FROM METAPHYSICS TO LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY
329
in contrast to their Romantic predecessors, who eschewed the vulgar and
the banal and were always mooning about an idealized world, one that was
exotic or heroic. The Modernists, after Monet and Cezanne, worked alone,
either outdoors or in modest, small studios. To them it had become a source
of shan1.e rather than pride-a mark oflack of originality-for the work of
a young artist to be identifiable as belonging to the "school of ..." Thus
while the lone modernist masters were setting novel styles in small studios
rather than in large ateliers with paid assistants or paying students, they left
the training function to the maligned academies or to art schools.
At about the time that large ateliers were disappearing, a novel type of
influential painter appeared, to whom I shall refer as "guru." The guru's
role was more inspirational than style-setting, with his atelier serving as a
parlor rather than a workshop for his devotees. The first of these painter–
gurus was Edouard Manet, who became the intellectual fountainhead of
the new generation of Independents. Manet's parlor-atelier was frequent–
ed not only by the leading young impressionist painters, such as Claude
Monet, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, and Jean Renoir, but also by the lead–
ing literary figures of the day, such as Charles Baudelaire, Emile Zola and
Stephane Mallarme.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, a novel working setting for
painters sprang up in the run-down Paris quarter of Montmartre: the ate–
lier commune formed by several hard-up artists who shared cheap working
space in a decrepit building yet worked independently. One of these com–
munes was the Bateau Lavoir, a sprawling wooden hut without gas,
electricity or water. It owes its fame to having been the site at which
Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon
was painted in 1904 by the penniless Pablo Picasso,
recently arrived from Spain. Unlike the great masters of the 17th century,
such as Rubens and Rembrandt, Picasso was to produce his prodigious
output of pictures without assistants or students. A typical master of
moderni ty, Picasso worked alone.
By the middle the twentieth century, an enormous stylistic diversification
of modernist painting had taken place. Novel styles had turned up at ever–
shorter intervals and lasted for ever-shorter periods, with action painting and
Pop Art providing late examples of this vast aesthetic embranchment. Finally,
towards the end of the twentieth century, there arrived the artistic era of
"stylistic stasis" that Leonard Meyer had predicted in the 1960s and which
came to be known as post-modernism. Post-modern painters make anachro–
nistic use of past styles, a practice that had formerly been considered corrupt,
contemptible, and dishonest from the purview of Western cultural beliefs
about originality and creation, causation and history.
Are there any painters left in the era of stylistic stasis who could still
be designated meaningfully as "master painter?" One candidate proposed
for this title was Andy Warhol, of whom it was said that "What Manet did
