Monet who most clearly opened up an ironic perspective on the new social relations of the

seaside. His numerous holiday paintings coolly record the stiff separation of these bourgeois family
members, the emblems of nationality in the flags everywhere, penetrating and intermingling with
the
sought-for ‘nature’, the casino eclipsing the church in his view of the promenade at Sainte-Adresse,
as though
to highlight the arbitrary fortunes created by the new speculative commercial ventures. Within such
an ironic
mode, from the 1860s to the mid-1870s, Impressionism created the seaside for its subject:

It was only at the end of his life that Monet came to paint the depopulated landscapes of the
Normandy
coast, along with his turn to water-lilies, and to stress in these beach scenes the ravaging destruction
of an
angry sea. It is as though there was now a gulf between nature and the human world that was
lacking before.
Yet by 1863 the Academic system was in tatters. Bourdieu describes this as the bankruptcy of the
fiduciary capital of the State artistic culture, that is, of the system through which
the State, rather like a central bank, creates the creators guaranteeing the credit or fiduciary
currency represented by

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the title of duly-accredited painter. (1993a: 251)

From the 1880s the Academy ceased to control the École des Beaux Arts. The tones in which
Bourdieu
describes this are in terms of the educational crisis faced by another type of homo academicus – that
of
students and university staff in 1968. What emerged from these challenges and changes was a
collective
conversion to a new structure of exhibition and distribution based on the critic-dealer system
(Bourdieu,
1993a; White and White, 1965). From that time on there is the emergence of a ‘new eye’, the
spectator of
modernity. ‘Manet dooms the academic eye’ (Bourdieu, 1993a: 248), and in doing so creates a ‘new
world’.
Manet is the revolutionary within this academic world (1994a: 148–9). He massively subverts the
institution of art by refusing submission to its sacred authority. To this hieratic art, born from the
moral
career of discipline and order of the priestly hierarchy, Manet’s art possesses the upstart originality
of one
who appears to lack rigour. In a brilliant perspectivai gaze, Bourdieu thus renews the potential for a
historical
understanding of Manet using an interpretative study of contemporary reviews. He foregrounds,
first, the
view of the threatened academicians and subsequently that of the Manet circle.

Manet treats the artistic heritage the way Benjamin’s flâneur handles merchandise. The Louvre is a
passage, a market
stand, where the painter strikes his bargain. (Clay, 1985: 3)

• It is surprising that Bourdieu does not theorise the inhospitable space of the first avant-
garde to women more systematically. For understanding their omission from traditional art
histories does not mean merely putting the women back in, discovering a hidden heritage
lost in auction rooms or even a subculture with subterranean connections. It means, rather,
perceiving how the whole field of cultural production is structured in such a way as to
marginalise women artists. This occurs through the basic categories of traditional art history,
the monograph and catalogue raisonné, which celebrate the single creative individual, the
division between art and craft, and the privileging of certain forms of art over other types of
artistic expression

• It is true that the women in some respects benefited from the decline of the Academy and
its institutionalised patriarchy: the emergence of independent studios in which women
painters could be taught meant an unprecedented increase in the numbers of women
painters in Paris… The women Impressionists had to negotiate this barrier. For some, an
effective marriage bar meant that they gave up painting even if talented (Edmé Morisot)
(Parker and Pollock, 1981: 43). Others viewed their work less as the public and professional
activity identified with male artists than as one that they combined with domesticity and
especially the management of the bourgeois household (for example, Berthe Morisot). It is
noteworthy that none of the women Impressionists had to live off art, as Bonheur had done
in the 1840s and as the working-class artists’ model, Suzanne Valadon, was to do in the
1880s. It is the consequent lack of self-image as pioneering bohemians that may well explain
why painters like Berthe Morisot or Cassatt, however strong and subtle in developing light
palettes and sketchy brushstrokes, failed to develop the experimental drive of Manet, Seurat
and some of Monet’s work. Their distinctive angle of vision led them to a domestic Realism,
with less distanced representations of the female or child subject, but not to the epoch-
making new subjects represented by Dejeuner (1863), or the Bar at the Folies Bergères

