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Lasting Impressions: The Legacies of Impressionism in Contemporary Culture by Jesse Matz

2018; Duke University Press; Volume: 64; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/0041462x-7142105

2325-8101

Max Saunders,

Art, Politics, and Modernism

There can be few movements in art to have suffered such dramatic reversals as Impressionism. Initially it shocked conservative tastes not just for the political radicalism of its focus on the seamier side of Parisian life and leisure—sexuality, prostitution, drink—where the bourgeoisie and lower classes got adulterated, but also for the way its programmatic immediacy and rapidity issued in works that to viewers accustomed to realism seemed like scandalously unfinished sketches. The movement famously got its name in 1874 when, during its first group show, the critic Louis Leroy scoffed at Monet’s “Impression: Sunrise,” titling his review in Le Charivari “The Exhibition of the Impressionists.” But the group liked the term, and adopted it. When young Henry James saw their second show in Paris two years later, he was comparably unimpressed: “To embrace [these artists] you must be provided with a plentiful absence of imagination. . . . The Impressionists . . . declare that a subject which has been crudely chosen shall be loosely treated. They send detail to the dogs and concentrate themselves on general expression” ([1876] 1956, 3). To James, Impressionism’s audacious provisionality seemed inimical to artistry. To Ruskin, in another defining moment of contemporary resistance to Impressionist aesthetics, it appeared a contemptuous confidence trick. Writing about Whistler’s “Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket,” exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery, he said: “I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face” (1903–12). Whistler sued, and won the case. But the damages, notoriously set at a farthing, indicated that the judge sided with Ruskin, and the trial bankrupted Whistler.As waves of new, modernist movements broke in the early twentieth century—Fauvisme, Cubism, Die Brücke, Futurism, Vorticism— Impressionism was no longer avant-garde. By 1910, when Roger Fry curated the first post-Impressionist exhibition in London, Impressionism was something in relation to which you were supposed to be post-. Of course Impressionism didn’t just cease. One of the many virtues of Jesse Matz’s earlier book, Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics (2001), is its demonstration of Impressionism as an influence persisting through the modernism of writers such as Proust, the later James, Conrad, Ford, and Woolf.The avant-garde view that Impressionism had swiveled round from being a revolutionary provocation to a tedious convention reflected the converse volte-face in public taste. As Impressionism was acquired by museums and collectors, it became the standard of modern beauty, and so it has remained in the art world, or at least in the world of blockbuster exhibitions, museum merchandising, and art for investment. Impressionism continues to draw the biggest crowds, generate the most mechanical reproductions, and achieve the highest auction prices.It is this curious persistence of Impressionism—despite post-Impressionism, despite abstraction, despite conceptualism, despite postmodernism—that provides Matz with the central subject of his brilliant new book, Lasting Impressions. What does its persistence tell us about Impressionism? And what does it tell us about ourselves, and our subsequent aesthetics? Matz begins, engagingly, with a confessional reminiscence. He is fifteen. The two still lifes that hung in his childhood home, and which he had barely attended to, are described by a sophisticated friend as examples of “pseudo-impressionism,” and he sees them differently: as examples of “false artistry” and “fake luxury” (1). The rest of the book traces how these subthemes—of kitsch, on the one hand, and trickery, on the other—appear inseparable from the legacies of Impressionism. Researching the painter of those still lifes, the Hungarian émigré Béla Kontuly, Matz is surprised to find that he had been a modernist before the Second World War. For a Western modernist, a turn to Impressionism in the 1960s would seem a regression, an anachronism, a turning of his back on Abstract Expressionism, yet Matz argues that it could equally be read as an escape from an enforced Socialist Realism, a declaration of the freedom of individual perceptions and styles.This could be the introduction to a very fine book focused solely on the legacies of Impressionism in painting and—given Matz’s earlier book—in literature too. These certainly provide two central lines through Lasting Impressions, as we shall see. But the most striking thing about the book is how much more it offers. It also takes in music, advertising, cinema, tricksters, the art market, the mass marketing of reproductions, and, in a surprising but dazzling conclusion, books popularizing cognitive science and books about autism. Taken together, the case these explorations assemble so cogently is that notions of the “impression” remain central not only to our aesthetics but also to our philosophy of mind, our