Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  Illustration 1 Degas, Cotton Merchants in New Orleans

  Illustration 2 Degas, Portraits in an Office (New Orleans)

  Although Degas did the two pictures at nearly the same time, he saw them in different terms, characterizing the Fogg picture as “less complicated and more spontaneous, of a better art, where people are in summer dress, white walls, a sea of cotton on the tables.” What likely made it “better” in his eyes was this simplicity and spontaneity, which kept it at a greater distance from the traditional academic ideals of “finish” and narrative coherence. Zola fleshed out the negative implications of such a standard for the Pau picture when he disapprovingly called it “bourgeois” after seeing it at the second impressionist exhibition in 1876. To Zola, Degas’s best work was in his sketches: “As soon as he begins to polish a picture, his drawing grows weak and pitiable; the drawing in pictures like his Portraits in an Office (New Orleans) results in something between a marine painting and an engraving for an illustrated newspaper.” Such a view (set down ten years before L’Oeuvre’s much more skeptical account of impressionist innovation), draws Degas toward the juste milieu painters with whom he sometimes had friendly relations: it was to Tissot in London that he wrote the descriptions of the New Orleans work quoted here. But the art critic and longtime friend of Degas, Edmond Duranty, found the work’s subject matter and composition to be perfectly in accord with the aims of impressionism as he set them out in his book The New Painting:

  What we need are the special characteristics of the modern individual – in his clothing, in social situations, at home, or on the street … It is the study of states of mind reflected by physiognomy and clothing, the observation of the relationships of a man to his apartment, or of the particular influence of his profession on him, of all the aspects of the environment in which he evolves and develops, as reflected in the gestures he makes … The individual will be at a piano, examining a sample of cotton in an office, waiting in the wings for the moment to go on stage, or ironing on a trestle table.

  All these were Degas’s subjects, so that Duranty here presented him as what Baudelaire called a “painter of modern life,” a title the poet had awarded precisely to a magazine illustrator, Contantin Guys, and which many observers attached to the impressionists, for reasons to which we will come in a moment. First, however, we need to ask what image of modern bourgeois life Portraits in an Office projected.21

  Influential writers who have taken up this question emphasize the dissociated qualities of the scene. Robert Herbert quotes with approval Rudolf Arnheim’s assessment that we are here confronted with “the atomization of society in an age of individualism … No over-all constellation holds the crowd together, and hence there is no limit to the changes that may occur in the relationships between the participants.” It is certainly true that very little direct interaction takes place between the people portrayed, all but two of whom (the buyer and broker at the table) seem to be preoccupied with some matter in which no one else participates. But this is in no way the whole story. In the first place, relationships between the participants are far from indeterminate: we, like the painter, know that three of the figures belong to the same family (one of them married to his cousin). We recall that family relationships remained central to both business and personal life in this period, creating ties both cherished and bemoaned whose significance requires that we give less credence to the long-held image of bourgeois life as radically individualist; here the scene simply would not exist did it not rest on the triangle formed by the two Degas brothers and their uncle (cum father-in-law).

  Second, all the participants bear some relationship to the enterprise of the Musson firm, which like others functioned precisely by giving unity to tasks that might appear to have no relation to each other. Herbert cites Simmel as a reference point for the abstract and indifferent nature of the social relations he finds in the picture: the centrality of money turned many interactions into matters of impersonal calculation.22 True enough, but Simmel’s analysis had another crucial side, in its focus on the ways that markets and other mediated relationships allow people to synthesize multiple distant ties and connections, creating long “chains of purposive action” through which individuals can gather and concentrate resources, pursuing and achieving personal and collective ends impossible without them. Such frames of action draw people together in ways different from traditional communities; some of their binding threads are less visible on the everyday surface because they stretch beyond local horizons and only come together inside people’s heads; but they rest on concrete material relations all the same. Portraits in an Office makes numerous references to such linkages. The most obvious is the newspaper René reads at the scene’s center, a nodal point in a web of information on both business and many other matters of interest to the scene’s participants, and as good a symbol of the world to which such ties are central as one could wish. Less prominent but not to be missed is the image of a ship on the wall in the background, in its way a medium of the same kinds of links (Marilyn Brown thinks it may be a Confederate ship, and therefore a reference to the loyalty of the Musson family to the south in the Civil War, but even if this could be demonstrated the ship would still call up the firm’s international connections, many of which were with northern English manufacturers and merchants). Then there are the many references to the firm’s relations with its clients, the cotton growers for whom it largely served as an agent, some of whom were hundreds of miles from New Orleans: the records of transactions in the envelopes stacked on shelves at the rear, the record books to which the two figures on the picture’s extreme right give attention, and the blue letter atop one of them. Finally, the picture stages a complex interplay of internal and external relations. The opening to a world outside highlighted by the newspaper is echoed in the window at the rear center, and reinforced by the wall of interior windows to its left. These elements of the scene were simply there, to be sure, but this does not prevent them from underlining the point that all the goings-on inside the office at once draw on, draw together, and animate its active connection to the complex movements of people, means, and products outside.

