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Оглавление2. The Little Gods of the Street
In the like sense, the beggar boys of Murillo (in the Central Gallery at Munich) are excellent too. Abstractly considered, the subject-matter here too is drawn from ‘vulgar nature’: the mother picks lice out of the head of one of the two boys, while he quietly munches his bread; in a similar picture two other boys, ragged and poor, are eating melon and grapes. But in this poverty and semi-nakedness, what precisely shines forth within and without is nothing but complete absence of care and concern, which a dervish could not surpass, in the full feeling of their well-being and delight in life. This freedom from care for the external, this inner freedom in the external is what the concept of the Ideal requires. In Paris there is a portrait of a boy by Raphael: his head lies at rest, leaning on an arm, and he gazes out into the wide and open distance with such bliss of carefree satisfaction that one can scarcely tear oneself away from gazing at this picture of spiritual and joyous well-being. The same satisfaction is afforded by those boys of Murillo. We see that they have no wider interests and aims, yet not at all out of stupidity do they squat on the ground, rather content and serene, almost like the gods of Olympus; they do nothing, they say nothing; but they are people all of one piece without any surliness or discontent; and since they possess this foundation of all capacity, we have the idea that anything may come of these youths.1
These lines appear in the first book of the Lectures on Aesthetics published after Hegel’s death, based on his students’ notebooks. And we read them willingly as a happy improvisation, an example opportunely chosen by the professor in order to explain this ‘ideal’ whose sensible realization constitutes the artistically beautiful. For in this section devoted to elaborating the concept of the beautiful that is the object of artistic production and aesthetic reflection, the professor willingly illustrates his argument with contemporary examples: the latest salon where a new school of painting ends up giving a caricatural aspect to ideal beauty, a polemical work in which a connoisseur opposes ideal theories with the exigencies of sensible matter and the technique that transforms it. Here two paintings from the Munich Gallery and a painting from the Louvre illustrate the argument. Two Murillos and one Raphael, or at least a painting attributed to Raphael. In the period when Hegel saw it, the portrait of the young dreamer with the velvet beret that posterity alternately attributed to Parmigianino and to Correggio was still attributed to Raphael. The correction of the attribution matters little here. What deserves attention is the coupling of the two names: Raphael and Murillo. For them to be associated in this way, for one to recall the other, an abyss needed to be crossed in the hierarchy of painters. In the tradition of Vasari, renewed by Bellori and Félibien, Raphael is the master par excellence, the one who nourished himself in Rome on the monuments of antique art and knew how to transpose their noble simplicity onto the pictorial surface. In the prize list of painters compiled by Roger de Piles in 1708, he was the undisputed master in the fields of drawing and expression, equalled only by Guerchin and Rubens in composition. Colour alone, of which Titian and the Venetians were the recognized masters, constituted his weak point. But even this weakness contributed to his supremacy for all those who considered drawing the directing principle of the art of painting, and colour its simple servant.
Murillo was very far from deserving such homage. Beggar Boys Eating Grapes and Melon probably entered the collection of the Prince Elector of Bavaria as early as the late seventeenth century, and a few English travellers brought some of the Sevillian master’s works back to their country in the eighteenth century. But one would search in vain for his trace, and that of his compatriots, in the surveys that learned eighteenth-century Europe compiled of its great painters and schools of paintings.2 Undoubtedly there is an empirical reason for this. The religious works created for Spanish convents and the royal family portraits did not leave Spain at all. And even there, the visitors complained about the unwillingness to allow them to be seen. An English traveller, who hoped to see the Murillos at the Hospital de la Caridad, in Seville, recalled his desperate attempts to overcome the ill will of the lazy monks in order to access the chapel where the paintings were covered with a black veil that was lifted only a few days each year.3 The Napoleonic armies satisfied the curiosity of these amateurs in their own way: there were eight paintings from the Caridad among the paintings seized by the general Soult, whose raids forced Spanish painting to enter the patrimony of universal painting. But the ‘balance’ of painters and Schools, as it was practised, excluded the idea of such a patrimony. The distribution of Schools was a distribution of criteria of excellence: Florentine drawing and Venetian colour, Italian modelling and Flemish chiaroscuro, and so on. A new national school could only take its place if it seemed to incarnate a specific excellence. And it was admitted that colour, the only praiseworthy element in the Spanish, came to them from the Flemish who had themselves inherited it from the Venetians. For a new ‘national’ painting to become visible, the idea of art as patrimony needed to impose itself: art as the property of a people, the expression of its form of life, but also as a common property whose works belonged to this common place now called Art, and that materialized in the museum.
