Even More Modern than Today

Yves Bonnefoy's introduction to Gaeton Picon's book The Birth of Modern Painting suggests that among the significant accomplishments of Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe was to remove the authoritarian voice of meaning from painting.

The painting is thus the response, without anxiety, or even reflection, of the painter's sensibility to a mere bit of color in the light....followed his taste for first glances–perceptions untainted by prior knowledge–after which he worked, in the diverse moment's of the work's genesis, solely with immediate, unreasoning, but obligatorily total adherence to the suggestions of a an obscure, inner necessity....The result was a sudden silencing of the voice that until then, whether clear or confused, never stopped asserting through the intermediary of things the authority of an order of the world, of an a priori truth, of an orthodoxy of thought. 

Manet  painted what he imagined, whether it made sense or not. He did not try to place his nude woman at the picnic in a context that could in any way be interpreted allegorically. It is clearly not a historical painting. The work is a pure painting, as Bonnefoy calls it, an act of the imagination.

Seeing, in other words, the interest in perception that is nothing but itself, seems to replace vision, as Mallarmé was later to believe.

He explains that this leaves the painter with the brave task of meeting and trespassing onto the unconscious. Finding their own inner source of intoxication, painters must live and produce without support or refuge, painting the visual impact of their hermetic dismissal. He goes on to make a statement that I think might have equally significant value today if recommended carefully.

This is not only an intoxicating discovery, a clear direction, the positivity of Being regained after centuries of interpretation and theory always falling short of the presence of the world; it is also an unceasing incitement to venture into the unknown, and therefore, something that can be admired and appreciated, but just as easily feared.

French painting had been ruled by the Academy, and Felibien had established a hierarchy of painting that placed historical painting, and allegorical painting, at the top. Though the imagination was called upon, it was done within the constraints of a general knowledge base and accepted interpretive skills determined and reinforced by the Academy. David's perfect portrait of Lavoisier and his wife, shows his chemistry tools to evoke his experiments oxygen, gunpowder and the chemical composition of water. Symbols are intentionally placed; poses are struck to suggest meaning. Manet suddenly rejects all this to permit a strong, enveloping but also anti-idea image. The challenge is to appreciate it without trying to explain it.

And here is where I come today. Without necessarily backtracking to require today's artists to mimic some past form or style, would it not be possible to reconsider this "intoxicating discovery" of stepping away from thought? Though much conceptual art has offered something, has it not also produced an expectation that suddenly appears quite traditional, that is the requirement to think about the art-experience? I can hardly claim to knowing what such art might be today, or how it might be identified, but perhaps we might discover it in the effort of trying to look at art rather than think, read plaques, learn biography. We might begin seeing more.