  Although it may not be possible to draw up a balance sheet for the mix of dissociation and connection the picture calls up, there are good reasons for thinking that Degas himself did not think the first more significant than the second. Among them is his expressed hope to sell the canvas to some rich cotton manufacturer or merchant. His involvement in the commercial dimension of his work seems to have been deepened by living with his American relatives. Put off at first by finding himself in a place where business was the dominant subject of conversation, he yet admired his brother’s ability to talk the talk (as Christian Buddenbrook did in regard to Thomas), ending up writing to Tissot that “Here I have acquired the taste for money, and once back I shall know how to earn some, I assure you.” These words came at a moment when the Degas family finances were still strong and healthy, but they would cease to be so a year later, following the death of Edgar’s banker father, leaving him with a much greater need to gain income on his own (and perhaps contributing to the sour mood he often displayed in his later life). The New Orleans letters suggest he already knew much about the market for pictures in England (where, as Diane Macleod has shown, there was a much livelier middle-class interest in contemporary art than has often been supposed), since they refer both to Durand-Ruel’s London agent Deschamps, and to the Manchester picture dealer Thomas Agnew, who worked with collectors such as Henry Fairbairn and was important in assembling the “monster exhibition” of art treasures mounted there in 1857. Degas even named one Manchester manufacturer whom he knew to be a collector (although he misspelled his name, “Cottrell” for Cottrill) as a possible buyer of one or both of his New Orleans pictures, “for if a spinner ever wished to find his painter, he really ought to snap me up.” The hoped-for sales did not come through, and it is perhaps possible that even a highly finished and easily readable canvas such a
s Portraits in an Office might have disturbed a potential buyer by reason of the dissociative qualities Herbert and Arnheim see in it; but it is just as likely that a person acquainted with the inside of a business office would recognize the ability of seemingly disparate activities to contribute to a coherent goal, as well as knowing how much business in the time rested on family relationships, even without being able to identify the actual individuals in this one. Another of Degas’s images of businessmen, Portraits at the Stock Exchange of 1879 (Illustration 3), provides what many might regard as an unflattering portrait of the investor Ernest May, listening over his shoulder as an associate whispers information to him, but May was a longtime friend and supporter of Degas, and bought the picture.23

  Illustration 3 Degas, Portraits at the Stock Exchange

  One last aspect of the New Orleans canvasses needs to be noted. Although Degas may not have been explicitly aware of it, the scene given with such detail in Portraits in an Office depicted a mode of doing business that was about to disappear. Michel Musson and his partner were a firm of cotton factors, middlemen between growers and buyers. Mostly they worked one-on-one with the former, providing them with credit, purchasing supplies for them, and – the most speculative aspect of the business – buying the crops, often before they were harvested, and then selling them to brokers who in turn sent the material on to manufacturers such as the one Degas hoped might buy his picture (the Buddenbrook family business involved a similar relationship to rye growers in Germany). But the disruptions brought about by the American Civil War became the catalyst for the rise of a different system, in which individual factors such as the Musson firm yielded their importance to large-scale cotton exchanges operated by a multitude of agents. One reason for this shift was the demise of the old slavery-based plantation system, which led to an expansion of both sharecropping and of landowners who subdivided and rented out their holdings instead of farming them directly. The cotton exchanges served the needs of this larger number of smaller producers, who now sought credit not from factors but from the spreading number of banks, and operated in a market restructured by telegraphy and railroad shipping. The mid 1870s were the time of this transition (sped on by the disruptions in markets brought by the American Civil War and, in France, by the loss of Alsace to Germany in 1870), and in New Orleans some who had worked as factors, including Musson, were active in setting up and running the new exchange.24 The move from the first to the second of these ways of doing business was part of the larger late nineteenth-century transformation in which forms of commerce and politics based on direct relationships between individuals gave way to more abstract and impersonal ones; the turn by Musson and his partners to the new cotton exchange was not unlike the absorption of traditional notables into modern political parties.

  What is particularly significant about this transition here is that many features of impressionism as a recognizable school and style reflected it too, including both the way Durand-Ruel sought to organize the emerging and increasingly international market for new art, and characteristic qualities of the painting itself. That this was so has been especially and justly emphasized by Robert Herbert in the book to which we have already referred. Herbert highlights the close connection between the subjects and even the style of impressionist pictures and the transformation of Paris under the Second Empire. Not only do many impressionist streetscapes and urban scenes depict the new boulevards, squares, and parks opened up by the reconstruction (other favorite subjects were the suburban spaces of weekend leisure made accessible by railroads); the signal flooding of scenes with light and air and the new techniques developed to evoke it (such as painting on a white rather than a dark ground) reflect the change in urban atmosphere effected by the rebuilding, evident in the contrast between such images and the much darker urban scenes portrayed by romantic artists a few decades before.25 Behind this mutation lay the shift Jeanne Gaillard describes from an urban lifestyle characterized by stability and “introversion” to one of mobility and “extraversion”: many impressionist scenes call up a city of people in motion through the new streets, living their lives along the arteries that gave Paris a closer integration as a site for both business and pleasure, while simultaneously providing access to the railroad stations that gave it more rapid and effective access to the world outside.26

