Modern art reflects a destabilization of the traditional understanding and significance of the artist’s work process. A new consciousness of labor and its capacity for meaning evolved as artists developed a consciously modern form of art. One dominant trend—typified in its early stages by the Impressionists, followed by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Matisse—is directly comparable to the values traced in the previous chapter with regard to the Arts and Crafts movement. In this trend hand labor, attention to materials, and the social and psychological values of making are dominant concerns. The overall tendency is to reject values and processes associated with industrial production in favor of what were perceived to be more natural and human qualities. Intuitive making and the physical and material aspects of the artistic process were important, and as a corollary awkwardness, ineptitude, and failure were more meaningful and often more highly esteemed than inhuman perfection. The second dominant trend—typified by the Neo-Impressionists, Purists, Constructivists, and Bauhaus adherents—which developed slightly later than the first, is characterized by an embrace of values associated with industrialization. Rather than situating artistic processes in counterpoint to industrial processes, these modern artists adopted aspects of industrial production processes, attitudes, and goals to make artworks.
What the artists of both tendencies share is a belief that how they make their art, their productive process, is highly meaningful. The artist’s craft and techniques are no longer a narrow professional concern, as they had been prior to the nineteenth century. The very nature of the artist’s labor is in question. Where does the artist’s work belong in a modern industrialized society? Does the artist maintain the ideals and academic standards of the past, or are new processes and techniques required? For the modernists the answer was clearly the latter, but they varied enormously in their conception of what the new approach should be. For some their process was intended to foster intuitive and free productive activity, while others embraced more controlled and rational processes directed toward specific aesthetic and social goals. Modern artists’ working processes reveal stances taken in relation to the values and processes of modern society—a desire either to develop neglected qualities or to assist in the advancement of newly dominant ones. In both cases the artistic product itself was intended to reflect the processes of its production. Unlike the tradition of the fine arts established in the Renaissance, which valued intellect over the artist’s manual labor and generally ignored the latter in public discourse, modern artists increasingly valued and displayed their processes, often explaining and promoting them in written texts and interviews. The artist’s work was no longer simply the production of aesthetic objects; the modern artist was a worker whose labor had new purpose and meaning in modern society.
The shifts in values associated with the artist’s work in the nineteenth century are striking, and in many ways surprising. The standard account of the development of modern art describes the gradual overcoming of the rigid strictures and technical training associated with the academy and their replacement by a liberated, more creative, individual, and expressive approach to art making. While this is, in its broad outline, a reasonably accurate description of nineteenth-century developments, the specific forms of valuation that accompanied these overall changes are often unexpected. For one, the modern painter’s labor was often perceived as more physical and less intellectual than that of his academic predecessors. The modern painter’s work was also seen as becoming more, rather than less, preoccupied with technical concerns. Thus liberation from the constraints of traditional subject matter and techniques meant, in the opinion of many observers, that modern artists were more engaged with the physical constraints of the medium than were academic artists. This is notably different from conventional descriptions of modern art’s development, which tend to stress the conceptual innovations of modern artists’ work in terms of subjects and techniques, as well as in their rejection of an academicism overly dependent on the mindless deployment of established technical procedures. Also notable is the fact that many critics and artists considered modern artists to be less hardworking than their academic predecessors and peers. Such assessments are clearly dependent on the vantage point of the judge, but what is undeniable is that during the nineteenth century the conception of the artist’s labor, particularly the painter’s labor, was subjected to significant scrutiny and change.
Albert Boime’s The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century examines shifts in artistic training and production that increasingly placed value on the early generative phase of the sketch rather than on the finished work. Linking this change in emphasis to the French Revolution’s goals of individual freedom and Romantic ideals of originality, inspiration, and expression, Boime suggests some of the linkages between artistic labor and the overarching attitudes and goals that condition the value and direction of that labor. Academic artistic training in nineteenth-century France was designed to prepare artists to create grands machines, the large-scale paintings of significant historical or religious subjects that had been considered the pinnacle of academic production since the seventeenth century. Artists’ training stressed hard work and diligence indicated by the mastery of controlled techniques of highly finished illusionistic drawing and painting. These techniques also signified moral qualities such as self-control and discipline, as well as denoting the artist’s conceptual labor—the educated thought required to make the many choices involved in successfully creating a complex work of art. Mechanical skills and technical knowledge were thus hallmarks of academic artistic production, and they were intensively developed by copying works of earlier masters as well as by the graduated exercises of the academic curriculum.1
Serving as a counterpoint to the development of polished technical skills were academic exercises intended to provoke the aspiring artist’s natural and instinctive abilities. Quick sketches were associated with inspiration and genius, and drawings made from memory were thought to develop the artist’s mental abilities and promote original compositions; both beliefs were consistent with the views of Leonardo and other earlier theorists.2 As Boime has discussed, the two poles of academic artistic training were often at odds. In the first half of the nineteenth century a quickly sketched copy of a masterpiece could be considered mere “hackwork, the product of industry,” or the primary means to rediscover a great artist’s initial inspiration.3 In the eighteenth century a rapid and sketchy painting or drawing style had been admired as an index of inspiration, enthusiasm, and native genius.4 Artists attempted to provoke the imaginations of viewers, who responded by mentally completing the inchoate areas of the image.5 Early nineteenth-century Romantic artists such as Géricault similarly adopted sketchy, incomplete styles to convey their inspired originality and freedom. This was not without its problems. Delacroix was concerned by the difficulty of retaining the marks of inspiration in a completed painting, and he noted that the artist who knows his work will be exhibited loses confidence in his inspiration and tends to overfinish his painting, thereby ruining it: “He modifies it, he spoils it, he overworks it; all this civilizing and polishing in order not to displease.”6 In contrast, Thomas Couture produced what were essentially facsimiles of inspiration, working to give his paintings the qualities of an unfinished sketch by obliterating underlying signs of meticulous labor with dry, sweeping brushstrokes.7
From the academic vantage point the unfinished qualities of the sketch made it unsuitable for serious consideration and public display: “Everything pertaining to preliminary studies was identified with métier, and everything concerning the finishing process was identified with the artist’s erudition.”8 Even acknowledging the potential of the sketch to reveal native talent and inspiration was not enough to qualify it as a completed artwork. Ingres, widely admired for the perfect finish of his paintings, insisted on concealing his method in order to keep the painted illusion intact. Ernest Meissonier, also known for his meticulous finish, was similarly concerned to hide the traces of his labor and refused to exhibit anything but finished works in his lifetime. Many artists, including Delacroix, believed that the ability to finish a work successfully was the mark of a true artist. According to this view talent was relatively common, but the refined intellectual capacity and technical knowledge required to make a successful artwork were comparatively rare. Nineteenth-century artists and viewers who evaluated art by academic standards often criticized unfinished, sketchy paintings as signifiers of laziness and incompetence rather than inspiration and originality; some critics deplored the “chorus of exaggerated praise for all kinds of improvised work, pochades and ébauches, the sketchy and the half-finished, and systematic denigration of conscientious work.”9
