Painting the Difference: Sex and Spectator in Modern Art (review)

Painting the Difference offers a gripping interpretation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century images, mostly paintings, mostly of women. The artists Harrison discusses are modernist icons: Renoir, Manet, Cézanne, Degas, Morisot, Cassatt, Picasso, Matisse, Bonnard, and Rothko. But he brings these canonical painters into entirely fresh focus by showing how their techniques develop from a driving concern with the question of just who is seeing what paintings reveal. Harrison's central claim is that this self-consciousness arises from a sustained confrontation with the social domination at work in the male regard, including the painter's regard, that shapes the appearance of women's bodies in modern life. Competent engagement with modernist paintings, on this view, depends on apprehending the aesthetic force of sexual difference.

Modernist self-consciousness in painting, Harrison says, arises out of a practical puzzlement about how a painting can show the spectator in the painting through whose viewpoint the spectator of the painting imaginatively sees the depicted content. This is a quandary for the modern age, a postaristocratic epoch when the question of whom paintings address admits no stable answer. Although expressed by Harrison using concepts of Richard Wollheim's, this issue is also familiar from theorists such as Michael Fried and Stanley Cavell for whom an art becomes modern when it takes up, as an insight about itself, the realization that the forms in which humans know things also impede acknowledgment of the quiddity of things known. Artistic modernism, in this light, is a species of skepticism about the cognitive power of appearances coupled, sometimes, with an artistic effort to defeat that skepticism. But while this view is familiar, Harrison's take on it is unique, because he sees the viewpoint at stake in modernist paintings as gendered specifically male. The central dialectic pursued by Harrison is that a male viewpoint is both the subjective condition of possibility for the visible scenes and a shadow over them. To make this shadow itself visible to spectators of modernist paintings requires staging a confrontation in paintings between male authority and the depicted bodies of women that submit to and embody it. But just as looking at a voyeur hobbles his visual authority, showing the male regard in painting challenges its canonical aesthetic authority. If contesting canonical authority over how things should look is a core dynamic of artistic modernism, it follows that "painting the difference" is one key to understanding it. Summing up his reading of Renoir's Les parapluies, Harrison writes, "It was first and foremost in pictures of women that artists in the later nineteenth century generally learned and practiced techniques both for the representation of self-consciousness in pictured figures and for the stimulation of self-consciousness in engaged spectators" (36).

Harrison's tracing of gendered self-consciousness amply augments our understanding of modernist painting. But two significant consequences of his interpretation, in my view, make Painting the Difference invaluable. The first has to do with the source of modernist aesthetic norms. Harrison argues that it is not sufficient to grasp the achievement of Renoir, Manet, et al. merely to grasp that through their work "the decorum of the classical broke down" (65). That they negated received aesthetic authority is unquestionable, but their deep aim remained positive throughout: to depict the social and sexual relations required to make the human figure visually intelligible, even if doing so required sacrificing easy pictorial legibility. Realism thus came to cut against familiarity. In contrast to classicism, which places visual objects behind the picture plane in an objectively structured world (and which, in any case, Harrison sees as having degenerated into fantasy by the middle of the nineteenth century), modernist painting is transactional; it enables us to attend to how the unseen subjective conditions of visibility are incised on visible objects themselves. To engage a modernist painting competently, the spectator must imaginatively occupy a position in which (like a disempowered voyeur) he surrenders his presupposed authority over its depicted...