Jean-Baptiste Greuze, „Kindesliebe“, 1763

The fact that art must be contentious if it wants to assert itself art field or press for social changes can count as a hardly questioned consensus for large parts of recent art history. For this reason, confrontational art has long been based on an implicit agreement which in turn threatens to displace other potentials of dispute. For it is not only social, political, and economic controversies or arguments over aesthetic questions of value that can be linked to artworks. Rather, pictures, sculptures, installations, or performances bear contradictions and tensions that can be unfolded in processes of perception as well as overlaid with other interests.

Before a work of art intervenes in social contexts or asserts itself as an aesthetic position, it is already characterized by fundamental, inherent conflicts. In a succinct, yet by no means uncontroversial manner, Martin Heidegger sought to define a tension fundamental to all artworks when he spoke of the “fight between world and earth” [1] that distinguishes art from an ordinary object. Two constitutive elements that can only be insufficiently signified with material and form enter into a conflict in the work of art, while at the same time remaining inextricably dependent upon each other. One needn’t follow Heidegger’s multi-premised proposal in all detail to recognize how strongly art’s effectiveness is based on its own conflicts, which can be updated and unfolded on the most various levels.

For art since the Renaissance, this constitutive conflict has mostly been characterized as the tension between what is represented and the means of representation. The pair of concepts, transparency and opacity, goes in a similar direction, describing that pictures can allow an unimpeded view to the objects appearing in them, but often disturb this view through self-reflective references to their own status as pictures. [2] What can always compete with what is shown in the picture is the simple fact that every picture must also show itself. Depending on the artwork’s properties, such conflicts arise in different forms – for example, as the discrepancy between the establishment of space and the surface structure in the classical painting, or as the tension between the seemingly lively appearance of a body represented in a sculpture and its sheer materiality. As differently as such conflicts can be experienced, viewers are always faced with the following challenge: Concentrating on one aspect blocks out other, competing moments; every insight comes at the price of momentary blindness toward others. If one takes these experiences of conflict seriously, there is no doubt that they can only be carried out temporally and in a process. There are indeed good, tangible reasons for grasping Heidegger’s intuition that the work of art is the site of a “fight between world and earth” from the perspective of an action. The conflicts characterizing the work do not lead to a final synthesis, unification or sublation. Instead, they continuously prevail.

At issue here are not the basics of an aesthetics of conflict, which have already been outlined in various ways, [3] but the question of whether and how such constitutive conflicts can also be brought to bear in the fight between viewers and critics. Isn’t the threat of the fundamental conflicts in the respective artwork silenced when the work serves to take on a political, social, or aesthetic position? Does the fight with and for art result in the internal contradictions and tensions of the respective work receding into the background? Do discourses, discussions, and debates leave sufficient room for an artwork to bring its contradictory nature to bear? These questions cannot be answered in a general way. It would shortsighted to immediately understand every verbalization of experiencing art as a discursive “dressing” and disambiguation. Language, discourses, and texts can serve to balance tensions and conceal contradictions, but they can also provide many different possibilities to unfold contradictions, even to emphasize them in terms of their undecidability. It seems likely, then, that those speaking of and in front of artworks have both options: They can try to do justice to the conflictual experiences, or privilege and highlight a certain view to the respective work.

A conversation about artworks appears ideally suited to let their immanent tensions emerge by drawing attention to elements standing in conflict with one another. While a line of argument structured in a monological way usually places weight on individual aspects and must order them in a certain sequence to substantiate a specific proposition, a conversation, a personal exchange among several viewers or the literary genre of dialogue, for instance, can juxtapose different perceptions and, in its openness, demonstrate how conflicts can be unfurled in temporal processes. The varying experiences that can be articulated in a conversation needn’t necessarily lead to a quarrel about how to interpret the work, pressing for unambiguousness and thus subduing its tensions. Instead, different perspectives and perceptions can question each other and thus make experienceable that the great variety of possible contexts of meaning in the artwork can never be entirely covered by the means of language – as indispensable as it may be.