Given the foundation of the unfinished, sketch-like work in discourses promoting inspiration, genius, and freedom, it is somewhat surprising that the Impressionists were often considered by their peers to be more concerned with painting technique than with inspiration and freedom. This is a significant thread of the discourse surrounding Impressionism and may be seen as part of the foundation for a formalist viewpoint, which would not develop a careful formulation until the twentieth century. Meissonier, renowned for the extreme precision of his own technique, criticized Impressionist painters for their lack of invention but praised their technical knowledge and facility with painted effects.10 Another highly successful nineteenth-century painter working in a flawless academic style, Jean-Léon Gérôme, employed a similar method of evaluation when he denigrated the handling of paint as merely “a question of skin.” For him the important consideration was “construction,” the composition of the work, which was traditionally associated with the artist’s conceptual ability.11
During the course of the nineteenth century a high degree of finish became a key means to distinguish academic painting’s dedication to traditional intellectual qualities in contrast to a new modern painting, which adopted a physical conception of painting associated with contemporary experience. Romantic painters who employed traditional indexes of inspiration in their seemingly rapid painterly technique diminished in the academic context, and it was the modern artists who most often produced rough, highly textured paint surfaces. Modern artists who rejected traditional subjects to embrace contemporary life—be it the woods and fields of the Barbizon painters, the rural life and working peasants of the Realists, or the urban and suburban scenes of the Impressionists—adopted modes of painting that emphasized their physical immersion in the material world. Portable tubes of heavy-bodied paint allowed them to work rapidly and directly from nature.12 Critics often compared Realist painters employing palette knives to apply heavy layers of thick paint to masons working with their trowels. This cliché served a dual purpose: it described the directness of the painter’s physical engagement with the material of his art, and it implied the artist’s rough, unrefined, and anti-intellectual approach.
It is commonplace to connect the changes in nineteenth-century painting to economic shifts in the art market, most notably the decrease in painters able to support themselves by fulfilling official state commissions and the increase in the art-buying public among the bourgeois middle classes. What also must be addressed are the effects of a reevaluation of artisanal labor in the context of rapid industrialization and the growth of the urban office worker. These effects are evident in the Arts and Crafts movement and its widespread influence, but they have not generally been associated with shifts in nineteenth-century painting. One such effect that has not been carefully considered is essentially a reversal of the long-standing academic tradition that values the painter’s intellect above his craft. In the new modern artistic approaches of the nineteenth century, the artist’s claim to intellectual superiority vanishes and is, in part, replaced by what may be described as the artist’s value as a craftsperson, a physical rather than an intellectual worker. It is not just the plein-air subjects that appeal to the city-dwelling connoisseur; it is also the associations of the Barbizon/Impressionist painting with the hand-crafted object, one made by an individual, and aggressively displaying that fact through a rough and idiosyncratic technique. Furthermore, it is precisely the nineteenth-century modern artist’s naïveté, his willed ignorance, and his search for a direct representation of the innocent perception of nature that becomes his trademark.13
Interestingly, it is not only the nineteenth-century modern artist who appears to be more of a craftsperson than a fine artist in the traditional terms of the academy. Late nineteenth-century academic painting was widely seen as having abandoned intellectual concerns to become merely a highly refined style of flawless naturalism, as represented by the very successful work of William-Adolphe Bouguereau. The intellectual abdication of late nineteenth-century academic art rendered it what traditional academic art theory, grounded in the intellectual value of the fine arts, would likely have considered a mere craft product. And in its finely finished technical perfection, the work of the academics appeared less like a refined handcraft and more like something artificial, inhuman, machine-made. By contrast, much modern nineteenth-century painting, with its idiosyncratic rendering and lack of finish, signified human and natural processes of production imbued with emotion and individuality. It is the latter that became identified with truly artistic creation and ultimately linked to the artist’s conceptual activity, while the former was increasingly considered mindless illustration.
Cézanne’s disdainful criticism of academic technique and its admirers is exemplary of the modern artist’s view of the profound artistic significance of his own labor: “I have to work all the time, not to reach that final perfection which earns the admiration of imbeciles.—And this thing which is commonly appreciated so much is merely the effect of craftsmanship and renders all work resulting from it inartistic and common. I must strive after perfection only for the satisfaction of becoming truer and wiser. . . . The hour always comes when one breaks through and has admirers far more fervent and convinced than those who are only attracted by an empty surface.”14 Cézanne’s insistence that he has to work very hard not to paint “perfectly” is notable. Whereas once artists labored for years to master correct painting technique, for the modern artist the difficult labor is to avoid it. Skill is merely having the means to produce an “empty surface”; it is craft rather than art. And the struggle the artist undertakes to circumvent skill makes him “truer and wiser,” leading to intellectual achievement.
The growing number of painters who abandoned traditional academic finish in the nineteenth century represents a change in general ideas about the artist’s process. While there is little that is completely novel in the ways the artist’s activity was conceived, there were distinct shifts in emphasis and degrees of significance. Among the most notable was the extent to which the artist’s labor engaged the physical and mental experience of being in the world as indicated by the increasing stress on the artist’s direct access and response to nature. With the Barbizon painters, the Realists, and the Impressionists the artwork was increasingly viewed as the result, even the record, of the artist’s unique and individual response to experience of the world. Supporters of the new art believed that conventional techniques of representation acquired in the course of academic training hampered the development of a technique that would convey the artist’s own specific, idiosyncratic way of seeing. According to Richard Shiff, by the late nineteenth century “the mode of perception, of vision, was of greater consequence to the impressionist or symbolist artist than the view seen or the image presented. In this respect both impressionists and symbolists placed themselves in opposition to what they regarded as ‘academic’ art that valued the object of its own creation more than the process that brought it into being. The conception of ‘impressionism’ that motivated Monet, Cézanne, and others centers on a particular kind of experience—at once objective and subjective, simultaneously physical, sensory, and emotional.”15 The modern work of art becomes evidence of the artist’s working experience, and critics who supported the new art acknowledged this by focusing their commentary on technical issues.16
Shiff has discussed the difficult situation of Impressionist painters, whose technique was often interpreted as signifying contradictory procedures and aims. While modern artists pursued originality in rejecting established academic techniques and procedures, they were not to be understood as merely responding with passive spontaneity to their sensations. Thus modern artists must be considered diligent workers with developed techniques based on careful study, who were also responsive and without preconceptions in their representation of nature.17 All of this may be viewed as an attempt to rediscover and define a thoroughly natural process of artistic creation, one that avoided the preformulated and established methods of academic tradition and yet was comparably rigorous in the pursuit and employment of its means. Deviations from strict photographic realism were the first, and a relatively simple, means to signify an individual and nonmechanical artistic process. Far more difficult than this fundamentally negative approach to avoiding competent conventional representation was discovering a strategy that would display the artist’s hard work and dedication to the development of individual creative means. An idiosyncratic, nonacademic style was potentially as easy as painting without having mastered traditional representational techniques, a so-called primitive style. More complex was developing a means to convey the seriousness and skill that would earn critical respect and public admiration.
