The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp, and Avant-Gardism. - book reviews

For Jensen, that mythic speech is the false dichotomy of the commercial versus the noncommercial. As he writes:

I have found no polarization more exemplary of modernist rhetoric than the endlessly voiced distinction between authentic art and commodities, an opposition central to the definition of "avant-gardism." . . . The dialogue of money and art is manifest in the language, in the institutions, and in the actions of modernist artists and their audiences. It is a discourse that is at once narrow and wide, that invades and colonizes many discourses, while in many respects remaining singular and untouched by them. This protean relationship has become so bound up with the rise of modernism and its accompanying discourses that they can never be separated. The attempt to separate them is itself one of the central tropes on which modernist criticism has been based. The narrative about art and money is just one of many possible narratives, but one that I hope elucidates the manifold nature of the dialogue, or better perhaps, the aporias of art and money within the context of the rise of modernism. The two partners remain alien to one another, though always, endlessly intertwined. (p. 10)

The intertwining of art and money is nowhere more evident than in the emergent class of entrepreneurial dealers to whom Jensen gives the title "the ideological dealer" (p. 49). By ideological, Jensen does not mean political, but instead, a dealer concerned with constructing an art-historical lineage for his wares. Furthermore, the ideological dealer is an "enlightened" dealer, a "visionary," dedicated less to his own financial gain than to the "altruistic" mission of displaying contemporary art for the public good, for an audience (p. 49).

Exemplary in the circle of these "enlightened" and "altruistic" dealers is Durand-Ruel, who in 1869 began the process of promoting himself as "a Medici of contemporary art - for whom commerce was an unfortunate sideline" (p. 56). Interestingly, and somewhat paradoxically, although his practices were fundamentally important to the creation of the dominant fiction of modernist autonomy, it was not the "ideological" Durand-Ruel's Impressionists, but the more classically "entrepreneurial" Georges Petit's artists of the juste milieu who first circulated widely throughout Europe, both in galleries and within the Secessionist organizations of the 1890s.

The juste milieu, a term originally used to describe a form of painting that reconciled classicism to Romanticism during the July Monarchy, and was then extended by Albert Boime to describe a "compromise movement" in the Third Republic,(3) is redefined by Jensen as less a particular aesthetic movement than a useful analytic tool:

The juste milieu understood as a tool, and not an "entity" or a "movement," allows for a new perspective from which to view fin-de-siecle art politics and the game of establishing an artist's "modernist" or "qualitative" credentials.... The Kunst-politik of the juste milieu is contained within a history of those quintessential art institutions of the 1890s, the Societe nationale des beaux-arts and the international Secessionist phenomenon. The demonstrable decline after 1900 of the reputations of the juste milieu may also tell us much about the formation of the Impressionist canon, a canon that explicitly excluded the juste milieu and in so doing destroyed those artists' cultural and market value. The destruction of the juste milieu paradoxically marked the moment when Impressionism's co-equality with modernism was torn apart. In challenging the naturalist position of their "fathers," the Post-Impressionists also laid claim to their exclusive right to be the "sons." In the process, the juste milieu were no longer able to claim to be the true, authentic inheritors of a living Impressionist tradition. (pp. 140-41)