I recently wrote on rightwing art for IM-1776, mostly in the form of an interview with a young sculptor, Fen de Villiers, who wishes to review the historical styles of the end of the 19th c., beginning of the 20th, the last time the arts could plausibly claim a relationship to manliness. One thing that struck me, listening to Fen talk about his apprenticeship years, is the ongoing, largely complete transformation of art schools into silly seminars of Marxist hysteria. It’s important to notice that the established or orthodox liberal & left positions or ideology are now fundamentally sterile. Whatever transgressive art emerged in the 20th c., it’s now dead & it’s quickly becoming forgotten.
This made me return to something I’ve long wanted to post about, thoughts on the conflict between the bourgeois & the bohemians, perhaps the most famous conflict regarding art in the 19th c. in Europe (20th in America). Let me give you an example rather than an argument or a story. This is an early painting by Edvard Munch, from 1881, when he was not yet 18, of the living room of his home. This is Norway; Munch is famous for being very miserable & encouraging others to think about suicide; I don’t recommend his art. But look at the home of his youth:
I suppose people would now call such a room quaint & poor; some perhaps would call it trad; most people I suppose would like the cat in front of the blue chair on the right, some would like the needlework on the green chair on the left. It is unlike our living rooms in lacking technology. The place of technology in our lives was taken, in that way of life, by culture. The two ways have in common a concern with education, the mind, imagination… The claim I would like you to consider was that living this way of life with its contradictions led Munch to madness. I do not wish to excuse his art or encourage anyone to try it out, but we must consider coolly the difficulties involved in the introduction of beauty & leisure into our lives, which is part of what makes us think of ourselves as middle class.
Munch’s father was a devout Christian; sometimes his piety is described in unflattering terms. That is one vision of the character or purpose of leisure—contemplating man’s eternal destiny, the greatness of God. Munch was an atheist, his contemplation of man was perhaps as full of misery as the Christian notion of sin, but nevertheless quite different. Altogether, this interior drama of the soul seems absent from this room.
Let us then start to look at the room again. The title of the painting, the parlor of the Munch girls, points to one important fact. Domestic life is more about women than men; the parlor is still about women, but not at work, at leisure; even the needlework at home in such rooms is compatible with conversation. The sofa & the chairs indicate that this room is for sitting rather than doing things, or moving about; the only restless movement one can conceive is tied to the rocking chair. This is a room for looking at things, a decorated room: The plants on the windowsill, the mirror in the distant left corner, & the paintings on the walls indicate the concern for beauty, but they require quite a bit of thinking through. The room as a whole then is respectable, the colors suggest modestly taste in the arrangement, but the wooden floor & the whitewashed ceiling both attest to its meagerness. To what extent is it possible to have leisure when you are poor? To what extent, especially, is beauty available to the poor? That would seem to point instead to public things—the local cathedral, for example, or the major square of a town—to public events especially, such as festivals. The middle class, however, is defined by private property & self-control; therefore the desire to own even beautiful things is tied up with one’s own life, separate from the public; not the façade, but the parlor, is what counts. The meagerness of the room somehow includes luxury—the paintings. The artist in the bourgeois world is alike a meager man, but contributes luxury, but to the private life, rather than to public life. He is hired by the bourgeois, on their terms, & there cannot be any talk of public honors.
What may not be obvious about this room & what it represents in the life of the middle class people is that it is an imitation of the aristocracy. The aristocrats were the first to hire artists to make their likenesses in a portrait, for any number of reasons. Paintings in Europe before that were primarily religious. The gradual replacement of holy images by political & then social concerns follows the glory & decadence of the aristocracy. The artists themselves retained some strange kinship to aristocratic concern long into the modern centuries. Their anti-bourgeois bohemian attitudes are nothing but the playacting of decadent aristocracy.
Look again at the paintings, most of them are portraits that help keep the family pious, & therefore help keep it a family. The family is the primary aristocratic institution, since it is blood & education both, & it means remembering the past & preserving it. The popular opinion is otherwise—ordinary people do not remember the names of their ancestors in previous centuries. Beautification, however, comes to mean something else in the bourgeois world—the beautification of the quotidian, of the ordinary life, which is a liberation from the past & a new disposition to the future, an openness to the possibilities brought into our awareness by the frequent changes in taste, manners, & even beliefs. The artist cannot hope that his works will be remembered, since memory is tied up to the past—unless in reorienting to the imagination, he can see the character of the future, which may mean the character of man as a being or the character of a way of life as a project. A daring new kind of artistry is therefore explicitly the necessary companion, whether servant or advisor, of the bourgeoisie.
Brilliant. Titus at his (your) best. Much appreciated.