The Brooklyn Rail

Art and Science in Conflict

Friedrich Nietzsche, in the Birth of Tragedy (1872), clearly asserts that there is a conflict between art and science. The issue was explicitly remarked by the Nietzsche translator and commentator, Walter Kaufman, in a footnote to his edition of The Gay Science,(Book Two, footnote 57). This later book, written between 1882 and 1886, prompts Kaufman to forthrightly make the claim: “it was there that he (Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy) first raised the problem of the relationship of art to science.” A commentator today might feel some surprise at learning of this. The current record of philosophical thought since 1872 has hardly acknowledged that an epistemological schism has taken place. Such has been the effacement of aesthetic thinking in modern culture. 

This is a fateful statement. The dominance of scientific knowledge today in the modern world is so ubiquitous that any adherents of aesthetic experience who may still exist deferentially concede epistemological primacy to the scientific understanding of phenomena. The crucial issue with Nietzsche is that he does not so concede. The Birth of Tragedy, and the books that Nietzsche wrote in rapid succession over the brief duration of his working life, amounting to less than two decades, represent a milestone in the development of an aesthetic, as distinct from a scientific, and what is more, here is the crucial point, a moral, modern philosophy. If they are taken seriously, it must be recognized that modern art and science are in a state of confrontation.

I have remarked elsewhere, and reaffirm here, that I do not possess a formal academic training in philosophy, and so do not pretend to debate either Nietzsche’s detractors or his advocates on philosophical grounds. I would not normally stray onto the domain of philosophical speculation; even less do I want to engage with the new human science of sociology. My subject is modern art and my notion of ‘modernity’ is that of Baudelaire. Yet, I am urged to so stray by no less a personage than the philosopher Nietzsche himself.

Art and Ideology 

Might we say of the social caste of what was once called the ‘bourgeoisie’, which would refer to the emergent class of city folk back in the Paris and London of the nineteenth century or, in our own day, of the professional, managerial class, captains of administration and industry, in Washington DC, New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai, or where-have-you, that this social caste constitutes the white whale which modern artists have pursued for over two hundred years across the oceans of modern society? If so, are those same artists, in the company of the great poets and prose writers, together with the great philosophers, a host of Ismaels who, in telling the story, have tried to break the positivist monomania of a technologically minded culture, that of western, and now indeed perhaps global, civilization, in order to open up another world of intelligence, feeling and beauty? Like Melville’s myth, the conundrum is unresolved.

Again, to account for how philosophical systems of thought take shape and then, over time, begin to decompose, taking on the guise of ideologies, which are attached to a specific place and time, always a prey to self-interest, with its attendant paranoias, is surely a fascinating topic for reflection. For example, as eighteenth century Europe transitioned into the nineteenth, the age-old order of monarchy was swept away by the French Revolution, visiting chaos on its underlying philosophical and ideological identity. However, that old order was to return in a very few years, in the form of empire with Napoleon and, then, was formally reinstated by the victors of Waterloo in 1814. Yet, as the nineteenth century developed, it became increasingly clear that a fundamental change had indeed occurred, that no battle in a field in Belgium could reverse, and that this old order would never entirely return. A new ‘modern’ order, based on industry and the professions, was emerging to replace the structure of social hierarchy which had previously been based on birth and land. 

The issue which has not been addressed in the history of art, and which this study sets out to consider, is to think through the point of view of art and artists with regard to this seismic shift in the way the human animal conceives of how it lives in the modern era.

A new economic model of industrial production and a new metropolitan manner of living had emerged to shape mind and body. The new life was guided by utilitarian pursuits and by what became known as a ‘positivist’ understanding of reality. This ‘positivism’ had a formal advocate in the philosopher Auguste Comte, though his thinking never quite rose to the level of a philosophy. Instead, positivism accepted the task of settling in to take charge of the popular outlook of the new society. In other words, it constituted an ideology. Does this ‘positivism’ not guide our relationship to the world right up to the present day, both in Europe and America and, arguably, across the entire planet?

The modern age is thought of as being defined by science and technology. However, its dawn, spanning broadly the entire nineteenth century, was marked by an acute sense of internal conflict at the level of aesthetic experience. The notion that such conflict represented a defining theme of the birth of the modern age would not perhaps have been recognized clearly at the time by the society at large or even, at this late date, by our contemporary society. Nevertheless, as stated above, it is identified very forcefully in the writings of the great modern philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, with the publication of The Birth of Tragedy in 1872. Nietzsche’s writings in general can be understood as a rejection of nineteenth century science and of the positivist ideology which sustained it in the popular mind. 

