For the late nineteenth century, the cradle of modernism, did not feel the uncertainties about the machine that we do. No statistics on pollution, no prospect of melt-downs or core explosions lay on the horizon; and very few of the visitors to the World’s Fair of 1889 had much experience of the mass squalor and voiceless suffering that William Blake had railed against and Friedrich Engels described. In the past the machine had been represented and caricatured as an ogre, a behemoth, or – due to the ready analogy between furnaces, steam, smoke, and Hell – as Satan himself. But by 1889 its “otherness” had waned, and the World’s Fair audience tended to think of the machine as unqualifiedly good, strong, stupid, and obedient. They thought of it as a giant slave, an untiring steel Negro, controlled by Reason in a world of infinite resources. The machine meant the conquest of process, and only very exceptional sights, like a rocket launch, can give us anything resembling the emotion with which our ancestors in the 1880s contemplated heavy machinery: for them, the “romance” of technology seemed far more diffused and optimistic, acting publicly on a wider range of objects, than it is today. Perhaps this had happened because more and more people were Jiving in a machine-formed environment: the city. The machine was a relatively fresh part of social experience in 1880, whereas in 1780 it had been exotic, and by 1980 it would be a cliché. The vast industrial growth of European cities was new. In 1850, Europe had still been overwhelmingly rural. Most Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans, let alone Italians, Poles, or Spaniards, lived in the country or in small villages. Forty years later the machine, with its imperative centralizing of process and product, had tipped the balance of population towards the towns. Baudelaire’s fourmillante cité of alienated souls – “ant-swarming City, City full of dreams/Where in broad day the spectre tugs your sleeve” – began to displace the pastoral images of nature whose last efflorescence was in the work of Monet and Renoir. The master-image of painting was no longer landscape but the metropolis. In the country, things grow; but the essence of manufacture, of the city, is process, and this could only be expressed by metaphors of linkage, relativity, interconnectedness.
These metaphors were not ready to hand. Science and technology had outstripped them, and the rate of change was so fast that it left art stranded, at least for a time, in its pastoral conventions. Perhaps no painting of a railway station, not even Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare, could possibly have the aesthetic brilliance and clarity of the great Victorian railroad stations themselves – Euston, St. Pancras, Penn Station, those true cathedrals of the nineteenth century. And certainly no painting of a conventional sort could deal with the new public experience of the late nineteenth century, fast travel in a machine on wheels. For the machine meant the conquest of horizontal space. It also meant a sense of that space which few people had experienced before – the succession and superimposition of views, the unfolding of landscape in flickering surfaces as one was carried swiftly past it, and an exaggerated feeling of relative motion (the poplars nearby seeming to move faster than the church spire across the field) due to parallax. The view from the train was not the view from the horse. It compressed more motifs into the same time. Conversely, it left less time in which to dwell on any one thing.
At first, only a few people could have this curiously altered experience of the visual world without taking a train: the crackpots and inventors with their home-made cars, and then the adventurous rich, veiled and goggled, chugging down the country lanes of Bellosguardo or Normandy. But because it promised to telescope more experience into the conventional frame of travel, and finally to burst the frame altogether, the avant-garde of engineering seemed to have something in common with the avant-garde of art.
As the most visible sign of the Future, the automobile entered art in a peculiarly clumsy way. The first public sculpture ever set up in its praise stands in a park at the Porte Maillot in Paris. It commemorates the great road race of 1895, from Paris to Bordeaux and back, which was won by an engineer named Émile Levassor in the car he designed and built himself, the Panhard-Levassor 5 – which could go at about the same speed as a jumping frog. Nevertheless, Levassor’s victory was of great social consequence, and worth a memorial, since it persuaded Europeans – manufacturers and public alike – that the future of road transport lay with the internal combustion engine and not with its competitors, electricity or steam. In all justice there should be a replica of the Levassor Monument set up in every oil port from Bahrein to Houston. Yet it looks slightly absurd to us as sculpture today, suggesting the difficulties artists faced in transposing the new category of the machine into the conventions of traditional sculpture.
It is a stone car – an idea that seems Surrealist to a modern eye, almost as wrong as a teacup made of fur. Marble is immobile, silent, mineral, brittle, white, cold. Cars are fast, noisy, metallic, elastic, warm. A human body is warm, too, but we do not think of statues as stone men because we are used to the conventions of depicting flesh with stone. (When these conventions are violated, as in the second act of Don Giovanni when the statue of the Commendatore comes alive, the effect is always spectral or comic.) The problem for Jules Dalou, who designed the Levassor Monument, was the lack of agreed conventions for depicting a headlamp or a steering wheel. Such motifs were too new, like the machine itself, so no exact representation of a car in stone could be as visually convincing as the car itself.
Yet the cultural conditions of seeing were starting to change, and the Eiffel Tower stood for that too. The most spectacular thing about it in the 1890s was not the view of the Tower from the ground. It was seeing the ground from the Tower. Until then, the highest manmade point from which Paris could be seen by the public was the gargoyle gallery of Notre Dame. Most people lived entirely at ground level, or within forty feet of it, the height of an ordinary apartment house. Nobody except a few intrepid balloonists had ever risen a thousand feet from the earth. Consequently, the bird’s-eye view of nature or townscape was an extreme and rare curiosity, and when the photographer Nadar took his camera up in a balloon in 1856, his daguerreotypes were not only snapped up by the public but also commemorated, in a spirit of friendly irony, by Honoré Daumier. But when the Tower opened to the public in 1889, nearly a million people rode its lifts to the top platform; and there they saw what modern travellers take for granted every time they fly – the earth on which we live seen flat, as pattern, from above. As Paris turned its once invisible roofs and the now clear labyrinth of its alleys and streets towards the tourist’s eye, becoming a map of itself, a new type of landscape began to seep into popular awareness. It was based on frontality and pattern, rather than on perspective recession and depth.
This way of seeing was one of the pivots in human consciousness. The sight of Paris vu d’en haut, absorbed by millions of people in the first twenty years of the Tower’s life, was as significant in 1889 as the famous NASA photograph of the earth from the moon, floating like a green vulnerable bubble in the dark indifference of space, would be eighty years later. The characteristic flat, patterned space of modern art – Gauguin, Maurice Denis, Seurat – was already under development before the Tower was built. It was based on other art-historical sources: on the flatness of “primitive” Italian frescoes, on Japanese woodblock prints, on the coiling and distinct patterns of cloisonné enamel. When Gauguin’s friend Maurice Denis wrote his manifesto "The Definition of Neo-Traditionalism" in the summer of 1890, it began with one of the canonical phrases of modernism: that “a picture – before being a warhorse, a nude woman, or some sort of anecdote – is essentially a surface covered with colours arranged in a certain order.” Denis was invoking this principle in order to bring painting back to a kind of heraldic flatness, the flatness of banners and crusaders’ tombslabs and the Bayeux Tapestry, in which his ambition to cover the new churches of France with Christian frescoes might prosper. The Eiffel Tower had nothing to do with his interests; but the idea of space that it provoked, a flatness that contained ideas of dynamism, movement, and the quality of abstraction inherent in structures and maps, was also the space in which a lot of the most advanced European art done between 1907 and 1920 would unfold.
~~The Shock Of The New -by- Robert Hughes
