[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.96 This supposed  optical bias, Greenberg40 had claimed  for instance, in his statement quoted above  had devel-1 oped as an acknowledgement of the modernist  discovery of painting s186MODERNI SM S MANET1 ontological  essence as an autonomous practice of mark-making upon2 a limited and shaped support.Later notions of  opticality , the  sheerly3 or purely visual , etc. all the claims pejoratively called  formalist , in4 fact  might be said potentially to subsist in this dropped statement:5  The latest abstract painting tries to fulfil the Impressionist insistence6 on the optical as the only sense that a completely and quintessentially7 pictorial art can evoke. Though Fried proposes, as I ve discussed, his8 own criticisms of elements of Greenberg s conceptual apparatus 9 particularly, and most fundamentally, the idea of painting s  essence 10 it is obvious that Fried s own claim in 1965 that the history of modernist11 painting evinces  an increasing preoccupation with problems and issues12 intrinsic to painting itself might be said to have genetic links itself to13 Greenberg s notion of Impressionist painting s  optical bias.9714 If the idea of modernist self-criticism can entertain reductive as15 well as sophisticated definitions, then so can the notion of painting s16  surface.Greenberg claims that Manet s paintings surfaces are such17 that the viewer sees them as pictures first, and then as painted surfaces18 containing imagery  that this is so, Greenberg concludes, indeed19 indicates that modernist painting is  a success of self-criticism.98 Clark20 observes, however, that the critics who first wrote about Manet s paint-21 ings  kept the surface present almost too vividly in their accounts.22 It was on the surface that imagination could do its work, where23 Manet s  exaggerated play with normal identities , his altering of worldly24 appearances, happened.9925 The surface of the face of the depicted woman   barmaid and26  prostitute ?  in A Bar at the Folies Bergère, for instance, is both  the27 face of the popular , claims Clark, but also  a fierce, imperfect resis-28 tance to any such ascription.It is a face whose character derives29 from it not being bourgeois, and having that fact almost be hidden. 10030 (Mallarmé, writing in 1876, had talked of the painting of what he called,31 enigmatically, the  flesh-pollen of the surface of a woman s face.101)32 Fried observes that, although Manet s surfaces, along with those by the33 Impressionists, were stressed, they certainly shared this with Courbet s34   frankly and massively declared  such as the Burial at Ornans.He35 qualifies this, rather obscurely, though, saying that in Courbet s case36 it wasn t so much a matter of declaring the surface of the canvas upon37 which the paint was put, rather it was  their status as surfaces made38 of paint.102 No clear distinction should be drawn, he adds  sounding39 here a bit like Clark  between Courbet s  realism and Manet s40  modernism , given the centrality of surface to both artists.The larger1 story of painting in the later-nineteenth and twentieth centuries is187MODERNI SM S MANET1 that of what Fried calls a  plurality of modernisms or say of modernist2 adventures.1033 To reiterate, neither should Manet s own  modernism be under-4 stood through what Fried calls  an  Impressionist reading  one, that5 is, like Greenberg s, which claims for that art an essentialist simplifica-6 tion based on  the dual thematics of flatness and visuality.104  Impres-7 sionist here, somewhat confusingly, seems to be simply a synonym for8  formalist-modernist.Whatever the complexities of Manet s relation to9 the Impressionist painters, and given Fried s own partial and mostly10 unelaborated reading of Impressionism as a form of what he calls  ocular11 realism , he is adamant that the artist s concerns (his Mallarméan12  cause ) as a painter were much broader.105 Manet s  profound involve-13 ment with instantaneousness  also with strikingness  as a marker14 of the primordial encounter , Fried asserts,  the inescapable or quasi-15 transcendental relation of mutual facing, between painting and beholder16 was a decisive feature of his work from the beginning.106 This summary17 is perhaps the closest Fried gets to defining the aim and nature of18 Manet s  realism.19 What else has Fried s own encounter with 1960s abstract painting20 been, if not an involvement with  the experience of, belief in, desire21 for  such  instantaneousness understood by him as a condition and22 guarantee of true aesthetic value? When Fried speaks of  the beholder ,23 his own beholding must be an experience his memory and understanding24 of which informs his sense of what that beholding fundamentally,25  primordially is.Manet s and Stella s paintings changed Fried s subject.26 Clark s The Painting of Modern Life, Fried explains in the preface27 to Manet s Modernism,  transformed studies of that artist, and its author28 became Fried s  chief interlocutor and friend after they spent two days29 together looking at Manet s paintings at the 1983 retrospective exhibi-30 tion at the Grand Palais in Paris.107 Great art s  instantaneousness of31 affect, then, is best conjoined with review and debate  as much for32 critics as for artists   not just interpreters, collaborators. states33 Clark, apropos of Pollock.Baudelaire and Manet had been similarly34 entwined over the ways in which past art, the art of the museums, might35 have a presence, open and subliminal, in modern painting.10836 Manet s Execution of Maximilian articulated its producer s rela-37 tion to such past art (Goya s, above all) with what Fried calls a dramatic38  literalizing of strikingness , a dramatizing, that is, of the confrontation39 between painting and beholder:  a field of multiple, labile, and conflictual40 identifications and counteridentifications, with Manet himself  Manet1 as painter-beholder  at once everywhere and nowhere.109 Greenberg s,188MODERNI SM S MANET1 Fried s, and Clark s accounts of modern painting  their shifting, some-2 times overlapping, but also radically diverging critical modernisms, split3 between accounts of its  good and  bad complexities,  positive achieve-4 ments and  negations , tradition and situation  might equally be5 said to be full of such  identifications and  counteridentifications ; to6 contain allegories of themselves as simultaneously reasoning, feeling,7 and dreaming subjects.8 Having written back, then, to modern art, it is now time to ask,9 in conclusion, what became of what was supposed to have been its10 successor  postmodernism [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]