Critics who knew the Impressionist artists personally often stressed their hard work; Mallarmé stated that the Impressionist was an energetic modern worker,18 while Zola compared Manet to a hardworking bourgeois.19 Their labor, in the discussions of both critics, consisted largely in forgetting what they had learned about painting in order to paint what they see in nature. Clumsiness becomes a sign of success in this project, as is evident in Zola’s criticism: “Not the least delight for the eyes. A painting austere and serious; and extreme concern with truth and accuracy, a will fierce and strong. You are a great blunderer [maladroit], monsieur [Pissarro], you are an artist that I like.”20 “Pissarro . . . does not have any of the minute skillfulness of his colleagues. He is in the realm of excellence, the relentless pursuit of the true, heedless of the tricks of métier. His canvases, which lack all fireworks and spice, discover a nature too living and too pungent in its reality.”21 Zola, who admired above all the artist who revealed the uniqueness of his vision, his individual temperament, considered the artist’s labor an intensive project of self-discovery, a stripping bare of all conventions of seeing and artistic technique that would make painting a trivial production process. The painter who knows what he sees and how to make a picture of it is merely a mechanical producer of an artistic commodity. Impressionist painting is the record of the hard work involved in developing a truly personal and direct visual relation to nature.22
One of the primary reasons that Impressionist paintings suggest the artist’s labor is their lack of finish and the representational clarity that traditionally denoted completion. These are paintings that often seemed to contemporary viewers to be arrested at an early stage in their process of creation, which might continue to its resolution when the painter returns to the canvas. This is evident in early critics’ and viewers’ complaints that specific paintings seemed unfinished, as well as in the persistently reiterated critical conviction that Impressionist artists had not yet resolved their means of expression. For example, Ernest Chesneau wrote, “Obviously, this is not the last word in art, nor even of this art. It is necessary to go on and to transform the sketch into a finished work. But what a bugle call for those who listen carefully, how it resounds far into the future!”23 While comments such as this indicate contemporary critics’ desire for some more finished form of painting than that achieved by Impressionist artists (and arguably an inability of nineteenth-century critics to recognize a work of art as adequately resolved if it did not have an academic finish), it also suggests attitudes toward artists’ working processes. Critics apparently found both interest and aesthetic satisfaction in works that were not resolved or finished. However, they also seemed to believe that viewers must have faith in the artists’ ability to conclude their researches and resolve their means because, they imply, it is their ultimate resolution that will justify the interest of the earlier stages.
As far back as ancient Greece commentators admired the qualities of unfinished artworks, but what makes the Impressionist critics’ comments unusual is that they promise a successful future with no basis for their certainty. Impressionist paintings were not presented as unfinished; it was the critics and viewers who projected the need for further development and completion onto them. The promise of future resolution, and the persistent deferral of its fulfillment, will haunt modern art for decades. What in the end might be one of the most significant distinctions of modern art is not only its temporary and provisional nature, but its faith in an ultimate resolution of artistic means, the ability to truly finish a work of art. Once artistic resolution and fulfillment are abandoned as impossible dreams and process is embraced for its own sake, the art object loses its potential to be a material object of absolute plenitude and aesthetic satisfaction. This is what happens in the 1960s.
From the beginning, the possibility of a successful resolution to the modern artist’s labors often seems unlikely. The frustration and failure of the modern artist was established as a staple of the critical discourse with the inception of the new art. Balzac’s seventeenth-century character Frenhofer was a nineteenth-century creation that highlighted the difficulties faced by the isolated artist who labors without social direction or restriction.24 His labor is pure, which would seem to lead him to exalted achievements as he works unconstrained by external requirements, but Frenhofer wallows in a solipsistic rut, unable to form an accurate evaluation of his own work, into which he puts all his energy, faith, and dedication. The result is complete failure. Cézanne’s self-identification with Frenhofer is famous25 and suggests the painter’s ironic self-appraisal. Like Frenhofer, Cézanne was financially independent and able to devote himself fully to artistic self-realization. In claiming identity with Frenhofer, Cézanne seems to embrace the fictional artist’s failure. Cézanne expects to have devoted his life to painting indecipherable messes when his work is judged by other eyes.
Aruna d’Souza has discussed the extent to which the many accounts of Cézanne’s “doubt” and “failure”—and particularly the widespread and enduring identification of the artist with Claude Lantier, the doomed protagonist of Zola’s novel L’Oeuvre—is a discursive product linked to late nineteenth-century views of the linked pathologies of degeneration and genius.26 Cézanne and his work have become inextricably bound up with Zola’s portrayal of the authentic artist as necessarily a frustrated failure. In Zola’s novel genius is inevitably abortive and impotent, and yet the artist sincerely dedicated to his impossible project points the way to the future. This is how Zola saw the Impressionists, whose “struggle is not yet over: they remain unequal to the work which they attempt, they stutter without being able to find the word. But their influence is no less profound, because they follow the only possible course, they march towards the future.”27
In Zola’s interpretation the Impressionist artist has abandoned the certainties of convention to pursue an art structured by the individual temperament in relation to the world. In this project there are no dependable guidelines for success; indeed, it may well be that the notion of individual temperament to which Zola was so dedicated is necessarily a barrier to the full “realization” of an art. Individuality as indexed by a marked idiosyncrasy of style is, to follow Zola’s metaphor, a language in its nascent stages. Once it succeeds and becomes a recognizable language, a means of communication through established codes, it loses its originality. Failure is thus built in to the romantic notion of the modern artist as a unique individual creating an art reflecting a singular vision. To succeed, the modern artist must fail, must remain unique, isolated, misunderstood, speaking a barely comprehensible language. Success would mean establishing a style, a language that others can employ with attendant conventions and correctness—in other words, a new academicism.
