Direct your eyes outdoors

The novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans was sent to review the Paris Salon—the predecessor to contemporary art fairs—in 1879. A jobbing art critic, he reported from the Palais de l’Industrie (a few years later replaced by the Grand Palais that now hosts Art Basel) that “I hate, with all my might, the majority of paintings exhibited.”1 So they sent him back the next year, where he discovered that “mediocrity is in operation this year, even more furiously than ever.” In 1881 the majority of the exhibition was “even more laughable than those of previous years”; in 1882 he promised to “restrict myself to citing a few works that can’t be confused with the worm-eaten fruits of this bargain basement.”

Out of the worm-eaten fruits—Orientalist fantasies and picturesque peasants—he praised fresher paintings by Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, illustrating the still-relevant point that even the most dispiriting presentations on this scale can contain great works (for those with the eyes to see and the stamina to find them). And if it seems obvious now that these Impressionist pioneers would be remembered while their peers were forgotten, then it needed someone from outside the academic and commercial establishment to make the case. Having done his duty inside the salon, Huysmans then counseled “people sickened by this cheap and insulting display of prints and paintings to cleanse their eyes by directing them outdoors” where they might find, on a billboard, a poster by Jules Chéret advertising the cabaret. There is, he wrote, “a thousand times more talent in the least of these posters than in the majority of the paintings I’ve had the sad privilege of reviewing.”

There’s much to be written about those Chéret posters—how they link back to pre-revolutionary painting, are indebted to the Japanese prints then causing a sensation in Paris, anticipate the work of artists as diverse as Sigmar Polke, Emory Douglas, and Jenny Holzer—but the point is that the images most influential on the history of art were not to be found in the salon, but in the surrounding city. And this begs the question, after Art Basel Paris was curtailed by an uprising spreading across Europe, of what is to be found on the streets outside the Grand Palais? What images are being pasted to lampposts, painted on signs, or attached to barricades that will last beyond the work in the fair? Here is a reminder, firstly, that the most enduring works are rarely incubated by the established institutions, only reclaimed later. And secondly that, however frustrating it can be, you might have to study what is in those institutions in order to be able to see clearly what will come next.