Impressionism Reconsidered

Claude Monet: Impression, soleil levant (1872) [1] 

Oil on canvas (48 x 63 cm) 

Musée Marmottan Monet

 

 

I. 

 

My view of French Impressionism has until now largely been shaped by D. H. Lawrence's argument that it was essentially an attempt to dissolve substance and to make the body into a thing of light and colour:

 

"Probably the most joyous moment in the whole history of painting was the moment when the incipient impressionists discovered light, and with it, colour. Ah, then they made the grand, grand escape into freedom, into infinity [...] They escaped from the tyranny of solidity and the menace of mass-form. They escaped, they escaped from the dark procreative body [...] into the open air: plein air and plein soleil ..." [2]   

 

This was a moment of ecstasy; albeit a relatively short-lived and illusionary moment. For invariably the impressionists were brought back to earth with a crash by the so-called post-impressionists, who championed the "doom of matter, of corporate existence, of the body sullen and stubborn and obstinately refusing to be transmuted into pure light, pure colour, or pure anything" [3].  

 

Nevertheless, even if the cat came back - "bristling and with its claws out" [4] - there's no need to denigrate or dismiss the impressionists. And indeed, Lawrence acknowledges that they were wonderful; "even if their escape was into le grand néant" [5] and even if many of their works, whilst delightful, look somewhat chocolate boxy to us now.  

  

 

II. 

 

The thing that I'm now starting to appreciate is that impressionism wasn't just about the attempted escape into the great nowhere via the denial of substance that Lawrence writes of. 

 

It was also characterised, for example, by visible brush strokes, unusual perspectives, and the attempt to capture movement and the passage of time and impressionism was profoundly hated by piss-taking critics of the period not for its idealism, but it's violation of the rules and conventions formulated by the Académie des Beaux-Arts that had long governed painting in France [6].         

 

In other words, the impressionists were not really afraid of the human body anymore than Turner, whose work was so influential on their thinking, was afraid of ships; they were fed-up of a governing body telling them what to paint and how to paint and they turned to colour and the realism of everyday life in order to defy the authority of the Grey Ones obsessed with lines and contours and idealised images of the heroic past.   

 

It's a little surprising, further more, to find Lawrence of all people criticising artists for painting outdoors in order to capture the ever-changing effects of sunlight and shadow on natural settings; would he really prefer them to remain studio-bound and producing true (because fixed and enduring) representations of the world ...? 

 

I know Lawrence believes that a painting has to come primarily from the artist's intuitive awareness of forms and figures - that working from models and objects can actually spoil the picture [7] - but, c'mon! that's no reason to jeer at those who prefer to work en plain air and catch fleeting glimpses of things and people palpitating avec mouvement, lumière, et vie, as Stéphane Mallarmé said of this new style of seeing and painting.  

 

Ultimately, for a writer like Lawrence who values immediacy and quickness and who attempts to compose a new form of verse that he terms poetry of the present - i.e., one that opens out on to chaos and is all about the nowness of the moment - to criticise impressionism in the manner he does, is more than a little surprising, it's disappointing [8].     

And so, today I'm going to give two cheers for the young painters - headed by Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir - who, in Paris in the early 1860s, revolutionised the world of painting [9].   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The title of this painting provided the movement's name after Louis Leroy's 1874 article - 'The Exhibition of the Impressionists' - implied that the painting was, at most, an amusing though unfinished sketch and not to be taken too seriously. Ironically, the term impressionist - a bit like punk a century later - quickly gained favour with the public and it was also accepted by the artists themselves, even though they were a diverse group in style and temperament, unified primarily by their spirit of independence and rebellion (again, a bit like those musicians categorised under the genre heading punk rock). 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 197. 

 

[3] Ibid.

 

[4] Ibid., p. 198.

 

[5] Ibid., p. 197.  

 

[6] Via its control of Salon exhibitions and educational programmes, the French Academy of Fine Arts (founded in 1816) enforced rules and conventions for painting in the 19th century, thereby significantly influencing the style and subject matter of art during this period and determining the careers of artists.

      Privileging neoclassical and romantic styles and the depiction of mytho-religious or historical subjects - or traditional portraiture - the Academy required artists to display a high level of technical skill and ability rather than creative innovation. The impressionists - to their credit - challenged the conservatism and authority of the Academy; they weren't interested in producing perfect pictures made with precise brushstrokes and a restrained use of colour, overlaid with a thick coat of varnish and doxa.

