Brushstroke and Emergence: Courbet, Impressionism, Picasso

Brushstroke and Emergence

Brushstroke and Emergence

Courbet, Impressionism, Picasso

James D. Herbert

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

JAMES D. HERBERT is professor of art history and cofounder of the PhD program in visual studies at the University of California, Irvine.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2015 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2015.

Printed in China

24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-27201-6 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-27215-3 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226272153.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Herbert, James., 1959– author.

Brushstroke and emergence : Courbet, impressionism, Picasso / James D. Herbert.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-27201-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-27215-3 (e-book) 1. Brushwork. 2. Painting—Technique. 3. Courbet, Gustave, 1819–1877. 4. Picasso, Pablo, 1881–1973. 5. Impressionism. I. Title.

ND1505.H47 2015

750.1'9—dc23

2014039417

This book has been printed on acid-free paper.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Brushstroke and Emergence

Notes

Index of Principal Discussions of Featured Paintings

Illustrations

1 Vincent van Gogh, The Sower (1888), detail

2 Jean-Léon Gérôme, Dance of the Almeh (1863), detail

3 Gustave Courbet, The Waterspout, Etretat (ca. 1870)

4 Gustave Courbet, The Waterspout, Etretat (ca. 1870), detail

5 Gustave Courbet, The Waterspout, Etretat (ca. 1870), detail

6 Gustave Courbet, The Waterspout, Etretat (ca. 1870), detail

7 A[ndré] Gill, G. Courbet (1868)

8 Gustave Randon, A Waterspout; Waterspout Favors the Bold (1867)

9 Gustave Courbet, The Waterspout (1866)

10 Gustave Courbet, The Roe Deer’s Shelter in Winter (ca. 1866)

11 Gustave Courbet, The Roe Deer’s Shelter in Winter (ca. 1866), detail

12 Gustave Courbet, The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Artistic Life (1854–55)

13 Gustave Courbet, The Painter’s Studio (1854–55), detail

14 Quillenbois [Charles-Marie de Sarcus], M. Courbet in all the glory of his own individuality . . . (1855)

15 Edouard Manet, Music in the Tuileries Gardens (1862)

16 Edouard Manet, Music in the Tuileries Gardens (1862), detail

17 Edouard Manet, Music in the Tuileries Gardens (1862), detail

18 Edouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1881–82)

19 Claude Monet, Rue Montorgueil, Celebration of 30 June (1878)

20 Claude Monet, Rue Montorgueil, Celebration of 30 June (1878), detail

21 Claude Monet, Boulevard des Capucines (1873–74)

22 Fortuné Louis Méaulle (after drawing by Georges François Guiaud), Paris, Avenue de l’Opéra (ca. 1880)

23 Paul Cézanne, The Temptation of Saint Anthony (ca. 1875)

24 Paul Cézanne, The Temptation of Saint Anthony (ca. 1875), detail

25 Paul Cézanne, The Temptation of Saint Anthony (ca. 1875), detail

26 James Ensor, Tribulations of Saint Anthony (1887)

27 James Ensor, Tribulations of Saint Anthony (1887), detail

28 Georges Seurat, Sunday on the Grande Jatte (1884) (1884–86)

29 Georges Seurat, Sunday on the Grande Jatte (1884) (1884–86), detail

30 Georges Seurat, Young Woman Powdering Herself (1889)

31 Georges Seurat, Young Woman Powdering Herself (1889), detail

32 Pablo Picasso, Ma Jolie (1911–12)

33 Pablo Picasso, Ma Jolie (1911–12), detail

34 Pablo Picasso, Ma Jolie (1911–12), detail

35 Pablo Picasso, Ma Jolie (1911–12), detail

36 Pablo Picasso, Ma Jolie (1911–12), detail

37 Pablo Picasso, Ma Jolie (1911–12), detail

38 Pablo Picasso, Ma Jolie (1911–12), detail

39 Pablo Picasso, Ma Jolie (1911–12), detail

40 Pablo Picasso, studio assemblage (1913)

41 Pablo Picasso, Ma Jolie (1911–12), detail

42 Pablo Picasso, Guitar, Sheet Music, and Glass (1912)

Preface

I should say a word or two about the somewhat idiosyncratic format of this book. First, concerning its short length. As academic scholarship faces an ever more challenging environment for achieving publication, I believe that those of us working in the humanities need to experiment with alternative means for presenting our arguments. Rather than produce a book at twice the length but with perhaps less than twice the substance, I wish to explore whether this reduced scale might represent a more viable size for the academic monograph. Second, the lack of major internal subdivisions to the essay (the infrequent minor breaks simply serve to give you a chance to take a break, or grab a cup of coffee). I have long been intrigued by the possibility that an argument might be enhanced in subtle ways by having the writing emulate some of the characteristics of the events and artifacts it analyzes. Thus, for instance, Paris 1937, my second book, ends with the phrase The dampness in-between. - while replacing an introduction and conclusion with an entr’acte situated in the middle of the text. Or, the chapter in Our Distance from God, my third book, that examines Robert Wilson’s 14 Stations is itself broken into fourteen sections. One of the ideas I will be exploring here, working from the writings of the philosopher John Haugeland, is that at times it can prove impossible to distinguish artist from painting because, viewed at the level of neurons and brushstrokes, the connections between them are so numerous and intertwined that to treat them as two separate components interacting at a limited interface entirely distorts our understanding of the artistic process. Accordingly, I am loath to break my argument into separate chapters, which would tend to reinforce precisely the sense of the autonomy of individual artists and paintings that this book would like to question. Readers who consult this book with an interest in only one of the artists it examines have recourse to the index of featured works.

