THE 1850s AND 1860s

The 1850s and 1860s have habitually been seen as the crucial turning point in cultural modernity. These are the years in which Manet and Flaubert are said to set culture on a new course. Modernité is born in Paris. The means of representation, the signs, symbols, and media themselves become the fundamental subject of art, rather than being deployed primarily in the service of expression or mimesis. As T.J. Clark puts it, Manet places 'a stress on the material means by which illusions and likeness are made' (Clark 1985: 10). Frequently, it has therefore been thought that the role of the historian-cum-theorist of cultural modernity is to reflect back upon the way in which this defining change took place, for better or for worse. In so doing, we understand the very grounds of our specifically modern cultural condition, and can meditate upon it and upon its consequences. This mode of thought might be termed a recognition: we experience a prise de conscience in which we comprehend from our history what it is to be modern. Some of the most influential essays and books of the twentieth century were based upon such an approach, from Greenberg through Clark and Fried, to Bourdieu and Foucault. To give just one example, Foucault in his 'Fantasia of the Library' (1967) tells us that Flaubert was 'singularly modern', because he 'produced the first literary work whose exclusive domain is that of books'. Consequently, 'modern literature is activated'. Similarly, Manet brings 'the new and substantial relationship of painting to itself' (Foucault 1977: 90, 92). It is but a step from here to the erasure of the face of man, and the death of the author: the text and the sign now predominate. We must recognise this major shift in our discourse, and consider its implications. These various attempts at what we might term the recognition of cultural modernity are not, however, unproblematic. In particular, there have been widespread challenges to the centrality of the French model of modernity, not least in the history of art. It has been pointed out that the Francocentric approach creates a perilous circularity. Any text or work of art will be deemed 'not truly modern' if it does not agree with the line of thought attributed to the canonical French figures. This has been the fate, for example, of the Catalan artist Fortuny, and of the Italian Macchiaioli, dubbed failed moderns …