      Interestingly, although the French public were at first hostile, they gradually came to admire how the impressionists were offering a fresh and original vision, even if the art critics and art establishment continued to disapprove of the new style (during the 1860s, the Salon jury routinely rejected about half of the works submitted by Monet and his friends, obliging them to exhibit independently in the following decade).  

 

[7] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Making Pictures', in Late Essays and Articles, p. 231.  

 

[8] The only modern painter that Lawrence seems to admire is Cézanne, dismissing other post-impressionists as sulky and still contemptuous of the body, even if they begrudgingly admit its existence and, in a rage, "paint it as huge lumps, tubes, cubes, planes, volumes, spheres, cones, cylinders, all the pure or mathematical forms of substance". 

      See D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Articles, p. 198.   

 

[9] And a big shout out also to Gustave Courbet, who had gained public attention and critical censure a decade earlier by depicting contemporary realities without the idealisation demanded by the Académie thereby inspiring the impressionists to be bold; and to Édouard Manet, whom the younger artists greatly admired, even though he never abandoned his liberal use of black as a colour and never participated in the exhibitions organised by the impressionists, of which there were eight in Paris; the first in April 1874 and the last in June 1886. Camille Pissaro was the only artist to show work at all of them.   

 

Phallic Pictures 2: L'Origine de la Guerre by Orlan

ORLAN: L'Origine de la Guerre (1989) 

Aluminium backed cibachrome 88 x 105 cm 
orlan.eu

For all his phallic bravado, I wonder what D. H. Lawrence would have made of Orlan's reimagining of Courbet's obscene masterpiece, The Origin of the World (1866), now retitled The Origin of War (1989) and featuring a close-up of the indecently exposed lower-body of a naked male - including an erect penis - rather than centring on the hairy, gaping cunt of a woman ...?

I suspect he wouldn't like it; that he would condemn it as a pornographic example of sex in the head, even though, arguably, it's a work that invites comparison with his own canvas, Boccaccio Story (1926), featuring the exhibitionist Masetto caught snoozing with his cock out before some passing nuns.

I suspect also he would be troubled by the fact that the work is by a woman and thus subjects the male body to an ambiguous female gaze that just might be derisive more than desirous; scornful, rather than reverential. For whilst Lawrence wants women to worship the male body in all its phallic beauty and potency (as Connie worships the body of her lover Mellors), he seems full of anxiety that they should find the male sex organ foolish and imperfect; a little disgusting in its unfinished clumsiness.

And then there's the title chosen by Orlan for her work; a title which implies the phallus is a symbol of violent masculinity and lies at the root of armed conflict. Lawrence would absolutely deny this. For him, whilst the penis as a physiological organ obviously belongs to an individual male agent, the phallus is something that rises into being between lovers, forming a bridge that brings people into touch and enables the post-coital bliss that he terms the peace that comes of fucking.

Thus hatred of the phallus - seen here rising darkish and hot-looking from the little cloud of vivid gold-red hair - is uncalled for and betrays perhaps the great modern horror of being in touch; what Lawrence insists is the root-fear of all mankind.

And so, without suggesting readers get on their knees before the phallus and subscribe to Lawrence's phallocentric mystery religion, I do think an attitude of queer wonder that mixes a little awe and excitement is preferable to any lazy attempt to denigrate, belittle and nullify the erect cock, or, indeed, the small soft penis, which is really just another little bud of life as Connie says, rather than a potential source of evil.

When, as it must, the phallus inexorably penetrates the body of another, it might indeed come with the thrust of a sword and bring suffering and death. But, more often than not, it comes with "a strange slow thrust of peace, the dark thrust of peace and a ponderous, primordial tenderness, such as made the world in the beginning" ...


Notes

Mireille Suzanne Francette Porte is a French artist, born in 1947. She adopted the name Orlan (which she always writes in capitals) in 1961, aged fifteen. She's primarily an artist who works with and on the flesh (usually her own); more of a carnal artist, as she says, than just an artist concerned with the body.

Her 1989 work, L'Origine de la Guerre, which uses a photograph of the actor Jean-Christophe Bouvet taken by Georges Merguerditchian, is surprisingly (or perhaps not surprisingly) little-known. For an interesting discussion of her work, see Cerise Joelle Myers; 'Between the Folly and the Impossibility of Seeing: Orlan, Reclaiming the Gaze' (2006) - click here.