The initial stages of this argument first appeared recently in a lengthy essay, Courbet, Incommensurate and Emergent, Critical Inquiry 40 (Winter 2014): 339–81; I have long appreciated the kind support of Jay Williams and others at that journal. A much shorter version of the analysis of Picasso’s Ma Jolie came out over a decade ago in What Matters, Word & Image 20 (July–September 2004): 165–73. There, I made the mistake of granting credence to Picasso’s remarkable assertion of absolute control over his sitter and his technique alike. Since no one has since taken me to task for this blunder, I am availing myself here of the chance to rectify the error.

After one has been in this profession a while, one’s circle of colleagues grows smaller, but also more precious. My friend Matthew Simms, in addition to providing valuable comments on draft versions of several selections from this project, has given me confidence that the sort of open-minded and creative reader that I like to imagine as I write actually exists. My student Eric Morrill gave the section of this essay concerning Courbet an extraordinarily insightful critique. Robert Herbert, my graduate advisor decades ago, read with interest and engagement long beyond the time when institutional expectations would have prompted him to do so. My father, Daniel Herbert, continues as an encouraging reader, as long as I don’t mention certain theorists not to his liking. Richard Neer, who helped see the Courbet essay through Critical Inquiry, gave the work encouragement and a necessary shove in a new direction at a crucial turning point. My mother-in-law, Monique Whiting, continues to capture infelicities in my translations from the French that I could never hope to perceive on my own. At the University of Chicago Press, Susan Bielstein instantly grasped what I was doing, and ensured that Hyde Park was the place for me to do it. I benefited from insightful, nuanced, and usefully suggestive external reader reports; only later was I honored to discover that their authors were two of the art historians for whom I reserve my highest respect and admiration, Whitney Davis and Alex Nemerov. Anthony Burton and James Whitman Toftness shepherded the manuscript through the production process with high professionalism and good cheer. Sandra Hazel served as an exemplary copy editor, respecting my style and intent while saving me from needless errors.

I never would have written this book had I not decided eight years ago to take up the viola, and thereby discover with what agonizing slowness the mastery of artistic creation cedes to the feeble onslaught of intellect and force of will. The fellow musicians with whom I have enjoyed many hours together and from whom I have learned so much are too numerous to name, but I would like to make special mention of Don Ambroson, my occasional viola instructor and constant chamber music coach. And, of course, Cécile Whiting continues as my first and last reader, who indulges me both extended discussions about still inchoate ideas and occasional mental abstractions from family life. From such a remarkable network of always fascinating and fruitful interactions, this book has emerged.

Brushstroke and Emergence

Courbet, Impressionism, Picasso

The subject of this essay is a simple thing: the brushstroke. The use of hairs attached to a stick as a means to smear pigmented linseed oil on canvas dates in Europe to sometime in the fifteenth century; but in France during the nineteenth century and extending into the early twentieth, brushstrokes came to assume remarkable importance as ends of their own. Strokes grown large and hefty, visibly manifest on the surface rather than feathered away in subordination to composition or theme, were taken to reveal a newly valued persona in the drama of artistic production: the individual artist, autonomous from institutional determination, in full control of technical means ostensibly of his own devising. The impressionist artists perhaps best personified this new character, but the authority of the powerful idea spans from at least the works of Eugène Delacroix in the early nineteenth century to Pablo Picasso’s fundamental recasting of the meaning of the brushstroke some ninety years later. During this period, one of the central tenets of modern European art held full currency: the strong subjectivity of the artist creates the brushstroke, while the brushstroke divulges the essence of the artist.

This belief in the nature of the relation between brushstroke and artistic self remains familiar enough in our own day that we must pause a moment to realize how strange it really is. A glob of paint as an indication, a frozen trace, of autonomous subjectivity? Right off, it should be obvious that directly behind this image of coherent individuality lurks a basic contradiction, because the brushstroke must somehow convey both conscious intent and habituated practice. Both are necessary for this version of the modern artist to survive as an idea: intent affirms command of the process, whereas habituated practice assures the value of expertise, at times even of peerless performance, in the final product. And yet, as we shall come to see, these two qualities always remain in tension, for habit necessarily suspends part of conscious thought. Beyond this difficulty, brushstrokes take up their meaning in fields of vast multiplicity, crowding together in tens or hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, on each canvas. We shall discover that they take the form they do owing to their interactions not only with the other brushstrokes around them but also with the physical properties of brush and canvas, and with the twitches of the artist’s hand and arm, and with the firing of the billions of neurons coursing in the brain and down the limbs. A brushstroke may be simple on its own, but collapses into meaninglessness in such isolation. It attains complexity and significance only when part of a massive multiplicity. A curious vehicle, then, for the representation of monadic, autonomous individuality.