Surely, the seizures of the French armies in the occupied territories constituted quite a peculiar form of ‘common patrimony’. An extreme example can be found in the cynicism with which Soult collected misappropriated ‘gifts’, through armed force, for his private collection. Yet the very pillaging of the convents in Seville implied a new value attributed to their content. And one can readily smile at the naivety or the impertinence of this French officer announcing the arrival of a convoy of Flemish masterpieces in Paris: ‘The immortal works left to us by the brushes of Rubens, Van Dyck and the other founders of the Flemish school are no longer in a foreign land. Reunited with care at the orders of the people’s representatives, they are today deposited in the holy land of freedom and equality, in the French Republic.’4 But among the patriots who were outraged by the thefts committed in Spain or Holland, in Italy or Germany, more than one art lover recognized the benefit claimed by the looters: having made paintings ‘that were absolutely unfit to be seen due to the smoke, grime and old oils with which they were covered’5 visible to all art lovers. One thing is certain in any case: the revolutionary event, the new declaration of ancient freedom, and the spoils of war of the ‘armies of freedom’ vertiginously accelerated the movement that, with the progressive opening of princely collections to the public since the middle of the eighteenth century, made the works of the painters and Schools enter into this new milieu of ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’ called art. In this sense, commentaries elicited by the return of the works to their country in 1815 are significant, such as this speech a Berlin journalist ascribed to a Memling Resurrection, attributed to Van Eyck at the time: ‘I am only truly famous since the sorrows of war led a great number of people to flock to Paris … This was like a resurrection, and now that I am presented to the eyes of all, here, in my country, I am astonished to see how the way people see me has changed.’6 The very brutality of the operation accentuates the constitutive paradox of art’s new place: on the one hand, the works that enter it do so as expressions of the life of their people, themselves belonging to the patrimony of human genius. It accounts for why new ‘schools’ can appear there: the distribution of schools is not regulated by the distribution of criteria of academic excellence, but rather by their embodiment of the freedom of a people. But, inversely, it is because works henceforth express a collective belonging that it becomes possible to individualize them, to subtract them from classifications, and to draw the work attributed to the most sublime representative of the great ‘Roman’ school and the genre paintings of little Sevillian beggars closer to one another.
For, according to Hegel, what had been ruined was not only the hierarchy of schools, but also the hierarchy of genres. He does not compare a Madonna by Murillo to Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, which he saw in Dresden. The Munich Gallery does not possess any. He compares the young man with the beret with two of these five paintings of children which ended up in Munich through a very specific path: via Dutch merchants. This is how Murillo’s five bodegones entered, directly or indirectly, into the princely collection. In a way, it is as Flemish genre paintings that the little beggars of Seville are presented to Hegel’s gaze in a gallery that possesses an important collection of ‘little’ Dutch or Flemish painters, like Teniers or Brouwer, who devoted themselves to painting domestic scenes, tavern fights or village festivals. And it is within a passage devoted to Dutch genre painting that their example occurs to him. The status of the artistic ideal is in effect linked to the evaluation of this kind of painting – that is to say, to the questioning of the hierarchy of pictorial genres. It had been a long time indeed since aristocratic collectors became infatuated with these popular scenes and Teniers’s sale value reached reputable figures. Nevertheless, they were ranked at the bottom of the ladder throughout the eighteenth century: a great painting required a great subject. In scenes of domesticity, villages and the cabaret, one could certainly admire the dexterity of the painter (Teniers receives the same grade in composition as Leonardo da Vinci in Roger de Piles’s classification) and allow oneself to be seduced by the art of shadow and light. But these merits equally amounted to signs of baseness: ‘Some inferior dexterity, some extraordinary mechanical power, is apparently that from which they seek distinction’, was Joshua Reynolds’s verdict, in the 1770s, on these paintings and the genre that they embodied.7 The representation of vulgar scenes and people could only match the skill of an artisan, not the ability of an artist.