Nietzsche traced the origins of the scientific view of the world back to Socrates and his amanuenses, Plato and Aristotle. Socrates employed the notion of syllogism to develop an understanding of the world, inventing reason and what Nietzsche called the formation of “theoretical man”. Plato set down this new understanding in a suite of dialogues on ethics which outlined how to live life in accord with a moral outlook. Aristotle, for his part, wanted to understand the physical world and he employed this new intellectual faculty of reason to introduce scientific knowledge. Nietzsche felt that this invention of socratic reason, both on the ethical and the scientific fronts, alienated the human animal from an instinctive engagement with the world and thus rendered the human subject, he and she, unhappy and unfulfilled. As a consequence, he set out in The Birth of Tragedy, to effect a break with socratic thinking. 

Much Nietzsche commentary passes over or downplays this conflict with science. While it is easy to show, by reference to the text, that Nietzsche made the break with Socrates, his critics either tend to overlook this as an inconvenient truth or pretend that it can be discounted. In either case, they attempt to operate a sleight of hand.

Nietzsche’s claim, in rejecting socratic syllogism, is certainly unexpected and in conflict with the basic premises of western culture. What then sustains it? This is a second point on which his critics falter. Nietzsche could hardly make this enormous claim if he did not have an alternative to offer, and Nietzsche does have this alternative. Yet philosophers are loath to acknowledge or lend it credence. Nietzsche’s claim is that art has always, reaching back to ancient times, offered an alternative understanding of the world from that of reason and science. His commentators, who are mostly from the field of philosophy, fail to see or, at least, to acknowledge this. 

Nietzsche’s thought is nothing if not audacious. The implications are profound and far-reaching. This assault on socratic thinking has confused and troubled many, not the least among them, those who are nominally supportive of Nietzsche and have made an effort to appreciate his position. After all, reason is taken to structure our outlook on the world based, as it is, on the accumulation of objective knowledge. Out of this has been developed a notion of universal truth, morality and social organization. Not to beat about the proverbial bush, reason has been fatally linked with this ubiquitous notion of ‘God’ across human culture. Western culture has imposed this notion as the original premise beyond which inquiry is forbidden. Can Nietzsche really be imagined to advocate for the overturning of these foundations of western civilization? If we look closely at Nietzsche’s writings and take him at his word, the answer will appear to be, Yes! 

It is fascinating to read the various commentators on Nietzsche. They, in turn, are clearly fascinated by him and the scope of his speculations. They are mostly impressed with his challenge to philosophy, since that is their professional purview. Yet, there is always a note of hysteria at the edge of their commentaries. Again, can he really mean to abandon socratic thinking? How does one separate oneself, as a philosopher, from the identity of rational argument on which consciousness is founded? Would this not throw the mind into a state of madness? Did not Nietzsche himself end up in just such a state during the last decade of his life? Were these the wages of a reckless enterprise? These are troubling questions and the simplest recourse is to just not ask them. 

Nevertheless, Nietzsche’s position may begin to make more sense when one realizes that he does not propose abandoning an intellectual apprehension of the world. It should never be forgotten that one of the Nietzsche deities, Apollon, alongside Dionysos, was the god of consciousness, measure and individuality. What Nietzsche is proposing is an alternative manner of thinking, crucially based on aesthetic experience. It is impossible for philosophers to understand Nietzsche without embracing this aesthetic dimension. If they try to deny it, they end up putting Nietzsche back into a philosophical straitjacket of concepts, which is what they want to do, but which he rejects.

Nietzsche launched his assault on positivism in the early 1870’s. The positivist outlook had been gathering across the entire century, since the revolutionary upheaval of 1789 in, first France, and then generally throughout Europe. We should not forget, however, that the United Kingdom of England and its subject realms, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, had already led the way into the industrial revolution over the previous century prior to the political revolution. However, the cultural transformation of the Revolution did not take hold in England. What transpires in 1789, in France, is an awareness, across the continent of Europe, of a whole new philosophical sense of social identity that is never understood in England. We may well ask if it has ever been understood in the United Kingdom’s greatest colony, which now goes by the name of the United States of America. In 1872 it seems that philosophy, in the person of Nietzsche, had finally come to a moment of reckoning with the new scientific world that was taking shape and, with it, the popular outlook of positivism. 

We see that the scientific advances in knowledge of the modern age, accompanied by the positivism of popular ideology, are inextricably engaged with a sense of consciousness. It may be argued that consciousness had already been birthed by Socrates two millennia earlier. However, consciousness in western culture had always been engaged with religion. In the modern period, it was now finding a new incarnation with an apparent freedom from the old religious ideology of the past. This consciousness of the modern age confronts modern art. It is both being shaped by science and by its foundation in rational inquiry, and being questioned by Nietzsche’s opposition to those premises and his search for common cause with modern art.