To explore the dynamics whereby modern painters form brushstrokes and brushstrokes form modern painters, I will be deploying the idea of emergence as it has been developed in the nascent science of complexity, a truly interdisciplinary line of thought that over the past quarter century has come to play a role in academic domains ranging from physics and computer science to biology and economics (it had been theorized earlier in the realm of philosophy). Emergence concerns the way in which the interactions of simple behaviors at one level of a complex system can prompt unpredictable events at a higher level of the system that are qualitatively different from anything that exists at the lower level. A single event, viewed from the perspective of different levels, can present radically different traits, even as various accounts are all describing basically the same thing. Phenomena that emerge at an upper level remain irreducible to the myriad interactions at the lower level; they cannot be predicted from or explained by them. Reciprocally, emergent entities can exert themselves on the fields from which they emerge, but they can neither dictate nor anticipate the specific nature of the interactions in those fields. By way of a quick example (we will encounter others), the complexity of the coherent mind emerges from the interactions of relatively simple and wildly disparate neurons. You can’t examine a bunch of axons and dendrites and determine that a person is contemplating beauty and truth, but neither can you begin with the knowledge that the person is thinking about beauty and truth and then name the configuration of neural firings that realizes those thoughts. Emergence considers neither lower nor upper level as the real one, against which the other suffers demotion to the status of derivative illusion. Causality flows in both directions: from the small, simple, and massively multiple to the large, complex, and singular, as well as back again.

This intellectual model proves a useful way to think about brushstrokes for a couple of reasons. First, it provides a means to conceive of the simultaneous existence of seemingly contradictory phenomena—habituated practice and conscious intent, say—in the same event. Second, it recognizes the possibility of forms of agency both realized through the interactions of massively multiple parts (brushstrokes on a canvas, neurons in the brain) and manifested in the form of complex emergent entities (artistic subjectivity, a single work of art). Modern painters shape brushstrokes and choose themes, but also conversely—since agency and direction of causality will always be at issue here—brushstrokes shape, and themes choose, painters. Consequently, we can witness the emergence of artists from artworks and artworks from artists not at the general level of theoretical principle but in the actual messy mechanics of specific pictures. Ultimately, this small book fails if it does nothing more than use modern painting to affirm the tenets of emergence, and succeeds if it manages to apply the ideas of emergence in such a manner as to generate insight into the particular character of how modern paintings come into being and go about their complicated work.

While an analysis of the entities and properties that develop out of the interactions between the small and the great, between multiplicity and singularity, between habit and intent, may well prove useful for analyses of works of art from across great swaths of time and space (human neurology and the dynamics of emergence remaining relatively stable across such expanses), this book focuses on a particular set of artifacts from France of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries precisely because of that period’s much more culturally specific valuation, perhaps even overvaluation, of the brushstroke as a strong indicator of the self. Moreover, this extended essay does not aspire to provide a comprehensive history of the ways in which emergent phenomena manifested themselves in the brushstrokes of this phase of modern painting. It does not trace an origin, elaborations, and a demise. Rather, it grapples with a mere roomful of paintings by a select few artists in order to explore how an underutilized concept can shed intriguing new light on certain key junctures of that history. The context of that ninety-year trajectory cannot impose its imperatives to determine the character of the specific works I examine, and those works cannot adequately represent that context. Finally, just as the image of the coherent, autonomous artist constantly plays against the messy multiplicity of the process of painting, so too my method requires frequent leaps between broad philosophical or scientific principles and the cussedly intractable material reality of specific patches of paint.

Certainly I am far from the first art historian to recognize that paintings do not always originate in the conscious mind. For instance, Meyer Schapiro has hinted at a wild abandon generated by the great motor-storm of brush work in the works of Vincent van Gogh (an artist with whom we will begin the body of this text, albeit only briefly).¹ Yet quite often in such scholarly arguments artistic impulsion, once it leaves the conscious mind, shifts to the unconscious: with Freud’s da Vinci, for instance; or with Schapiro’s van Gogh and even more with his Paul Cézanne; with Rosalind Krauss’s Optical Unconscious.² And the unconscious, while often regarded as lacking the cohesion and coherence of consciousness, nevertheless qualifies much more as a complex singularity than as a massive collection of simple elements. Whatever its relation to consciousness, the interactions between the pair cannot convincingly be recast as an instance of emergence in the sense I employ the term. Perhaps the art writer most intrigued by the forces of engrained habit beyond the artist’s conscious intent was Giovanni Morelli writing in the late nineteenth century (who will make a passing appearance later), but Morelli regarded the traces of such habits principally as a means of connoisseurial identification rather than as material for broader art-historical and even philosophical rumination, as I hope to do here.³ Throughout the following analysis, I