented.” Whereas the great poets of antiquity had merely “given rhythm to action,” the new poetry would be ahead of life, en avant, “truly a multiplier of progress!” In order to make it such the poet had to abandon the traditional concern for formal beauty or coherence: “If what he brings back has form, he gives it form, if it is formless, he gives it formlessness.” Rimbaud’s own poems were in no way formless, but the visionary program they sought to embody burdened their author with what he soon came to see as near-delusional faith in the reality of his metaphorical transformations. “I habituated myself to simple hallucination: I very sincerely saw a mosque where there was a factory, a school of drummers made up of angels, carriages on the roads of heaven,” and “I ended up considering the disorder of my mind sacred.” Facing the consequences of putting himself into such a state was one reason why Rimbaud gave up writing poetry while still in his twenties and fled Europe, passing briefly through Indonesia before ending up for some years in North Africa where he worked as a commercial agent dealing in coffee and weapons. Both his letters describing the poet-seer and his abandonment of poetry would later be celebrated by the surrealists as a foreshadowing of their still more programmatic attempt to replace the traditional image of the artist with one dedicated to releasing the powers once confined inside the aesthetic sphere, and thus to infuse life with utopian imagination. Rimbaud’s project gave a new dimension to the formula for modern consciousness Marx had rooted in the bourgeois revelation of the potential previously hidden in human energy and activity: as “[a]ll that is solid melts into air” a new kind of knowledge of life and destiny emerges, but the “sober senses” Marx saw as taking in the result had given way to boundaryless intoxication. And the outcome pointed to dangers in the avant-garde faith in modern self-transcendence that many inspired by it have not been willing to admit.31
A strikingly similar progression from an artist dedicated at once to stability and to fluidity to one for whom the substance of aesthetic practice inhered in a radical and even violent commitment to the bursting of clear limits took place a generation later in Vienna, in the careers of Gustav Klimt and Oscar Kokoschka. Because Carl Schorske has given detailed and insightful accounts of both in his celebrated Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, a brief summary of their relationship can suffice here. Klimt’s career began and ended with works whose devotion to clarity of outline shines forth, evoking a stability that his subjects still hoped their world preserved. He quickly made his reputation with a decorative canvas for the new Burgtheater that opened in 1888, a group portrait of the fashionable audience in attendance at the auditorium of the old one, showing nearly a hundred casually posed and easily recognizable figures, notables in Viennese politics, business, culture, and high society, and done in a style much like the one Jensen associates with the juste milieu (Illustration 7). His last works, the ones best known today, include luscious and yet highly stylized female images, some portraying upper-class women encased in elaborate dresses. There is an almost Byzantine strictness and formality to these pictures, but also a blurring of boundaries: in some, the mosaic-like construction of the dresses continues into the backgrounds of the paintings, causing figure and ground to merge into each other. This obscuring of outlines seems to confirm the stability of the central subjects, however, rather than threaten it (Illustration 8).
Illustration 7 Klimt, Auditorium of the “Altes Burgtheater”
Illustration 8 Klimt, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I
This identification with stability went into eclipse in the works that made Klimt a controversial figure in the years around 1900, the panels he produced as decorations for the new University of Vienna. Allegorical representations of the faculties of medicine, philosophy, and law, these pictures turned him from a favorite of the public to an object of widespread suspicion and hostility. Here all is flux and motion, qualities difficult to reconcile with academic claims to be the fount of stable, communicable knowledge. Schorske’s evocative descriptions can hardly be surpassed. In the philosophy panel (Illustration 9), “the tangled bodies of suffering mankind drift slowly by, suspended aimless in a viscous void. Out of the cosmic murk … a heavy, sleepy Sphinx looms all unseeing.” “Medicine” was represented by a visually similar “phantasmagoria of half-dreaming humanity, sunk in instinctual semi-surrender, passive in the flow of fate … lost in space.”32 One thing that lay behind these images (and others in Klimt’s work we cannot pause to consider) was a fascination with the pessimistic, anti-rationalist philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, an interest Klimt shared with other Viennese in his time. Schopenhauer explained the repeated disappointment of human hopes in every realm – love and politics chief among them – by positing a cunning cosmic will that operated beneath the surface of events, an all-powerful but indifferent life force animated by no other aim than its own survival, and which infused individuals with an illusory sense of their own independence in order to employ them as its vehicles, orchestrating the human drama of desire, asp
