I didn’t travel overseas until I was in my mid-twenties, so I was slow to grasp what every serious student of art quickly learns: there are two major schools of Impressionism, the French school and the school of whatever country you happen to be in.
I grew up in Detroit, and for many years my primary—really, my sole—museum was the Detroit Institute of Arts. Fortunately, it had a rich collection of paintings. Within its gleaming marble walls, across Woodward Avenue from the city’s equally gleaming main library, I learned, in self-improving schoolboy fashion, that there were great painters with names like Claude Monet and Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro. And that there were—just one or two steps behind them—American Impressionists, with names like John Henry Twachtman and Thomas Dewing and Walter Merritt Chase.
When I finally reached England, I learned, confusingly, that just one or two steps behind Monet and Degas and Pissarro was a group of painters with names like Philip Wilson Steer and Walter Sickert and Harold Gilman. And from England I went to Italy, where I learned that just behind Monet et al. stood a cluster of splendid Italians, whose names I didn’t process. And so it goes. I haven’t yet visited Bulgaria or Finland or Australia, but I’m confident that, when I do, I’ll learn that the second great school of Impressionists is, respectively, the Bulgarian, the Finnish, the Australian.
What to make of renown of this kind? Actually, my interest here lies less with the actual art than with an artist’s deliberate adoption of a categorizing term. In this case, we have a school, or a mode, so beloved that it becomes a sort of default preserve, a universal method that, having originated with an enviable and emulous coterie, ramifies endlessly. Impressionism? Everyone wants a part of it. Everyone claims a part of it.
In the eighties, I lived for three years in Japan, working one day a week for an import-export business. My colleagues were sararimen (salary men), for whom the company was sun and moon and family. They fretted endlessly about compulsory retirement. Sometimes, retired sararimen were known, in their desperation, to take up painting. I felt I knew what their canvases must look like. Jogging once along Kyoto’s Kamo River, I approached a slight man, around sixty years old, who had set up an easel along the bank. “He’s doing an Impressionist landscape,” I said to myself, and it turned out that, yes, he was. (He was wearing a navy-blue sports coat, a red tie, and a black beret. What else could he be painting?)
A similar phenomenon is apparent in the library. Students of comparative literature know that there are two great Dickensian novelists: Charles Dickens and whoever’s considered most Dickensian in the country whose literature you’re studying. Years ago, in a college survey course of Spanish-language literature, I learned that Benito Pérez Galdós is Spain’s Charles Dickens. (Just a step or two behind …) I’ve more than once seen the writer Chetan Bhagat (of whose work I’ve never read a word) described as India’s Charles Dickens. No doubt he, too, lags behind by just a few steps.
And so it goes. There are two great true-crime books: Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” and the latest grisly offering on the New Arrivals table in your local bookstore. Two great modern movies about organized crime: “The Godfather” and last week’s warmest bloodbath.
Of course, an artist might voluntarily link his work to others’ for a variety of reasons. The crassest is commercial—an attempt at market building. (If my true-crime book could sell even half as well as Capote’s; if our Mafia movie would gross even a fraction of what “The Godfather” grossed.) But the impetus may be noble as well. Painters around the world marched beneath the Impressionist pennant largely owing to their genuine excitement at having discovered a school that looked fresh and unexhausted—they were looking for work, and here was meaningful employment.
But, when artists adopt a category for themselves, they ultimately, almost inevitably, end up resenting and resisting it. At the end of the day, artists will repudiate names and descriptions that are not of their own devising or shaping. What they embrace with one hand, they will shake off with the other.
It’s a place of ambivalence, then, where artist and critic—symbionts in theory, antagonists in practice—turn out to be fundamentally at odds. Their basic propulsions oppose each other. Critics see likenesses; they sort and unify. Artists see differences; they commerce in exceptions to the rules. If I was slow to grasp the two major Impressionist schools, I was slower still to understand this ongoing tension between artist and critic.
I suppose I didn’t really comprehend it until I was in my thirties, and my first novel was published. The book was called “Equal Distance,” the year was 1985, and I remember being a little surprised and disappointed to discover that it was repeatedly described as a coming-of-age novel. My objection wasn’t put into words, but I guess it might have been naïvely formulated as: Why are these critics so bent on fitting my book into a group? In my mind, my protagonist was, simply, himself: a Midwestern boy living and working in a radically displaced environment—yes, Japan—where life struck him as stubbornly impenetrable. Much of what he saw and felt was new to him, as, of course, it had been to me during my three-year Asian sojourn.
But, by the time my novel came out, I was also writing book reviews, often of novels, some of them first novels, and I was regularly engaging in the very practice that I found distasteful when it was applied to my own work. I was categorizing and characterizing—the critic’s natural task. He or she is presented with a sort of Amazonian jungle of leafage—or verbiage—where green, tenacious lives are underfoot, overhead, and all around. The critic—who, like Adam, achieves mastery over the world in part by naming it—brings to the jungle an impulse of order, an urge to taxonomize. At first, I wasn’t aware of any incongruity in my behavior. You might say that I was being contrarily consistent—behaving in accordance with each of the counter-running roles I’d assumed.
Surely, no serious novelist consciously seeks to create a likeness: I’m going to write a book like those I like. The goal is always something singular, exorbitant, discrepant—something that vindicates those feelings of intense individuality, of specialness-of-self, which initially propels the wish to publish. What other goal could justify the otherwise preposterous yearning to contribute another brick to the construction of that great, teetering Tower of Babel that is the sum of all published novels?
Yet, as a critic, I’ve found it useful—often necessary—to brandish my own clutch of literary terms: a surreal novel, a state-of-the-nation novel, a science-fiction novel, a naturalistic novel, a Faulknerian novel, a Forsterian novel. And I’ve grown increasingly aware that on the receiving end of my words sits someone doing his or her best to think outside those terms, to create a book that would render my critical vocabulary irrelevant.
Our Bulgarian (or Finnish or Australian) painter may embrace the classification of Impressionist. He may even deliberately select a typically Impressionist subject—lily pads, a train station. But he’s surely thinking that he brings to his task the elusive miracle of Bulgarian (or Finnish, or Australian) light, a transformative presence that makes all the difference. Here is a luminosity to bring the ghosts of Monet and his gang bowing their heads to the canvas in a gesture of intense scrutiny indistinguishable from reverence.
The artist may well be deluding himself. In its purest, wildest form, his self-nourishing fantasy is of a world where each earthly thing, as Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, in perhaps the most beautiful poem ever written about self-definition, “finds tongue to fling out broad its name.” Here, no voice is insignificant. Each voice has its place in the earthly chorus. Meanwhile, in an increasingly quiet corner of the world, the critic is dispelling fantasies and fallacies; he is systematizing chaos.
You might suppose, then, that the angels of Heaven, custodians of unalterable law, would be rooting for the critics. But they’re not. According to Hopkins, the divine impulse “plays in ten thousand places.” The angels are on the side of the benighted and deluded artists, who are lit with the hope of finding the true, the unique, the self-perfecting voice: “myself it speaks and spells / Crying What I do is me: for that I came.” If the angels subject everything to a measured and impervious surveillance, surely there’s a slight softening of their gazes when the floundering artist improbably finds his way, and a glint of impish gloating when the critic—that master of directions, ever handy with explanations—somehow goes utterly astray.
Brad Leithauser’s most recent novel is “The Art Student’s War.” His collection of new and selected poems, “The Oldest Word for Dawn,” was published last year. He is a frequent contributor to Page-Turner.
Update: A previous version of this post incorrectly identified Paul Gaugin and Paul Cézanne as Impressionists. They are generally recognized as Post-Impressionists.