If the aim is to pursue the question regarding the extent to which the constitutive, immanent tensions of artworks were expressed in earlier epochs, one will also and especially have to take a look at dialogical texts. The presumption suggests itself that it is, in a special way, forms of conversation in which different views of a work can be explicated equally and with their contradictions. One can indeed find – alongside the classical, art-theoretical treatises serving to argumentatively underpin and assert decisive positions – a surprising number of dialogues on art since the Renaissance in which very different positions are clarified. In these texts, for example, Paolo Pino’s Dialogo di pittura (1548) or Lodovico Dolce’s L’Aretino (1557), disputes about the rank of different genres or artists are openly discussed. The contours of an art discourse thus emerge, which can be counted as a fundamental alternative to the normatively and, in the ideal case, consistently arguing treatise. [4] The means of fictionalization and making literary offer additional possibilities to leave room for deviating, for heterodox positions and a multi-voiced dialogue.

And yet for the most part one searches in vain for persisting, irresolvable contradictions and a permanently equal coexistence of opposing positions in these writings. Many early-modern dialogues on art and artworks follow the example of didactical conversational forms and in the end prioritize the chain of thought of a specific view. If contradictions remain, they are understood less as the characteristic of the viewed object, the work of art, but are instead attributed to the various viewer positions. Vincenzo Borghini, for example, sought to explain the different views of paintings or sculptures through different spatial locations and simultaneously deliberated the possibility of a synthesis: “Also bear in mind […], that the number [of viewers] comprises many eyes and minds; one sees something, the other thinks about something else, and what one person doesn’t see is seen by the other standing next to him. Hence, one person notices one thing and the other something else, and by talking to each other the many details, which are already perfect in themselves, become something comprehensively perfect.” [5] Thinking in perspectives, which characterized early modernity, made the dependency of perceptions and arguments on the location explainable, while at the same time promising a sublation of seemingly contradictory positions. Yet it appears to have impeded a consistent unfolding of conflictual experiences. The multi-perspectival dialogue of early modernity therefore confronts diverging positions, yet it doesn’t result in, on principle, irreconcilable, permanent contradictions. [6] So it appears that one would futilely seek a linguistic form that would bring the conflict constitutive of the artwork to bear.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, however, one can find texts that do not try to tame such tensions in artworks, but instead to unfold them. This turn owes not only to a gradual shift in emphasis from normatively arguing art-theoretical texts to an often dialogical critique of art. [7] Literary forms of conversation had gained significance much earlier than with early art criticism in the field of art literature, but dialogical texts (feigned conversations and as well as correspondences) were now employed in a different way: In the context of art criticism, it is no longer just superordinate questions of rank and value that are up for debate, but increasingly concrete experiences made in front of individual works of art. In this sense, the dialogue is no longer predominantly subject to a didactical or persuasive strategy, it can serve an open, indecisive juxtaposition of different positions or even culminate to paradoxes.

Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, „Ansicht des Salon du Louvre im Jahre 1753“, 1753

There is hardly anyone who developed the art of exposing contradictions creating a tension in the examined object as well as in one’s own writing in a text-immanent manner as joyfully as Denis Diderot. His Salon reviews, [8] written from 1759 onwards and counting as the foundational texts of art criticism, possess a modeling potential for writing about art today precisely because of their programmatic contradiction. They make it evident in which way judging can itself be addressed or problematized without giving up the claim to judge. On first sight, Diderot appears as a figure preferring unambiguous posits at times exaggerated to apodictic demands. In his opinion, art has to face a clear task; quite in the tradition of Horace, it should delight, move, and in this manner teach. What is new in Diderot is his call for not only historical pictures, but also “genre pictures” taking on this task. Scenes from everyday life such as those by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, who in Diderot’s view created them vividly and convincingly, were to entice the touched viewer to morality and virtue through the transfer of affects. This thought, which initially appears to be focused entirely on art-historical and genre-historical questions, bears a fundamental problem that is highly instructive for our context. For if one takes a closer look at the form and course of Diderot’s line of argument, fundamental aporias emerge which are constitutive of art criticism: Despite all attempts to keep or gain a distance, it is always already involved and entangled in the subject matter being critiqued, and Diderot’s style of writing is an attempt to productively cope with this problem by highlighting the contradictions in a performative way. In constant conflict with himself, Diderot brings both participation and distance to bear. In this manner, he forms an equivalent to the tensions that profoundly determine many pictures. For it is not the already outlined conflictual moments between immersing in what is depicted and concentrating on the means of depiction, or between the picture as a living vis-à-vis, as it were, and the painting as a mere artifact that incessantly appear in Diderot’s Salons.