• In particular, the sphere of consumption liberated men for a whole new way of seeing, but
this was not the case for women. Respectable women were denied access to many of the
new sites of modernity, sites which were always available to the lions’ of the Jockey Club.
Clark was the first to show the Impressionists ‘trespassing’ on such popular or risqué spaces,
but a gender perspective on the women Impressionists is only unevenly offered. The
subjects of Impressionism are revealingly totted up by Pollock in a table entitled the ‘erotic
territories of modernity’, which graphically differentiates between the ‘ladies’ portrayed in
the parks and theatre loges by both male and female painters (Cassatt and Morisot) and the
‘fallen women’ of the backstage theatre, the cafés, the folies and the brothels, who were the
subjects of Manet, Guys, Degas and, to a lesser extent, Renoir but none of the women
(Pollock, 1988b: 73).10

• These women painters nevertheless possessed a distinctive iconography. Their paintings

betray their restrictions, for we can see how the angle of vision creates enclosures
 (balustrades, verandas, fences) within which their female subjects are placed (see, for
example, Berthe Morisot’s The Harbour at L’Orient (1869) or her On the Balcony (1872)

For Bourdieu, the essence of newness in art was the attack on the hegemony of literary or narrative
values so as to remove the appearance of natural necessity in the choice of means of representation
(1993a: 247).Thus the painterly constructivism evident in Manet’s sketchy brushstrokes or the tonal
weight of his patchesof colour is the consequence of the anti-illusionistic demystification of the
artistic prophet. As in a Brechtiangaze at classicist certainties, the ‘new eye’ promotes the conflict
over style to a political act: one which in
itself destroys the taken-for-granted classifications rooted in the rules of form. For regulation is
always linked
to the sense of order imposed by the academic artist as a delegate of the State. He is right, surely,
that such
art was a crucial part of the cantilevered support structures for a much wider set of representations
which had
once extended from bottom to pinnacle so as to legitimate the whole regime of Louis-Philippe.

that Manet is not just revolutionary by innovating new means of production. He is also
revolutionary in the choice of subject and its meaning. Secondly, while Bourdieu is correct in seeing
the
emergent organisations of art as a new anomie (that is, a new narrowing of the sphere of control by
the
collective consciousness), he has failed to explore the ways in which this artistic de-regulation both
reflected
and represented the economic anomie of the new consumer industries (Durkheim, 1989: 254–8).
Bourdieu is right that Manet and Impressionism have to be understood in terms of positions taken
up
within the autonomous field, and in part as a movement of renewal springing from a critical
response to the
older, established generation of Realists. He just doesn’t carry this far enough.
In other words, if Realism had a rural subject, Impressionism had an urban focus. If Realism depicted
work, Impressionism depicted leisure.

Rather, Manet in particular and the Impressionists in general failed to

gain a public understanding of their work because they wanted to do things which were often the
work of
popular genres. They were exploring the nature of the new social relations. To put it at its most
bland,
painting, for them, needed a fresh iconography. This is concerned with the nature of modem
existence, and
especially with the experience of the ‘new social strata’ whose entry into the spectacular arena of
modem
consumption was being initiated.