The insoluble tensions at the heart of a dominant view of the modern artist’s identity and labor contributed to the enormous significance of process in modern art. Given that resolution, the creation of a successful product, is tantamount to abandoning the modern artist’s fundamental identity as someone who seeks the proper and unique means of individual self-expression, the most successful of modern artists are those for whom the process of making art remains forever unresolved. Cézanne was exemplary in this regard. Roger Fry emphasized the artist’s efforts to evade formulas and characterized his art in formal terms: “It is evident that all his life he was continually brooding over one tormenting question; how to conciliate the data of Impressionism with—what he regarded as essential to style—a perfect structural organization. . . . It was this determination to arrive at a perfect synthesis of opposing principles, perhaps, that kept Cézanne’s sensibility at such a high tension, that prevented him from ever repeating himself, from ever executing a picture as a performance. Each canvas had to be a new investigation and a new solution.”28 Living and working in isolation for much of his career, Cézanne was unconcerned with the production of a marketable product; his paintings, often undated and unsigned, were left in a state of provisional completion. He is famous for the statement made toward the end of his life that he was the primitive of the way he discovered, that all those years of labor had only achieved a beginning.29 His “doubtful” achievement was, nevertheless, at the cost of many years of great labor that required all his focus and all his energies. Isolated and famously misanthropic, Cézanne followed in the footsteps of the Michelangelo legend, an artist who devoted himself completely to his art.
The paintings themselves are typically understood to display the artist’s perceptual and creative processes as their fundamental subject. Meyer Schapiro’s description of a Cézanne painting is exemplary: “the minutely ordered creation of an observant, inventive mind intensely concerned with its own process. . . . Tangible touches of color . . . [make] us aware of a decision of the mind and an operation of the hand. . . . The self is always present, poised between sensing and knowing, or between its perceptions and practical ordering activity, mastering its inner world by mastering something beyond itself.”30 While this might be said of many Impressionist works, in the case of Cézanne his paintings are often considered uniquely insightful indexes not just of an individual “way of seeing” but of the complex nature of seeing, in which the tensions between nature and the viewing subject, eye and body, eye and mind exist in a state of interdependence in which no single aspect can be successfully isolated.31
These issues and the paradoxes they raise were at the root of the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s interest in Cézanne’s art: “His painting was paradoxical: he was pursuing reality without giving up the sensuous surface, with no other guide than the immediate impression of nature. . . . This is what Bernard called Cézanne’s suicide: aiming for reality while denying himself the means to attain it. This is the reason for his difficulties and for the distortions one finds in his pictures.” For Merleau-Ponty, however, the tensions and paradoxes of Cézanne’s painting are not merely a peculiarity of the artist’s project, they are revelatory of human perception, and also of the nature of all painters’ endeavors: “Cézanne discovered what recent psychologists have come to formulate: the lived perspective . . . is not a geometric or photographic one.” Visual perception encompasses the multiplicity of sensory experience, and it is this unified perception, this wholeness that Cézanne strove to represent: “That is why each brushstroke must satisfy an infinite number of conditions. Cézanne sometimes pondered hours at a time before putting down a certain stroke. . . . Expressing what exists is an endless task.” In keeping with received notions regarding the Impressionist project, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the painter’s desire to paint naturally without relying on convention, and like Zola he compares the painter’s work to the creation of a language: “He speaks as the first man spoke and paints as if no one had ever painted before. . . . The artist launches his work just as a man once launched the first word, not knowing whether it will be anything more than a shout. . . . The meaning of what the artist is going to say does not exist anywhere—not in things, which as yet have no meaning, nor in the artist himself, in his unformulated life.”32 Cézanne’s painting is, in Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation, a creative process in the fullest meaning of the phrase; no conception precedes it.
Out of his sensations Cézanne creates a new language with every work; and this labor is inextricably bound up with the artist’s life, his psychology as well as the material circumstances of his existence. As Merleau-Ponty described it, “That work to be done called for that life. . . . Cézanne’s life found its only equilibrium by leaning on the work that was still in the future. His life was the preliminary project of his future work. The work to come is hinted at, but it would be wrong to take these hints for causes, although they do make a single adventure of his life and work. Here we are beyond causes and effects.”33 It has been observed that Merleau-Ponty found in Cézanne’s art and statements crucial elements for the development of his own phenomenological philosophy, in which the physical body plays a key role in human experience and epistemology.34 Thus, although Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology belongs to a later point in the historical trajectory I have been tracing, it has roots in the nineteenth century, when artists (and writers on artists) first started to find the travails of the artist’s working life more than trivial biographical information. The philosopher’s serious consideration of Cézanne’s creative process may be viewed as a kind of ratification; the artist’s difficulties were a matter of profound importance—a key means for thinking through the nature of embodied experience and the significance of material production in a world where such issues had hitherto largely been overlooked and ignored.
In the discursive context of Impressionism and Postimpressionism the modern artist’s labor often figures as a particularly individual, unpredictable, idiosyncratic (and often useless or failed) form of creative production. Critical and theoretical accounts of the modern artist’s labor emphasized it as natural, unregulated, and notably distinct from the conventional labor of academic artists, which was implicitly (and sometimes directly) linked to dehumanized and mindless industrial labor. Beginning in the 1880s, however, there were notable changes in the discourses supporting modern art, which began to adopt language and ideals that occasionally reflected a growing willingness to conform to modern industrial work processes, attitudes, and goals. A new generation often favored a more objective, universal approach. Maurice Denis’s distinction between “subjective deformation” and “objective deformation” is exemplary of the new attitude. Subjective deformation is the result of the artist’s individual way of seeing, while Denis theorized objective deformation as employing a universal means of formal distortion that would enable the creation of a shared artistic language of form.35
Neo-Impressionist painting in particular is understood as rejecting Impressionism’s purported idiosyncrasy and embracing modern scientific approaches and the industrial values of objectivity, efficiency, and regularity.36 Neo-Impressionist painters were presented as recording optical experience with scientific accuracy. Paul Signac described the Impressionist painters as using a “technique relying on instinct and inspiration,” while the Neo-Impressionists employed a “methodical and scientific technique.”37 Modern artists’ abandonment of academic technique and conventions of picture making was presented not as an attempt to evade the mechanical and predictable in favor of the unique and individual, but as steps on the road to a more accurate representation of optical experience. The employment of a regularized “dot” brushstroke was proposed as the most effective means for achieving the optical mixture of colors based on the principles of divisionism. Signac claimed Delacroix as the technical forebear of the Neo-Impressionists and cited his warnings against the seductive charm and “convenience” of ostentatious brushwork. More desirable, in Signac’s view, was the neutral efficiency of the divisionist stroke: “The optical mixture of small strokes of colour methodically laid down one next to the other, does not leave much room for virtuosity and skill. The painter’s hand has little importance; only the eye and brain take on a role.”38
Supporters of Neo-Impressionism promoted the virtues of the divisionist technique in terms that revived long-established academic tenets. The most notable of these is the stress on the artist’s intellect over manual technique. Paul Signac claimed that reducing the painter’s language by removing the signifying capacity of the brushstroke and regularizing the means for representing light and color made Neo-Impressionist painting a more efficient means for the artist to communicate an individual vision: “Is it necessary to mention that this uniform and almost abstract execution leaves the originality of the artist intact, and even helps it? Actually, it is idiotic to confuse Camille Pissarro, Dubois-Pillet, Signac, and Seurat. Each of them imperiously betrays his disparity . . . but never through the use of facile gimmicks. . . . To them objective reality is simply a theme for the creation of a superior, sublimated reality in which their personality is transformed.”39 In addition, as Signac indicated when he described the technique’s evasion of virtuosity and skill, there was a notable tendency to present the technique as more populist—anyone might learn this technique and be able to communicate their vision. And, in fact, many successful painters employed the technique in the last decade of the nineteenth century.