iration, suffering, and death as the theater of its perpetuation. Sexuality was a central element in the will and its work, since it is the desiring body that bears the primal feelings and motions that give expression to life itself, and which join us to the cosmic All. Klimt’s depiction of mostly nude bodies, mysteriously linked together and losing their clear outlines in a movement in which all participate but none can direct, called up the philosopher’s dark vision. It was Schopenhauer who first inspired Nietzsche’s belief – to which Thomas Mann always remained ambivalently drawn – that the artist who knew the stability of the world to be mere appearance possessed a deeper understanding than the rationalists who thought they could grasp items in the sunny clarity of logic, and Klimt’s refusal to validate the professors’ belief in the reliability of their knowledge was at least partly driven by a similar conviction. Even so he seems never to have wholly abandoned his sense that stability too had a place in art, since it finds expression in the mosaic geometries of his later portraits.33
Illustration 9 Klimt, Philosophy
Kokoschka’s career would be marked by a turn away from this Baudelaire-like mix, and his case shared a number of features with Rimbaud’s. At one point a protégé of Klimt, he aimed to give fuller and more direct expression to the hidden psychic and cosmic energies the former had portrayed in a more muted way, developing a style marked by rough, jagged forms of expression that called up a tense, conflicted, and potentially violent inner realm. The violence found realization in the work he produced in connection with a 1908 exhibition or Kunstschau directed by Klimt. Here Kokoschka’s subjects were the destructive potential of adolescent sexuality, in a long and sometimes obscure illustrated poem, The Dreaming Boys, and the ravaging and fatal outcome of struggles for supremacy between the sexes, in a shockingly raw and blood-soaked play, Murderer, the Hope of Women. Later Kokoschka would pursue the search for the dissolving powers at work in the interior of individuals through a remarkable series of psychological portraits, in which the subjects seem to vibrate with a kind of galvanic force, an inner energy at once erotic and spiritual, and which supplied the artist with his vision at the same time that it gave life to his subjects. Stability is not wholly absent here, but it is pregnant with its own dissolution. In a double portrait of himself with his lover Alma Mahler, Kokoschka pictured at once their union and their separation: her calm restfulness contrasts with his rigid and tense wakefulness, generating a complex force-field of attraction and repulsion that gave rise to the “Tempest” of their relations denoted in the work’s title, and carrying the couple toward what Peter Vergo seems correct to regard as a kind of oblivion (Illustration 10).34
Illustration 10 Kokoschka, The Tempest (Bride of the Wind)
When André Breton called for the avant-garde to organize itself around pure fluidity and thus cure itself of the “fixation mania” that had impeded its efforts to release creative energy into the world, he did not recognize his appeal as an echo of the moves that separated Rimbaud from Baudelaire and Kokoschka from Klimt, but both sequences show that the impulses he sought to draw on and intensify had long been at work. It would be wrong to claim too close a connection between these recurring turns to fluidity by writers and artists and the desires and impulses generated through relations with everyday objects invoked at the beginning of this chapter, but the link was palpably present in Klimt’s milieu; he belonged to a group within the Vienna Secession that sought to embellish and enrich life by joining the “high” arts of painting and sculpture to craft products including pottery, furniture, clothing, and books, thus creating living spaces whose contents would infuse them with the qualities of imagination and fantasy of which art was the bearer. The Kunstschau of 1908 was a project of these artists, and the continuity its director’s late portraits established between elegant clothing and artful forms was part of it. But the avant-garde work that most clearly made the connection between the world of commodities and the unquenchable desires whose promise and threat to dissolve all stable boundaries radical art sought to inherit was a French one, the surrealist Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (Le Paysan de Paris) of 1924.
Here most of the action takes place in an enclosed shopping arcade, the Passage de L’Opéra, one of numerous such spaces opened up in Paris during the first half of the nineteenth century. Aragon’s focus on them as peculiarly revelatory of modern life’s potential for self-transcendence would inspire Walter Benjamin to make them central to his more massive and theoretically ambitious attempt to portray nineteenth-century Paris as a repository of revolutionary promise. The arcades had been important vehicles for expanding the consumer goods market in the early nineteenth century, but their role was largely usurped by the department stores that became prominent after 1850, so that Aragon’s locale was a remnant of a Paris receding into the past. Quaint, dark, and vulnerable, its days were numbered because the continuing reconstruction of the city along lines begun under Haussmann meant it was slated for imminent demolition. But that was just the point: not only was the Passage a transitional space, a symbol of urban life as a congeries of connections between separate and distant sites and things, it was itself proof of the instability and ephemerality of modern life. This made the arcade a peculiarly appropriate location for the dream-like experiences fostered by its shadowy, somewhat decayed, often mysterious, and suspect interior. Being inside it turns the writer into the urban equivalent of the gaping, astonished countryman overwhelmed at the mysterious powers lodged in the world.