economy, and our social and political life. “Impressionism,” says Matz, “is everywhere” (18).The opening chapter explores “Histories for the Tache”: the signature Impressionist touch, spot, or brushstroke, and the “dual nature” it has repeatedly been understood as displaying—both the guarantee of the phenomenological reality of the rendered perception and a sign of the paintedness of the surface, the facticity of the artwork. If the technique “could simulate something real, it also expressed the artist’s individual personality” (37). In the second chapter, “The Impressionist Advertisement,” Matz explores another side of this technique. He begins with a hostile review from 1874, in which Jules-Antoine Castagnary argued that Cézanne offers a lurid warning revealing what happens to those who “pursue the impression to excess”: “Starting with idealization, they will arrive at that degree of unbridled romanticism where nature is merely a pretext for dreams and where the imagination becomes powerless to formulate anything but personal, subjective fantasies without any echo in general reason, because they are without control and without possible verification in reality” (quoted in Matz, 72). Matz argues that, according to this view, Impressionism ushers in the “shallow culture of meaningless sensation” (73) that Baudrillard was to deplore a century later: “It led, in other words, to advertising,” and “the main problem with advertising is its impressionism.” That is characteristically shrewd, though it needs setting against a far worse problem: that advertising, far from representing fantasy without control, attempts precisely to control our fantasies so as to achieve unconscious manipulation of our desires for commercial ends. In case studies of particular advertisements, though, Matz discovers a more nuanced dialectic. Those ads drawing on the avant-garde potential of inchoate perceptions have proved problematic, introducing a gap between image and text. In those drawing on the familiarity of Impressionism, then—Matz’s example here is the 1992 Levi’s campaign of “The Swimmer,” based on John Cheever’s story about a man pool-hopping his way home through the suburbs (but with Cézanne’s bathers also in the background)—what from one point of view is a kitsch banalization of a serious critique is in fact “a spur to serious pleasure and valid judgement . . . an ongoing project of perpetual aesthetic emergence” (98). This duality becomes the dominant theme of the second half of the book: it is precisely those productions likeliest to invite denigration as kitsch or con that prove sites of the most interesting “aesthetic emergence,” forging new forms and styles out of Impressionism’s bargain debasement.The third chapter, on French cinema, analyzes the influential notion of photogénie: a problematic term intended to convey the essence of cinema as art. Skillfully unpacking its ambiguities, Matz concludes that, ultimately, “photogénie is a fetishized version of the impression” (113); in other words, that while early theorists of cinema thought they were trying to analyze the new medium, they were also still working through the contradictions of Impressionism: its dual power to evoke reality and the phantasmatic. Lasting Impressions then takes a global turn, moving away from America and Europe to consider “The Image of Africa.” Matz gives an excellent analysis of Chinua Achebe’s rejection of Conrad’s work as racist, relating it to colonial literary education and to Achebe’s own fictional aesthetic; Africa, according to Achebe, is reduced in Heart of Darkness (1899) “to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind” (quoted in Matz, 133). To whatever degree one thinks Conrad is implying a critique of imperialism, “it is the height of corrupt imperialist fraud, this relocation of large-scale cultural trauma to the tragic ‘consciousness’ of those actually responsible for it” (133). What was required—and what Achebe’s own fiction provides—is a realism adequate to “Africa’s social context” (136). Things Fall Apart (1959) is “directly antithetical to Conrad’s impressionism because it reflects the power of African social life to overdetermine subjective reality rather than its incapacity to shape it.” The implication that Africa has a single “social context” might give us pause, especially in an argument about an imperialist reduction of the Congo to a crisis in Kurtz’s or Marlow’s subjectivity. In fact, this chapter attends with nuance to writers from, or writing about, several different countries—Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Buchi Emecheta, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie—and to how the problem was just as much the educational system, which, however well-intentioned as a preparation for independence, nonetheless imposed the British canon.Matz then goes on to offer what seems like a counter-argument, central to his book, about realist writers following Achebe: “This antithetical tragic realism, however, retains a Conradian sense of the problem of the subjective impression. Conrad’s way of writing the image of Africa provoked a postimpressionist realism designed to make the impression’s duality more reliably one of self and world, Achebe’s work, and then the ‘School of