SEEING THE FUTURE: MODERNIST PAINTING AND THE GAZE Chris Shaw Hughes April 2006

At the Opera A woman in black, arm propped up on the balcony in front of her, looks intently through a pair of opera glasses at, presumably, the actors, dancers or singers on the stage before her. However, as we are not shown her view, this can only be a guess, and as the picture is so obviously about looking, perhaps we should be looking a bit deeper for other possibilities. A clue that urges us to resist the ‘At the Opera’, Mary Cassatt, 1878

obvious is her position: she sits high within the theatre [we are shown the balcony she inhabits sweeping round and we can see people below her on a lower level], and yet her glasses are held high and she appears to be looking directly out, on a plane equal to hers rather than downwards towards a stage. The impression we’re left with is that she is most likely looking somewhere else on her level of the balcony, and that the object of her attention is probably another person. Of course there is the possibility that some altercation, argument or mini-drama is unfolding off stage that has drawn her gaze away from the entertainment on stage, but careful examination of what part of the audience we can see shows that hers are the only pair of eyes focused in that particular direction. Whatever she looks at is for her own private pleasure. However, her pleasure is not entirely her own because, unseen, another pair of eyes gaze at her. A male theatre-goer in another part of the balcony looks through his opera glasses at her, and the watcher becomes the watched. As the viewers of the picture, our first impression could be that we are in a powerful viewing position, as from our vantage point we are able to watch her, and watch him watching her. However, in actuality our position is a lot weaker than we might imagine, as not only can we not see what she sees, but as she looks across our line of vision we are also confronted by the male watcher who could, in fact, be watching us. With this closer look at the painting’s construction, we discover that although we have been invited to look into the picture, we have only been shown part of the story. We end up witnessing less than the principle characters, with virtually no chance of discovering the real focus, or subject of the painting. Is this a challenge to the traditional prospect of the viewer, who would normally be given the prime position from which to see all? After all, aren’t paintings produced for us, the viewer? Aren’t we supposed to be placed, by the artist, in the ideal position? Where has our privileged position gone? Our gaze is steadfastly ignored by the main figure of the woman, and then confronted by what appears to be no more than a sketchily constructed bit part player. What is the artist trying to do? Drawing our attention to how we look at paintings seems too simple an explanation, especially when you take into consideration the gender of the artist.* Work by artists such as Degas and Manet, set in the theatre, made it clear that scenes like this were part of the everyday sexual trade that went on between rich male theatre goers and prostitutes. Griselda Pollock explains: “Indeed, most of the images in both high and popular culture of this period, in which a woman, a box at the theatre, and a pair of opera glasses appear, signify unequivocally the initiation of commercial sex between top-hatted gents and overdressed working-women or courtesans.” 1 However, this woman is dressed in the black daytime attire which would normally be worn to a Sunday matinee, usually accompanied by a lecture, so in contrast to the work of her male counter-parts, Cassatt’s woman is more likely to be educated and ‘respectable’. All of which leaves us no closer to discovering the object of her gaze, or indeed, the identity of her admirer. Is it possible that she is looking for him and we are witnessing the prelude to some kind of pre-arranged secret liaison? We will never know because the painting has turned its back on us and Cassatt has cast us in the role of the outsider. What we can tell is that Cassatt, along with Degas, Manet, Caillebotte and others were making significant statements in their art about the ideas around “being seen” and “seeing” as well as looking at new compositional constructions, such as the use of mirrors and flattening out of the picture’s surface, to highlight different ways of showing, and seeing paintings.

