The wall at the edge of the stage

Imagine a wall

In 1758 Denis Diderot, the editor of the Encyclopédie, printed a play called Le Père de famille together with a short book of advice for people who write and act in plays. The advice ends one of its chapters with a strange instruction. In plain English (our translation of his French): “Whether you write or whether you act, think no more of the spectator than if he did not exist. Imagine, at the edge of the stage, a great wall that separates you from the pit; play as if the curtain never rose.”

The purpose was practical. If actors seem not to know they are watched, the audience feels like unseen witnesses at a real event and is moved by it. Diderot is often credited with the “fourth wall,” but he did not use that phrase. A box set on the stage has three walls, a back and two sides, and the fourth wall is the invisible one along the front, where the audience sits. The French phrase for it, quatrième mur, is hardly found before the late nineteenth century. Diderot’s image was a wall, and the name came later. The art historian Michael Fried showed in Absorption and Theatricality (1980) that painters of the 1750s and 60s, such as Chardin, were chasing the same ideal: figures so absorbed in a task that the picture seems to have no viewer.

This lesson uses the wall as a picture for something bigger. Long before and long after Diderot, thinkers have treated beauty and art as a world set apart from daily life: something you look at from outside, safely, and do not use. The rest of this course asks what happens when the wall comes down, and whether anyone should want it to. This first lesson asks how the wall was built, and who first knocked.

Three marks of looking

The philosophers’ wall is made of words. Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) gives the first and best known. Judging something beautiful, Kant says, is “entirely disinterested.” He means that the pleasure does not depend on wanting the thing or on whether it exists. His example is a palace. Asked whether I find it beautiful, I may answer that I do not like things “made merely to be stared at” (Bernard’s 1892 translation, in the public domain), and still admit it is beautiful if I look at it for its own sake alone.

The lectures behind this course start with a homelier case. If a real apple sits in front of you, you want to eat it, and you cannot share it: if you eat it, I cannot. If it is a painted apple, nobody tries to bite it, and a thousand people can enjoy the same apple at once. In this reading, art is the kind of thing that can be enjoyed without being used up, and that is what “disinterested” comes to.

Two more words complete the usual picture. In 1912 the British writer on aesthetics Edward Bullough wrote of psychical distance. Imagine a fog at sea, he begins: for most people it is acutely unpleasant. But if you put aside the danger and the practical worry and attend to the milky veil over the water and the strange solitude, it can be a source of intense enjoyment. Distance, Bullough says, is gained “by putting it out of gear with practical needs and ends.” He does not mean cold: he warns that too little distance, such as a jealous husband watching Othello, spoils the experience, and too much leaves it empty. Then the American philosopher Jerome Stolnitz, in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art Criticism (1960), spoke of “disinterested and sympathetic attention” to anything at all for its own sake.

The lectures sum the tradition up in three words: disinterested, distant, detached. They are not one thinker’s official list, since each word has its own owner: Kant, Bullough, Stolnitz. But together they describe a view that dominated aesthetics for two centuries: that looking at beauty is a special mode of attention, in which you do not act, do not own, and do not care about what is real, and that this is what makes it pure. In 1964 the American philosopher George Dickie called the whole idea a myth. In “The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude” he argued that no special attitude is needed. What Bullough called losing distance, such as the jealous husband, is simply failing to attend to the play.

Walls of brick and rules

Words alone would not make a wall. Buildings and institutions did. The French priest Charles Batteux named five arts, music, poetry, painting, sculpture, and dance, and traced them to a single principle in Les beaux-arts réduits à un même principe (1746). The historian Paul Oskar Kristeller argued in two articles of 1951 and 1952 that “fine art” as one family, separate from crafts, is an eighteenth-century idea, and Larry Shiner took the thesis further in The Invention of Art (2001). The thesis is disputed: James Porter argued in 2009 that the ancients and medievals had more of it than Kristeller allowed. A safe summary is that many historians date “fine art” as we know it to about 1750, and some classicists see more continuity.

Whatever its date, the idea acquired addresses. The Louvre opened as a public museum on 10 August 1793, the first anniversary of the fall of the monarchy. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art was incorporated on 13 April 1870 and opened its first rooms on 20 February 1872. Concert halls, opera houses, and national galleries followed. Each does the same thing as Diderot’s imaginary wall. It marks off a place where the rules are different: you sit quietly, you do not touch, you do not eat or ask what it is for.

The American philosopher John Dewey saw this clearly. In Art as Experience (1934) he complained that once art objects are cut off from the conditions in which they were made and used, “a wall is built around them that renders almost opaque their general significance.” He pointed at the museum, which he called a memorial of the rise of nationalism and imperialism, since each capital’s collection displays its own history and “the loot gathered by its monarchs.” Even the Parthenon, he observed, was built by the Athenians not as a work of art but as a civic commemoration. His aim was “to restore continuity” between art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings of ordinary life. Dewey’s wall is the one around finished objects, not Diderot’s stage wall. But the two walls belong to the same family.