Diderot likes a good dispute. He argues for the cause, the renewal of art as a moral authority. He argues with artists at the same time he lends them a voice in his texts, voices he controls but makes audible, so that they are asserted also in contrast to his own opinion. Not least, he also argues with himself. He does so in feigned, imaginary dialogues with the person commissioning him with the Salon reviews, Friedrich Melchior Grimm. Grimm is attributed the role of formulating objections to which Diderot responds. Diderot argues by weighing the pros and cons in a monologue, but also by entering into a dialogue with the protagonists of the pictures to be reviewed [9] – a form of description that very effectively stages the tensional relationship between participating in the object and criticizing it from a distance. Despite his emphatic support of a morally elevating art, it is not Diderot’s objective to assume an unambiguous position in which the internal contradictions of art would be abolished, but to elucidate the contradictions of this critical endeavor itself in his texts. This does not imply that Diderot wants to relinquish control over the text or the argumentation and dispense with judgements. But it is above all the process of coming to a judgment and the blind spots of one’s own writing that interest him and that emerge in the mode of conflict.

In the introductory sentences of the Salons from 1763, there is an elucidating and irritating statement on the task and abilities of the critic. Diderot does not demand creating a distance, but instead calls for opening up to the work and, in writing, nestling with the spirit and style of the artwork to be judged. What is required to this end is a “heart that could be charmed, a soul susceptible to an infinity of enthusiastic differences, a variety of styles which answer to a variety of brushes; the ability to be substantial and voluptuous as with Deshays, simple and true like Chardin, delicate as Vien, sad like Greuze, create all possible illusions like Vernet.” [10] This is a surprisingly modest and yet ambitious remark from the pen of a critic who did not spare with quick and usually very minimally founded judgements and stood up for “naturalness”, i. e., an at least upon first sight anti-rhetorical form of description. [11] Already here one finds signs of a claim to derive the mode of writing, if not the criteria for judging, from the work itself – a thought that was to be made a program in Romanticism and inevitably internally contradicts the demand for critical distance. This contradiction is not critically marked in Diderot, but it articulates itself all the more tangibly in various modes of writing, from the emphatic visualization of the depicted scene to the apodictic judgment. What emerges in the alternating approaches to the picture is the basic tension that the viewer lets him/herself be moved by the picture, as Diderot himself demands, but at the same time seeks to keep it at a sober distance allowing a judgment in the first place.

It is this Salon in which Diderot also starts speaking with other voices, be it that of the visitor, the artist or the figure in the picture. [12] For example, Diderot argues with François Boucher, whose ease and fruitfulness he admires, while at the same time complaining about his hopeless mistake, untrue coloring. In a short feigned dialogue, he lets Boucher formulate the demand to imagine his objects solely “in the mind”, so as to capture the supernatural as well. (I, 439) But precisely this stance, the art critic replies, impedes a “true” depiction. Diderot responds to Boucher’s answer – that he doesn’t care much for the truth and that the colors in paradise might appear just so – with a remarkable inversion of responsibility, which is indeed also meant to point to his exceeding his own competence: Boucher is not a good philosopher if he doesn’t know that everywhere in the world God is regarded as something different from man. (I, 439) The imagined, now cornered dialogue partner is not given the chance to respond. However, doubting the philosophical competence of the painter may also raise questions regarding the change in position from philosopher to art critic, which Diderot himself underwent. This decisive judgement that apparently tolerates no objection already implicitly refers to the fragility and dubiousness of Diderot’s own position.

Elsewhere, Diderot is at odds with his own criteria, even with critique in general. After a first look at La piété filial by Greuze, he lets others speak for himself, to then initially confirm their judgment: “The arms of this figure, a charming figure by the way, are said to be rigid, skinny, badly painted, and without details […] Oh, that is of course all too true.” (I, 465) Further critical observations, articulated with the voices of others, on the lacking naturalness of a pillow and the use of buttons from other pictures – arguments that are familiar from Diderot’s own appeals but are nevertheless annulled the next moment: “Finally […] Oh, a thousand devils ought to seize the critics, and me first of all! This picture is beautiful, very beautiful, and woe betide the man who can contemplate it for a moment in cold blood!” (I, 465)