Achebe’ that his realism inspired, developed a postimpressionist mode in which perceptions could emerge into political consciousness” (136). This is the characteristic turn that Lasting Impressions traces across the long twentieth century and its various media: the rejection of Impressionism entails a return to and rethinking of the impression, allowing new aesthetic configurations to emerge.Chapters 5 and 6 explore two grounds on which Impressionism has been rejected. “The Impressionist Fraud” juxtaposes three very different cases of figures attacked as tricksters: aesthetic showman Yves Klein, whose blue “monochromes” sought to engage with perceptual process in Impressionist ways, and James Frey, whose memoir of recovery from alcoholism, A Million Little Pieces (2003), endorsed by Oprah Winfrey, notoriously proved to be a work of fiction. In between these two, Matz discusses Ryoei Saito, the Japanese entrepreneur whose legendarily high bids for Impressionist works at auctions contributed to what was perceived as “the Japanese impressionism bubble” (185), and who was subsequently exposed as a financial fraudster with little care for art (he joked he would have Van Gogh’s portrait of Dr. Gachet cremated with him). If Impressionism from the start conjured anxieties about its sleight of hand, and associated commercial trickery (remember Ruskin contra Whistler), Matz sees these later tricksters as showing it as emerging into new forms of playfulness.Art fraud implies a conscious desire to hoodwink someone about the originality or value of an artwork. In chapter 6, on contemporary art, Matz attends to a case where belated Impressionism is berated as a form of kitsch—a species of unconscious fraud, in which the derivative work pandering to popular sentimentality passes itself off as original and worthwhile. Thomas Kinkade, as Matz puts it, “made his name at the shopping mall, peddling the imagery of nostalgia”: a world of folksy rural beauty, illuminated with a supernatural glow. Many malls have outlets for reproductions of his work, which, bizarrely, customers can pay to have customized with some taches added by the hand of a store employee. This seems the clearest-cut case imaginable of a debased and commercialized pseudo-impressionism. Matz contrasts Kinkade with a very different artist who nonetheless also evokes Impressionism’s visual style: Peter Doig, whose work doesn’t aspire to an Impressionist look but draws on its textures and motifs to produce work that is at once beautiful, referential, and innovative.Then, in another breathtakingly antithetical move, Matz writes that “Kinkade is not therefore a hopeless case. If his pseudo-impressionism is kitsch because it fails to make his kitsch aesthetic a subordinate part of a postconceptual art project, perhaps it only takes a postconceptual project to redeem his pseudo-impressionism—to make it too a proper form of art“ (222). This is more than an elegant speculative antithesis. He describes just such a project, “staged by Jeffrey Vallance, an installation artist associated with the ‘infiltration’ art movement,” who became “the first (and still only) curator to mount a show of Kinkade’s work”: Thomas Kinkade: Heaven on Earth (2004), at California State University, Fullerton. The show presented Kinkade’s oeuvre, and his world, as an art installation, thus foregrounding the very question kitsch discourages, of how to look at and understand the work of art. Vallance advocates a strategy of “dissonance arousal,” whereby the “cognitive dissonance” (quoted in Matz, 223) of such an experience—of being encouraged to look critically at kitsch in a museum setting—results in an effect of transcendence. People came expecting to hate the work but enjoyed the exhibition (Oh no, it’s kitsch! Wait, look, it’s meta-kitsch!). It is a further example of belated impressionism finding itself at the contemporary cutting edge.Chapter 7 on “The Pseudo-Impressionist Novel,” draws on David James’s work on the afterlife of Impressionism in contemporary fiction to juxtapose three novels with especially close relationships to Impressionist precursors: W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001), with its knowing reference to Proustian involuntary memory, and two novels that make impressionist authors central characters: Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998) and Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004). Here Matz’s argumentative strategy comes home with full and disconcerting force. Each book is initially critiqued as succumbing to pseudo-Impressionist kitsch. The fact that the involuntary memories triggered in Austerlitz are of the Holocaust debases both the experience of the victims and the methods of impressionism. That Tóibín’s Henry James evades articulating his homoerotic desire even to himself seems to Matz a failure of impressionism to register the disturbances of mental life. Similarly, Cunningham’s aestheticization of Woolf’s suicide and modernization of the story of Mrs. Dalloway are seen as lacking the very qualities that make Woolf’s writing so existentially challenging.Then Matz crafts some cognitive dissonance of his own. Such Holocaust memories as are triggered in Austerlitz are enigmatic, uncanny traces of experiences