The museological and revolutionary constitution of artistic patrimony was evidently bound to overthrow this hierarchy. It was their capacity to translate freedom – of genius and of the people – which now had to define the value of paintings, rather than the distinction of the people represented. But this upheaval did not come without problems. No doubt the organizers of the revolutionary Louvre forcefully declared the end of
ridiculous distinctions of story, or genre, or landscapes, or history … nature having told no-one that a village dance was out of place in the gallery of a people who imposed upon itself the duty to honour the values of the countryside, and to prefer its pleasures; nature having told no-one that it only breathes under Alexander’s tent and ceases to revel in the nooks of an enchanting site.8
It remained unclear how the potential for freedom could be recognized on a canvas, and how what could be seen in the works of patrimony could incite the virtues of a free people. The revolutionary redactor emphasized this: even if nature did not know genres, one still needed to distinguish between its products. This is where the break from the ancient hierarchy quickly posed a dilemma: what education of a republican people could one expect from the tavern scenes preferred by genre painters? At first, Northern painters were only admitted for some edifying paintings. Thus the redactor of the Décade philosophique was able to oppose the ‘historical flatteries’ and ‘the lies eternalized by Rubens and Lebrun’ to the ‘works of mercy’ symbolized by the Return of the Prodigal Child by Teniers or The Dropsical Woman by Gérard Dou.9 For the most part, popular Dutch or Flemish scenes offered no legible instruction to the republican people. The task thus fell upon great painting, upon the painting of great subjects, to provide this education. But what were these great subjects? What did the works of the great masters represent if not biblical episodes, mythological scenes, portraits of sovereigns and their royal favourites? In short, their subjects bore testimony only to religious superstition and oppression. The same report emphasizes that ‘long centuries of slavery and shame’ had turned art away from its ‘celestial origins’. All of its works were ‘stamped with superstition, flattery and libertinage’ to the extent that one was ‘tempted to destroy all these baubles of delirium and deceit’.10 Winckelmann could still sigh like a grief-stricken lover before the freedom withdrawn from the world and preserved in antique stones. The curators of the republican museum had to confront this paradox brutally: the patrimony of freedom was there, in their crates, in the heart of the capital of the republican world, but this patrimony was composed of works that were the product and the consecration of servitude. Was it necessary to destroy all these ‘baubles’ and cover the walls of the Louvre only with paintings celebrating the great scenes of antique history and the heroism of revolutionary armies? But even when the subject of the action would not give rise to controversy, a deeper split affected the edifying value that could be given to painting. One now presumed to know: painting could not find perfection by representing an action. It only truly excelled at representing movement at standstill. This is the reason history painting with a message was perfected in The Intervention of the Sabine Women by David: the painting of an action interrupting military action. The positive message of peace could be identified through the calm lines, but not without a strange feeling summed up by a commentator: for him the most beautiful figure of the painting was a squire whose ‘juvenile and admirable forms breathed the ideal’.11 But this ideal figure seemed indifferent to the action. The squire was turning his back to the warriors as well as the women who were separating them.