‘Young Man at hisWindow’, Gustave Caillebotte, 1876 ‘The Balcony’, Edouard Manet, 1868/69 Perhaps the idea of subject looking outside the painting’s parameters, beyond the frame, playing with our field of vision is a pre-curser to the explorations of size and scale so readily embraced by the American abstract expressionists 75 years later, and the flattening of the picture’s surface in favour of illusionistic depth certainly formed a major part of modernist painting’s ethos and method which still stands firm today. However it didn’t take modernism to invent the conception, or maybe it should be the deception, of the watcher becoming the watched; and subjects staring out at us from the canvas was not a recent innovation even in 1878 when ‘At the Opera’ was painted. By then, photography had already usurped painting as the main medium with which artists could represent images of the world they lived in, and freed painting to explore other conditions of human experience. Modernism in painting was in full flow, but what was ‘modernist’ painting? There are obviously many answers to that question, but Griselda Pollock suggests this one: “Social histories of art have, however, also taught us that the what of painting, drawn from modern life, was made modern only because of the how: modern art is modern because of a self-conscious manipulation of paint and surface in order to bring out the ambivalence and complexity of the relations between painting as a fabricated representation and its referents in the social world. Modernism in art is not merely the anecdotal recording of scenes of contemporary life. In modern-ism the what and the how are in tension, making viewers work with the alternation between seeing a painting as a painting and seeing a painting as a representation that makes us think about an experience in the world.”2 “Seeing painting as a painting” rather than as a representation seems to be the crux of matter. And this certainly links the European modernist painting of the mid to late19th century with that of the American abstract expressionists, colour field painters and minimalists of the1950’s and 60’s. As well as this, supporter of this new modernism, critic Clement Greenberg, famously wrote about the necessity of preserving the flat picture plane in order to maintain the medium’s specificity, which he believed was the only way in which painting could retain its lofty status within the arts.

Modernism was changing painting from being ‘pictures’ which represented life, to ‘objects’ which represented the materials and the supports used [paint and canvas, stretcher, board etc]. However, this emphasis on supports had produced painting which was starting to look more like sculpture, ‘Vir Heroicus Sublimis’, Barnett Newman, 1950/51 and there was a risk therefore of painting losing its specificity and becoming 3 dimensional rather than adhering to the flat picture plane insisted on by Greenberg. This constant pushing of the bou-ndaries [almost literally] of painting, and the concentration on the supports and the perimeters of paintings as much as on the painting itself, by artists such as Newman, Stella, Ryman and Rothko put the very survival of the medium in jeopardy. Both Donald Judd and Michael Fried expressed the view that a lot of recent modernist paintings, by emphasising the shape of the support, were in danger of becoming three-dimensional objects rather than paintings. ”The new [i.e., literalist] work obviously resembles sculpture more than it does painting, but is nearer to painting.”3 ‘Nunca Pasa Nada’, Frank Stella, 1964

Art and Theatre Michael Fried, in his seminal essay, ‘Art and Objecthood’, also spoke of another battle for survival, a battle to establish a new relationship with its audience. “That there is a war going on between theatre and modernist painting, between the theatrical and the pictorial – a war that, despite the literalists’ explicit rejection of modernist painting and sculpture, is not basically a matter of program and ideology but of experience, conviction, sensibility.”4 But what was Fried afraid of? If theatre was entertainment, and popular entertainment at that, perhaps his fear was of art becoming like theatre, like entertainment, a part of ‘popular’ or ‘mass’ culture and, like Greenberg warned, at risk of losing its position within the high arts. It’s perhaps ironic that Fried talks of painting’s need to ‘defeat or suspend theatre’ when the late 19th century modernists used the theatre so effectively to create their new work and reinvigorate the way their audience looked at it. Is it possible that Cassatt et al were also using the theatre as a metaphoric battleground in their fight against the salons, and for new audiences? Fried speaks of the literalist [minimalist] work having an audience of one, of existing for the beholder alone, as ‘his’ unique experience. “Someone has merely to enter the room in which a literalist work has been placed to become that beholder, that audience of one – almost as though the work in question has been waiting for him. And inasmuch as literalist work depends on the beholder, is incomplete without him, it has been waiting for him.”5 So if the work “is incomplete” without the beholder, could it have been an acknowledgement that art needed the spectator more than the spectator needed art that created the need for a new, modernist, way of painting? Modernist painting [and sculpture] surely recognised the need to include the ‘modern’ spectator and explored many ways of doing just that. Firstly with the gradual removal and denial of the ‘mass need’ to recognise what a painting was ‘of’ and replacing it with the ‘individual experience’ of the work itself. The 19th century avant-garde pathfinders responded by rejecting classical subjects and carrying out their modernist explorations of non-representation [or non-subject] within the contemporary settings of the places of entertainment and leisure within their modern towns and cities. The later modernists [mainly in America] took things even further and ‘went for broke’ by eliminating subject altogether, and searching for expression within the actual medium itself. An expression that would create an individual experience for each and every viewer of their art, whatever the medium; paint, metal, wood, stone, film, nothing. “To render substance entirely optical, and form, whether pictorial, sculptural, or architectural, as an integral part of ambient space – this brings anti-illusionism full circle. Instead of the illusion of things, we are now offered the illusion of modalities: namely, that matter is incorporeal, weightless, and exists only optically like a mirage.”6 One thing is certain, art, and probably more specifically painting, and the way it was viewed has been developing and changing at a rapid pace for the last century or so, and contrary to the view that some modernist painters were strictly formalist in their outlook, which could possibly stifle the progress made and cause stagnation, Fried is convinced that “something like a dialectic of modernism” had been in effect since about the mid to late 19th century which had created a kind of perpetual revolution in painting.