Yet if consciousness in the nineteenth century wanted to reject religion, and both science and Nietzsche seem in agreement on this point, it was prey to a new one, namely positivism. Let us call this modern consciousness. As this modern consciousness is born, that is scientifically-minded consciousness, nominally without religious affiliation, the temptation is to imagine that the forces of the modern world, political, economic, social, but also philosophical and aesthetic, have been united in a single rational and utilitarian purpose. This was Comte’s dream and perhaps Hegel’s as well. Nietzsche rejects it in The Birth of Tragedy. There is an inherent contradiction between the rational outlook of ‘theoretical man’, as framed by Nietzsche, and the human experience of being aesthetically engaged in the life of the world. Nietzsche would seem to suggest that it is the role of the modern artist, in consort with the modern philosopher, to explore this contradiction and come to a new understanding. This task endures.

The Birth of Modern Art and the Modern Aesthetic

When considering art in the modern period, the question must be raised as to how it responded to the changed circumstances of life and thought in the nineteenth century. Did the societal transition from the ancien régime into the modern age constitute a crucial moment when the apparent continuity of life was definitively ruptured and art took on a new form? If so, did a new, specifically modern, aesthetic emerge? Once again, the answer is clearly, yes, to both questions. Following the French Revolution and entering the nineteenth century, modern art was born. It is worth remarking that it was born in Paris, the same city where the revolution had taken place. The emblematic figure in this new development of a modern art is Théodore Géricault (1791-1824), the first major artist to belong, as his birthright, to the modern era. This is the case that I made in an earlier volume, The Modern Aesthetic (2017), to which the current essay is a sequel. It is worth remarking that it was not born in London, the initial city of industrialization where we continue to find a more or less inane vestigial attachment to monarchy, or what is termed, hedging its bets, ‘constitutional monarchy’, a contradiction in terms if ever there was one. I leave to others to decide whether this has introduced a fatal senility into the great English culture of Shakespeare.

At the risk of some repetition, it needs to be stated that from the mid-17th century through the Revolution, and beyond, the model for an artist’s education and training was provided by the Académie Royale de peinture et de sculpture, founded in 1648 by Mazarin at the behest of Louis XIV, which later became known as the Académie des Beaux-Arts. This notion of the Fine Art Academy came into existence with the purpose of binding art to the political and religious order of monarchical society. The thought that this might be necessary indicates, perhaps, some doubt as to whether, if left to their own devices, artists might not have wandered off on another path.

In modern American society, such speculation cannot ignore that the new art of the motion picture quickly aspired to the status of an academy, further extending this notion into that of ‘industry’. Could there be a more eloquent testimonial to the desire on the part of society to put its hand on the neck of creativity? Louis X1V would have raised his wig to the the moguls of Hollywood. 

In any case, the Academy ruled art with a ruthless authority, controlling its economic support through the system of patronage.  Academies proliferated throughout Europe and America in the nineteenth century. To qualify in the Academy, candidates were required to perform a long training in the Ecoles des Beaux Arts and to adhere to its prescribed rules of artistic value. The artist must aspire to an idealized vision, achieving illusion of the subject through an harmonious and neutral paint surface. Academic art was expected to instill a message of morality, thus aligning it with, and requiring that it endorse, established religious and social value.  A chosen means was through allegory. Academic art also established a hierarchy of genres with historical and mythological subjects ranking above others, such as landscape or still-life. In order for artists to show their work in a public context they had to apply to the salons where a jury enforced academic standards. In the nineteenth century the livelihood of artists depended on their success in the Paris Salon and the Salon d’Automne. Artists such as William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Alexandre Cabanel, Thomas Couture and Jean-Léon Gérôme dominated these events and prospered from the sales that took place there. The modern artists lived out their lives, for the most part, in very difficult circumstances. They still do. 

In contrast to the Academy, modern art was born as a reaction against the system of Beaux Arts aesthetics. The modern artists who began to emerge with Géricault were relatively isolated individuals. Their future was decided by their first act, which was to reject the practice of the Academy. The immediate consequence was that they were cut off from established patronage. They were deprived of the ability to make a living. As a result, they found themselves relatively free to make the crucial decisions about how and what to paint that were impossible in the Academy. Yet, it is important to note that they had this freedom because the society of the day was indifferent to, indeed dismissive of, their vision of art. At a certain point, that society became actively aggressive, if not to say revengeful, against these modern artists. It will be objected that today modern art is held in very high esteem, as witnessed by the enormous prices for masterpieces in the contemporary art market. This is a very complex issue which, hopefully, will be considered in the course of this essay.

There was a second important factor in the development of modern art. This was the opening of the Louvre to the public as an art museum. In the first decade of the nineteenth century the Louvre was being enriched by the spoils of Napoleon’s campaigns. For a period, great works of art were arriving on a steady basis from Italy and it is said that Géricault, identified here as the first great modern artist, was among those who volunteered to open these consignments and install the paintings on the walls of the new museum. From this opportunity came Géricault’s firm conviction that an artist should form his mind and hand by studying the Italian masters. Courbet followed Géricault in this conviction and at the century’s end Cézanne was still insisting that young artists should go to study the masters of the Louvre.