Yet Diderot’s emphasis is not at all exhausted in playing off the impotence of words and in particular critical language against the effect of the picture. He is instead concerned with the wide variety of modes of description that each reconstruct different aspects of the work and simultaneously mark critical processes. By simply claiming that the picture is “beautiful, very beautiful” and concluding with threats in case anyone dares to elude the effect of the painting, Diderot decides against the familiar forms of critical argumentation. By positioning himself in this way, he insists on a passionate approach to the picture which, as demonstrated in his own descriptions, can stand directly next to a distanced perception. Therefore, it is less about arriving at a clear, rational judgment – for that which appears as judgment is a passionate appeal. Instead, the text highlights the different and conflicting approaches to the picture.

The peak of the rhetorical magic that Diderot unfolds in front of the pictures is marked by the Salons from 1765 and 1767. Here, he no longer speaks about the picture but with it, most impressively in the case of the Girl Weeping Over Her Dead Bird, also painted by Greuze. The text, or rather the encounter as Diderot stages it, starts with great enthusiasm about the beauty and charm of the depiction. Yet it already remains unclear here whether these qualities owe to the girl or the painting, the enthusiasm is interrupted by self-observations. “Soon one is surprised to find oneself speaking to the child, consoling it.” [13] Yet the fantasy of merging beholder and picture is not abandoned through this. Instead, it is to become visible as such and intensified in the next step by a dialogue with the depicted girl, which in a narrative manner goes beyond that which is shown. Not only the painting touches its viewer; instead, the enthused critic makes the poor girl, which he pictures as a fallen one in an extensive description, cry due to his conversation. [14] The paragon between image and language, the dispute about the reality of authorship, which in this case seems to be won by the author of the text and not by the producer of the painting, [15] is beside the point in our context. What Diderot brings forth in exceeding the picture is its potential of rousing the imagination of the viewer all the more and involving him or her in what is shown precisely by withholding what is visible. [16]

Grimm’s possible objection against this method is inserted in the text with a good portion of self-irony: “What! My dear friend, you are laughing at me!” One could expect that the disturbance owes to the dialogue with the painted girl, but Diderot twists the laughing: He attributes it to the fact that a “serious person” is speaking to such an insignificant girl weeping over something entirely trivial. He thus once more confirms the topos of liveliness that negates the difference between image and life itself. While this view of the painting was just emphasized by laughter as a topos based on deception, the illusion of the conversation with the girl is again reinforced. Diderot uses this turn to address a further aspect of the painting. He responds to Grimm’s laughter: “Can you see how beautiful she is! How interesting she is! I hate to trouble her. In spite of that, it will not displease me to be the cause of her pain.” [17] With this tasteless male joke, Diderot reveals the evident, not at all elaborated, erotic appeal of the picture and the corresponding platitudinous fantasies of a male beholder. In the end, he does not even spare a further, explicit mocking remark against Greuze, whom Diderot himself held in high esteem, made in lieu by the painter Vernet. Greuze must learn from the landscape painter that among his enemies he has “a certain somebody who seems to love you madly, but will destroy you.” Asked who he is, Diderot lets Vernet answer: “You yourself!” (I, 569) It is exactly the example of Greuze, whom Diderot praised as no other painter, that makes it clear that the work of this painter also reveals aspects that Diderot values less and addresses all the same, although this is against his own interest in defending the painter as the best “genre painter” of his time and thus as the epitome of his own art theory. This again reveals that conflictual arguments cannot simply be attributed to different speaker positions, but are articulated by reverting to different text genres and styles.

The Salon of 1767 is Diderot’s longest. To defend himself against the scope, but also to emphasize his own qualities, he starts with being overmodest: “Don’t expect me, my dear friend, to be as rich, various, wise, mad, and fertile this time as I’ve been in previous Salons. Exhaustion is setting in.” [18] That is more correct than Diderot could have presumed at the time, for the Salons from 1769 onwards are merely a tired echo of his brilliant texts from the 1860s. Yet the review from 1767 is permeated as no other by dialogues in which Grimm, entirely in line with the ancient tradition of dialogue, is brought into play by Diderot as a questioning and quarrelsome counterpart to repeat, reinforce, or twist arguments. In contrast to ancient dialogues, the issue in the Salons is not to arrive at a clear conclusion. Instead, even if clear judgments are made, what remains visible are contradictions and turns in the process of making a judgment as irresolvable tensions. Diderot employs this method not only in the introduction, in which he elaborates basic art-theoretical considerations, but also in the reviews of pictures that are in part staged as conversations in front of the paintings.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard: „Koresus und Kallirhoë“, 1765

