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We live in the age of ephemeral images , where reproductions of Vincent van Gogh paintings make their way on to coffee mugs, t-shirts and canvas totes as easily as corporate logos and slogans. Our societal proclivity for the appropriation and dissemination of images — be they revered or irreverent — has ultimately, and perhaps paradoxically, created a longing for a return to “authenticity.”
In recent decades, art theorists have explored the concept of the “real,” portending a contemporary era of art production that is grounded in materiality, physical place and the body. It is ironic that the historical artworks that are most often commodified are also grounded in corporeal experience; the Impressionists, whose works are most frequently reproduced on greeting cards and sweatshirts, attempted to coalesce landscape, with its natural light and vivid colors, with human perception and sensation.
The “authentic” impulse pervades the Masterworks from The Phillips Collection exhibition, currently on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art. At first, one might presume that this is due to Duncan and Marjorie Phillips' approach to amassing their collection, currently traveling from its Washington, D.C. home. As the exhibition wall text indicates, “[They] collected with an eye to correspondences between works of art across decades and centuries. The result is a highly personal collection of remarkable paintings by masters from the 17th through 20th centuries.” More than a “highly personal collection,” the exhibition is a pithy lesson on the European art history master narrative of post-Renaissance European artistic production. The collection utterly adheres to commonly held convictions about what is deemed as acceptable, and what is venerated as Art .
Unlike contemporary narratives — those populated with diverse gender, racial, and regional perspectives — the narrative inherent in the Phillips Collection is, with the exception of one work by Berthe Morisot, white, male and European. This is not surprising, given the time in which the collection was accumulated (Phillips reached his collecting peak in 1923). However, our contemporary reverence for the kinds of work in the collection is significant, as the van Goghs, Matisses, Picassos, Renoirs and Monets stand as the pinnacle of what our culture views as legitimate — again, “authentic” — art. The cultural eras we look to with the most awe are tied to the birth of a modernist aesthetic ideal. Works of art are cultural artifacts; avant-garde art is entrenched in Enlightenment notions of progress, and these ideals are at the heart of contemporary capitalist ideology.
Despite the predictable art-history narrative put forth in the exhibit, there are several of works of pure genius, including paintings by Honoré Daumier, the 19th-century Frenchman best known for his political cartoons. The Uprising depicts a scene of a revolt that may have been inspired by the French Revolution. The artist captured the grim urgency of the uprising, portraying the frustration and anger of the poor under the reign of Louis-Phillippe. Without the historical reference, it is a timeless, placeless scene, and a central male figure's raised fist singularly evokes the power of a mass of discontented people. Conversely, Daumier's Three Lawyers depicts a trio of smug, well-groomed lawyers who appear to be gloating in the aftermath of a decisive case. Together, the corpulent threesome form a pillar of social power; they are so intoxicated by their authority and rank, they fail to notice a poor, ghostlike figure in the shadows behind them. The symbolism is blatant and is similar to the irony in the artist's political cartoons. However, the painterly aspects of the work add to the dismal scene; the lawyers are statuesque and brightly lit, and the impoverished individual behind them is expressionistically painted. This serves to further obscure the person and his or her destitute condition and subordinate station in society.
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The exhibition also includes some abstract works not characteristic of the artists' usual styles. Wassily Kandinsky's Autumn II is a beautiful painting done in a less linear and more atmospheric manner than many of his better-known works. Unlike the linear “composition” pieces, which are based on musical arrangements, Autumn II is an amalgamation of hazy patches of color. The arrangement of burnt yellows, pinks, oranges, blues and greens creates a uniformity that yields to the flat plane of the canvas.
Also included are several paintings by Paul Cézanne, including The Garden at Les Lauves, painted around 1906. The piece reads as a culmination of the artist's creative obsession with compressing the three-dimensional into a series of two-dimensional planes on canvas. In the Mount Sainte-Victoire series, he obliterates dimension, relating foreground to background, ultimately allowing the landscape to succumb to the flatness of the canvas. The Garden at Les Lauves takes this notion further with a mere suggestion of a landscape; here the absence of color is as important as the quickly applied, hatched brushstrokes of pigment. And Cézanne defies his own interpretation of a horizon line, as the blue from the sky bleeds into the green of the landscape below.
Another thoroughly modern landscape is The Mediterranean, painted in 1857 by Gustave Courbet. With its cool green sky and teal blue sea, the work is as much an abstract painting as it is a fully conceived landscape. Courbet obliterates any predilection for dimensionality, painting five distinct fields of impressionistic color. Here, Courbet is clearly 100 years ahead of his time, as The Mediterranean , with its formalist tendency toward flatness and pure, transcendent color, would not have been out of place in a New York art gallery in 1957.
The title of the exhibition catalogue, art beyond isms: Masterworks from El Greco to Picasso in the Phillips Collection, alludes to the collectors' attempt to amass a collection based on purely visual, sensual experience. Many of the works are imbued with an air of timeless sublimity. However, the works of art in the collection, like the times they reflect, are not devoid of “isms,” for modernism itself is at the heart of this collection. Modernity is, after all, not only tied to the avant-garde, it is also tied to progress and industrialization. It is revealing that the artworks we revere as “authentic” are so patently rooted in the capitalist notions of advancement and innovation.