Modern art began as a matter of individual initiative. With time it may have gained the appearance of a movement, with a broader cadre of adherents, yet it is still possible to maintain that its development has always been in the hands of a short list of now celebrated names. Part of the issue here is that art historians have a proclivity towards charting stylistic developments at the expense of aesthetic meaning. This may well be because they have little confidence in their capacity to identify aesthetic meaning. The development of modern art across the nineteenth century includes the following prominent artists: Géricault; Courbet; Manet; Cézanne among, of course, many others. Again, one can call these artists celebrated today, even though Géricault, and even Courbet, have, to different degrees, been pushed aside, or into the past, where they can be more or less ignored from the perspective of modern art. Even if they are not forgotten, it is important to not lose sight of the fact that during their life-times, they were frankly opposed and neglected, if not actively denigrated, by official taste and by the public. Their success, to the extent that they had success, was one of scandal. In time, of course, this notoriety led to canonization as a new tradition of art, but that was largely a development, after the fact, of the twentieth century. In their life-time, they were excluded by the dominant academic tradition of art and they, for the most part, were unable to live from the proceeds of their art. 

From this story of modern art’s alienation from established society comes the romantic myth that art is the product of, and thrives in, poverty. In fact, if we look at the four leading names, mentioned above, we will note that they all came from independently wealthy backgrounds, even if the support that, in his early life as an artist, Cézanne received from his father, who had no regard for the vocation of art, was, at best, minimal. It is an open question as to whether these artists could have achieved the bodies of work that they left to posterity without the material family support that they had at their disposal. What can, however, be maintained is that this material support does not explain their vocation for the independent and dissident modern art that they pursued. It seems clear that each of these strongly individual artists was guided by an intellectual and aesthetic vision both born of, and independent from, the modern age. 

Modern Art and the Birth of Modern Criticism

If the two elements of, first, rejection of academic art and, second, acceptance via the Louvre of the Italian Renaissance as model, are essential aspects in the formation of modern art, the other remarkable component is the exchange of understanding that occurred, throughout the nineteenth century, between modern artists, on the one hand, and writers and philosophers, on the other. This relationship between artists and writers has only been inadvertently acknowledged. Baudelaire is the crucial, initial protagonist of this exchange.

If Géricault is the first modern artist, recognition of this status of modern art requires an understanding of Baudelaire’s criticism. There is a considerable irony in this realization because Baudelaire appears to have overlooked Géricault, in favor of the younger figure of Delacroix. Baudelaire was three years old at the death of Géricault. Delacroix, younger than Géricault by only seven years, and therefore roughly his contemporary, would survive him by almost forty, to die in 1863, only four years before Baudelaire’s own death in 1867. Thus, for Baudelaire, the brevity of Géricault’s life and Delacroix’s longevity made the former artist a figure from the past while the latter was his contemporary. Both artists, however, have come down to posterity as major figures of the romantic school of painting, although this essay argues for a very different view, namely that Géricault was not a romantic artist, but the first modern artist, and that Delacroix, romantic that he was, was not indeed a modern artist. 

Baudelaire has been credited with introducing a new, modern approach to the criticism of art. What set him apart was that he did not consider his task to represent the social outlook of his time or to hold artists to its account. His standard was not the teaching of the Academy and even less did he consider morality to be a value in art. Baudelaire was an apostate. This set his writings apart from the vast majority of contemporary criticism and salon commentary. The central term for Baudelaire was Beauty. Baudelaire’s paramount concern was with identifying the attributes of aesthetic value, conceived on its own terms. Baudelaire asked himself, where did this aesthetic value lie? Once again, it did not lie in social morality nor in the conventions of academic style. Rather it might lie in the raw experience of personal life as it was taking shape in the post-revolutionary city society of the early nineteenth century. From this intuition came his clarion call for artists to paint from modern life. This call placed Baudelaire outside the Academy, in a no-man’s land between the artist and society.

If Baudelaire largely failed to understand Géricault’s key role in instigating modern art, he also largely failed to recognize the significance of Courbet. Born in 1819, Courbet would live until 1877. He is, therefore, the almost exact contemporary of Baudelaire, though outliving him by ten years. Courbet was recognized as the leader of a realist school of painting that was emerging to challenge romanticism. Critic and painter were closely associated, with Courbet painting Baudelaire’s portrait and placing him in the wings of his great painting The Painter’s Studio (1855). Yet Baudelaire came to feel that the painter’s avowed realism lacked the crucial dimension of the imagination, which for him was the supreme value in art. With Delacroix, Baudelaire found this value of the imagination and, therefore, it was Delacroix who became for him the model artist of his time. 

