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Fingerprints of a Haze

2019; Duke University Press; Volume: 52; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00295132-7738749

1945-8509

Gayle Rogers,

Art, Politics, and Modernism

Harry Levin opened his famous essay “What Was Modernism?” (1960) with his somewhat bewildered lament that a new apartment building in New York City had been named the Picasso. For Levin, this meant that modernism—understood as a revolt against the increasingly commercialized aesthetic sensibilities of the bourgeoisie—was now dead, commodified just like wallpaper and pop music. We have all had analogous moments. Years ago in Madrid, I saw a placard advertising Burger King's new salad menu; it read: “Verde que te quiero verde” (Green, how I want you green), the opening line of Federico García Lorca's surrealist masterpiece “Romance sonámbulo.” In such moments, the cognitive dissonance sometimes results from a shattering of our previous beliefs that the artist, poem, or movement in question was somehow pure—and thus, that capitalism's pernicious reach had tainted a more authentic artworld. But in many cases, what startles us is an incongruence: the widespread social and political energies that fostered the emergence of the movement in question seemed unadaptable, genetically ill suited for mass commodification.Jesse Matz's Lasting Impressions: The Legacies of Impressionism in Contemporary Culture unfolds from a more extended and nuanced example of such a personal moment—one that eventually takes us from Claude Monet to Yves Klein to contemporary narratives of autism. Matz shows us two paintings that hung on the wall in his childhood home; he barely gave them thought when he was growing up until a friend called them “pseudo-impressionist.” Indeed, the label seemed to fit: they looked like cheap 1960s knockoffs of French impressionist still life studies. Matz believed that his parents were only a degree or two removed from the college student with a Van Gogh poster on a dorm room wall: impressionism turned into “mass market hack work” (5).What a disappointment this was for the young Matz: what aesthetic movement seemed more inherently and even vociferously opposed to the logic of mass production and consumption than impressionism, with its reliance on unreproducible arrangements of personal experience and its affirmation of art's temporal change that no factory assembly line or group of paid painters could ever recreate? But Matz's recent investigations into the origins of these paintings initiate what is a consistently engaging, highly readable, and seriously rewarding reconsideration of impressionism's lives and afterlives. It turns out that the paintings were by the Hungarian artist Béla Kontuly, an important figure in early twentieth-century art and politics in his native country, and that they were a noticeable deviation from the signature style Kontuly had developed across his career. Now they seemed to Matz both authentic and puzzlingly secondhand: were they inherently valuable because of Kontuly's history, or were they the castoffs of an artist's late career, painted in hopes of making a little extra money? Matz's attempt to rethink the aesthetic categories and assumptions that he had brought to both the paintings and the stories that they embedded opens a Pandora's box of persuasively revisionary argumentation.Matz first returns to the origins of impressionism, which—contra the narratives of both public memory and decades of museum retrospectives—was “always commercial” and “always shaped” by “public taste,” equally filled with putative originals and derivatives, innovators and poseurs (11). Impressionism itself was a brand, Matz reminds us, and it was trying to carve out a space in a moment in the 1870s that “had not yet seen the distinction between high-art painting and mass-market commodity, so no narrative could simply identify co-optation” (48). In other words, to consider impressionism's legacies through since-discredited lenses such as “authenticity,” Matz argues, seems both wrongheaded and unnecessarily narrow—as wrongheaded as imagining that impressionism had been completed and sealed off by 1910, when the Postimpressionists could plausibly declare victory.What if, instead, we rethought impressionism's formative project itself, then looked for its traces in both obvious and unexpected sites? Matz's book “seeks to explain what really makes contemporary culture impressionistic, but it also seeks to redefine impressionism in terms of its fuller life as a transhistorical mode” (25). Lasting Impressions therefore argues that “impressionism is the folk art of modernity itself”—it is still being made—and that today, it is at once “everywhere” and “nowhere”; its diffuse yet powerful influence reaches from auction houses to “mainstream literary fiction” (18). And yet “few major artists would lay claim” to its legacies: indeed, what painter now would depict hazy haystacks without irony, and at the same time, what theorist of cognition and distraction would point directly to impressionism in his or her intellectual lineage (18)? But Matz contends that a number of figures in literature and the arts—Zadie Smith, David Mitchell, Chimamanda Adichie, Peter Doig, even the embattled James Frey and the unesteemed Thomas Kinkade—are in fact “assert[ing] impressionism's contemporaneity” in their works, all without the kinds of signs, styles, tropes, or even knowing winks that we expect to see when marking “legacies” (30).Why does impressionism's influence more generally seem so overbaked yet underacknowledged? Among impressionism's more fruitful, controversial, and long-lasting legacies, Matz shows, were its essential “dualities” bound up in questions of sequence, contradiction, paradox, dialectic, performativity, and above all, “its abundant antinarrativity” (41). Matz works through each of these across the space of his book in order to show how impressionism threw open fundamental questions of perception, ontology, visuality, and subject-object relations that remain unresolved in part because the movement refused to narrativize them. Instead, the narratives of impressionism were forged variously by markets, by art critics, by scandals, and by the movement's powerful antagonists. We see in first-generation literary impressionism, then, that the movement “was a theory of perception and a matter of style, but also a dualistic outlook and thus a thematic concern—and a problem for plot” that implied no certain politics (but still earned condemnation by figures like György Lukács) (51). Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, for instance, translated visual impressionism to novelistic style but failed to resolve whether the effects of this mode of writing were singularizing and atomizing or fundamentally social and collectivizing—especially when the reader was left to be sole arbiter of that question.Matz's excellent and original chapter on Conrad, Chinua Achebe, and modern African writers recontextualizes Achebe's dual reaction against Conrad's racism and his style by returning to the late colonial and newly postcolonial institutions of higher learning in East Africa. Here, in a moment when the novels of a generation of modernist writers were awkwardly included in colonial education projects and then were imbricated alternatively in incipient nationalist and leftist movements, Matz argues that the ways in which “university prestige . . . rerouted impressionist emergence into imperialist rationality” half a century ago actually provide a framework for reading what he calls “postcolonial impressionism” (142, 32). In a searching historical and geographic sweep, Matz circles outward from Africa and brings together Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Ayi Kwei Armah, Ezekiel Mphalele, Buchi Emecheta, Barbara Kingsolver, Sebald, and Adichie, eventually settling on Adichie's Half a Yellow Sun as the paradigmatic text that “surpasses the ironic nothingness and watery fuzziness of pseudo-impressionism” to recast impressionism's much-debated midcentury legacies (166).Matz plots novels against the many arrayed fields in which impressionism's foothold is apparently stronger but equally contradictory. His chapters move swiftly from the world of advertising—in which impressionism almost seems to desire its own appropriation—to speculative art markets. In the case of the former, Matz thinks through the implications of impressionism's configuration of perception, attentiveness, distraction, and ephemerality to argue that “to think that impressions (then or now) cheapen culture may therefore be to think undialectically, to revert to a deadlocked cultural theory too rigidly given to assessing perceptual forms for their potential for subversion or containment alone” (84). Instead, we must see that the “impressionist advertisement is kitsch, since it does co-opt an avant-garde aesthetic for a commercial purpose, and because it does co-opt aesthesis itself” (95). In the case of art markets, he revisits another set of racially charged debates, this time in the 1990s, prompted by the multimillion-dollar purchases of impressionist works by a new generation of globally visible Japanese magnates. As it turns out, the speculative economy of Gilded Age America was already fundamental to the internationalization of impressionism as a movement—Matz could have cited Laura Meixner's valuable work here—and was being replayed over a century later. And impressionism “seemed to encourage the cheapening of art; complicit in bubble economics and financial chicanery, impressionism developed a reputation for double-dealing, becoming responsible for a growing public tendency to equate success in art with high price tags, fueling suspicion that matters of taste had entered into new conspiracy with the marketplace” (183). But, Matz shows, what Western critics “didn't realize was that [Japanese] interest in impressionist art was a moderating restraint upon merely financial interests, pursued in just the way Western elites themselves had typically legitimated wealth through cultural refinement. But with fuller authenticity: the refinement in question had been the legacy of a Japanese culture for which decorative display was not distinct from true art” (186).Such ironies and reversals abound in this book. Matz traces them through the ambiguous, apparently kitschy versions of impressionism that Doig and Kinkade seem to hazard very differently; through “popular cognition” books by Malcolm Gladwell, Daniel Kahneman, and Jonah Lehrer; and through novelizations of the lives of impressionist writers—Colm Tóibín's The Master (on Henry James) and Michael Cunningham's The Hours (on Virginia Woolf). These final two, Matz argues, help to validate the varieties of pseudo-impressionism that the book has reconceived and traced. Along the way, Matz also revisits Renoir and early French cinema, whose stylistic innovations “cohere around an effort to humanize film mechanics” in a moment when camera work risked becoming a dehumanizing, soul-robbing force (108). Here and throughout, what makes this book compelling is not some clear, roots-and-branches narrative of impressionism's growth and diffusion, but rather the counterintuitive cases by which impressionism's internal contradictions might be recast—and by which “pseudo-impressionism” might appear as legitimate an heir as any. Matz has no interest in championing impressionism or its legacies, and his agnostic, voracious, and deliberate approach to his topics pays true dividends.For this reason, Matz's book also holds significant pedagogical value. Many of us have tried to help students of all levels understand how and where to identify influence, genealogies, patterns of dissemination, revision, and appropriation. The danger in such work is that we reduce the original object into a monolith or a pattern (“Virginia Woolf signifies a, b, and c”) that students then attempt to find in any number of sites scattered across cultural history, as if playing out a version of the children's book Are You My Mother? Matz's project takes a more critically instructive approach: he uses the question of legacies—rather than assuming legacies as concretized by either conscious references or less conscious Bloomian anxieties—to interrogate the nature of what we call the original, to ask how the legacies illuminate what we have often refused to see in that original. We come away from this book seeing impressionism as multiform and protean. Matz's range in this book is quite impressive: he is equally at home in the weeds of technical debates in art history and in analyzing pop psychology self-help books.There is a double edge to this method, though: if some questions remain unresolved in Matz's book, they center on his risk of assigning too much generative power to French impressionism. This is probably a conscious risk on Matz's part so that he avoids the very pitfalls of categorizing certain phenomena as authentic, others as ersatz—categories that he shows throughout the book to be dubious aftereffects of the impressionist revolution itself. The chapter on film seems less argumentatively integrated and less markedly “contemporary” than the others (though it is valuable on its own terms), and at certain moments, the book's terminology slips a bit too easily between “impressionism” and “modernism”—terms that matter a good deal in their distinctions, especially in the Jamesonian formulations that Matz invokes. These are small concerns, however: Matz's book is authoritative, his mastery of his subject is second to none, and this book's own lasting power will lie in its remarkable ability to force its readers to rethink a vast, ongoing set of dialectics now one hundred forty years old, and the masters, frauds, innovators, and hacks who turn out to be almost as interchangeable and indistinguishable as the objects at once enlightened and obscured by the impressionist tache.