Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X

Home

Home archive

Issue 8. Mélanges/Miscellaneous

Modernism's 'ut pictura poesis'

A review of Arden Reed, Manet, Flaubert, and the Emergence of Modernism. Blurring Genre Boundaries

Author: Jan Baetens
Published: May 2004

Modernism’s ‘ut pictura poesis’

A review of: Arden Reed, Manet, Flaubert, and the Emergence of Modernism. Blurring Genre Boundaries.

Cambridge/New York, Cambridge UP, 2003

(0-521-81505-3)

Modernism's history is a history of purity. The story it tells is that of a permanent struggle with all that threatens a medium's essence or specificity. Modernism, in other words, is the anti-ut pictura poesis by excellence. Within this history, the terminus ab quo is often Manet (rather than Baudelaire, whose praise of the mix of the eternal and the ephemeral in modern beauty can now be seen as very close to what Greenbergian modernism opposed most violently: postmodernism). With Manet, the story goes, painting freed itself from the anecdotal, the narrative, in sum from the reign of words, in order to become pure painting, i.e. traces of colour in a non-illusionary space. The revolution accomplished by Manet's Olympia or Déjeuner sur l'herbe then echoes the achievement of Flaubert who some years earlier had tried to compose a book on "nothing", with no story at all, a book of mere words and sentences.

The intellectual agenda of Arden Reed's book is very clear: the author attacks frontally this stereotype vision of Manet's and Flaubert's modernism, not in order to prove that Manet and Flaubert were still more pre-modern than they believed, or already more postmodern than they ever could imagine, but in order to challenge the very core of our contemporary, Greenbergian view of modernity in painting (and, to a lesser extent, in literature). The basic claim of Reed's study is indeed that modernism's craving for specificity is not a matter of direct and simple opposition and separation of media and genres, but on the contrary, and paradoxically, a matter of the blurring of genre and media boundaries. If, in the 1860s, painting and writing cease to be considered "sister arts", the global breakdown of this ut pictura poesis ideology did not result from the denial of possible analogies or overlaps but from the very encounter and mixture of both media. In other words, it is to the extent that painting tries to "speak" that it finds its way toward modernity, and the same with writing when it tries to "paint" with words. It is thus the ultimate impossibility of a complete, transparent blending that explains why painting and writing could evolve so self-consciously beyond the realist and naturalist doxa of that time.

Such a vision changes dramatically our current conception of modernity which becomes Baudelairian once more, yet without any fashionable concession to postmodern hybridism. Modernism becomes a matter of differences, not of mixed media. Corollarily, this vision changes also the way we look at Manet and Flaubert. What Reed does in this study is to take seriously what the works of these founding fathers of modernity obviously display but what always remained masked by the force and the prestige of certain commentaries and powerful metatexts: in the case of Manet, the critical intervention of his friend Zola, who contributed to the myth of Manet the proto-abstract painter; in the case of Flaubert, his own comments that rejected, for instance, all types of illustration.

How much more complex their respective works are is demonstrated by Arden Reed in an exemplary set of close readings of Manet's "Young Lady in 1866" and Flaubert's last completed work, the Three Tales. The author reads both works against the grain by reading each of them in the light and the mirror of the other, not only in the rich intertextual web that multiplies the relationships between painting and text (think for instance of the parrot, predominantly visible in the two works), but by taking at face value the strong hypothesis that Manet proposes also a text and that Flaubert creates the verbal equivalent of an image.

After having constructed a general art-historical framework that enables him to make his very peculiar ut pictura poesis reading of two works and two artists often quoted as the paradigmatic examples of the anti-ut pictura poesis stance, Arden Reed offers a set of careful close readings which are inserted between, on the one hand, a thorough historical and art-historical contextualization and, on the other hand, a set of more psychoanalytically inspired interpretations which complement and reinforce the stylistic and thematic close readings in a highly convincing way. The author's erudition commands constant admiration, as does his very cautious and subtle use of the Freudian and Lacanian interpretative schemes which are never used as ultimate key. Moreover, Arden Reed writes in an elegant and straightforward style, paying exceptional attention to the logical structure of his argumentation.

The blurring of boundaries is most visible in the theme of the "stain", which Arden Reed analyzes as a painterly principle in Manet and a structuring lexeme in Flaubert. Yet what these analyses reveal is that the stain, be it as a visual phenomenon or as a linguistic item, functions as an element that resists mediological closure. Far from being the fastest way to abstraction, the stain in Manet's work happens to be so complex and ambivalent a sign that it transforms paintings in texts, and vice versa, whereas Flaubert's use and abuse of the word "stain" ("tache") obviously aims at obtaining, in the eyes of his reader, some very painterly effects.

It is impossible to retrace here in all the richness of its numerous details the depth and ingeniousity of Reed's analyses, but one can easily assume that they will soon be part of the core of literature on Manet/Flaubert as well as on modernism. Reed's book is also a more than welcome contribution to the ut pictura poesis discussion, for it manages to escape the sterile and anachronistic discussions on the boundaries between the modern and postmodern. Reed shows with exceptional clarity that Manet and Flaubert are modern, not postmodern, but that the basic issue of their modernity is a particular form of genre and media blending that postmodernism does not really thematize: the very presence of one medium within the other. In that sense Manet, Flaubert, and the Emergence of Modernism. Blurring Genre Boundaries may be read as an exercise in deconstruction, but the emphasis put on art-historical contextualization makes it a brilliant example of what scholarship in visual culture ought to be today.

This site is optimized for Netscape 6 and higher

site design: Sara Roegiers @ Maerlantcentrum