Literature, heretofore, not to mention philosophy, had always assumed primacy over the visual arts. It laid claim to this role because it considered that its medium of language gave it access over image to an exchange with philosophical, religious and social thought that painting lacked. Painting contained the temptation of pleasure. Few literary or philosophical figures have shown much interest in painting. The problem is that, beyond this issue of moral censure, possession of a literary faculty does not at all guarantee a sympathetic feeling for painting. In fact, very many literary figures have little feeling for visual art and a philosophical mind-set seems to entirely preclude any such feeling at all. Baudelaire, on the other hand, was stimulated by painting. Baudelaire represents what can happen when a major literary imagination makes a genuine engagement, on equal terms, with painting, without this presumption of superiority that so many literary figures assume and without what we may call this color blindness that so often afflicts them. It does not occur with much frequency. Where most critics discussed art from the standpoint of already accepted opinion, Baudelaire attempted to represent the artist’s project, or at the very least, he set out to establish a space between the artist and the standpoint of already accepted opinion, where the former would have the opportunity to make its case. 

There are very few such examples, where literary figures of note genuinely engage with the visual arts. The most significant candidate to consider among Baudelaire’s peers would perhaps be Gustave Flaubert.  Flaubert was very interested in the notion of developing a modern aesthetic. One only has to read his letters to Louise Collet to see that. His views were very much aligned with those of Baudelaire. The two corresponded. Flaubert also oscillated between a romantic, or symbolist, form and the realism of his most famous work, Madame Bovary. This novel may be read as a description of nineteenth century positivism, but it is nonetheless a scathing indictment of this outlook. One might imagine that Flaubert would have seen the interest of Courbet’s and Manet’s painting, if not that of Géricault. Yet Flaubert did not engage with the painters of his day.

In connection with this line of thought, where we identify the pretension of literature to align itself with morality and philosophy, and discount painting on its supposed deficiency in this regard, it should not escape our attention that both Flaubert, for Madame Bovary, and Baudelaire, for Les Fleurs du Mal, were prosecuted for “insult to public decency”. Flaubert was exonerated, while Baudelaire, finding himself isolated, was found guilty. Of the two, he was the easier prey for the public prosecutor.

Baudelaire exhorted the artists of his day to embrace modern life. This call to paint from modern life injects a measure of ambiguity into Baudelaire’s aesthetic thought that remains unresolved. By his embrace of Delacroix, Baudelaire had accepted the romantic definition of the imagination. This led to Baudelaire’s rejection of Courbet and also his ambivalence towards Manet. However, this romantic imagination was bound to conflict with the banality of everyday modern life, where Baudelaire otherwise recommended that the inspiration of modern art should be sought. Baudelaire’s nascent aesthetic of modernity was really in conflict with Delacroix’s sense of aesthetic value. The issue can perhaps best be seized by comparing Géricault, whom I have called the first great modern painter, with Delacroix, whom I do not consider to even qualify as a modern artist. There is no question but that Géricault entertains a relationship with the romantic movement. One can superficially identify Géricault’s paintings as belonging to that tradition. But, so then, with the long line of romantic self-portraits that he painted in his early years, does Courbet. However, it is equally clear that Géricault did not believe in the idealism and antiquarian subject matter of romanticism. More specifically, he was indifferent to the archaic notion of glory, in all its forms, to which Delacroix remained passionately attached. To state the matter forthrightly, Géricault did not believe in the romantic imagination’s desire to embrace ideology. 

Géricault breaks with romanticism over his curiosity for, and his desire to engage with, the very modern life that Baudelaire will later recommend to the modern artist. Géricault anticipates this aspect of Baudelaire’s aesthetic thought by a quarter of a century. One can see this in his embrace of contemporary subject matter, notably the napoleonic wars and an event such as the sinking of the Médusa, which agitated Parisian political public opinion of the day, but also in his extensive studies on paper of the misfortunes of modern life, lived in the big cities of Paris and London. Yet what is perhaps more important is that he was completely devoid of the philosophical idealism of the romantic outlook. This emerges in a comparison between Géricault’s understanding of madness with that of Delacroix. For Delacroix, madness is a literary conceit, as we see in his famous painting of Dante and Virgil crossing the Styx. The condemned surround the bark, writhing desperately in the knowledge of their sins, committed during their time on earth. This is conventional Christian ideology. Today, Delacroix’s painting appears histrionic. In contrast, Géricault’s notion of madness involves the everyday experience of ordinary mortals, the alienated, together with small children who, if not mad, possess an untamed and heterogeneous psychic awareness which looks forward to Freud’s exploration of human sexuality. One does not feel that there is any life for these juvenile individuals beyond the one that they confront here and now in the flesh. It is this acutely modern outlook which led me in The Modern Aesthetic, as I understand it, to place Géricault as the dissident component of a triangle of personalities, which also contains Napoleon and Hegel. These two latter protagonists of the early modern period represent, respectively, the outlook of power and philosophy of the day. However, it is Géricault who gives birth to the new aesthetic of the modern age and it is Baudelaire who begins to articulate a critical understanding of what that might signify.