“The chief function of the dialectic of modernism in the visual arts has been to provide a principle by which painting can change, transform, and renew itself, and by which it is enabled to perpetuate virtually intact, and sometimes even enriched, through each epoch of self-renewal, those of its traditional values that do not pertain directly to representation.”7 ‘Gare St Lazare’,* * Edouard Manet, 1872/73 Looking back to Manet and Cassatt, we can see how they made use of ‘the gaze’ both politically and compositionally to forge ahead with modernism and create a new kind of art, a new kind of painting. The American modernists, including the abstract expressionists and the minimalists [literalists], recognised, and responded to, the importance of the spectator’s gaze, and sought ways of creating an individual experience, either optically or emotionally by use of the medium, not subject. However, in the end, is it the gaze it cast upon itself as well as the relationship it has with its audience that has been at the root of its continued survival and the seed of its future success?

Notes: 1. Pollock, Griselda, ‘Mary Cassatt; Painter of Modern Women’, London, 1998, p144 2. Pollock, Griselda, ‘Mary Cassatt; Painter of Modern Women’, London, 1998, p21 3. Donald Judd, ‘Specific Objects’, in ‘Art in Theory, 1900 – 2000’ Harrison & Wood, p826. 4. Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, Chicago and London,1998, p160 5. Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, Chicago and London,1998, p163 6. Greenberg, Clement, ‘The New Sculpture’, in ‘Art and Culture: Critical Essays’, Boston, 1961, p144 7. Fried, Michael, ‘Three American Painters: Noland, Olitski, Stella’, in ‘Art and Objecthood’ , Chicago & London, 1998, p218 * I have not explored the obvious feminist issues concerning the gaze in this essay as I thought it more important in this instance to concentrate strictly on the relationship between modernist painting and spectatorship. The gaze as related to patriarchal power is a separate issue and I feel it would have over complicated the argument. ** I’d love to think that Manet was aware of the possible anagrams within the title of this painting ‘Gare St Lazare’. Picture credits. Title page: Rothko, Mark. ‘Light Earth and Blue’, 1954. From SOHO ART @ www.soho-art.com Cassatt, Mary. ‘At the Opera’, 1878. From CGFA @ http://.cgfa.sunsite.dk/cassatt/p-cassatt12.htm Caillebotte, Gustave. ‘Young Man at his Window’, 1876. From the Artchive @ www.artchive.com./C/Caillebotte/c-botte_window.jpg.html Manet, Edouard. ‘The Balcony’, 1868-69. From the Artchive @ www.artchive.com.artchive/M/Manet/balcony.jpg.html Newman, Barnett. ‘Vir Heroicus Sublimis’, 1950-51. From The Museum of Modern Art @ www.MoMA.org Stella, Frank. ‘Nunca Pasa Nada’, 1964. From Artnet @ www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/polsky/polsky1-25-3.asp Manet, Edouard. ‘Gare St Lazare’, 1872-73. From CGFA @ http://.cgfa.sunsite.dk/manet/p-manet15.htm

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