Some walls are soft. The lectures point out that a person who joins an arts association or is called an artist crosses a line that has no brick in it. They also point to an administrative curiosity: in March 2018 China’s legislature approved the merger of the Ministry of Culture with the National Tourism Administration, and the new Ministry of Culture and Tourism was inaugurated on 8 April 2018. The official slogan was that culture should promote tourism and tourism show off culture. The lectures read the merger as a sign that travel is now classed with appreciation, as an activity in which one does not work. That reading is interpretation, not documented intent. Tourism is also a large labor sector.

Figures who look back

If art lives behind a wall, a painter can pretend the wall is solid or let a figure glance through it. Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii (painted in Rome in 1784 and shown at the Salon of 1785; Louvre) is a stage with its fourth side taken away. Three brothers reach toward swords held up by their father; nobody looks at us. Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (about 1817–18; Hamburger Kunsthalle) is a small painting, about 95 by 75 centimeters, in which a man stands with his back to us, a Rückenfigur, and ignores us just as completely.

Édouard Manet’s figures do not. Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (painted 1862–63; Musée d’Orsay) was refused by the jury of the 1863 Salon and shown among the rejected works in the Salon des Refusés, and part of the scandal was the nude woman’s direct look at the viewer. His Olympia (painted 1863, shown at the Salon of 1865; Orsay) has a reclining model, Victorine Meurent, who meets our eyes with no pretense that we are not there. Manet is often called the father of modern art. When the French state bought Olympia in 1890 it did so by public subscription, which Claude Monet organized. In a lecture given in Tunis in 1971, Michel Foucault argued that Manet’s pictures acknowledge their own canvas and the place of the viewer: they are objects to be looked at, not windows.

A glance out of the frame is not new with Manet. In Las Meninas (1656; Prado) Velázquez, at his easel at the left, looks out of the picture at us. The five-year-old Infanta Margarita Teresa stands at the center with her maids of honor, two dwarfs, a chaperone, and a dog; a man stands at the open door at the back; and on the rear wall a small mirror shows two faces, usually taken to be the king and queen, Philip IV and Mariana. Foucault, in the first chapter of The Order of Things (1966), read it as a picture about looking: the gazes converge on a point in front of the canvas, where the viewer and the sovereigns stand, and it is a representation of the way an age represented. Some readers conclude from it that the wall was already cracked in the seventeenth century.

Others dispute the premise. The philosopher John Searle (1980) found a paradox in the picture’s self-reference. Joel Snyder and Ted Cohen (1980) used optics to argue that the mirror reflects the portrait on Velázquez’s canvas, not the king and queen standing before the picture. Leo Steinberg (1981) saw the royal couple as interrupting an ordinary scene. The most common view is still that the mirror shows the couple posing for the artist, but art historians remain divided over what Velázquez is painting and where the royals stand. The lectures offer their own reading of the picture; this course does not rely on it. All that is safe to say is that two centuries before Manet, a painter put himself and a mirror into the room.

The wall from the other side

Manet pushed from inside. Marcel Duchamp pushed from outside. In 1913 he fixed a bicycle wheel to a stool, and in 1915, in New York, he began to call such found objects “readymades.” Then came April 1917. Duchamp, a director of the new Society of Independent Artists, sent a white porcelain urinal, laid on its back and signed “R. Mutt,” to the society’s first exhibition at the Grand Central Palace in New York. The show’s rule was no jury and no prizes: anyone who paid the six-dollar fee could enter. The board nonetheless kept the urinal out of sight. Duchamp resigned, along with the collector Walter Arensberg. The photographer Alfred Stieglitz photographed the piece at his gallery, 291, and the second issue of a little magazine, The Blind Man, printed an unsigned defense. Its key sentence for the history of art is short: he chose it. The original is lost. The Philadelphia Museum’s signed 1950 version is the earliest of about fourteen full-size replicas.

Who made Fountain? In a letter to his sister dated 11 April 1917 Duchamp wrote that “one of my female friends,” under a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt, had sent in the urinal. In 2002 the scholar Irene Gammel proposed the German-born artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and later writers have added arguments. The scholar William Camfield found no document or testimony that she made it, and the Tate observes that “sent” is not the same as “made.” A cautious summary: Duchamp’s name stands on the work; a minority holds that the Baroness made it; no document shows that. Either way, the object came from a plumbing catalog, not a studio. In a 2004 poll of 500 art-world figures, commissioned by the Turner Prize’s sponsor, Fountain was ranked first among the most influential works of the twentieth century.

