The Painting of Modern Life
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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“For the petit-bourgeois consumer of culture in the twentieth century, the available form of popular art has been black American music, and that is where my notion of collective vehemence was picked up—from kinds of blues singing and shouting, from improvised ensemble playing, from Charlie Parker’s way with the themes and harmonies of white popular music, from Little Richard and Fats Domino. But this kind of list is more than usually misleading here: the effect we are talking about does not for the most part lead to ‘masterpieces,’ and can be found almost anywhere, often surrounded by pure shlock.”.--The Painting of Modern Life (1985) by T. J. Clark |
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The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (1985) is a book by T. J. Clark. The title is based on the essay by Baudelaire "The Painter of Modern Life".
Product description:
- The Paris of the 1860s and 1870s was supposedly a brand new city, equipped with boulevards, cafes, parks and suburban pleasure grounds - the birthplace of those habits of commerce that constitute "modern life". Questioning those who view Impressionism solely in terms of artistic technique, T.J. Clark describes the painting of Manet, Degas, Seurat and others as an attempt to give form to that modernity and seek out its typical representatives - be they barmaids, boaters, prostitutes, sightseers or petits bourgeois lunching on the grass. The central question of the book is this: did modern painting as it came into being celebrate the consumer-oriented culture of the Paris of Napoleon III, or open it to critical scrutiny?
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Table of contents
chapter one The View from Notre-Dame • 23
"Meyer Schapiro,"The Nature of Abstract Art," Marxist Quarterly, January-March 1937, p. 83; reprinted (with no indication of its first place of publication) in Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries, by Meyer Schapiro. The passage I quote was subjected to interesting criticism in Delmore Schwartz's "A Note on the Nature of Art," Marxist Quarterly, April-June 1937, pp. 306-7. This is the place to acknowledge my other obvious debt, to the bits and pieces of Walter Benjamin's Arcades project, especially the material in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism.
chapter two Olympia's Choice • 79
chapter three The Environs of Paris • 147
chapter four A Bar at the Folies-Bergere
Excerpts
"the perfect heroes and heroines of [the] myth of modernity were the petite-bourgeoisie"
See also