not his in the first place. Rather than failures of impressionism, they are failed impressions put to ingenious, evocative, postimpressionist, and postmodern uses. When Cunningham returns to Woolf herself in the third section of The Hours, Matz identifies “the uneven, uneasy style of thought and feeling we actually do find in Mrs. Dalloway” (243). But pondering Cunningham’s selective mimicry of true Woolfian impressionism produces another moment of cognitive dissonance. Is he using impressionism merely as occasional decorative ornamentation? Or is he reflexively placing it alongside other fictional modes, to assemble a metafictional impressionism? Analyzing the passage in The Master in which James shares a bed naked with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Matz finds a vital impressionism that both expresses James’s homoerotic curiosity and his failure to act on it: in James’s mind, as Tóibín imagines it, thought of sexuality is vague not simply because James is repressed but because there is no sexuality without the language for it. That problem—at once so Jamesian and so contemporary—is what makes Tóibín’s version of the Jamesian impression such a timely reinvention (249).A second kind of critique thus appears alongside the imputation of kitsch: a critique that can condemn pseudo-impressionism for its uneven handling. Again, however, that critique can flip over into its antithesis: unevenness as a sign of technical and theoretical agility, a post-postmodern reflexivity to set alongside Doig’s and Vallance’s postconceptual reinvestigation of impressionism and its relation to kitsch. This rhetorical zigzagging might induce motion sickness rather than transcendence. But the final chapter, “Thinking Medium,” makes clear what is at stake. Matz brings out the way that books popularizing expertise about rationality and decision-making, such as Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, or Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, adopt “an impressionist outlook when the mind’s mysteries are a matter of impressionistic intuition” (256). He takes their attention to ephemeral, fluid perception before it is subjected to rational interpretation to indicate how important the concept of the impression remains in contemporary culture, and how it has been co-opted by self-help books and corporate training. The intricacies, subtleties, and stylishness of Matz’s argument are impossible to capture in summary. But he effects a superb deconstruction of what he calls, in the subtitle of the final chapter, “The Rhetoric of Popular Cognition,” showing that just as Kahneman’s model of binary systems of fast and slow thought processes is undermined by his advocacy of a middle way, so Gladwell’s invocation of the notion of expertise threatens his advocacy of “thinking without thinking.” What Matz doesn’t quite say, though his juxtaposition implies it, is that the two books are themselves already antithetical: Kahneman offering to teach us to trust our impressions less (especially when statistics are concerned), Gladwell offering to teach us how to trust them more.This literature is contrasted with another that may appear incommensurate: autism memoirs, such as Temple Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures and Other Reports from My Life (1996) and Tito Mukhopadhyay’s How Can I Talk If My Lips Don’t Move? (2008). The rationale is a shift in the theory of autism from the view that “people with autism were locked in their own minds and unable to understand the minds of others” (263), their symptoms “all a matter of nonimpressionability,” to an antithetical view that “it is hypersensitivity that produces the autist’s classic non-communicative detachment,” a hypersensitivity, that is, to impressions. According to this view, “the sensitive mind is unable to integrate sensory input,” which allies the autist with the impressionist—and produces that “cognitive dissonance” that has come to seem inseparable from Impressionism’s reception. In a final tour de force, Matz argues that whereas Kahneman’s and Gladwell’s business books dissect impressionist consciousness, Grandin and Mukhopadhyay fully inhabit it, achieving a formal integrity that does justice to the cognitive diversity they experience and that escapes popular cognition’s version of contemporary impressionism. And here we realize that Matz’s own radically ambiguous perspectives are a quest for a mode of argumentation that can remain open to Impressionism’s foundational shaking of foundations.Lasting Impressions was published before a business guru, trickster, and fraud became president of the United States, and before “fake news” became news. There is, however, one key twenty-first century phenomenon it doesn’t take on but which arguably represents the most significant locus of new forms of contemporary impressionism: the digital world. The flooding of perception with ever-changing and enhanced visuality on sites such as Instagram; the impression of immediacy, fluidity, and reportage on the real in social network sites; the ephemerality of Snapchat; the tache effect of the tweet; the immersivity of virtual reality—all these examples might lead us to think that the “i” in “iPhone” could as well stand for impressionism.