The hidden Mod in the New Art History

Abstract

2. E. and J. de Goncourt, Mémoires de la vie littéraire (Paris, 1956), 1:835, trans. and quoted in T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: When, during the 1970s, it became possible to talk about a New Art History, the term carried an implicit allusion to art of a particular place and time. The place was Paris; the time was the second half of the nineteenth century; the art in question represented the data of contemporary life to the exclusion of older subjects like myth and religion. The city exerted a spell, making the urban transformations of its core and periphery somehow exemplary of how modern life was to be lived. And, by extension, art that qualified as modern needed to have drawn both its subject matter and its sensibility from the same phenomena. Older distinctions between Realism, Impressionism, and Post-Impressionism in nineteenth-century French art became less salient, the rubric “Modern Life” encompassing their shared territory. That usurpation entailed a shift in definition from particulars of painterly style to what older art historians had sequestered in their discipline under the heading of “iconography,” in other words, characteristic subject matter bearing coded cultural meaning. So it was not just a matter of opulent boulevards or weekend leisure as objects of description; it was a different way of life betokened by such innovative urban and suburban pastimes. For guidance as to the coded meanings of the modernizing city, certain commentators, often dyspeptic ones, offered eloquent testimony. Especially favored were the writers Edmond and Jules Goncourt, who wrote in their singular voice about the disquiet they experienced at the changes around them. In one passage from their journal (November 18, 1860), they reacted with almost apocalyptic alarm at the colonization of central public thoroughfares by open-air cafés and the lingering, loitering crowds they attracted (fig. 1):