  The resulting forms of experience became crucial elements of nineteenth-century modernism, and Herbert cites canvasses by several artists as exemplary of them. In Manet’s The Railway of 1873 (Illustration 4), the title seems to refer only to a smoky presence in the background, visible through an iron fence; we find ourselves face to face with a young woman looking up from the book in her lap, seated next to a standing little girl who turns her back to us in order to look through the bars at the train yard. We appear to have interrupted the young woman’s reading, forcing us “to recognize ourselves as that characteristic city dweller, the unknown passer-by … It is the encounter of one stranger with others, one of those chance meetings that mark the modern city.” Our inability to know how the two figures are related to each other (parent and child, sisters, caretaker and charge?) “reinforces the idea that we have simply happened upon them.” Simmel recognized just this mixture of physical proximity and psychological distance as characteristic of modern city life; one result might be a certain indifference and neutrality, but another was to allow individuals to invest others and the surroundings where they encountered them with imagined meanings that play a role in forming a sense of self. By making the railroad part of the scene and putting it in the title, Manet calls up the role it played in offering distant places as generators of both desire and imagination.27

  Illustration 4 Manet, The Railway

  The attempt to capture such moments, representative of what Baudelaire called “our more abstract modern life,” inspired other paintings of the time, well illustrated by Gustave Caillebotte’s The Man at the Window (Figure 5). Here a male figure inside an elegant apartment looks down into a square to observe a woman crossing it; rendered tiny by the effect of distance, she appears as “curiously vulnerable,” her “fragile aloneness” heightening the scene’s psychic import by enhancing her availability as a target of fantasy projection. The recognition that such experiences fed a specifically modern form of imagination, calling attention to the fluidity of both outer and inner experience, is evident in another railroad picture from the mid 1870s, Monet’s Gare St-Lazare (Figure 6). Here we find ourselves inside the train shed, surrounded by recognizable objects (and human figures) that have all the same lost their clear outlines, partly through the effect of steam and partly from the patterns of sunlight and shadow. We do not know whether the engine to the left is leaving or entering the station, but the painter has provided (as Herbert notes) “a symmetrical, measured composition” that creates a kind of balance between the contained finitude of the scene and the way the many blurred objects and boundaries allow us to imagine things only implied or alluded to in it.28 The near-reduction of a nameable and bounded prospect to a play of uncertain and suggestive shapes and colors goes beyond what we find in the smaller and more “impressionistic” of Degas’s two cotton office pictures; it seems to point forward to Monet’s own later images of water-lilies, to Cezanne’s proto-cubist figures and landscapes, and more generally to the trajectory that would draw modernist painting toward the decomposition of objects and the turn to abstraction as a vehicle for rendering states of mind and feeling not susceptible to being directly depicted.

  Illustration 5 Caillebotte, Man at the Window

  Illustration 6 Monet, The Gare St-Lazare

  Toward the avant-garde

  In the succession of movements that led from the mid century modernism of the impressionists to the revolutionary stance for which Bretoncalled, the alternative he set up between an aesthetic that countenanced stability and one devoted to pure fluidity often made an explicit appearance. The two poles were self-consciously united by the poet whose fascination with the mod
ern city as inspiration and subject gave him close relations to the impressionists, Charles Baudelaire; but well before the century’s end this mixture was being challenged by projects that pointed toward Breton’s rejection of “all that is solid.” Only a few years after Marx invoked this formula, Baudelaire defined the modern as “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent.” It was the task of “The Painter of Modern Life” to represent this mobility, but Baudelaire was never drawn to conceiving artistic expression in its terms alone. Beauty always had another component, “an eternal, invariable element” best expressed by “classical poets and artists,” to whom he remained tied by virtue of his devotion to formal perfection and linguistic precision. Not for him the romantic aesthetic of spontaneity espoused by the bohemian likes of Murger, whose equation of art with the life lived in its name justified their refusal or inability to “submit themselves to any training. They do not know that genius (if indeed one can name the indefinable seed of the great man in this way) must, like the apprentice acrobat, risk breaking his bones a thousand times in private before dancing for the public; that imagination, in a word, is only the reward of daily practice.” Baudelaire was all the same permanently drawn to the world of flux and instability he rejected in these places, praising the illustrator Guys for immersing himself in the ever-changing life of the city, for setting up house “in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite,” and at one point glorifying the bohemianism he derided at others, calling it “the cult of multiplied sensation.”29