It might be enlightening to associate the great Géricault portraits, in contrast to romantic idealism, with the studies of body parts that, history recounts, were obtained by Géricault from a local morgue.

Modern Art and Modern Philosophy

“… the gods of Epicurus who have no care and are unknown …”

Friedrich Nietzsche (Gay Savoir) op. cit. #277

It is important to recognize that this development of a modern view of criticism laid the foundation for a new relationship between artists and philosophers in the nineteenth century. Hegel will cast his shadow across the whole nineteenth century and Freud will take shape coming out of its later decades, reaching into the twentieth century and up to the Second World War. Yet, if we stick with Baudelaire for a moment, there is little room for doubt that his writings, both in style and thought, look forward to Nietzsche. Nietzsche read Baudelaire, forming a deeply sympathetic sense of identity with him. He also read Stendhal, another major literary figure with an interest in art, and found a similar identity of outlook. Looking beyond Nietzsche, to his most immediate and distinguished descendant, Georges Bataille, we have the example of a philosopher who took these baudelairian and nietzschean insights, alongside Freud, into the twentieth century, to reveal a shocking vision of, but also an extraordinary opportunity for, the future of the modern enterprise. Even today our contemporaries, not least in the field of modern art history, are horrified by the contemplation of what Bataille reveals of the human animal, his and her yearnings, and their relationship to art. It is no coincidence, at the same time, that Bataille wrote two essential books on art. These two books, Lascaux, or the Birth of Art and Manet, are crucial for the development of a modern aesthetic. The first explores how art defines human identity at the dawn of time, while the second identifies the intellectual outlook of modernity with modern art. If one wants to contest these books, one should at least take them seriously. No American art historian, to my knowledge, has ever done so.

It is no coincidence that Bataille, on the very first page of his Lascaux study, evokes Picasso, the emblematic twentieth century modern artist, without explicitly mentioning his name. Picasso and Bataille are known to have associated, with the latter accompanying the former on occasion to the bull fight. Bataille writes that, in the history of art, “according to the opinion of the greatest living painter” (my italics), the cave paintings of Lascaux “have never been improved upon”. It is perhaps worth mentioning in passing that when Bataille wrote those words, Matisse had recently died, thus leaving the field of art to his colleague Picasso, and also for Bataille to make this claim. The relationship between Picasso and Nietzsche’s thought, and by extension Bataille, has been discussed in an earlier volume of this essay. The relationship of Matisse to Nietzsche’s philosophy is a topic that has never been seriously considered. The field of art in the twentieth century will continue to be disputed, if this is not too rude a word, between these two great artists, Matisse and Picasso. 

In the acknowledgement of Picasso, we see Bataille’s recognition that art would henceforth be central to the development of a new aesthetic philosophy. Art historians, who follow the scientific model, have yet to examine Bataille’s books on art for what they are, namely as foundational texts of this new philosophy of the modern aesthetic. Yet it must also be admitted that art historians have never yet acknowledged that such a thing as the modern aesthetic exists and has been jointly created by the great modern artists and thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To do so would take the evaluation of art out of their hands and place it in those of the great modern artists themselves.

Yet, an apparent paradox, in the interests of clarity, needs to be acknowledged here. Crucial to the notion of an aesthetic dimension to philosophy, and a philosophical dimension to modern art, is the declaration by Baudelaire that the more philosophy interferes in the creation of art, the more art will decline in quality. This case is clearly made in the essay entitled “Philosophical Art”. Baudelaire declares forthrightly: “The more art wants to be philosophically clear, the more it will degrade”. Baudelaire laid what he called “the error of a philosophical art” at the feet of the contemporarily emerging German school of idealist philosophy, which for us today would mean Hegel. The paradox is carried further when one considers that this German philosophy grew up alongside and is intimately allied with romanticism, which Baudelaire, in the person of Delacroix, had endorsed, but which Géricault, this essay would maintain, had rejected. 

Nevertheless, as modern art developed across the nineteenth century, it did begin to engage with a philosophical outlook of its own. This was not the outlook of German idealism that Baudelaire decried, but rather of a new, anti-academic philosophical approach which opposed philosophy as it had previously been constituted. I have given the leading names among the modern artists as Géricault, Courbet, Manet and Cézanne. Among the modern philosophers one can list Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud and Bataille. Among these latter names, it is above all Nietzsche who aligns the philosophic enterprise with artistic creativity. These modern philosophers, at least most definitely Nietzsche, made common cause with modern art. In other words, the anti-philosophical position expressed by Baudelaire in his essay, mentioned above, only presents an apparent contradiction. What Baudelaire objected to was philosophy as it had been conceived in the idealist tradition, which denied aesthetic thought. The philosophy proposed by Nietzsche and his descendants offers a new kind of aesthetic understanding.

