Aisthesis. Jacques Ranciere

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