The Neo-Impressionist painter was concerned with the finished work of art, the product. The final work was intended to provide a seamless and complete visual experience, not one that (as with Impressionist paintings) insistently reminded viewers of its creation by obvious material traces of an idiosyncratic physical process. In addition, unlike Cézanne’s proto-linguistic style, the Neo-Impressionist “language” is fully formed and intended to be transparent to its content. Through mastery of divisionism, the Neo-Impressionist painter is theoretically able to fabricate paintings that directly communicate his or her idea or vision. The fabrication process is essentially instrumental; manual dexterity and physical engagement are reduced to a minimum. This is in keeping with the Neo-Impressionist painters’ understanding of vision and painting as isolated, essentially disembodied, optical experiences. This disembodied vision reaffirmed painting’s traditional association with the mind and intellect; in Neo-Impressionism the manual activity of painting becomes an efficient vehicle for conveying the painter’s idea.
By claiming divisionism was a painting technique that allowed for a direct representation of the artist’s vision, unimpeded by the manual tricks of painterly gesture, Signac and others were trying to establish it as a more mental, even spiritual, art than previous modern styles, most particularly Impressionism. A modern scientific painting technique restored the traditional intellectual value of painting as a fine and liberal art. From this vantage point it is possible to see Impressionism once more as the academics had done, a style primarily engaged with métier, essentially the material craft of painting, rather than an intellectual art. Mastery of an impersonal technique with a foundation in scientific optics could reestablish modern painting on an intellectual basis and avoid the sloppy “gimmicks” of painterly craft. All those precisely painted dots reaffirmed the cleanliness of the painter’s labor and highlighted its rationality.
Neo-Impressionism recuperated certain traditional academic values, but there are important distinctions that arise from the shifting valuation of craft in the nineteenth century. After the establishment of industrial manufacture many common handmade products lost value and became obsolete. Subsequently, with the success of the Arts and Crafts movement and related discourses, handmade objects gradually assumed a position of higher value than those that were mechanically produced. It was by displaying their intellectual concerns that the fine arts of painting and sculpture initially distinguished themselves from the merely handmade—the so-called minor arts or crafts, in which material technique was the sole concern. By the eighteenth century, coincident with the beginning of modern industrialization, the values of intellect and rationality that had distinguished the fine arts from the minor arts began to be replaced by emotional and expressive values. Industrialization further complicated the identity of the fine arts by adding the need to demonstrate their distinction from the mechanically produced.40 A painting in which representational technique was so realistic that it approached the photographic was in danger of being considered a mechanical demonstration of technical skill rather than a skillful, and hence transparent, display of the painter’s (traditionally intellectual) subject. The fine art of painting in particular (sculpture was less immediately affected) was thus the locus of a collision between different and evolving systems of value: one, the valuation of the mental/intellectual/emotional over the manual/material, and two, the valuation of the handmade crafts over mechanical production.
Impressionism largely managed to hold these differing value systems in balance through the figure of the artist whose idiosyncratic, “unfinished” technique guaranteed both the evasion of the mechanical and that the manual/material was the product of an individual’s mind and emotions. Neo-Impressionism, in emphasizing intellectual content by adopting a more scientific approach to technique, upset this equilibrium. Although it was compared to weaving, a traditional form of craft labor, the efficient regimentation of divisionism threatened to become mechanical. Neo-Impressionism thus stands in marked opposition to the high valuation of the individual idiosyncrasies of the handmade as promoted by Impressionism and in the realm of crafts and decorative arts in the late nineteenth century. Neo-Impressionism’s elevation of the artist’s vision, the more scientific and accurate representation of optical effects and emotion through divisionism and the calculated effects of design,41 revived and advanced the long-established tradition of painting’s intellectual concerns and appeal to the mind. And as Signac argued, Neo-Impressionism’s technique was no impediment to the manifestation of each artist’s unique vision. Implicitly, individuality is assumed to be a transcendent immaterial quality, one that is part of the artist’s intellectual, and possibly spiritual, identity and not essentially connected to the physical body.
Neo-Impressionism inaugurated a new approach that would profoundly affect modern art and the conceptualization of the artist’s working processes. This style—based on a predetermined, uniform, and systematic technique—was, at least theoretically, shared by all artists who employed it. It provided an efficient, largely mechanical process to achieve the basic pictorial goal of satisfying human aesthetic needs while communicating an individual vision through the painted product. Given this attention to the effective creation of a product, it is not difficult to see Neo-Impressionist painting as the artist’s equivalent to modern industrial production techniques in which efficiency takes priority.42 For the first time the modern artist’s process could be understood as aligned with the processes, values, and achievements of modern industry. And, as Signac claimed, a predetermined technical process was not an impediment to the human value of individual self-expression; it could be a means to affirm the uniqueness of the individual. Freed from the requirement to create an autographic material technique, the Neo-Impressionist artist was unbound by physical constraints and able to communicate the visual, mental, and spiritual directly to the viewer. This is comparable to the liberating effects often claimed for modern industry, which reduces the need for dirty physical labor and offers the worker more opportunities for intellectual development and participation.
