Harris Jonathan - Social History of Art, Volume 3

THE fact that the development of courtly art, which had been almost uninterrupted since the close of the Renaissance, comes to a standstill in the eighteenth century and is superseded by the bourgeois subjectivism which, on the whole, still dominates our own conception of art today, is well known, but the fact that certain features of the new trend are already present in the rococo itself and that the break with courtly tradition really takes place in the first half of the eighteenth century is not so generally familiar. For, although we do not enter the bourgeois world before Greuze and Chardin appear, Boucher and Largillire already bring us very close to it. The tendency towards the monumental, the ceremonious and the solemn already disappears in the early rococo and makes room for a more delicate and intimate quality. In the new art preference is given to colour and shades of expression rather than to the great, firm, objective line and the note of sensuality and sentiment is to be heard in all its manifestations. Therefore, although in some respects the Dixhuitime is nothing more than the continuation, indeed the consummation, of baroque splendour and pretension, the uncompromising way in which the seventeenth century insisted on the grand got as a matter of course is foreign to it. Even when they are intended for the highest classes of society, its creations lack the grand heroic mould. But, naturally, the art we are dealing with here is still a very aloof, very refined and essentially aristocratic art, an art which regards the criteria of the pleasant and the conventional as more decisive than those of spirituality and spontaneity, an art in which work is performed in accordance with a fixed, universally acknowledged and constantly repeated pattern, and of which nothing is more characteristic than the masterly, though all too often purely external technique of the execution. These conventional elements of the rococo, which derive from the baroque, are only gradually dissolved and replaced by the characteristics of bourgeois taste.

The attack on the baroque-rococo tradition ensues from two different directions, but is based in both cases on the same opposition to courtly taste. The emotionalism and naturalism represented by Rousseau and Richardson, Greuze and Hogarth, is one, the rationalism and classicism of Lessing and Winckelmann, Mengs and David, the other. Both oppose the ideal of simplicity and the earnestness of a puritan outlook on life to the courtly taste for ostentation. In England the transformation of courtly into bourgeois art takes place earlier and is carried out more thoroughly than in France itself where the baroque-rococo tradition continues underground and is still perceptible in the romantic movement. But, at the close of the century, the only important art in Europe is bourgeois. It is possible to differentiate between a progressive and a conservative trend within the middle class, but a living art expressing aristocratic ideals and serving court purposes no longer exists. In the whole history of art and culture, the transfer of leadership from one social class to another has seldom taken place with such absolute exclusiveness as here, where the aristocracy is completely displaced by the middle class and the change in taste, which puts expression in the place of decoration, could not possibly be any clearer.

To be sure, this is not the first time that the middle class appears on the scene as the upholder of taste. As early as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a leading position was held all over Europe by an art of a predominantly middle-class character. It was not until the later Renaissance and the age of mannerism and baroque that its place was taken by works in the courtly style. But in the eighteenth century, when the middle class again attains economic, social and political power, the ceremonial art of the courts, which had meanwhile come into its own, breaks up2 again and yields to the unrestricted sway of middle-class taste. It was only in Holland that there was already a middle-class art of high standing in the seventeenth century and one much more thoroughly and consistently middle-class than the Renaissance, which was interspersed with chivalric-romantic and mystical-religious elements. But this Dutch middle-class art remained an almost completely isolated phenomenon in the Europe of the time and, when the eighteenth century established modern middle-class art, it did not link up directly with this earlier manifestation. There could be no question of a continuous development, if only because Dutch painting itself lost much of its middle-class character in the course of the seventeenth century. Both in France and England, the art of the modern middle class had its real origins in social changes at home; these had inevitably to be the basis of the displacement of the courtly conception of art, and the stimulation received from contemporary philosophical and literary movements was bound to be stronger than that from the art of countries remote in time and space.

The development which reaches its political climax in the French Revolution, and its artistic objective in romanticism, begins in the Rgence with the undermining of the royal power as the principle of absolute authority, with the disorganization of the court as the centre of art and culture and the dissolution of baroque classicism as the artistic style in which the power-strivings and power-consciousness of absolutism found their direct expression. The ground for this process is already prepared for during the reign of Louis XIV. The endless wars throw the finances of the country into confusion; the public exchequer becomes empty and the population impoverished, since it is impossible to create tax-payers by whippings and imprisonment and economic supremacy by wars and conquests. Even during the lifetime of the roi soleil critical remarks about the consequences of autocracy are heard. Fnelon is already quite candid in this respect, but Bayle, Malebranche and Fontenelle go so far that it has been rightly maintained that the crisis of the European spirit, the history of which fills the eighteenth century, was in full swing from 1680 onwards. The Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns marks the beginning of the conflict between tradition and progress, classicism and modernism, rationalism and emotionalism, which was to be settled in the pre-romanticism of Diderot and Rousseau.

and began his reign by reacting against the old methods all along the line. In the political and social spheres he strove for a renaissance of the nobility, in the economic sphere he favoured individual enterprises, such as that of Law, for example, he introduced a new style in the way of life of the upper classes and made a vogue of hedonism and libertinism. A condition of general disintegration began, which none of the old ties was able to resist. Some of them were reconstituted later on, but the old system was now shattered once and for all. The first act of state of Philip of Orlans was to annul the will of the departed king, which provided for the recognition of his illegitimate children. That was the beginning of the decline of the kings authority, which, in spite of the continuance of the absolute monarchy, was never to be restored to its former greatness. The exercise of supreme power became more and more arbitrary, but the confidence of those in power became more and more unsettleda process best described in the often quoted words of Marshal Richelieu to Louis XVI: Under Louis XIV no one dared open his mouth, under Louis XV everyone whispered, now everyone speaks aloud and in a perfectly free and easy way. To think of assessing the real power of the state on the basis of government orders and decrees would be, as Tocqueville remarks, a ridiculous error. Sanctions, such as the famous death penalty for the writing and spreading of books against religion and public order, remained on paper. The worst penalty the guilty had to pay was to leave the country, and they were often warned and protected by the very officials whose duty it was to prosecute them. In the age of Louis XIV the whole intellectual life was still under the protection of the king; there was no defence apart from him, much less any defence against him. New protectors, new patrons and new centres of culture now arise; art develops very largely, literature entirely, away from the court and the king.