Jeremy Hacker
Project Outline
Impressionism and Desire
If a photograph could capture desire perfectly and fulfil our longing of achieving a powerful aesthetic moment, then why bother painting at all? There must be some reason artists, particularly painters, choose to work with particular mediums with a specific choice of what gets put onto that medium. The impressionist painter before the end of the 19th century began to play with light, time, subjective focus, and a different portrayal of desire, but why? One only has to look at realistic paintings, near photographic in viewing, such as William Adolphe Bouguereau’s, The Birth of Venus, to see what impressionism is potentially and most likely responding to. The woman of this painting is portrayed as a heavenly, godlike woman who stands among cupids in an otherworldly oceanic scene. This painting and Titian’s, Venus of Urbino, both represent the popular, traditional style of depiction of Venus, and painting, which poses the ideal vs the real. With these two paintings in mind, we can look at two Caillebotte paintings, Nude Woman and The Floor Scrapers, and immediately see a shift in perception and reception of art. Nude Woman portrays a naked woman lying on a couch, hardly in a position to care for the viewer, and The Floor Scrapers has an undertone of homosexuality and a brief glimpse of modernism-the idea of scraping out the old and bringing in the new. An immediate contrast immediately surfaces between photorealistic realism painting and impressionism, being their choice of engagement with the viewer and desire’s role in affluence of that view. Realism was held to a high standard of tradition, which art critics didn’t fail to impose on the rise of impressionism, confused and bitter with what they thought shoddy and not well-done painting. The viewer is thus confronted with having to wrestle with the ideas present in these paintings, rather than be pleased with immediate satiation of desire through realism. There’s nothing comfortable about staring at Caillebotte’s Nude Woman, but you can’t help go through a list of questions as to why this piece of furniture is there, who is she, what has happened, etc., whereas in the realistic paintings I’ve brought up don’t leave much room for the imagination as their story unfolds like a fill-in-the-blank picture book.
Why does it matter to look at an art style over 100 years old, when modern art already presents extensive questions about art’s importance and purpose? With any artistic medium there is a tradition and history ingrained in it, because an art style doesn’t spring from nothing. I imagine it is a widely held, firm belief that modern art has its roots from impressionist ideas, particularly the way in which impressionism shifted the viewer’s focus, playing with their desire and anticipation. With the change of time come the change of society, yet when one lingers with impressionism they can’t help but see ideas still prevalent today, particularly with the way we address our desires toward sexuality and commercialism. My goal is to look at the poignant themes which impressionism responds to, and correlate those ideas toward modern times, with desire as a main emphasis in both the viewer and artist’s frame of mind. What I’ve done so far is to give a brief explanation of impressionism’s relationship with desire, but I’ve yet to examine desire. Beside the common sense response to the question: what is desire, I’m curious as to what and where desire comes from. In an examination of Lacan’s psychoanalysis of desire, Borch-Jacobsen has summarized Lacan: “Unknowable, unreal, denatured, sexually neuter, the ‘object’ of desire is therefore a non-object, a negated object.” (1) If we’re to look at impressionism with this theory as a lens, then what ideas about human desire can we uncover, particularly with what we choose to pine over, and what can the past say about, and even change, the way we think of the present? With a psychoanalytical approach in examining desire, and viewing how shifts of art styles occur as influenced by culture and time, I will try and show how and what role desire plays through looking at key impressionist paintings.
Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. “Desire Caught by the Tail.” Lacan: The Absolute Master. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991. 202. Print.