Aragon (or his first-person narrator) first encounters the place’s mysterious power in a shop selling umbrellas and canes, many extravagantly decorated, bearing animal heads with jewel-like eyes, “foliage, cats, women, hooked beaks, countless materials,” the lot arranged in fan-like or crossed displays. Having spent an evening at a café table opposite the shop’s window, swallowing drinks while waiting for a person who did not turn up, Aragon arises to leave just as the arcade’s lights were being switched off (the place was gated up at night). In his tipsy and irritated state the darkened cane-and-umbrella shop suddenly becomes a phantasmagoric scene, bathed in an iridescent light and giving forth a sound like sea-shells; an ocean rolls in, with a swimmer who turns out to be a woman he had encountered some years earlier in another country. Then, as suddenly as it came, the vision fades away. Other establishments breed other ephemeral fantasies, so that by the end the Passage has become “a method of freeing myself of certain inhibitions, a means of obtaining access to a hitherto forbidden realm.” Its true name rears up as on a fantasized street sign, “Passage de L’Opéra Onirique,” “Arcade of the Opera of Dreams.” For Aragon it provides a site from which to promote his own commodity, surrealism, a product put into circulation by enemies of order under “the anodyne pretext of literature,” which “allows them to offer you at a rock-bottom bargain price this deadly ferment which it is high time to make generally available for consumption.”
The exploration of the arcade concluded, he tells us that “the modern world is the one that weds itself to my ways of being”: its constant undermining of permanence promises a great crisis that will leave no certainties standing, making contemporary life into “one moment of an eternal fall.” Aragon proposed to construct a new mythology for this modernity, one whose tutelary divinities would be symbols of its peculiar powers of self-transcendence. Among them were gasoline pumps with their brashly colored “luminous, faceless heads,” bearing mysterious dials with foreign and invented words, metallic counterparts to the stone ones “of Egypt or of cannibal tribes who adored only war. O Texaco motor oil, Eco, Shell, great inscriptions of human potentiality.”35 Aragon, it should be noted, saw himself as an enemy of bourgeois life; later he would be one of the few surrealists to remain inside the Communist Party after Breton and most of the others ended their brief flirtation with it. But like Marx he could not avoid the recognition that the transformative power of modernity to which he appealed was a product of the very bourgeois world for whose overcoming he worked, and th
at the energies that promised to turn it into a realm of pure fluidity had to be sought inside it.
Aesthetic autonomy and the temptation of modernity
The kinship between artists and bourgeois life visible beneath the hostility that often marked their surface relations, and that we have considered on the plane of ideas in this chapter, has been examined in a more sociological light by a recent German historian. The proclaimed opposition between artists and burghers, Dieter Hein observes, owed much to modernity’s heightened segmentation of tasks; it was “a mirror image of the rapidly developing process of differentiation that took place both inside the Bürgertum and inside the realm of artists.” Like professionals in law, medicine, or academic disciplines, artists and their close collaborators sought to organize and oversee their activities on their own, rendering themselves independent of the people and principles that had formerly claimed authority over them. This they did by constituting the realm of art and judgments about it as “a concern of professionals, artists, critics, museum directors, art-historians, gallery owners and patrons. Artists and bourgeois were much closer to each other in their professionalization than may appear from their conflicting claims about the meaning and position of art in society. Their distance from each other was like that which obtains for all occupations in the modern world of differentiated work.”36 Hein’s description corresponds in a general way to the “aesthetic sphere” Max Weberregarded as one instance of the rationalization by which different forms of modern activity organize themselves according to their own standards and principles, and for which Kant already provided a theoretical basis in the 1790s, but it also applies in a more emphatic way to the organized system that emerged through the association between artists, dealers, and critics set up by Paul Durand-Ruel in the 1870s and the various Secession organizations of the 1890s that drew inspiration from him, followed by the sequence of vanguard movements Breton sought to supercede by drawing on Duchamp’s example. Breton’s taking Duchamp’s turn to “readymades” as a liberation from the series of collective stylistic programs through which the avant-garde had developed points up an important difference between art and the other realms with which Hein compares it, namely the potential orientation toward pure individual autonomy it always bore, and of which Kant’s theory of the genius and Duchamp’s program of giving himself as an artist the right to name any object as his work were successive realizations. Duchamp’s abolition of the boundary between objects that were “art” by virtue of meeting some specific set of aesthetic criteria and the much wider range of ordinary things of everyday use was another way of accomplishing the goal Breton also attributed to Picasso, namely “to render the exterior object adequate to his desire,” just the project pursued earlier – and in a way that more clearly revealed its dangers – by Huysmans’s hero Des Esseintes.37
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