Nietzsche cannot be supposed to have had much awareness of the modern art tradition at the time that he wrote his books. It was still establishing its identity during his life-time. The philosopher was born in Prussia in 1844, just five years after Cezanne. In adult life, he migrated south towards Italian Switzerland, notably Sils-Maria in the Engadine, and to northern Italy, Genoa, Torino and Nice in the south of France. He never visited Paris. He would not have come across Géricault or Courbet without an introduction to Parisian artistic circles, which he did not have, and in the case of Géricault, due to the timeframe and Géricault’s relative obscurity, perhaps not even then. Manet’s great masterpieces had been painted very recently, in the decade prior to the writing of Nietzsche’s books, and so it seems too much to expect that he would have taken notice, unless there had been a personal connection, which was not at all the case, as stated above. Cézanne’s colossal achievement was weighted towards the last decade of the century, when Nietzsche lay incapacitated and removed from any awareness of the world and its affairs.  Nietzsche then died in 1900. At that time, Cézanne was living and painting mostly in isolation and virtual anonymity in his native Aix-en-provence. Cezanne would die in 1906.

Nevertheless, it is fascinating to consider Cézanne and Nietzsche living so closely at some point, intermittently, but in the same timeframe, with Cézanne in Aix and Nietzsche, on occasion, in Nice. When we consider these two towns in the late nineteenth century, they are indeed far removed in identity, if not in distance, from each other. Both lay at considerable remove from the centre of modern art in Paris and from Berlin, where Hegel had taught his new idealist philosophy at the university. Yet somehow the connection between Aix and Nice in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, vague though it may seem to the mind of reason, closer really to association, augurs a new relationship between art and philosophy, which is to say a philosophy grounded in aesthetic experience rather than in the moral censure of platonism. Cézanne would forever link the aixois countryside with the destiny of modern art and his great descendant, Matisse, would similarly connect his life to Nice, forever grafting its surroundings onto art history in the twentieth century. The identity of modern art today cannot be separated from the light and culture of the French Mediterranean, of Aix and Nice. 

We see then how great artists and philosophers interact with their times and with each other. Something is being forged between their separate, yet overlapping, experiences. There is almost no apparent contact of significance, no sense of cause and effect yet, in hindsight, we recognize that a profound underlying bond has been established. The relationship of modern art to modern philosophy is, therefore, not to be envisaged in terms of this interplay between cause and effect, those tools of the scientific outlook, that Baudelaire had roundly rejected. What we can now see is that the great artists of the period, and notably those just mentioned, using their own pictorial terms, and on their own initiative, undertook to embark in their art on the development of a fresh philosophical, what we can identify in hindsight as a specifically ‘nietzschean’, understanding of the world. In other words, if we believe that this nietzschean philosophy, based in creative thought, is to be found in Géricault’s paintings, juxtaposing the 1812 date of Le Chasseur de la garde with the 1872 publication of The Birth of Tragedy, we can say that the birth of this modern aesthetic predates Nietzsche by sixty years and appeared first in painting. But then again, as a complementary idea, would this modern aesthetic experience, that is contained in Géricault’s painting, have the same significance today, or indeed any significance at all, if we could not associate it with the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche? It is precisely this failure to link Géricault with Nietzsche which has led art historians to think of the period in terms of romanticism and realism and overlook the birth of the modern aesthetic.

Nietzsche’s nomadic way of life, dating from his academic retirement from Berne and his adoption of the dubious status of an independent man of letters, offers the first clue as to how he would develop an aesthetic philosophy aligning with modern art. The modern artists too had abandoned the academy and rejected the moral order of the new society. It may be said that both Nietzsche and the modern artists were seeking independence of thought and action, not only from the ideological norms of the old order but also from those that were being established in the new. Nietzsche was always an uncompromising critic of the ideology of nationalism, particularly the German nationalism of his day. When he went into retirement, he voluntarily rescinded his Prussian passport and lived, henceforth, stateless. His health and way of life also dictated a path towards the south, away from his northern, Prussian roots. These developments in his personal life tracked his intellectual and cultural proclivities towards an identity based on cultural value in opposition to the trends in northern Europe of contemporary political and economic life, based on utility. This dichotomy between north and south is still valid today. The Mediterranean basin is associated with the genesis of western culture coming out of ancient Egypt, Greece, Renaissance Italy and, in the modern period, the link between Paris and the Côte d’Azur, before the Second World War enforced a migration to New York. This exodus momentarily brought about a new interest in modern art among a generation of artists in New York and then, in a dizzying turn of events, the American art world, for the most part, abandoned it again. This will all have to be addressed in what follows.

