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The realism of a Flaubert, a Manet, a Degas thought not. This kind of realism was expository, not didactic. It did not aim to show things as they might be—the argument of political art — but as they actually were. Its model, often invoked by Flaubert, was the objective procedure of scientific thought, and its aim was to produce a perfectly limpid art in which the world would be mirrored. There is everything in common between the relentless detail in which the boredom and pointlessness of Emma Bovary's life was built up, and the minutely articulated jumble of reflections behind the blank-faced nana in Manet's Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882. Both works, in a sense, point forward to the "objective," molecular constellations of dabbed light from which Seurat assembled his figures on the speckled lawn of the Grande Jatte. If the origins of one aspect of the avant-garde lie with Courbet, those of the other are to be found in Manet: in detachment and irony, art contemplates its nature as a language, without hope of changing the world. The quest for formal perfection and the renewal of visual speech are enough.
From 1880 on, much advanced art would be more gratuitous, relativistic, ironic and self-sufficient (in the sense of its indifference to the traditional social aims of painting or sculpture) than it had ever been. The very idea of avant-garde activity was of something "special," open to small coteries of people who needed to know a lot of other art in order to appreciate the subtleties of the New. Modern art looked esoteric because it was. To see how a cubist Braque or Picasso from 1911 connected to the realities of modern Life, with its quick shuttle of multiple viewpoints, its play between solids and transparency, its odd tensions between signs, letters and numbers on the one hand and extreme painterly ambiguity on the other, demanded the kind of sympathetic attention that very few people were prepared to give.
This change is not imaginable without the intellectual permissions and opportunities for irony given to bourgeois artists by a bourgeois society. Under such a dispensation, art claimed the same rights as the sciences that Flaubert took as a Literary model: in particular, the right not to be understood too quickly or by too many. Unpopularity and marginality — "uselessness" — gave the new work of art a chance to develop its resonances before it faced the full stress of public inspection.
In the past 30 years, vanguard art seems to have lost its "political" role. At the same time, although we still have lots of art — a stream of it, feeding an apparently insatiable market and providing endless opportunities for argument, exegesis and comparison — painting and sculpture have ceased to act with the urgency that was once part of the modernist contract. They change, but their changing no longer seems as important as it did in 1900, or 1930, or even 1960. When one speaks of the end of modernism, one does not invoke a sudden historical terminus. Histories do not break off clean, like a glass rod; they fray, stretch and come undone, like rope. There was no specific year in which the Renaissance ended; but it did end, although culture is still permeated with the active remnants of Renaissance thought.