The lines quoted from D. H. Lawrence (including those that I have recalled from memory and put in italics) are taken from chapters 12 and 14 of Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983).   

Those interested in reading a related post to this one on D. H. Lawrence's painting Boccaccio Story, should click here.

Genitalpanik 1: My Pussy My Copyright

Deborah de Robertis 

facebook.com

Some readers may remember that I expressed my admiration for the performance artist and vulva activist Deborah de Robertis after she initially came to public attention in 2014, by exposing her cunt at the Musée d'Orsay in front of Courbet's obscene masterpiece, L'Origine du monde: click here to read, or re-read, the post. 

It was, I thought, a courageous and amusing attempt to expose the hypocrisy of a phallocentric art world happy to stare into the abyss of a gaping vagina on a canvas or a screen, i.e., when framed by culture and offered as an image to be consumed, but uncomfortable with seeing such in the real world made of actual living flesh.   

Anyway, I'm pleased to report that Ms de Robertis is still continuing with her one-woman attempt to change the world by spreading her legs and declaring ownership of her own body: my pussy, my copyright; this time round obliging visitors to the Louvre to contrast the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa with the explicit display of her sex.

What Leonardo would have made of this, I don't know: for whilst he loved to paint beautiful women and possessed a detailed anatomical knowledge of their bodies, including their reproductive organs, his erotic fascination was clearly for young men and he drew many highly intimate studies of the male anus.

Nor do I know what the mostly bemused tourists who witnessed the event made of it; press reports that they were stunned and outraged seem exaggerated to me. What I do know is that the authorities weren't amused and the artist was held in custody for two days before appearing before a beak who ordered her to face trial on October 18 on charges of sexual exhibitionism and assault (she allegedly bit a security guard during her arrest).

Her defence, of course, will be that her goal was not to exhibit her genitals in a sexually aggressive manner, but to make people think about the role of women within art and, in this case, to remind them of the work of the Austrian artist Valie Export; the stunt at the Louvre being essentially an act of homage to the latter and her 1968 performance Aktionshose: Genitalpanik, which I'll discuss in part two of this post ...

Notes

To watch Ma Chatte Mon Copyright (2017), by Deborah de Robertis, uploaded to YouTube on 29 Sept 2017, click here. 

To read part two of this post on Valie Export and her Action Pants, click here. 

Where the Turtle Doves Sing (Reflections on Pubic Hair with Reference to the Cases of D. H. Lawrence and Eric Gill)

Gustave Courbet: L'Origine du monde (1866)

Oil on canvas (55 × 46 cm)

Controversial D. H. Lawrence aficionado, David Brock, reminds us in his latest column for the Eastwood and Kimberley Advertiser that the young Lawrence was shocked and horrified to discover that women, like men, possess pubic hair on and around the genital area, as a secondary sexual characteristic.

When, after sketching a female nude that he believed to be full of life and the carefree promise of youth, Lawrence was told by a friend that he needed to add hair under the arms and to the lower body if he wished it to look like an actual woman, rather than an idealised figure, the future priest of love physically assaulted his friend whilst shouting 'You dirty devil! It's not true, I tell you!'   

This lack of knowledge regarding female anatomy was fairly widespread, of course, amongst young men in Lawrence's day, even though they were growing up long after Ruskin's marriage to Effie Gray was annulled for non-consummation - so repulsed was he by the sight of her pubic hair on their wedding night - and after Gustave Courbet painted his voyeuristic masterpiece, revealing the hirsute origin of the world.

Indeed, even Eric Gill was surprised to find out - having seen photographic evidence - that women had hairy cunts. But whereas this realisation shocked Lawrence and tragically disconcerted poor Ruskin, it was, for Gill, a source of erotic excitement and soon established itself as one of his fetishistic delights; filling all the nooks and crannies of his pornographic imagination, both day and night, for the rest of his life.

As his biographer, Fiona MacCarthy, notes:

"Gill's fascination with the hair of the female, hair of the head as well as the belly, its waviness and density, its soft but springy texture, its symbolic use in both attracting and concealing, recurs all through his work, from his very early sculptures to the last of his nude drawings in the year in which he died."      

Of course, as David Brock also points out, Lawrence eventually overcomes his horror of pubic hair becoming something of a champion of the au naturel look and an exponent of such in his painting. And, in his final novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), there's a famous scene in which Connie and Mellors examine and play with one another's pubes; he threading a few forget-me-not flowers in her soft-brown maidenhair.      

In sum, whilst I don't think Lawrence's pubephilia was ever as strong as Gill's, he was nevertheless partial to a bit of bush in his maturity, for sexual, aesthetic, and philosophical reasons and - somewhat ironically - one suspects he would react with reverse shock and horror at the thought of Brazilian waxing.


See: 

David Brock, 'Book revealed author's 'late development'', Eastwood and Kimberley Advertiser, (25 Aug 2017), p. 22. 

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), Ch. 15.

Fiona MacCarthy, Eric Gill, (Faber and Faber, 1989), pp. 46-7. 

Deborah de Robertis: The Naked Truth

Deborah de Robertis (self-portrait, 2014)

Deborah de Robertis is someone I'm very fond of. For not only does she have a lovely face, but she provocatively blurs the lines between art, performance, criticism and flagrant self-promotion. Of course, she’s not unique in this by any means, but she does it with rather more style and chutzpah than most.

In May 2014, for example, wearing a beautiful gold sequin dress, she entered the Musée d’Orsay and posed in front of Courbet’s obscene masterpiece, L’Origine du monde, displaying her own sex and silently challenging passersby to gaze into what the artist does not dare to reveal in his painting; the concealed eye or black hole of the vagina that lies beyond the fleshy lips of the labia; the sticky abyss which stares into those who foolishly stare into it; the zero point where philosophers and insects lose their way.

De Robertis thus seductively turns the tables upon those who would not only objectify the female body, but render it passive via its representation. She seems to say: ‘You want to see a cunt? Here’s a cunt!’ knowing full well that the museum authorities will rush to cover it up just as the news media will censor their own images in their coverage of the story (whilst nevertheless hypocritically reproducing Courbet’s 1866 oil painting of Joanna Hiffernan’s nether regions).

Then, in January of this year, de Robertis repeated her stunt; though this time she stripped naked in front of Manet’s celebrated (but equally controversial) Olympia and ended up in a police cell for two days (held for indecent exposure), as well as the in the international press once more. Stretched out on the museum floor, she adopted the same confident and unabashed pose as the reclining nude in the 1865 portrait.

Unlike the latter, however, she had a miniature camera strapped to her head in order to record those who came to voyeuristically gaze at her. In interviews afterwards, de Robertis explained that her aim was to bring Olympia to life and reverse the usual relationship between model and viewing public; to extract what Baudrillard famously described as the revenge of the object.

For these twin operations of vulva activism (or what the brave women of Femen term sextremism), I salute her. Torpedophiles who are interested in seeing footage of the events should click here (Origin of the World) and here (Olympia).

Pussy (A Post for International Women's Day)

The term pussy has several meanings and can be used in a variety of ways; some innocent, some insulting, some vulgar. But what most interests is why this word should have become such a popular euphemism for female genitalia, thereby establishing an erotico-symbolic relationship between cats and cunts; small, soft, furry, carnivorous creatures on the one hand – and domestic pets that like to be stroked on the other.

The etymological origin of the word is uncertain; it may simply have derived from a sound used to attract a cat: Here puss, puss, puss! But, by the 17th century, pussy was commonly being used to refer to young women as well as moggies and by the following century it specifically directed us towards their sex organs.

Unsurprisingly, many women now regard pussy as derogatory, demeaning and dehumanising, rather than an affectionate term of endearment. But there are other women who use it quite happily and in preference to any of the other slang terms for vagina. Indeed, some even wear knickers with kittens printed on.

Personally, it’s not a word I’m entirely comfortable with. Not only is it a little too coy for my tastes, but it also lends itself too readily to double entendre and I don’t much like sexual innuendo (whilst conceding that it's long been a crucial component of bawdy humour, from the Barrison Sisters to Mrs. Slocombe). Nor do I see any need to disguise or apologise for biology; there’s nothing shameful about female bodies and the word cunt seems to me much more honest.

Having said that, feminist punk collective Pussy Riot have managed to cleverly invest the word with a new dynamism and militancy, rightly realising that this provocative combination of terms creates a powerful ambiguity and tension. Iggy Azalea’s inspired rap anthem, Pussy, has also helped to revalue the term.

Ultimately, however it’s referred to, we should all learn to love the vagina, celebrate labia pride, and support vulva activism. For where would we be - male or female - without that which Courbet rightly recognised as the Origin of the World ...?

Thanks to Kiranjit Kaur for supplying the image for this post and for her insight on the topic.