Nietzsche undertook to lead the life of a cosmopolitan man of culture, very much like Stendhal who engaged in long, extended Italian sojourns. The case will be made that the great modern artists of the nineteenth century shared this nietzschean outlook. While for the most part, they did not openly break with their French nationality, it was clear that they rejected the first Napoleon’s notion of empire and its extension into his nephew Napoleon 111’s régime in mid-century. Courbet, the most politically engaged, actually ran into trouble with the government of his day over his sympathy for the Commune and the destruction of the Vendôme Column, honoring the first Emperor Napoleon. The conflict threatened to ruin him financially, forcing him into self-imposed exile in Switzerland and hastening his demise.

The modern world was being constructed around these artists and writers as they worked in their studios or, as it may be in the case of the new impressionist generation, en plein air. Many had hoped for recognition in the new society, not least Baudelaire and Courbet, but their revolt against academic aesthetic values was evident and not to be tolerated. The salon’s refusal of the artists, the successful public prosecution of Baudelaire for obscenity, the revengeful prosecution of Courbet for his political radicalism and the long convalescent isolation of Nietzsche’s way of life, are a lugubrious tale of conflict with official society, not one of worldly success that could be widely admired. 

This modern world, which was taking shape, was based on the formation of enormous new wealth, provided by new methods of production and diverse technological invention, much like the world of today. These required the formation and concentration of modern life in cities with a new system of education, modern universities to prepare a specialized work force. This educational project, providing for the rationalizations of technology and economic life, was to be the particular concern of Hegel. A professional class, cultivating expertise in the interests of efficient planning and the maximization of production with return on investment, took shape. Along with this specialization came a new professional war machine, harnessing technological development to enhance national and economic dominance. In due course, this society would pursue conquest, providing for vast colonial empires. All this is being re-evaluated in contemporary society, as I write. Géricault unerringly foresaw this development right at the outset of the modern age. Yet it took the next century, when Bataille was confronted by the two World Wars, for the consequences to be revealed. The modern world had paved a path towards an extraordinary increase and concentration of power, based always on an assumed superiority of moral judgement, possessed by those to whom this power accrued. The only logic of this divine conception was growth. Bataille understood this growth to be a chimera and a stumbling-block to the promise of modernity.

The artists had seen the potential for personal freedom in modern life. However, Courbet’s Demoiselles des bords de la Seine and Degas’ identification of the notorious petits rats of the ballet world had begun to emphasize the shadows of city life. When Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe and Olympia put an unambiguous focus on the channeling of poor country girls into the city’s prostitution rackets, moral censure ensued, incidentally not at the rackets but at the paintings which uncovered the practice! One cannot say, however, that these artists, for their part, brought moral censure to bear on this practice. They seemed indifferent to morality. It is perhaps this that hypocrisy, caught in the act, detests the most!

As one dresses this litany of features to describe the formation of the modern world, one can perhaps sense the reader nodding in agreement, or at least in acquiescence, with how matters stand. This portrait of modern life, after all, has mostly been accepted as the normal course of affairs across two hundred years and on up to the present day. Max Weber’s celebrated study The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism has revealed its underlying structures. It is based on a concept of progress, linked to what we may call a notion of moral probity. Yet, is this not also the portrait of modern life that Dickens portrayed as wielding the fist of vicious social exploitation and in which Flaubert revealed a specious hypocrisy? The great modern artists are in fundamental agreement with their literary colleagues. 

Nietzsche, like Baudelaire, imagined that the Greeks of the archaic period had once known freedom. It is a very seductive thought. Baudelaire welcomed, in modernity, what he took to be an opportunity to once again engage in this joy of living, in the wake of escaping Christian culture’s moral straitjacket. Instead, he found that the new directors of modern society, the masters of administration and business, were intent on reinforcing, in a hypocritical fashion, the old Christian church’s moral view, perhaps the view of religion in general, to wit the regime of moral drudgery in this life, alleviated perhaps in the short term by alcohol and other intoxicants, to be exchanged in death for a better life to come, as a means for guaranteeing functional efficiency in the work place and control, as absolute as possible, of the institutions of power. This continues to be the model of the modern state, at least in the conservative view, as we know and live it today. Nietzsche derided this belief structure as conjured up by those he labeled “the afterworlds men”, that is to say the priests, or those who control what we might call today social media. 

In response, at the outset of book 3 of The Gay Science, Nietzsche establishes an open breach with the romantic link between nature and anthropomorphic sentiment. The chapter is titled, with remarkable prescience, Let us beware: 

“Let us beware of thinking that the world is a living being. Where should it expand? On what should it feed? How could it grow and multiply? We have some notion of the nature of the organic; and we should not reinterpret the exceedingly derivative, late, rare, accidental, that we perceive only on the crust of the earth and make of it something essential, universal, and eternal, which is what those people do who call the universe an organism.” 

It is clear that nineteenth century ideology identified with the notion of the physical world as a natural organism that could be harnessed to the principle of mechanics, as one harnesses a horse to a cart, and a consciousness to a moral identity. Nietzsche denounces this outlook and, again, the modern artists have sided with the philosopher against the social consensus.