Bourdieu’s perspective on Impressionism takes very much the conventional view of Impressionism
as a
revolution in form, even while it provides an analysis of its historical genesis. I have suggested that
this fails
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91
to take account of the artists’ interests in new types of bourgeois and popular culture. However, it is
permissible to accept Bourdieu’s concern for the attenuated place of objective representation within
Impressionist art, but only at a much later date, certainly not earlier than the mid-1870s (see
Frascina et al.,
1993).
The new autonomous art of late Impressionism and post-Impressionism gradually forgoes Pissarro’s
peasant, Caillebotte’s narrative interests in his subjects (which came to seem old-fashioned and
redundant)
and Manet’s sharp critical awareness of the social realities of the metropolis through the percipience
of the
flâneur. A similar point can be made about Monet. By the 1880s a gulf between the natural and the
human
worlds had opened up. Monet now paints angry seas and deserted beaches as though to point to
the revenge
of the elements on the social. It is this deepened disenchantment of the world, associated too early
by
Bourdieu with Manet’s ‘fresh eye’, which now precipitates the singular interest in the ‘permanent
revolution’
of form. In other words, Bourdieu’s weakness, in terms of Impressionism, is his failure to show its
early
character and the potential for the restricted field to develop artistically in several different
trajectories, each
profoundly affected by the nature of the specific period and the constituents of the avant-garde.
Despite these
omissions, Bourdieu’s analysis provides the important parameters of a new sociological history of
the
development of capitalism, the class nature of the avant-garde and the critic-dealer system. For
critics such as
Greenberg, by contrast, artistic autonomy is presented as an aesthetic imperative, as an embattled
and lonely
modernist remnant struggles with historicist certainty in a perpetual conflict against kitsch (1961).
Bourdieu has written on numerous occasions of the battle over social classifications implicit in
changes in
representations. His emphasis on the conflicts within linguistic signs – ‘in revolutionary situations
common
words take on different meanings’ (1991: 40 and n.29, 264) – could easily be extended to the study
of Manet
and the Impressionists. Moreover, he never reduces representations to mere superstructural
insignificance but
considers them a part of every action, an element of society in the mind. Yet, for all this, Bourdieu
still views
Impressionism as a group of painters unduly obsessed with the effects of light and with the desire to
impress
on the spectator the conventional nature of colour. He has neglected the fact that Manet and the
earlier
Impressionists were extending the scope of Realism to include the Utopian moments of everyday life
and that
they possessed a subcultural outlook, linking their resistance to other forms. This does not imply
that they
were always successful – Olympia, for example, cannot quite solve the contradictions inscribed in its
contours (Clark, 1980: 39) – but they did provide an ironic, distanced perspective on social relations
within a
regime that had a ‘protofascist’ character. Concerned to prick the inflated bubble of the cult of art,
Bourdieu
removes these elements from view.

2 heading
Manet’s painting was ‘a dance with ideology’, made more effective by its artistic
allusions – his new themes of consumption and leisure, middle-class idylls and fears. It is this
disruptive
power that lies behind his political liberalism, his ‘madness’. In this sense I argue that Manet cannot
simply
be seen, with Bourdieu, as the painter who abandoned ‘finish’, destroyed solidity, disrupted
perspective
conventions and introduced blocks of black: rather these changes in signifier occurred because the
relations
he depicted were simultaneously cut free of tradition, and provided graphic representations of the
new impact
of money and class.

Castagnary, the Realist critic, might have attacked Manet for

not sufficiently addressing ‘society as it is’, but it remains true that Manet’s painting both opened up
new
spaces – the theatre and the boulevard rather than the cathedral and the palace – and depicted new
personalities, through whom the subjective experience of modernity was conveyed. In other words,
with
Manet we have ignoble subjects, ignoble styles and even ignoble pastiche.

As Bourdieu realises, the career of Manet poses the question of formalism especially sharply. Yet the
recent
turnaround in Manet studies has balanced his revolutions in form with reappraisals of the meanings
of his
works.
Despite the brilliance of his typification of bohemia, Bourdieu understates its precise significance for
Manet as the location of stigmatised groups. Manet painted various pictures of bohemians in his
early work:
Les ‘Saltimbanques’ (drawing 1861), The Water-Drinkers (drawing, 1862), The Old Musician (1862)
and
Gypsy with a Cigarette (1862). Further work has now shown that the artist did not just associate
himself with
bohemia as a refusal of the ascetic work ethic of the bourgeoisie. In fact Manet was valorising the
image of
gypsies in a quite oppositional manner, for gypsies had historically been associated with the stigma
of
outcasts, seen as Jews or their associates, child and animal thieves, by the rural peasantry, and as
pariahs by
authorities (Brown, 1978: 31). The gypsies who had encamped triumphantly on the Champs-Élysées
during
the 1848 Revolution had been recently evicted: