Andrew's Wiki
Painter Modern Life

Constantin de Guys

• “originality that is sufficient unto itself and does not ever seek approval”
• “lover of crowds and incognitos”
• shy humble modest: wants you to think that he “Does not exist”: wants his anonymity in art too not just in crowds
• early works: got to painting like “a barbarian or child” “primitive scribblers
• without advice or education (cf Pound on Eliot modernizing himself all alone)
• “Great traveller and cosmopolitan”
• had worked for newspapers, covering the Crimean War and new operas, ballets
• not precisely an artist, but rather a man of the
  world”
  • “a man of the whole world, a man who understands the world and the mysterious and lawful reasons for all its uses”
    • interested in WHOLE WORLD (outside of the world of morals and politics); “spiritual citizen of the universe”
  • artist: “a specialist, a man wedded to his palette like the serf to the soil.” which is what is not good (many of them just “skilled animals”)
• genius comes from curiosity
• man-child, eternal convalescent “For whom no aspect of life has become stale”
  • THIS IS THE OPPOSITE OF ENNUI, of disaffection
  • the romantic strain in modernism
• “modesty…aristocratic reserve”
• Not the Same As the Dandy, Who is Blase
  • dandy “aspires towards insensitivity” – which is not Monsieur G, who craves passion
  • Constantin has capacity ” – sensitive spirits will understand me – of being sincere without being absurd”
• Position vis a vis Philosophy
  • “I would bestow upon him the title of philosopher, to which he has more than one right, if his excessive love of visible, tangible things, condensed to their plastic state, did not arouse in him a certain repugnance for the things that form the impalpable kingdom of the metaphysician”
  • philosophy seen as not loving tangible things
  • involves two motions: loving the things as visible and touchable; and then seeing their “plastic state” (materialism, cubism)
• people who get bored are “blockheads”

Recognizable Stuff: description of flaneur

• Right artist like a convalescent: like a child: b/c things are interesting in themselves to this person even the “most trivial”
  • “left our spiritual capacities pure and unharmed. The child sees everything in a state of newness; he is always drunk.”
  • Loves form and color
• But you can’t just be a child: you need to add reason of a man
  • “genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will – a childhood now equipped for self-expression with manhood�s capacities and a power of analysis which enables it to order the
    mass of raw material which it has involuntarily accumulated.”
  • notice we still have ORDER and REASON
• Inspiration: a convulsion, a nervous shock
• Flaneur
  • “The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes.” to “become one flesh with the crowd” w/”whole world his family” “into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of
    electrical energy.”
  • “passionate spectator” “independent, passionate, impartial” “lover of universal life”
  • joy: “amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the
    midst of the fugitive and the infinite.”
  • not actually home, but still AT HOME
  • to see the world but be invisible to it
  • metaphors
    • mirror: mirrors the crowd
    • kaleidoscope: “reproducing the multiplicity of life” in its motion
• Art as “Skirmishing,” “ferment of violent activity, as though afraid that the image might escape him”

Leisure Spaces

• Cafe, the painting “The Man of the Crowd:” “In the window of a coffee-house there sits a convalescent, pleasurably absorbed in gazing at the crowd, and mingling, through the medium of thought, in the turmoil of thought that surrounds him. But lately returned from the valley of the shadow of death, he is rapturously breathing in all the odours and essences of life: as he has been on the brink of total oblivion, he remembers, and fervently desires to remember, everything. Finally he hurls himself headlong into the midst of the throng, in pursuit of an unknown, half-glimpsed
  countenance that has, on an instant, bewitched him. Curiosity has become a fatal, irresistible passion!”

Subject/object

• “He is an ‘I’ with an insatiable appetite for the ‘non-I’, at every instant rendering and explaining it in pictures more living than life itself, which is always unstable and fugitive.”
  • Absolutely insatiable: waking up when it’s already light, agonizes over the opportunities he’s missed (and by watching will consume it all, passively, so for me it’s also a weird dream of the consuming non-worker)
  • And he IS a consumer: “He delights in fine carriages and proud horses, the dazzling smartness of the grooms, the expertness of the footmen, the
    sinuous gait of the women, the beauty of the children, happy to be alive and nicely dressed – in a word, he delights in universal life.”
    • as he notes every tiny change in fashion: a chignon as well as a military parade
• INSATIABILITY TAKES AWAY YOUR SUBJECT HOOD
  • “will be the last to linger wherever there can be a glow of light…wherever a passion can pose before him”
  • he is a MERE IMPERATIVE not a person
  • aesthetics of fragments is what Baudelaire is saying: he shows that the subject has broken down into a mere receptacle for modern life. The insatiable artist craving new images is parallel to the insatiable consumer, but you can’t change the outside world that is trying to interpellate you as a consumer. So what you do is turn it into something that you wanted to do already (capitalism didn’t make me insatiable, I promise it was I who wanted to be insatiable in the first place; this is Nietzsche’s will to power) and you use it to make art. Thus it’s an art of fragments b/c you collect something that you indiscriminately “pell-mell” got and make it into art, thereby giving it order.
  • it won’t be available to the bourgeoisie: “Few men are gifted with the capacity of seeing; there are fewer still who possess the power of expression.”
• Insatiable: “away he goes, hurrying, searching.”

Chaos

• Cities may but FULL but not chaotic
  • “the eternal beauty and the amazing harmony of life in the capital cities, a harmony so providentially maintained amid the turmoil of human freedom.”
• “he absorbs it all pell-mell; and in a few moments the resulting ‘poem’ will be virtually composed.”
  • is the environment pell-mell? or is his absorption pell-mell?
• Art As Order
  • “All the raw materials with which the memory has loaded itself are put in order, ranged and harmonized, and undergo that forced idealization which is the result of a childlike perceptiveness…acute and magical”
• The Inspiration for Art is Circumstantial
  • “Woe to him who studies the antique for anything else but pure art, logic and general method! ...he will lose all memory of the present; he
    will renounce the rights and privileges offered by circumstance – for almost all our originality comes from the seal which Time imprints on our sensations.”
  • AGAIN you have to take advantage of circumstance: this is the softer side of chaos
  • The Nowness of your time gives you the beauty of your art, even though it’s quite accidental

Modernity

• “He is looking for that quality which you must allow me to call ‘modernity’; for I know of no better word to express the idea I have in mind. He makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distil the eternal from the transitory.”
  • Less a celebration of the transitory than finding the eternal in the transitory
• We need to find the beauty in modernity: “much easier to decide outright that everything about the garb of an age is absolutely ugly than to devote oneself to the task of distilling from it the mysterious element of beauty”
• “By
  ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.
• “Every old master has had his
  own modernity….perfectly harmonious because…forms a perfectly viable whole”
• “This transitory, fugitive element, whose metamorphoses are so rapid, must on no account be despised or dispensed with.” b/c you’ll have “abstract and indeterminate beauty”
• Studying the past: “it can be no more than a waste of labour if your aim is to understand the special nature of present-day beauty.”
  • why? we have completely different cloth for clothing: moire antique, satin a la reine “or any other fabric of modern manufacture” can’t be learned to be painted by looking at old masters
  • why? even “Gesture” and “bearing” of women diff, as well as cut of clothes and fabric
• “For any modernity to be worthy to become one day antiquity, it is necessary for the mysterious beauty which human life accidentally puts into it to be distilled from it.”
  • World accidentally creates beauty, but it won’t take its place in the canons of taste until the artist “extracts” it and “fixes it”
  • whatever the world didn’t actually TRY to do, that’s where you can find beauty… interesting
• “everything that is �material’, or in other words an emanation of the ‘spiritual’, mirrors, and will always mirror, the spiritual reality from which it derives.”
• taking from old models will make your art “false, ambiguous, and obscure”
  • You Must Find Modern Beauty
  • “Woe to him who studies the antique for anything else but pure art, logic and general method!”
• Artists should observe FIRST and then try expressing it: that ensures originality
• It does have truth value
  • “faithfulness to the impression received, or as a flattering compliment paid to truth.”
• Never Get Blase: Business Utility v Artist Credulity
  • “For most of us, and particularly for men of affairs, for whom nature has no existence save by
    reference to utility, the fantastic reality of life has become singularly diluted. Monsieur G. never ceases to drink it in his eyes and his memory are full of it.”

Ships

• Like Le Corbusier
  • “What would you say, for example, of a marine painter (I am deliberately going to extremes) who, having to depict the sober and elegant beauty of a modern vessel, were to tire out his eyes by studying the overcharged. involved forms and the monumental poop of a galleon, or the complicated rigging of the sixteenth century?”