The most impressive of these conversational scenes can already be found in the Salon of 1765, in which Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s successful painting Coresus and Callirhoe is conjured as a dream before astounded Grimm. Diderot evokes a sequence of imaginary tableaux that are condensed to a single, speaking picture. (I, 599–608) By framing the text and creating a dialogue, what is not least staged is a basic condition of Diderot’s writing – the achievement of remembering and visualizing that is required to vividly present a not only dead but also absent picture in the act of writing. And this approach is again legitimized referring to an ancient tradition, for on the evening preceding the dream, Diderot, as he states at the beginning, claims to have read Plato’s allegory of the cave. (I, 599) Here, Grimm appears not only as a partner in quarrel, but as the midwife of reviving the picture and as a claqueur of the ekphrasis that the painting and its effects are capable of giving rise to. “Such is Fragonard’s painting; there in all its glory,” [19] Grimm exclaims. What verifies the force of this effect is the astounded insight of the figure of Diderot in the dialogical response to Grimm’s critique that he had dreamt it with the same flaws.

This last turn, conveying artistic deficiencies of the painting to the imagined, animated dream-image, marks a decisive point characterizing Diderot’s targeted vacillation between participation and distance as the unfolding of conflicts immanent to the picture as they were described above. While the skillful dramaturgy of the feigned dialogue between Diderot and Grimm initially seems to lead to merging the narration of the dream-image and the description of the painting, in precisely the moment of perfect illusion, the materiality of Fragonard’s work is referred to. For Grimm, the painting and the dream-image correspond to the extent that he is worried – against all topoi of the permanence of painting – that the picture could be equally transient: “If one loses sight of his painting [i.e., Fragonard’s picture] for one moment, one always fears that his canvas could fold together, like yours [i.e., Diderot’s dream], and the captivating and sublime appearances could disappear like the apparitions of the night.” (I, 606) As early as in 1763, Diderot had focused on the material foundations of the artificial picture using the example of a still life by Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin. [20] He now repeats and at the same time outdoes this point by decidedly making use of the possibilities of the dialogue. For it is the form of conversation that allows him to unfold to a temporal event the conflict inherent to the picture between visualizing that which is depicted and pointing out the pigment pastes or the limited canvas with literary means.

Fragonard’s Coresus and Callirhoe was not the only picture that incited Diderot to respond to conflicts within the image with equally tensional jumps and changes on all linguistic levels. With these few sketched examples, one of the most important functions of this rhetoric may have become clear: What emerges in these at times narcissistic games with words is the process of critique as such, which incessantly alternates between distanced observation of the pictures and one’s own reactions, on the one hand, and a passionate, empathetic approach on the other. Christoph Menke coined the succinct term “aesthetic critique” to describe this performative aspect of artistic practice, thus designating that which Diderot performs in his texts: Highlighting the conditions, possibilities and limits of describing and judging, and keeping alive the act of critique in all its fragility, but also necessity. [21] In the ostentatious contradictions that Diderot unfolds in dialogues, the change of roles and speaker positions, and by varying styles, the fundamental aporia of art criticism emerges, namely, to encounter its subject in both a participatory and distant way. Conflicts in which this aporia becomes apparent do not dispense with judgments, yet they make clear under which conditions they are possible. The way in which these tensions can be articulated in a literary way is exemplarily shown by the art of inner conflict in early art criticism. Understood in this way, Diderot’s practice of writing can encourage contemporary art criticism to allow for and even openly reveal contradictions and the process-oriented character of judging. A wagging forefinger is not needed here, but the effectiveness and power of seduction of an artful language that is able to both evoke the described object with its contradictions and elucidate the complex approaches to the picture which vacillate between participation and distance.

(Translation: Karl Hoffmann)

Image credits: 1. public domain, The State Hermitage Museum, 2. public domain, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 3. public pomain, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando