‘The Imaginary Public’: Uncovering T.J Clark’s Method of Categorising the Public in his Study of Gustave Courbet, Art, And Politics of 1848

Introduction

Timothy J Clark’s seminal books Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution and The Absolute Bourgeoise: Art and Politics in France, 1848-1852, did something quite different with the category of ‘the public’ in the context of 1970’s art history. The books were written as part of Clark’s project that intended to homogenise 19th-century realist painting into the political context of 1848. This, however, simplifies the actual aim of the project; it wasn’t just a study that integrated mid-19th century French art into its historical context, but one that asked questions relating to artistic form, systems of visual representation, theories of art and politics, social class, and the entire historical moment.[1] In other words, these books retraced the artists’ and artworks’ historical specificity and made ‘background’ ‘foreground’, setting the foundations for how to do a ‘social history of art’, following art historians such as Arnold Hauser, Meyer Schapiro, and others.[2]

Undoubtedly, one of the impetuses for being able to do this was Clark’s method of reframing the public; as Colin Mercer claims ‘the argument developed in both of these books is that the central stake of these processes [Clark’s project] is the public’ (my emphasis).[3] Following that, the exact enquiry for this essay is on this ‘public’. It intends to understand how Clark frames it and uses it as a method for his sociohistorical enquiry into French realist painting. When Clark refers to the public in his opening chapter ‘On the Social History of Art’, he isn’t alluding to a public that can be examined ‘empirically’, one which we might label as ‘the audience’ that interacts with the work through viewing it, but instead, one which acts as an ‘imaginary’ force within the work and as a presence within the painting. As he puts it:

This brings us back to the problem of artists and public. I want to put back ambiguity into that relation: to stop thinking in terms of the public as an identifiable ‘thing’ whose needs the artists notes, satisfies, or rejects. The public is a presence or a phantasy within the work and within the process of its production.[4]

Identifying the public as a presence or a phantasy has sparked an interest within me. I want to know what Clark means when he labels the public in this way and the effects this had on his art historical enquiry. Therefore, this essay is not one about French Realism in the 19th century but is instead about a methodology Clark is using to frame it. However, I do rely heavily on contexts surrounding particular paintings by Gustave Courbet as well as historical contexts as a gateway to unpacking Clark’s framing of the public. The Burial at Ornans (1849-50, Figure 1) as well as other works painted around the same time act as case studies in trying to understand the method, for example.

I intend to trace Clark’s method of the ‘imaginary public’ in two ways. The first is by working through the words Clark uses to describe it, trying to understand what he means when he uses words such as ‘imaginary’ and ‘phantasy’. For my writing, I will rely on general definitions of certain words along with Freudian and psychanalytical theories that may or may not have influenced Clark. Additionally, I will be using theories from renowned thinkers like Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) and Louis Althusser (1918-1990) to aid me in uncovering Clark's public. I will be exploring these theories through the lens of Clark's framing of the public, which will help me understand what he means when he uses the words ‘imaginary’ and ‘phantasy’ to define it.

The second means of unpacking Clark’s public will be done by examining the ways it is constituted as Imaginary. My essay will explore how Clark argues the public becomes ‘imaginary’ during the act of painting, something that he claims is central to ‘the production of the work’.[5] To do this, I will rely on the historical context of 1848 as well as theories from other thinkers and art historians that may help prise open Clark’s method.  I’ll also survey how the public is constituted as imaginary through the private voice of French critics. This is another mode by which Clark suggests the speculative public is fashioned.

By working through these two sections my essay will begin to uncover Clark’s methodological approach to the category of the ‘Imagined public’ he utilised in his analysis of Gustave Courbet, art, and the politics of 1848.

The Public as ‘Imaginary’ (?)

Trying to understand what Clark means when he labels the public as ‘imaginary’ requires some archaeology to discover its various meanings. His allusion to Freudian and psychanalytical theory cannot be relied on too flippantly. One cannot simply assume that when using ‘imaginary’, ‘phantasy’, and ‘unconscious’ to frame the public in Courbet’s work Clark means those words in the exact framework both Freud and other psychoanalytical thinkers used them. That said psychoanalysis undoubtedly influenced Clark’s framing of an anti-empirical public and acted as a ‘presence’ within his writing even if not explicitly. His use of these terms should be dealt with carefully. What does Clark mean by ‘imaginary’ and how is he using the term to frame his public? In what ways does it begin to act as a ‘presence’ and ‘phantasy’? I will answer these questions by delving into the meanings of such terms to uncover the potential ways Clark might have been using them concerning Courbet’s public. I will rely on their meanings in their general sense, in psychoanalysis and in other theories where they have been used.

Clark uses the term ‘imaginary’ only three times in Image of the People, but its use is important in understanding his notion of an anti-empirical public. In the opening chapter ‘On the Social History of Art’ he states: ‘Sometimes [that] public makes an appearance, in an Imaginary form […] for the most part it is an implied presence, a shadow, an occlusion’.[6] His coupling of ‘imaginary’ with other adjectives such as ‘shadow’ and ‘occlusion’ originally implies that Clark might’ve been using the term in a more general sense, in the way the word is spoken in everyday vernacular, describing something that exists ‘only in the imagination or fancy’ that has ‘no real existence’.[7] This sense of the ‘imaginary’ is somewhat detached from its psychanalytical meaning – the Lacanian sense of the word – but can be ascribed to Clark’s framing of the public we see depicted in realist paintings. Examining portrayals of the public in works such as The Burial of Ornans (Figure 1, 1849-50), The Stone Breakers (Figure 3, 1949), and The Peasants at Flagery (Figure 4, 1950), one could begin to pin this sense of everyday ‘imaginary’ to the works. It can be deduced that the public depicted is half-formed with ‘no real existence’, like a speculative image in our imagination.

Concluding that the public represented in these artworks is half-formed and speculative, like an image in one’s imagination, is plausible. But what are the implications of this on Clark’s project, and if the public operates in this way how so? The paintings I listed above were created by Gustave Courbet in his studio at Ornans during 1949-50. Courbet had left Paris and was finally a recognised artist with some freedom in what he could paint.[8] The public depicted in The Ornans paintings is an invention both from memory and from sketches used as reference material (see Figure 2). It is an encapsulation of both the concrete real (the things Courbet had seen) and the indistinct non-real (the things Courbet had invented and imagined). It is thus labelled as ‘imaginary’ because it is both real and non-real simultaneously. Clark uses the term in this way to allude to the public in Courbet’s paintings as something that operates as a conjectural and speculative force, one that represents the sense of unease and ambiguity in the context of revolutionary France. The public, in this case, has a hypothetical existence and therefore works like an image in the ‘imagination’.

Figure 1 - Gustave Courbet, The Burial at Ornans, 1849-50.

Figure 2 – Gustave Courbet, Sketch of The Burial at Ornans, 1849.

Yet, labelling the public as half-formed, as a thing that operates as a ‘presence or a phantasy within the work’[9] moves one from the general usage of ‘imaginary’ into its psychanalytic use. If the public operates as a semi-non-material image, as something that is real and not real concurrently, how does it work like a phantasy in psychanalysis, as Clark suggests it does? And how does this further define Clark’s use of ‘imaginary’? The spelling of the word fantasy with a ‘ph’ as opposed to the ‘f’ is an obvious allusion to psychanalysis. It had been adopted by thinkers such as Freud and Lacan to differentiate between fantasy in its common usage and its usage within psychanalysis.[10]  Laplanche and Pontail’s book, The Language of Psychoanalysis presents us with multiple definitions of the word ‘phantasy’. This dictionary of terms is too from the 1970s. It is useful here because it presents one with definitions of the words Clark was using in their specificity, which will help one to understand what he perhaps meant by them. Laplanche and Pontails define phantasy as an ‘imaginary scene in which the subject is a protagonist, representing the fulfilment of a wish ([…] the unconscious wish) in a manner that is distorted’.[11] As they continue to define the word, they emphasise that phantasies are usually imagined ‘sequences’ or ‘scenarios’ that are generated through unconscious desires. They also stress how phantasies are distorted. When looking back at the selection of artworks I have pointed to, this description seems quite fitting. The depictions of people are, as I have underpinned, imaginary scenes; they operate like an image in one’s mind and could be described as ‘sequences’ and ‘scenarios’ that represent a level of distortion. This distortion is enacted through processes of condensation, in which we see a depiction of multiple different French classes at once within Courbet’s painting. Condensation is described by Freud as a ‘compression’ of different dream thoughts that manifest themselves as the dream content in a singular image or ‘nodal’ point.[12] Usually this too is distorted and works to hide the true meaning of the dream in a form where it is ‘not easily recognisable’.[13] When Clark labels the public in works such as The Burial as a phantasy, he is leaning on this definition of the word and using it to elevate his method of calling the public ‘imaginary’. Through the condensation and distortion of different French classes, the public depicted in Courbet’s Ornans paintings, operate like a phantasy scenario. This is because it is unclear what class we are observing in The Burial, as Mercer reinforces:

Was this public, this people, the same as that which occupied the Hotel de Ville and the Tuileries in February 1848, or was it the petit-bourgeois supporters of the Montagne, or was it those who voted for the conservative victory in April of the same year, or was it the peasantry on whose mandate Louis-Napoleon was to come to power?[14]

The public in this case then, is not a singular homogonous body but instead a compression (or condensation) of multiple publics together. It thus operates like a phantasy image because, like in an image in a dreamscape, it is an amalgamation of different images at once in a singular image, which through the power of distortion, represents something ‘unrecognisable’.

Thinking about the context of the works, these depictions would have been ‘unrecognisable’ in 1850. The Burial, for example, was something entirely new and had never been done before, at least not on the scale that Courbet had utilised. Moreover, the works perpetuated a revolutionary aura by creating a ‘radical ambiguity’ in their representations of multiple class types. It operated as ‘imaginary’ through this ambiguity because it is neither one thing nor another but instead a mixture of things, like a dream image. Condensing and distorting the Parisian public into an ‘imaginary’ countryside scene sits neatly with the La Voix du Peuple’s claim that in the wake of 1848 ‘Paris reigns but the countryside Governs’.[15] Perhaps this is why art historians can call his paintings ‘revolutionary’ because they nod to a speculative and unfixed future that unnerved multiple French officials and critics. Courbet had generated a public by imagining a public that did not yet exist, but a public that could be. The Burial, Stonebreakers, and Peasants portray the public as a spectre of the ‘imaginary’, like an image in a dream, and as ‘phantasy’. Clark's use of Freudian terminology in his work was a credible way to frame Courbet’s public. By employing these words and working within their contexts, he encouraged art historians, students of art history, and interested readers to question the idea of a public that is not empirical, fixed, or clear, but instead abstract and uncertain, perhaps alluding to a public that may have been forming itself during the turbulent years after 1848.

Understanding Courbet’s public as this unclear entity, as something that is ‘imaginary’, allows the art historian to understand its representation as fragmented. I think it is important to mention here that I don’t think Clark’s use of the word imaginary is influenced much by the Lacanian usage of the word. Clark lived in Paris during his research for both Image of the People and The Absolute Bourgeoise, as he states he was a research fellow in 1966-67 at the Centre for National de la Recherche Scientifique in the preface to the Courbet book.[16] At the same time Jacques Lacan was holding public seminars and writing his Neo-Freudian psychoanalytical theories in Paris.[17] It wasn’t, though, until the 1980s that Lacanian theory began influencing art theory and history, in works such as Victor Burgin's The End of Art Theory.[18] With that said, it is unlikely that Clark was influenced by Lacan’s understanding of the ‘imaginary’ whilst writing his social art history of Courbet and other French Realist artists. Nonetheless, as we have underpinned through tracing the potential ways Clark might have been using ‘imaginary’ – in conjunction with psychanalytical terms such as ‘phantasy’, ‘distortion’, and ‘condensation’ – it is clear that Freudian and psychanalytical theory acts as an undertone to his mapping of an anti-empirical public that is manifested through and/or in the artwork. Perhaps the only link one could make to Lacan’s ‘imaginary’ and Clark’s version of it, is to the notion of the ‘fragmented self’ that one develops through a person’s recognition of their ego during the mirror stage.[19] Like the self, the French public in Courbet’s painting, in Clark’s sense, is distorted, disjointed, and lacking. Yet, I don’t think that Clark was thinking much about the Lacanian ‘imaginary’ when he was writing his method of the anti-empirical public. I believe his thinking was better situated within a Freudian understanding of the word and concentrated in a more general and early psychoanalytical framing of it.

Although, one might argue it is difficult to get away from the Lacanian sense of the ‘imaginary’ when trying to underpin Clark’s usage of the word. Despite outlining that I don’t think he relied directly on the Lacanian sense of the ‘Imaginary’, Clark could have been leaning on the Althusserian notion of the word when framing Courbet’s public, which is inherently related to Lacan’s understanding of it, creating a paradoxical relationship to Lacan’s theories. Louis Althusser wrote on ideology during the 1960s and 70s and utilised the word ‘imaginary’ within his Marxist analysis of the state and economy. In a subsection of an edited book on his writing, Althusser outlines that ‘ideology is a ‘representation’ of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’.[20] In other words, unlike the traditional Marxian view that ideology ‘reflects’ the material world, Althusser believed ideology was represented through an imaginary relationship to our perception of reality, which then becomes ‘ideological.’ Althusser makes this claim by showing that ‘assuming that we do not live in these ideologies’ (referring to religious ideologies, political ideologies and other world outlooks governed by figures such as God, justice, and duty) we assume that they’re not ‘truth’ but instead ‘largely imaginary’, something fictional.[21] In a first reading of this, one could deduce that Althusser’s use of imaginary is linked more to its general use; after all, fictional things are imaginary and have ‘no real existence’.[22] Yet what draws us back into a Lacanian notion of the word, is Althusser attention to language and structures that constitute ideology. We are always inside our ideology because we are forever reliant on the language, structures and apparatuses that create them. The things that materialise our world outlooks feel ‘real’, but in actuality are not. Thus, the relationship we have with ideology is governed by ‘imagined forces’ that take us away from the ‘real world’. When Althusser uses ‘real’ he is quite clearly leaning on the Lacanian sense of the ‘real’, referring to the state of nature we can never reach because we rely on language to construct our world despite it being the thing that cuts us off from it (the mechanism, structure, apparatus of society).[23] Thus, when developing our relationship with ideology we are always in a state of lack because everything we understand as ‘real’ (in Marxist terms: ‘our real conditions of existence’: production, repression, exploitation, ideologization and scientific practice)[24] is governed through ‘imagined forces’ much like our self is when it is developed during the mirror phase.

In unpacking this part of Althusser’s theory of Ideology one has come some way from Clark’s public. What does this have to do with it? What questions does thinking about the Althusserian ‘imaginary’, allow us to ask about Clark’s method of framing the public in Image of the People? Firstly, we should retrace how Clark identifies and frames Courbet’s (and subsequently artists’) relationships with his public. For Clark, Courbet’s public is the ‘mainspring’ of his art; it is the thing richly present and ‘ambiguously defined’ in his work, that acts as a phantasy within his painting and its production.[25] Is it that Clark could have been suggesting that the relationship Courbet develops with his public was an ‘imaginary’ one, much like the relationship of individuals to an ideology, as Althusser Claims? Thinking then, about Clark’s public and Althusser’s ‘Imaginary relationship to ideology’, Courbet too was struck by language, structures, and apparatuses – in the context of 1848-1856 France – which surely defined his ‘invention’ of a public that becomes an imaginary one? Therefore, asking whether Courbet establishes an imaginary relationship with the public in his work is a valid question that should be investigated.

Yet, thinking about this leads me to think about how this public becomes ‘imaginary’. So far, I have established why it functions as such by tracing the potential ways T.J. Clark could have been using the word within his framing of the public. By thinking about the relationship of Courbet to his public and posing it as ‘imaginary’, we begin to think about his creation of it, something which happens within the act of painting. I have briefly unpacked this in this first section of the essay when talking about the different methods Courbet uses to generate the public (memory and invention) but did not unpack this in detail. Furthermore, I haven’t spoken greatly on what, possibly, Clark might have meant when he labelled Courbet’s public as an ‘unconscious’ entity. He says in his chapter ‘On the Social History of Art’, in relationship to the public, that the ‘unconscious is nothing but its conscious representations’, something that operates like an unconscious thought through the ‘breaks, fails, falters’ in the critics’ voices.[26] It is because both of these things – thinking about Courbet’s relationship to his public as imaginary and the unconscious voices of the critics writing on him – lead one to think about the realm of ‘invention’, and ask the individual trying to understand Clark’s framing of the public to question ‘how’? How has this public become ‘imaginary’? How did it come to operate as a speculative entity in the work? For the remainder of the writing, these are the questions I will seek to answer.

Figure 3 - Gustave Courbet, The Stone Breakers, 1849.

Figure 4- Gustave Courbet, The Peasants of Flagery Returning from the Fair, 1849.

Constituting a ‘Public’ in the Act

Having broken down what Clark could have meant by framing Courbet’s public as ‘imaginary’ I have deduced that the public exists as a speculative entity, perhaps, nodding to a future where that public may exist. If this public acts as a conjectural force within paintings such as The Burial, how does it become ‘imaginary’? How is it constituted into being? A worthy place to start is to look back upon Clark’s introductory chapter ‘On the Social History of Art’. Clark believes this public is called into being in two ways. The first is through what I am going to call ‘the constitutive act of painting’, which refers to Courbet, alone in his studio fashioning a public that does not quite exist, using oil paint and paintbrushes. The second way is through the ‘unconscious’ voices of the critics who wrote on Courbet’s paintings (as well as the paintings of other French artists) in the salons of 1848-55. In the subsequent paragraphs, I will unpack how T.J. Clark uses these two factors to develop his framing of how the anti-empirical public is constituted as imaginary. I will rely on Clark’s writing and the writing of other art historians and theorists to continue uncovering Clark’s methodological approach.

Let me first unpack the way the public is summoned through the ‘constitutive act of painting’. As mentioned previously, Courbet painted The Burial at Ornans, The Stonebreakers and The Peasants at Flagery in the years 1848-50. The Burial was so large that there were only sixteen inches between the studio walls and the painting itself. This is why, as art historian Linda Nochlin claims, the painting has a ‘two-dimensionality’ to it; Courbet could never get enough distance between himself and the painting.[27] Although this appears obvious, this presents concrete evidence that Courbet was alone when he painted these works, a factor which is of important significance in trying to understand how it is this public is constituted as an ‘imaginary’ force. It is evident that a large inspiration for The Burial as well as other works by Courbet was popular print. Clark uses this evidence to make his readers aware of what imagery influenced Courbet to invent his representations of Parisian people in the countryside. He utilised prints such as Degré des âges (Figure 5) and The Convoi funèbre de Napoléon (Figure 6).[28] What becomes evident through looking at these prints is the presentation of social or ritualistic situations, which Clark makes note of, alluding back to the idea of Courbet creating a ‘scenario’ or ‘sequence’ which then becomes a phantasy within the work. Within these popular prints, similar to the realist works Courbet painted in the Ornans, we’re presented with a mixture of different people; therefore, one can perhaps understand the reason why there are multiple classes represented in Courbet’s work. The significance lies in how Courbet utilises these prints: along with rejecting the notions of the academy, appropriating the styles and motifs of artists such as Rembrandt, and combining this with the use of popular imagery, Courbet invents, affronts, rejects, and satisfies his ‘public’, a process that becomes an ‘integral part of creation’ and one which calls the public into being.[29] This dialectical nature of creation is key to understanding how Clark frames the public in Image of the People, which becomes a ‘phantasy’ or presence in realist painting. It is through these opposing forces of ‘inventing, affronting, rejecting, and satisfying’ that Courbet can manifest the public as a ghostly, speculative, uncertain entity that exists within the works, something that occurs within his brushstrokes as he sits in solitude, painting configurations of everyday people.  

Figure 5 - Èpinal Print, Degré des âges, 1826.

Figure 6 - Èpinal Print, The Convoi funèbre de Napoléon, 1800.

This solitude is of paramount importance for understanding Clark's complicated framing of the public. Through noting this, one can begin to question the nature of the relationship between an artist and their ‘public’, which can be compared to an individual's relationship to ideology in Althusserian theory. Courbet, who worked alone and created art that challenged, confronted, rejected, and invented his public, must have had some kind of ‘imaginary’ interaction with the political, social, and ideological situation of France during 1848 and beyond, as well as the actual public in Paris. As Clark argues throughout the Courbet book and as I outlined in the introduction to this essay, politics was a central impetus to the creation of Courbet’s work. Courbet was initially a spectator during the 1848 revolution and did not fight on the barricades.[30] Despite his socialist beliefs, influenced by French politician Perrie-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1869) whom Courbet developed a friendship, his connection with the revolutionary public was just as much an act of solidarity as his creation of a public through paintings was. By inventing a public through paint, one which becomes a ‘revolutionary presence’ through his work, it could be argued that Courbet developed an imaginary and fictional relationship with it and the revolution itself, one which can function similarly to an individual's relationship to ideology in Althusserian terms. Courbet's interaction with the public (the actual revolutionary public in France, the one fighting on the Barricades) was always solitary, illusory, and imagined, never in ‘reality’ but instead facilitated through paint. Therefore, as much as his representation of the public was speculative, his process of creating it was too; a process that is constituted within the act of creation and mediated by his relationship to the people he was seeking to represent.

There could be a similarity between how this idea of the speculative public is ‘constituted in the act of painting’ to how, professor of art and aesthetics, John Roberts, argues politics is constituted through the act of photography. In his book, Photography and its Violations Roberts writes about the constitution and mediation of ‘the political’ that occurs through the identity of the ‘unannounced photographer’ and ‘affective and empathetic effects of photography’. He states:

In other words, photography in its various social-relational modes is one of the primary means through which individuals inhabit, experience, and reflect on the world in which they find themselves, but also […] through which they experience and reflect on those worlds in which they don’t find themselves or don’t recognize themselves. As such, the unannounced identity of the photographer and the affective and empathetic effects of photography both play a constitutive role within the production and mediation of the political.[31] 

The notion of the unannounced photographer constituting the political is of interest here. Robert’s model can aid my thinking in understanding how Clark frames the constitution of the public in Courbet’s painting. The ‘unannounced photographer’ is someone who captures what is not intended to be seen or what should not be seen. Roberts argues that this occurs during documentary photography and especially in photographs taken by war photographers. By capturing such scenarios, the photographer and subsequently those who view the photograph can engage with a world that they do not recognize as their own. When photographers take pictures of atrocities, violence, and war, they depict ‘the political’ by highlighting the differences between people living in war zones to those who do not. Roberts believes that photography's ‘ostensive power’ is to provide an emotional connection and catharsis, suggesting that it can act as a catalyst for seeing what cannot be seen, which then invokes emotion and empathy within both the photographer and viewer. [32] This happens during the act of taking the photograph. Just as Courbet constitutes the ‘imagined public’ through painting, the mediation of the political is established within the act of photography. The ‘unannounced photographer’ is similar to Courbet because they are also in solitude when they photograph scenes of war and do not ‘recognize themselves’ within that world. By ‘solitude,’ I do not mean that they are physically alone like Courbet was in his studio painting, but rather alone in a place where they do not belong. Therefore, when the photographer takes a picture, they are absent from the political while also making it visible. Is this not what I have argued Clark suggests Courbet does in his creation of the speculative public? One which he creates at arm’s length from the revolution but one which becomes a symbol of revolution, constituted within the act of painting? Of course, there is not an exact connection between Robert’s and Clark’s models of constituting something, but this is a similarity, one of which I am mentioning because it aids my thinking on how Clark believes this ghostly public becomes ‘ghostly’, ‘Imaginary’ and ‘fictional’. What is clear, is that in both models – Clark’s and Robert’s – the thing constituted (the political and the public) is done so through the act of creation, within a solitude of some kind; In Courbet’s case through painting in his studio and for the ‘unannounced photographer’ in the process of photographing war and violence they’re not directly part of.  

The first part of this section analysed how the anti-empirical public becomes ‘Imaginary’ through the ‘constitutive act of painting’. This is one way the public becomes a presence within Courbet’s painting. The second way this happens is through the voices of critics writing on Courbet within the Salons of 1848-1855. Clark describes the process by which the public becomes a speculative entity through the critics’ words, stating:

As for the public […] the conscious is nothing but its conscious representations, its closures in the faults, silences, and caesuras of normal discourse. In the same way, the public is nothing but the private representations which are made of it, in this case in the discourse of the critic. Like the analyst listening to his patient, what interests us, if we want to discover the meaning of the mass of criticism, are the points at which the rational monotone of the critic breaks, fails and falters; we are interested in the points of obsessive repetition, repeated irrelevance, anger suddenly discharged – the points were the criticism is incomprehensible are the keys to its comprehension. The public, like the unconscious, is present only where it ceases; yet it determines the structure of the private discourse; it is the key to what cannot be said, and no subject is more important.[33]

Clark observed that between 1848 and 1855, forty-five critics wrote about Courbet's work in the salons. One of the critics, as pointed out by Mercer in his review of Courbet's Realism project, saw the public portrayed in paintings such as The Burial at Ornans and The Stone Breakers as a ‘mysterious and formidable force’.[34] This suggests that Courbet’s paintings may have evoked a sense of unease and uncertainty in the critic, which is, as Clark denotes, a feeling that arises from the unconscious mind. The use of adjectives such as 'mysterious' and 'formidable' to describe the public in the paintings resonates with this feeling of discomfort. It is possible that the critic felt this way when he saw the mass of people in The Burial and other paintings, which caused that sense of unease and anger which Clark writes about in his passage above. As Mercer reinforces there was an ‘unavoidable realization that something was troubling in the sombre brutality of the image [which critics] could not escape’.[35] This sense of anger and unease felt by the critics was perhaps due to the nature of French politics at this time. As another critic claims, the peasants we see in Jean-François Millet’s (1814-1875) The Gleaners (Figure. 6) embody ‘the pikes of the popular risings and the scaffold of 1793’.[36] Sure enough, Clark writes about the growing peasant population that was evolving in the provinces of Paris in Image of the People, one which began rallying the revolutionary aura of 1789 in and after 1848.

Figure 7 – Jean-François Millet, The Gleaners, 1857.

Concentrated anger and obsession with the public represented in Courbet's painting is the important thing to note here. It is this anger and obsession, which pours through the critic’s voices, that generated the public as a fictive entity? We could utilise J.L Austin’s linguistic theory of ‘performative utterances’ to understand the constitutive power of the critic’s voices, by which the public becomes ‘imaginary’ through their unconscious words. In Austin’s theory, performative utterances are those phrases – such as ‘I do’ or ‘I name’ or ‘I apologise’ – that do something rather than simply say something. They are phrases that constitute a particular outcome through their performative action. So, as Austin points out when the groom utters ‘I do take this my woman to be my lawful wedded wife’ he is, for all intents and purposes, ‘doing something rather than saying something’; he is performing a constitutive action.[37] We are, however, not directly conscious of the performative aspect of such utterances, but when spoken they change what was to something new. Austin notes that verbs are usually used to enact such performative utterances, but it could be argued that the Critics’ voices and writing, work in a similar mode to Austin’s phrases. Much like when the groom indulges in the act of pronouncing himself in matrimony to his wife, by uttering ‘I do’, Courbet’s critics constitute the public as imaginary and speculative through their angry, obsessive, irrelevant and unconscious acts of speech. When they label the public represented in paintings such as The Burial as ‘formidable’ and ‘mysterious’ they grant them a speculative revolutionary power, conjuring an ‘imagined public’ as they write their words. As Clark notes, this had arisen from the unease and unsettlement of seeing a mismatch of Parisian classes, working, sitting, and living, together in artistic configurations and perhaps comes out of a fear of the growing peasant milieu fashioning itself in the countryside after the unsettled years of 1848.

Austin’s theory has been used and critiqued by many thinkers since its dissemination. Nonetheless, as a theoretical framework, it helps to understand how Clark believed the public became an imaginary presence in Courbet’s realist painting. Much like in the ‘constitutive act of painting’ the public is constituted in the utterances of the critics. Their acts of criticism manifest a public that could be but one that is not quite yet, one that exists as an imaginary, mysterious and formidable force in the artworks.

Conclusion

This essay has aimed to unpack T.J. Clark’s method of categorising the ‘public’ in his study of French realist painting and the Politics of 1848. I have tried to understand why he chose to approach the public as 'imaginary' instead of empirical as well as what he meant when he used such terms to describe it.

I have divided my writing into two sections to explain Clark’s redefinition of the ‘public’. Initially, I tried to understand Clark’s use of the words ‘imaginary’ and ‘phantasy’ by looking at the everyday notion of the words as well as their meanings within psychoanalysis. During my research on the ‘imaginary’, I encountered Lacan’s sense of the word, but as I have stated was not certain if Clark was using it in this mode. Thus, I attempted to figure out what 'imaginary' meant in other areas of psychoanalysis and in other theories that Clark might have used to frame his notion of an anti-empirical public, looking into Freud’s dream work for example. However, the essay has placed Lacan’s complex notion of the ‘imaginary’ in contestation with Clark’s version of it and has asked if they’re compatible. It has done this by noting that the ‘public’ is fragmented much like the self within ‘the imaginary order.’ The writing also locates Lacan’s sense of the fragmented self in connection with the Imaginary public by questioning it through Althusserian theory on Ideology.

It is not clear exactly how Clark was utilising the ‘imaginary’ to frame his public. Still, I am certain enough that he was alluding to the ‘public’ as a speculative, ghostly, and notional force that existed in works such as The Burial, for example, and my writing has undoubtedly illustrated this point. This is noted at best when I write about how ‘condensation’ and ‘distortion’ operate in Courbet’s works. Through using Laplanche’s and Pontiail’s Dictionary of Psychoanalysis I understand how Clark was using such terms and prise open his method of the ‘imaginary public’.

Secondly, my essay has set out to discover in what ways Clark believed the ‘public’ was constituted as ‘imaginary’. The first way I do this is through examining Courbet’s ‘constitutive act of painting’; Courbet alone in his studio ‘inventing, affronting, rejecting’ his public, using multiple references at arms-length from the revolution.[38] My writing also does this by unpacking the passage on the critics’ unconscious voices, which Clark claims the ‘imaginary’ public is summoned within. My essay illustrates how the public represents a ‘formidable’ force that resonates with the growing peasant milieu in the countryside. The ‘public’, through their unconscious utterances, becomes a mysterious force within the work, one that represents a sense of unease and uncertainty that was concerning to critics.

In closing my writing, it is worth reinstating that the ‘public’ in T. J Clark’s study of realism operates as an anti-empirical body, one which is brought into being through and in the work of art. Categorising ‘the public’ in this way permitted T.J. Clark to ask questions that others had yet to, creating one gateway to reintegrate the study of realism into its political and social specificity, which was crucial for methodologically defining what and how to do a social history of art. This essay has not been one that has tested the method of the ‘imagined public’ in other areas of art history, but instead, one that has tried to understand it and its function. Understanding the method in other areas of art history might be another project in itself. Perhaps redefining the public as imaginary may only aid an art historian in their quest for a social history of realism, as it has done in T.J. Clark’s case.

Endnotes 

[1] Colin Mercer, ‘Public Subjects and Subject Publics’, Social History, Vol 9 (1984), 361-68 (362) <https://www.jstor.org/stable/4285373> [11/12/23].

[2] T.J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973) pp. 9-21 (p.11).

[3] Mercer, vol 9, p.362.

[4] T.J Clark, p.15.

[5] T.J. Clark, p.15.

[6] T.J. Clark, p.11. 

[7] ‘Imaginary, Adj & N. Meanings, Etymology and More’, Oxford English Dictionary, Oed.com< https://doi.org/10.1093//OED//3847209967> [19/12/23].

[8] T.J. Clark, pp.77-121.

[9] T.J. Clark, p.15.

[10] Jean Laplanche and Jean-Betrand Pontails, The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: The Hogarth Press Ltd, 1973).

[11] Laplanche and Pontails, p.314.

[12] Sigmund Freud, ‘The Dream Work’, in The Interpretation of Dreams (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), pp.381-465 (p. 383).

[13] Laplanche and Pontails, p.124.

[14] Mercer, Vol 9, p.362.

[15] Mercer, Vol 9, p.363.

[16] T.J. Clark, p.8.

[17]Julia Rivkin and Micheal Ryan ‘Introduction: Strangers to Ourselves; Psychoanalysis’, in, Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julia Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), pp.389-96.

[18] The Lacanian sense of the word ‘imaginary’ as well as other psychoanalytical theories influences Burgin in his Chapter ‘Re-Reading Camera Lucinda’ as well as other essays in the book, in: The end of art theory (London: Macmillan, 1986).

[19] Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as The Formative Function of the I’, in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julia Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), pp.441-46.

[20] Louis Althusser, On Ideology (Verso, 2008), pp.36-44.

[21] Althusser, p.36.

[22] Oxford English Dictionary <https://doi.org/10.1093//OED//3847209967.

[23] Slavoj Žižek’s, How to Read Lacan (London: Granta Publishing, 2006), pp.61-79.

[24] Althusser, p.38.

[25] T.J. Clark, p.15.

[26] T.J. Clark, p.12.

[27] Linda Nochlin, Gustave Courbet: A Study of Style and Society (New York: Garland Publishing, 1976), pp.72-129.

[28] T.J. Clark, p.81.

[29] T.J. Clark, p.15.

[30] T.J. Clark, p.47.

[31]John Roberts, Photography and its Violations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), p.5.

[32] Roberts, p.17.

[33] T.J. Clark, p.12.

[34] Mercer, vol 9, p.363.

[35] Mercer, vol 9, p.362.

[36] Ibid, p.362.

[37] J.L Austin, ‘Performative Utterances’ in, ed. by, J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock, Philosophical Papers, 3rd edn, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp.233-252, (p.235).

[38] T.J. Clark, p.47.

Authors Note: This essay was written for a module on art history and its methods during Will’s time as an MA student at the University of Leeds. It has been adapted for a blog post, and Endnotes are included. For a full bibliography, please contact the author.