By the beginning of the twentieth century the modern artist’s process was closely associated with objectivity, science, and industry as well as with subjectivity, individualism, and craftsmanship. These often-conflicting associations continued to haunt modern art throughout the century. As handworkers in the traditional artistic media of painting and sculpture, modern artists inevitably engaged with traditional craft processes and values. As artists their work was also inevitably situated in relation to the intellectual traditions of the fine arts. The difficulty was to define how these traditional concerns were relevant to the modern artist’s working process, and ultimately how the modern artist’s working processes were relevant to modern society. This was not simply a narrow professional concern of artists, as it had been prior to the nineteenth century when the academy defined the processes, nature, and role of art. Artistic process and its significance defined modern art. What precisely the artist did to make art and what that making signified in broad terms were fundamental to modern art’s purpose and meaning.
To a large extent the long-standing identification of modern art with a narrowly defined formalism has obscured the central importance of process in modern art. The dominant understanding of formalism focused attention on the formal qualities of the artwork in isolation from its means of production. It is commonly associated with the modernist criticism of Clement Greenberg, and also with that of Maurice Denis, Roger Fry, and Clive Bell, who contributed early theoretical formulations. They drew attention to the formal elements of design that had long been neglected by critics and viewers primarily interested in subject matter and narrative. These formal elements were not always considered in isolation from the process that produced them; as we have seen, Roger Fry analyzed the relevance of Cézanne’s process. Clive Bell’s focus was, in contrast, directed to the forms of the finished artwork rather than its process of production. Early formalists’ efforts should be associated with the broad attempt to give modern art an objective scientific basis. As the influence of Charles Henry’s theories on the Neo-Impressionists shows, some modern artists hoped to employ scientifically proven means to provoke specific emotional responses using color and shape. Early formalism was thus part of a general effort to understand art and aesthetics scientifically and in relation to human physiology and psychology.
Clement Greenberg’s mid-twentieth-century formalism emphasized an evolutionary view of modern art in which each art form was developing toward a state of pure medium specificity. In the case of painting Greenberg believed the essence of the medium was its two-dimensionality and that the evolutionary trend was toward flatness. He evaluated artworks in terms of their contribution to the evolution of their medium and not in relation to extra-artistic contextual concerns. He was also committed to making judgments of quality based on the artwork’s aesthetic effects as conveyed by abstract form. It was the “Greenbergian” approach to formal analysis of artworks that became standard in much art criticism, museum catalogs, and art-historical writing beginning in the mid-twentieth century. Artistic process and its central importance for modern art were largely overlooked and elided, while Greenberg’s insistently impersonal history of modern art’s formal evolution was widely influential.43
Key texts on early twentieth-century modern art, especially those written by modern artists themselves, show how central the artist’s process was to both the theory and production of modern art. Greenberg’s understanding of modernist art as evolving to an ever-greater purity of medium, independent of individual artists’ views and projects, is an abstracted view of modern art history. As he acknowledged, this grand scheme was not related to the conscious intentions of modern artists—although some, such as Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich, proposed theories and created works that were directly relevant. Considering the early modernist artists, critics, and theorists in terms of their expressed views on artistic process shows that a different sort of formalism than the one commonly associated with Greenberg was a major concern. This was a formalism in which the artist’s product is integrally related to the process of its creation. Although the final work was often intended to be a self-sufficient aesthetic object (and thus a reasonably appropriate subject for the sort of abstract formal analysis widely practiced in the mid-twentieth century), that was a minor concern compared to the complex processes that led to its successful creation. Furthermore, those processes were central to the meaning of the final artwork. They often distinguished it by means of indexical signs as human-made rather than an industrial product, thereby signifying a range of values associated with human identity and activity in opposition to inhuman industrial processes. In the instances when modern artists adopted values and processes associated with modern industry, their artistic labor was no less significant, and their goals remained indicative of broad human and social values.
In 1908 Henri Matisse published “Notes of a Painter,” in which he described his goal as a painter: “What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art which could be for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.” In Matisse’s view a painting is a purely aesthetic object whose effects are conveyed by formal means, and his text provides the outline of a pure formalism. The basic points include the following: (1) the artwork conveys its meaning by formal means and not by subject matter (“A work of art must carry within itself its complete significance and impose that upon the beholder even before he recognizes the subject matter”);44 (2) there is a natural relation between form and feeling that makes it possible to communicate by formal means; (3) the successful artwork is unified, and every formal element contributes to the meaning of the whole; (4) unity presupposes the artwork’s self-sufficiency, and therefore nothing external to the artwork is required to make it successful. These points stressed by Matisse are in keeping with the formalist views adopted by Bell, Fry, and later Greenberg; nevertheless, Matisse’s “Notes of a Painter” is also one of the most influential accounts of a modern artist’s working process and its significance.
By the time he published “Notes of a Painter” Matisse had studied and successfully employed academic painting techniques as well as the range of modern techniques and styles, including Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism, and Fauvism. This experience with widely different artistic attitudes and commitments contributed to the depth and seriousness of his account, which reveals the painter’s careful consideration of his artistic means. He begins by denying any distinction between the artist’s intellectual labor and the craft labor of the painter’s métier:
What I am after, above all, is expression. Sometimes it has been conceded that I have a certain technical ability but that all the same my ambition is limited, and does not go beyond the purely visual satisfaction such as can be obtained from looking at a picture. But the thought of a painter must not be considered as separate from his pictorial means, for the thought is worth no more than its expression by the means [emphasis added], which must be more complete . . . the deeper is his thought. I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have about life and my way of translating it.45
For Matisse, the painter’s intellectual labor is manifested in the painter’s means; the two cannot be separated as they had been in the academic tradition. This assertion is the foundation of the detailed discussion of his artistic process that follows.
Matisse methodically situates his working process at the intersection of nature, intuition, technical knowledge, and expression. Denying critical accusations that he applied a theoretical method in creating his purportedly “unnatural” paintings, and explicitly distinguishing his own intuitive approach from the scientific methods espoused by Signac and the Neo-Impressionists, Matisse insisted that his work as a painter is engaged with the medium as a means of expression. A key aspect of this engagement is his attentiveness to the expressive requirements of painting. Matisse described how each element in a given work affects the others and changes the equilibrium of the whole. The addition of a color, a dot, or a line completely transforms a work, and it is the artist’s role to constantly adjust the work’s elements in order to make it conform as a whole to his expressive intentions.46 This is material labor that cannot be done mechanically; it requires the artist’s full mental and emotional engagement at every moment.
Matisse’s text is characterized by a balanced evaluation of seemingly opposed aspects of the artist’s labor. He assigns importance to both nature and the imagination in the artist’s working process; likewise, intuition and technical knowledge also play key roles. Given his description of the artist’s need to calibrate the many opposed aspects of a successful creative process, it is not surprising that Matisse evaluates artists in terms of their self-discipline: “I think that one can judge of the vitality and power of an artist who, after having received impressions directly from the spectacle of nature, is able to organize his sensations to continue his work in the same frame of mind on different days, and to develop these sensations; this power proves he is sufficiently master of himself to subject himself to discipline.” This was one means Matisse used to distinguish his artistic goals from those of the Impressionists, who were presented as passive in their working processes rather than consciously directing their results at every moment. Matisse’s emphasis on discipline also indicated that he did not regard the painter’s work as simple or easy, even though it has its source in feeling. The artist must be able to control personal emotions in order to employ them successfully in the making of art: “I want to reach that state of condensation of sensations which makes a painting. I might be satisfied with a work done at one sitting, but I would soon tire of it; therefore, I prefer to rework it so that later I may recognize it as representative of my state of mind.”47 The painter’s disciplined labor results in an achievement that is not only expressive but intellectual as well. In addition, Matisse situated his working process in terms of traditionally classical values of harmony, clarity, order, and balance. These are achieved through the artist’s thoughtful and diligent labor.
Although he describes his goal as creating a work of his mind, at times Matisse describes the artist’s working process in a manner that suggests a craftsman’s preoccupation with technique as a means to create a successful product rather than the intellectual concerns traditionally attributed to artists. Despite his insistence on the artist’s responsiveness to the developing artwork, Matisse stated that he “must have a clear vision of the composition from the very beginning,”48 and he explicitly contrasted this with the “confused expression” of Rodin’s fragmentary approach. The contradiction between the need for a clearly envisioned final product and the constant negotiation and adaptation required to bring the work to fruition is never reconciled in the text.
“Notes of a Painter” serves to illustrate a key moment in the conception of the modern artist’s labor when a tenuous balance is struck between the process of the artwork’s creation and its achievement as a completed product. Matisse explains (albeit with some contradictions) the integral relation between how he paints and what he paints. His initial conception, a desire to express a particular emotion, guides his process, informing each choice in the creation of a work. Every brush stroke offers the artist new possibilities for the final work, and the artist’s labor is weighing each of these against the initial impetus of the work and deciding which would be the most effective in bringing the work into conformity with his initial conception—the feeling he intended to express. The final work reflects the moment when the artist was satisfied that the work had reached the ordered and harmonious material equivalent of this initial feeling.
Matisse’s approach is notably different from those of his predecessors. First, the academic artist’s process involves the development of preparatory sketches to resolve the final work’s composition, lighting, color, and so forth. Once these are decided the artist’s labor is largely a mechanical application of technique, which makes it possible for assistants to perform much of this labor in the studios of successful artists. Matisse, in contrast, has not resolved these issues prior to beginning work on the painting. Instead, he resolves them as he paints. From his description, he appears to consider the work’s overall balance of color and composition at every moment. Thus, at least theoretically, the painting is in some measure complete at each point in the process of its making.49 Much later in his career Matisse would document these provisional completions photographically, and occasionally he exhibited these photographs with the final painting.50 They show that Matisse’s paintings did not progress from less to more resolved; rather, they were subjected to (sometimes major) changes throughout their creation. Earlier stages were often no more or less finished to an external eye than the final painting, which Matisse presumably felt most effectively expressed the intended emotion.
The Impressionist artist’s process also differed notably from that of Matisse. The Impressionist paints records of visual experience, and each of the painter’s marks is intended to create an analog of the painter’s visual experience of the scene. There is (theoretically) no need for the Impressionist artist to evaluate the work in terms of its overall formal equilibrium as it is being painted; it is enough for the artist to work stroke by stroke, accurately recording each color area viewed. As noted above, Matisse explicitly contrasted his mentally engaged working process to that of the Impressionists. He made constant adjustments to bring the work into conformity with a preexisting conception that would express his feelings; each stage thus required evaluation in relation to the work’s intended purpose.
There is another key difference between Matisse’s description of his goals and that of previous artists. For the academic artist the goal was the subject of the artwork, be it an imagined death of Socrates or a still life painted from an array of real objects. Structural harmony was an important ingredient, but it was a subsidiary technical objective. The artist’s working process was geared to create an appropriate naturalistic painting of a given subject. Realist and Impressionist artists likewise worked to produce paintings of specific scenes. Their broad goal was accurate naturalistic representation of their subject. Matisse, in contrast, abandoned naturalism as an objective and replaced it with his own feeling of compositional harmony and expressive adequacy. Subject matter is described almost as an afterthought when Matisse briefly mentions his desire to avoid “troubling and depressing subject matter,” and his belief that the human figure allows him to best express his “nearly religious feeling” toward life. Far more important to him is his claim that the forms and colors of Giotto’s frescoes provoke appropriate feelings in him before he knows what scenes they represent. (This notion would soon be taken up by the formalist critic and theorist Clive Bell as “significant form,” which he defined as the universal sign of great art that requires no knowledge of subject or tradition to appreciate, merely a native sensitivity to form comparable to a good ear for music.)51 The painting’s subject—and a Matisse painting always has a naturalistic subject—has become largely a pretext, a touchstone for the artist’s working process. It prompts the artist’s work, but it does not serve as a model in any usual sense. Matisse does not analyze the figure and scene in order to make an accurate record of its appearance. He consults his feelings as he looks at the canvas and at the scene it represents; his work as a painter consists of “condensing” forms to “essential line,” of using color to provoke equivalents to the emotional experiences he has when perceiving the scene.
This describes a key step in the modernist development of nonrepresentational art, the beginning of the rupture between a painting’s subject and its representation in the painting. Matisse’s approach shows the influence of scientific studies of the relations between emotions and color and form. Although Matisse specifically rejected the direct equivalencies used by the Neo-Impressionists, such connections made it possible to conceive an art that could communicate emotion directly through formal elements. This opened up altogether new approaches to understanding the artist’s labor as well as changing the notion of what constituted a successful artwork. To communicate emotion Matisse uses a process reliant on intuition and feeling. The artist is the first test case for the success of the work—if it conveys the desired emotion to him then it may be presumed to do so for others. Even more important than the artist’s task of communicating emotion directly through form is the artist’s close attention to his own working process. As the significance of the artwork’s ostensible subject dwindles, the work becomes increasingly self-referential, and the artist is able to justify his labor in the terms of the labor itself. That labor consists primarily of the thoughtful evaluation of the emotional effects of every change in the artwork’s form.
Matisse effectively created a reliable formula to justify the value of all paintings created in accordance with his process: they are the expression of the artist’s feelings for the subject, and the choices made in their creation are intuitive given that feeling cannot be subjected to external rules. A problem raised by this stress on the artist’s intuitive personal expression and lack of rules was that it nullified fixed standards of artistic evaluation. This was far from being Matisse’s intention, but his text represented an important step in the detachment of modern art from the educational systems and institutions that had previously served to set standards and procedures for artists. This was often viewed as liberating and productive, but it raised a number of problems in terms of the education of artists and the evaluation of artworks. These problems have most often been addressed in terms of the modernist requirement of originality, which becomes an increasingly significant issue in twentieth-century art criticism and theory, but they appear initially in the embrace of un- or anti-theoretical emotional expression. The moment that expression becomes both the artist’s motivation and the artist’s goal, no objective standards can be consistently applied. All that may be termed a means of evaluation is an assessment of the artist’s sincerity—as indicated most often by consistent devotion to creating a type of work over the course of many years.52
Matisse did not intend to create a free-for-all in the realm of modern art production. He wrote “Notes of a Painter” in response to a specific situation, and his emphasis on intuition and expression was primarily intended to refute accusations that he was an overly theoretical and inhuman painter. His own work was anchored in sound academic discipline and technical training, and his goals were often traditional, most notably his insistence on the classical values of beauty, purity, and harmony. His own aesthetic expression was constrained by these values, and his mastery of naturalistic representation served as a foundation for his ability to discover “essential” lines and forms. The extent to which he assumed such a foundation was necessary for liberated expression became evident when he ran his own art school. He discovered that many of his students had little understanding of anatomy and were unable to draw the human body, so he instituted figure study sessions for them.53 Intuitive self-expression was by no means all that was required to create successful artworks in Matisse’s view.
An important corollary to the modern expressive artist’s requisite skills is the ability of the critic or connoisseur to evaluate the modern artist’s work. Successful modern art critics relied on their claim to be able to distinguish qualitative differences in artists’ self-expressive works. Christian Zervos, editor of the highly influential modern art magazine Cahiers d’Art, promoted the superiority of Matisse and Picasso based on the artists’ technical mastery, which he claimed was evident in even a single drawn line.54 This became an enduring cliché—the great masters of modern art had strong foundations in academic technical skills, and this gave them the ability to create innovative modern works. The knowledgeable viewer can discern not only the mark of genius but also the beneficial effects of traditional technical mastery in the most untraditional artworks. Such convictions have a basis in truth, but they often became unproven, and unprovable, assertions.
Critical evaluation relates directly to the conception of the modern artist’s process and its relation to the artwork, most particularly to the problem of establishing and regulating qualitative distinctions. What is to distinguish a successful artist’s work from that of the unsuccessful, or the professional artist from the amateur? If beginning in the nineteenth century artists need only record their unique “way of seeing,” how was success or, more urgently, failure to be determined? Some technical skills were required while naturalism remained an expectation, but once that barrier had been breached and it became a matter of expressing feeling, even the minimal requirement of reasonably accurate rendering was no longer evidently necessary. What were the signs in an artwork that would reveal the artist’s success when there were no standard operating procedures? The implicit answer most often made to this problem was that there were still fundamental requirements, the real artists met them, and the true connoisseurs could see that they had done so. If you needed to ask for further information you were not in a position to understand. That many things contributed to create successful modern artists’ reputations other than the quality of their work is unquestionable, but the fact remains that the only publicly acknowledged justification for artistic success was the artist’s ability as revealed by the quality of his or her work. Quality—whose work had it and whose eye could instantly perceive it—was the basis of artistic value. Those unable to perceive it were, as Clive Bell wrote, like a tone-deaf person at a concert, and given the social and cultural cachet of the arts there were surely many unwilling to admit to the insensitivity of their aesthetic perceptions.
Matisse’s famous desire to create art that soothes “mental workers,” businessmen and men of letters, also presents the artist’s role in a somewhat ambiguous position regarding his creative invention. Matisse situates himself in relation to contemporary society as a provider of pleasure and relaxation to the (implicitly middle-class and urban) male intellectual worker. In doing so he seems to define himself as a craftsman or decorator, an artisan whose final product is largely determined in advance both in broad terms and in specific details. While balance and purity are goals in keeping with a long tradition of Western art and aesthetics that served as a basis of French academic theory and instruction, Matisse omits the more elevated goals of academic art, most notably moral instruction and the accompanying representation of exalted and edifying actions and individuals. In the modern world the artist’s role is merely to serve people who can afford artworks and who want to occupy leisure time with pleasant and restful sights. Given such a social role, all that seems to be required of the artist is a developed technique and sensibility for aesthetic expression in a given medium.
Matisse’s formulation of his working process may be grouped with a broad Postimpressionist tendency to stress a more resolved, objective, and unified approach to the artist’s labor. In keeping with widespread efforts to solidify the modern artist’s project, Matisse also specified a significant role for the modern artist as a creator of socially useful products. This role is comparable to that espoused by the Arts and Crafts movement, which, as we saw in the previous chapter, also hoped to ameliorate the toll that modern life and labor took on society. This will be a long-enduring theme, and modern art will be repeatedly cited as contributing to the improvement of human life in the face of the debility inflicted by modern industrial society.
In the late nineteenth century there was a general preoccupation with worker fatigue and a pervasive fear that modern life disregarded the body’s needs and exhausted the health of the population.55 Nervous fatigue and neurasthenia, both terms used to describe an incapacity for sustained effort, were common complaints; according to Charles Féré, a prominent French physician of the era, they prompted people to indulge in luxuries, excitement, and physical pleasures.56 By describing his art as intellectually soothing, Matisse claimed he could contribute to the health of the population, and more than that, he implied that his art could reconnect the intellectual worker with the fundamental rhythms of life by means of the natural rhythms of art. Féré considered the rhythms of the body to be the root of all art and aesthetic pleasure; according to him, art “corresponds to the great laws of life, of rhythm, of symmetry. All art obeys these laws.”57 Thus, while it might appear that Matisse’s goals for his art were modest, they were allied with prominent contemporary social issues. In “Notes of a Painter” modern art is implicitly therapeutic, and in contrast to the overworked businessman the modern artist’s labor is natural and intuitive. It allows for self-expression and the creation of beautiful, harmonious objects that have healing effects. Modern art is firmly associated with leisure and relaxation, both directly in terms of the pleasure that it gives to nonworking hours and less directly in the implied association between the artist’s work and pleasant occupation.58 Amateur painting was well established as a popular pastime by the early twentieth century, and Matisse’s “Notes of a Painter” helped to refine and reinforce popular notions regarding the desirability and satisfactions of an artistic labor closely aligned with intuitive self-expression. These notions are, of course, markedly opposed to modern artists’ own insistence that they worked very hard.