The two moves are mirror images. A glance sends something out of the picture. A urinal brings something in from the street. After either, the question changes from “what does it show?” to “what makes it art?”, and the answer, in the lectures’ reading and in much of the twentieth century’s, is partly the wall itself: the museum, the show, the signature, the label.

Paint is paint

A second way out of the wall is to say there is nothing behind it. “Remember,” wrote the French painter and critic Maurice Denis, “that a picture, before it is a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order” (our translation, from “Définition du néo-traditionnisme,” Art et Critique, 23 and 30 August 1890; Denis was 19). The lectures give this sentence to Roger Fry, but the sentence is Denis’s. Fry, the critic who organized London’s Post-Impressionist exhibition in 1910 and wrote on Chinese art, held in his own words that a drawn line is “the record of a gesture” modified by the artist’s feeling.

If a picture is first of all a flat surface, there is no world inside it to keep behind a wall. The lectures say that in such pictures what you see is simply paint, and the paint is real, in the room with you. In the late 1940s Jackson Pollock laid his canvases on the floor and poured and dripped paint over them. Nothing in them is a scene seen through a window. Some critics still see pictures in the skeins, but Pollock’s documented sources are Siqueiros’s New York workshop of 1936, Navajo sand painters, and Surrealist automatism.

Lines from far away

The lectures add a thesis that is their own: when Western artists tried to get out of the wall, they borrowed from East Asia, because Chinese art, the lectures say, was never walled off from life. Parts of it are well documented.

Vincent van Gogh bought some 660 Japanese prints from the Paris dealer Siegfried Bing in the winter of 1886–87. In the autumn of 1887 he painted three oil copies. The Courtesan (after Eisen) is based on a print by Keisai Eisen that had been reproduced, in reverse, on the cover of the magazine Paris illustré in May 1886. Van Gogh copied the magazine’s image, so his own is also reversed, and framed it with water lilies, bamboo, cranes, and frogs taken from other prints. In July 1888 he wrote to his brother Theo that “all my work is based to some extent on Japanese art” (letter 640). The lectures say Japan rescued him from the dark, tonal manner of Western oil painting, of which they take Rembrandt as the model. But in another letter that same day (642), Van Gogh puts Japanese art in the same breath as Rembrandt and the old Dutchmen. He added Japan; he did not give up Holland. The popular story that Japanese prints reached Europe as wrapping paper has a real source: the engraver Félix Bracquemond found Hokusai’s Manga around 1856 in a printer’s workshop, used to pack a consignment of porcelain, but that was in Paris, and it was told half a century later. The word japonisme was coined by Philippe Burty in 1872.

On the Chinese side, the American painter Mark Tobey learned Chinese brush writing from a Chinese student in Seattle in 1922–23 and developed his “white writing” about 1935. Pollock saw Tobey’s shows. For the rest the record thins. Pollock’s debt to calligraphy is argued more than documented: Kakei Nanako ties it to his black paintings of 1951–53, but his well-documented sources for the pour lie elsewhere. Franz Kline denied that his black strokes were calligraphy, and for Matisse, who did admire Asian brush drawing, the lectures’ claim of a debt in his line rests on resemblance and not on documented influence.

Theater tells a clearer story. Yu Shangyuan (1897–1970) studied English at Peking University, was working at Tsinghua in 1923 when he won a scholarship to the United States, and studied drama at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh and then at Columbia in New York. With fellow students Zhao Taimu, Wen Yiduo, Xiong Foxi, and others he worked out in the United States a plan to renew Chinese theater. They returned in 1925. The “National Drama Movement” (国剧运动) began in Beijing in 1926, in a drama supplement (剧刊) of a newspaper’s literary page under the poet Xu Zhimo, and its essays were collected in 1927. Its central idea was 写意 (xiěyì), suggestion over detail, set against the realism of Ibsen. The lectures quote a passage in which a member of the movement says Western painters had found reinforcements in Chinese painting while Western theater looked toward the East in vain. We could not trace the passage and do not use it.

What the record does show is Mei Lanfang. On 17 February 1930 the Peking opera star opened at New York’s 49th Street Theatre; the run was extended and moved to a larger house for five weeks, tickets were resold at six times face value, and he went on to Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, receiving honorary degrees from the University of Southern California and, according to one report, Pomona College. In spring 1935 the German playwright Bertolt Brecht saw him perform in Moscow, and in 1936 he wrote “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting.” The performer, Brecht said, observes himself, and the Chinese actor never acts as if there were “a fourth wall besides the three surrounding him.” Brecht built a theater of deliberate estrangement partly on that impression. Scholars warn that his picture of Chinese theater was selective, and some think he misread what he saw.

That is the lectures’ thesis, minus its overreach: the Chinese stage did talk to the audience, and the brush line stayed visible on the surface of a picture, and both gave Western artists permission to stop hiding the machinery. What the evidence does not show is that Chinese art never had a wall.