It was thus impossible to base the education of freedom on the subject of the painting. Only one solution was available to those drawing testimonies of ‘long centuries of slavery and shame’ out of the crates: to nullify the content of the paintings by installing them in art’s own space. It was the placement of the paintings on the walls, the ‘air of grandeur and simplicity’ of the whole, and the ‘severe choice’ of the works that had to ‘draw respect’.12 The arrangement of art’s place and the singular potential of artists would have to teach free people what represented subjects could not be expected to teach them. The republican display of educational painting had the paradoxical yet logical consequence of training a gaze detached from the meaning of the works. How was one to expose the cycle painted by Rubens to the glory of Marie de Medicis, the scheming widow of the ‘tyrant’ Henri IV to the republican people? The chosen solution was to extract the two paintings that were the least immediately legible, the most allegorical: two paintings devoted to the reconciliation of the queen mother with her son, the young Louis XIII. These paintings became pure representations of general concord. The queen, seen in profile in the background, was partially masked by Mercury and by two figures of Peace that left the foreground to an enigmatic character, partially nude with bulging muscles. These detached fragments became unintelligible as historical scenes, and forcefully solicited a ‘disinterested’ gaze on the pictorial idealness of the figures: ‘Removed from their narrative sequence, the dense allegories of the scenes rendered them illegible except as figurative paintings and as examples of Rubens’s brush; the nude foreground figures became all the more prominent as signifiers of the Ideal.’13
The revolutionary declaration of the equality of subjects and the institution of the museum alone could thus not suffice to ensure the overthrow of the hierarchy. The addition of a supplementary but also a contradictory element was necessary. It was thus the revival of the art market, corresponding to the decline of the Revolution, which consecrated the little Flemish and Dutch works by opposing the ‘immortality of sales’ to the ‘immortality of biographies’.14 Prices from sales around 1800 for The Willows by Potter, or A Village Fête by Teniers, or The Ham Eater by the same artist, bear witness to this evolution. Later it was romantic travellers who transposed Winckelmann’s logic to works by painters from the Netherlands. Winckelmann had celebrated the perfection of the Greek and the Italian climate that gave an air of noblesse to the most destitute folk. Lacking sun, soft breezes and a clear blue sky, these travellers found paintings at every street corner and became exalted like Thoré in Ghent, ‘where the daughters of common people walk like princesses’ and where ‘Rubens found the type for his saintly women and the noble ladies in waiting of Marie de Medicis’.15 In 1824 the editor of the Globe had already dubbed Raphael and Adrian Brouwer as belonging to the same art: ‘Everything that belongs to the universe, from the highest to the lowest object, from the heavenly Sistine Madonna to Flemish drunkards, is worthy of being depicted in his works.’16 Here they founded a certain sociological republicanism of art, marking the conjunction between the life animating the pictorial surface and the equality of all subjects, which would be embodied in France by one man: Etienne Joseph Théophile Thoré, revolutionary deputy of the Second Republic, who, under the penname of Wilhelm Bürger, contributed to the glory of two artists still obscure in Hegel’s time: Franz Hals and Jan Vermeer. For Thoré, the equal attention that the older masters, Van Eyck, Memling or Roger Van der Weyden paid to ‘the landscape and its thousand accidents, to the blade of grass and rose branch or oak boughs, to the bird and the lion, to the cottage and the finest architecture’, was the sign of ‘a kind of pantheism, a naturalism, a realism, if you will’, characteristic of the Flemish or Dutch schools: ‘All classes of people, all the particularities of domestic life, all the manifestations of nature are accepted and glorified there.’17 In favour of the art of their time, the French contributing editors of L’Artiste began to develop this alliance between the freedom of art and the equality of subjects that makes genre painting the true historical painting. In the vibrations of the coloured surface it expressed the larger and deeper history of mores, the chronicle of ordinary people and everyday life that followed the hollow grandeurs of yesteryear. Nonetheless, this art would not be the art of the Second Republic in 1848. Instead, Joseph Chenavard was ordered to decorate the Panthéon with grand humanitarian frescoes. The rapid return of reactionary forces to power blocked the execution of these frescoes, but Chenavard’s sketches at least allowed the person who remains the French literature textbook inventor of l’art pour l’art, Théophile Gautier, to reveal himself as the most eloquent champion of programmatic humanitarian art.18
Hegel, for one, was invested in thinking exactly what art for art’s sake and art as the expression of a society had in common. He takes up the problem where revolutionary museographers set it aside: How is one to think through this ‘ideal’ that defines the excellence of painting, once it has been separated from criteria of academic excellence, from social grandeurs, or from its value as moral illustration? For the museographers of the new Louvre, the organization of the exhibition itself had to manifest the paintings’ belonging to the patrimony of freedom. Hegel wants to make this belonging appear on the very surface of the paintings, and especially on the prosaic works of genre painters scorned in the name of the demands of great art. This is precisely where one can best reveal the constitution of the Ideal that now makes up beauty. This is where its essential animating tension can be made manifest. This tension can be summarized simply: on the one hand, the freedom of the work signifies its indifference to its represented content. This freedom can thus appear purely negative: it relies only on the status of the works in museums where they are separated from their primary destination. Religious scenes or royal portraits, mythological compositions or domestic scenes, the paintings that yesterday were used to illustrate the truths of faith, to figure the grandeur of princes or to adorn aristocratic life, are offered in the same way to the gaze of anonymous visitors, ever less attentive to the meaning and the destination of the paintings. This indifference could mean that, from now on, painting is a simple matter of shapes and light, lines and colours. At first sight, the praise for Murillo’s little beggars or the Dutch or Flemish genre scenes seems to illustrate this idea. One must not misconstrue the ‘realism’ of the representation of the little beggar boys. It is itself the result of a process of abstraction. The child who lets himself be deloused is not simply the representation of everyday life in Seville. He is first a figure detached from another kind of painting, where he had a defined function: to illustrate the works of charity. On a painting hung on the walls of the Caridad hospital, the same Murillo depicted a very similar child. But it is Saint Isabella of Hungary who is busy cleaning his scabby forehead, while an old woman, like the attentive mother, appears as another patient in the hospital. The autonomy of painting is first and foremost the autonomy of its figures in relation to histories and allegories in which they had their place and their function. The representation of the destitute, people who have no importance on their own, allows for the upheaval of the illustration of subjects towards the pure potential of appearance. On the gallery walls, the light of the pictorial works shines indifferently on the quality of what it illuminates: ‘servants, old women, peasants blowing smoke from cutty pipes, the glitter of wine in transparent glass, chaps in dirty jackets playing old cards’.19 It is not the representation of these ordinary objects that makes for the value of the painting, but the glimmerings and reflections that animate its surface, ‘the pure appearance which is wholly without the sort of interest that the subject has’.20
This absence of interest is obviously not invoked by accident. It is the key word of the Kantian theory of aesthetic judgment. Hegel intends to show that this disinterestedness is not only the subjective property of judgment, but also the very content of painting, and especially the content of painting as such. Painting, in effect, is the art that does not merely describe things, as poets do, but makes them visible. But it is also the art that no longer concerns itself with filling space with volumes, analogous to the bodies it figures, as sculpture does. Rather, it uses its surface as the means to repudiate them: to mock their consistent solidity by making them appear through artificial means, but also illuminating their most evanescent aspect, closest to their shining and glittering surfaces, to the passing instant and the changing light. And it is also the art that manages to prove itself fully once it no longer serves any faith nor celebrates any self-perpetuating greatness: a village scene is something in which no social power seeks its image, it is thus what we look at for the pure ‘disinterested’ pleasure of enjoying the play of appearances. And it is this play of appearances that is the very realization of freedom of mind.
But a problem arises here: if the freedom of the painting consisted in this play alone, it would simply be identified with the virtuosity of the artist capable of transfiguring any profane reality. The Dutch painting would be privileged, since the very mediocrity of its subject shows that the virtuoso art of the maker of appearances is the only real content of painting, whatever its subject may be. But the relation between freedom of art and the indifference of subject does not allow itself to be resolved so easily; nor does the relation between profane life and artistic singularity. The freedom manifested by the insouciance of the characters depicted cannot simply be reduced to the freedom of indifference. The new concept of art demands – as a famous work by Kandinsky recalled in the next century – that it be the realization of content, of an inner necessary freedom. Hegel had already insisted as much: what is seen on the canvas is neither the life of the Golden Age peasant nor the dexterity of Teniers, Steen or Metsu. The play of appearances, light effects, and the jauntiness of the canvas must not arrive on top of the painting independently of the subject. They must reveal its true subject. The freedom incarnated on the canvas does not belong to the artist, but to the people able to domesticate hostile nature, end foreign domination, and gain religious freedom. Greek freedom was signified by indifference in the impassivity of the stone god. Dutch freedom was signified as the indifferent treatment of appearances in relation to the vulgarity of subjects. But this ‘indifferent’ treatment makes the non-vulgar, spiritual content of these subjects visible: the freedom of a people that gave itself its own way of life and prosperity, that can rejoice with ‘insouciance’ about the setting it gives itself after great pains, and rejoice in a disinterested way at the image of this universe, created by artifice, in the same way the child revels in the skipping of a stone skilfully thrown across the water’s surface. Hegel considers the child who throws pebbles to transform the natural landscape into the appearance of its own freedom as the originary figure of the artistic gesture, a figure itself inherited from the freedom that Winckelmann saw expressed in the indifferent movement of the waves. But the freedom of the child throwing stones is also the freedom that shaped him – that gave itself its own world by taming the sea and chasing the invader. Dutch liberty expresses itself in the modern art of painting which paints the reflection of light and water upon popular works and entertainments, as Greek freedom in classical art fashioned the serenity of gods.
Yet it not that easy to distinguish the joyful insouciance that characterizes the paintings of free Holland from the kind that spreads across the genre scenes of the Flemish people still under Spanish domination. It is even less simple to understand how the freedom of the heroic and industrious Dutch can be conferred upon the young beggars of Seville, these children of servitude, these children of the land of monarchy and superstition that had placed the Netherlands under its tutelage. It was necessary that they somehow find themselves in the Antwerp market, at the crossroads of Dutch freedom and Spanish servitude, integrated into the art of the people, in order to acquire their exemplarity. But on a deeper level, it was necessary that Dutch freedom, the freedom of an active people reflected on the polished surface of domestic objects represented by its painters, be identified with another freedom that could however seem to be its precise negation: that of the Olympic gods, that of the goddess celebrated by Schiller in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. Like the Juno Ludovisi, the little beggars enjoy the beatitude of those who have neither worry nor will, those who remain at rest, without any desire to speak or act. The Greek people attributed this absence of worry to their gods, the poet wrote, because it was the very essence of its liberty. He was probably thinking of the famous speech Thucydides attributed to Pericles, affirming that the military heroism of the Athenians had its source in their carefree lives. But the identity of hard work and heroic action with the absence of all worry had been affirmed by Winckelmann, who found its supreme embodiment in a Hercules at rest, lacking a head able to will and limbs able to act. If the insouciance with which the little Sevillian beggars eat their melon, play cards, or let themselves be picked for lice while munching bread, can express the artistic Ideal, it is because it comprises both the freedom of the modern people that gives itself a world through will power and that of the antique god who neither wants nor does anything. This idea of Greek freedom as the conjunction of supreme activity and perfect idleness, shaped by the shoemaker’s son Winckelmann, would later, as we know, during the French affirmation of collective will and great communitarian festivities, nourish the idea of a true revolution for young people, named Hegel, Schelling and Hölderlin – a revolution that would abolish the cold mechanics of the State and unite a philosophy that had become poetry and mythology with the sensible life of the people.
The author of the Lectures on Aesthetics stands on the other edge of the great revolutionary upheaval, when both the antique reconstitutions of the French revolutionaries and the dreams the revolution sparked in these young German philosophers and poets, now back to their senses, had subsided. And a few years earlier, in the same university, Professor Hegel, in his courses devoted to the philosophy of right, praised the formative influence of work and discipline, which left no room for reveries on the divine insouciance of these little beggars. But there are many kinds of wisdom, and Hegel’s wisdom does not celebrate the return to older values and traditions. Rather, in the forms and institutions of re-established order it shows the effective becoming-world of the liberty and equality carried yesterday by the cannons of republican armies and the dreams of a new Greece. Art and aesthetics are precisely two of these forms: an ensemble of places, institutions and forms of knowledge that welcome, make visible and intelligible the freedom inscribed in stone and on painted canvases, and especially on those paintings that incarnate the distinctly modern political liberty in the insouciance of their subjects: the freedom of the insurgent, protestant bourgeois of Holland rather than those belonging to the revolutionaries influenced by antiquity. This political liberty once it has passed onto the canvas, and been forgotten as an anecdote, provides the frame that allows us to see the freedom of painting present in the little lousy urchins of Seville, and in the dreaming young man of ‘Raphael’, this young man whose social identity is indefinable: What status could be denoted by this beret and this supple black dress, this nonchalant attitude, and this three-quarter pose that distorts the gaze and denies any intention of representing the social dignity of a character? Later art historians would conclude that here the artist – Correggio, one claims today – did not depict a client at all, but one of his peers, for fun, who might well be Parmigianino. The portraits that find themselves collected today in the physical and conceptual space of the museum – the free citizen, the oppressed little beggar of the people, and the young man without identity – make up only one single picture in the end: the portrait of the artist by the artist, the portrait of painting by itself.
Only, says Hegel, this being in itself is also a being outside oneself. There is no resemblance between the constitution of a free people and a burst of light on pots and plates. The freedom of painting is realized entirely within this gap, in this ‘subject’ that imposes itself on the artist, that robs him of the desire to do what he wants, that reduces the pure virtuosity he would like to exhibit to a vain technique. Northern painting falls into decadence when painters become specialists – one in the brilliance of a certain fabric, the other in metallic reflections. And with this, painting in general becomes what it is for us in museums: an art of the past. The heroic age of Dutch painting has passed, like the mythic age of Greek liberty. Painting no longer has its proper subject – that is to say, no improper subject, no subject that puts it outside itself in order to make divine freedom shine upon the foreheads and in the gazes of street children. Painters, from this point onwards, imitate painting. Some imitate scenes of Dutch and Flemish genre painting. But if tavern scenes can be imitated, liberty cannot, and the genre paintings of German painters exhibited at the 1828 salon only show us bitter and mean-looking petits-bourgeois. Others want to renew the great tradition of the Ideal incarnated in Raphael’s Roman frescoes. But on the walls of the salon, as in the churches they decorate, the ‘ideal’ turns out to be the absence of flesh, the simple invocation of itself. The true successors of genre painters are not painters any more: they are romantic writers, says Hegel, those who tirelessly animate the prosaic places and episodes that are the theatre of their cock-and-bull stories with the wings of their ‘free fantasy’. The freedom shining on the children of the street becomes pure poetic ornament in their prose, the ‘whatever’ that the artist’s empty freedom adds to any reality whatsoever.
Art is thus a thing of the past. As the patrimony of freedom, it finds its own place as part of the décor of a matured and wizened liberty, realized in a rational world of exchange, administration and knowledge. However, in this well organized past, the professor’s reverie introduces a singular call to what is to come. The professor of aesthetics does not merely celebrate the insouciance of these little beggars in his chair where, a few years earlier, the professor of the philosophy of law stigmatized laziness and mocked the ideal of the noble savage, content with the gifts of nature. For this Olympian adolescent that he has composed with the mixed traits of Murillo’s little beggar and the enigmatic young man of ‘Raphael’, he predicts a future that is just as unlimited as it is undetermined: one can expect anything from this young man, anything could come of him. There are many ways of imagining this future. The boy to come might have the features of the kid who accompanies ‘liberty guiding the people’, gun in hand, after the Parisian revolution of July 1830, on Delacroix’s painting. He is more clearly recognizable, no doubt, in the figure of Gavroche, whom Victor Hugo knocks down on the republican barricades, a kid just as insouciant among the bullets whizzing past him as the little kids eating grapes and melon or the young dreamer of the Louvre. But this politicization of the Sevillian kid admired by Hegel is also a prolongation of his meditation. On the walls of the Munich gallery, in the eyes of the philosopher who had been inspired by the French Revolution, the little beggars inherited Dutch freedom. In the prose of the exiled opponent, Victor Hugo, the insouciant child takes on this ‘freedom’ once more, on literature’s account, where the heroism of freedom fighters and the indifference of the little gods of the street are confounded. A century later a filmmaker who was hardly a revolutionary, Robert Bresson, made his child heroine, little Mouchette, an heir to Bara, the child martyr of the French armies of liberty immortalized by David’s brush.
The future of the insouciant child thus reopens what philosophy declared closed. The equal insouciance of the Olympic god and the Flemish drinker, of the Sevillian beggar and the young Italian dreamer, is not only preserved in the patrimony of art that is of the past. Art is not condemned to exhaust itself in the will to make art, in fantasy play and demonstrations of virtuosity. The disjunction between art and the beautiful, necessary for the beauty of art, would be found everywhere by the novelists of social comedy and the painters of new urban entertainment and Sunday outings, opening the path for those new artists, who would benefit from an unprecedented weapon in the quest to realize the union of art with non-art: the mechanical eye that does not know what it is to make of art or beauty. A thoughtless few stigmatized this machine that came to do the work of art. Others praised it, on the contrary, for liberating art from the tasks of resemblance. Perhaps both positions miss the aesthetic heart of the problem. No doubt it would have required the philosopher’s gaze on the Sevillian child to understand what the machine would give art: the availability of this non-art without which art could no longer live. The afterlife of the Sevillian child and the young dreamer in the beret is undoubtedly given its most exact formulation by Walter Benjamin, when he is speaking about the photographs of New Haven fishwives by David Octavius Hill: photographs where reality had burnt the image-character, where non-art had pierced a hole that placed it at the heart of what could henceforth be experienced as art.
1 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, ed. T. M. Knox, vol. I (Oxford: OUP, 1988), p. 170.
2 Some of the dictionaries of painting in use in the eighteenth century mention three Spanish painters – Velasquez, Murillo and Ribera – but none includes a Spanish School. For details, see Ilse Hempel Lipschutz, Spanish Painting and the French Romantics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972).
3 Maria de los Santos Garcia Felguera, La Fortuna de Murillo: 1682–1900 (Seville: Diputación Provincial de Sevilla, 1989), p. 48.
4 Le Moniteur Universel, 3 vendémiaire an III, 1842, reprint, vol. XXII, pp. 26–7.
5 Notice des principaux tableaux recueillis dans la Lombardie par les commissaires du gouvernement français dont l’Exposition provisoire aura lieu dans le grand salon du Muséum les Octidis, Nonidis et Décadis, à compter du 18 pluviôse jusqu’au 30 prairial an VI (Paris, Imprimerie des Sciences et des Arts, 1798), p. ii.
6 Berlinische Nachrichten, 26 October 1815, quoted by Benédicte Savoy, ‘Conquêtes et consécrations’, in Roberta Panzanelli and Monica Preti-Hamard, eds, La Circulation des œuvres d’art, 1789–1848 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007), p. 85.
7 Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 130.
8 ‘Rapport du Conservatoire du Muséum national des arts, fait par varon, un de ses membres, au Comité d’Instruction publique, le 26 mai 1794’, in Yveline Cantarel-Besson, ed., La Naissance du Musée du Louvre: la politique muséologique sous la Révolution d’après les archives des musées nationaux: [procès verbaux des séances du Conservatoire du Muséum national des arts] (Paris: Editions de la Réunion des Musées nationaux, 1981), vol. 2, p. 228. The allusion to Alexander’s tent refers to a painting by Lebrun long considered a masterpiece of historical painting.
9 Pierre Chaussard in La Décade Philosophique, year VIII, first trimester, p. 212, quoted by H. Van der Tuin, Les Vieux peintres des Pays-Bas et la critique artistique en France de la première moitié du XIXe siècle (Paris: J. Vrin, 1948), p. 58.
10 Rapport de Varon, quoted in Cantarel-Besson, Naissance du musée du Louvre, p. 228.
11 P. Chaussard, Sur le tableau des Sabines par David (Paris: C. Pougens, 1800), p. 17.
12 Cantarel-Besson, Naissance du musée du Louvre, p. 228.
13 Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth Century Paris (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), pp. 110–11.
14 Charles Lenormant, Les Artistes contemporains. Salon de 1833, vol. II (Paris: A. Mesnier, 1833), pp. 116–17. In the margins of a commentary about a Decamps painting, Lenormant opposes the ‘passionate attention’ that genre paintings by a Metsu or a Mieris spark in the auctions to the icy reception reserved for historical paintings, which used to be considered timeless.
15 Théophile Thoré, ‘Rubens en Flandre’, L’Artiste, 4th series (1841–46), vol. V, p. 218ff., quoted in Van der Tuin, Les Vieux Peintres des Pays-Bas, p. 34.
16 Le Globe, 17 September 1824, quoted in ibid., p. 61.
17 Théophile Thoré, ‘Musée d’Anvers’ (Brussels: C. Murquardt, 1862), pp. 34–5.
18 The seven articles Gautier devoted to Chenavard’s project in La Presse from 5 to 11 September 1848 were reprinted in his collection, L’Art Moderne (Paris: M. Lévy Frères, 1856), pp. 1–94.
19 Hegel, Aesthetics, p. 162.
20 Ibid. p. 598.
