Ingres Other-Wise

Abstract

The bather and odalisque occur repeatedly in the work of J.A.D. Ingres, forming one of several recurrent themes that punctuate the artist's career and give it an unusual degree of continuity.' This phenomenon of repetition in Ingres' work has been variously accounted for. Hans Naef sees it as a lack of imagination,2 and Marjorie Cohn as the pursuit of perfection.3 For Norman Bryson it arises from a continuous struggle to overcome the authority of traditional forms by constructing a personal canon, through the mechanism of sexual desire.4 All of these explanations ultimately focus upon the personality of the artist. They are concerned with his limitations, his aims or his conscious ambitions and with a personally inflected apprehension of the nature of sexual desire. Bryson's account, the most recent and most complex of the three mentioned here, uses a psychoanalytic reading of the works. But its concern is with the maker not his audience, with the motivation for the production of the works and not their effectivity. The artist is more than a hundred years dead, and past the possibility of resurrection by human efforts; the paintings, however, still live, both in that they continue to exist as objects and continue to be of interest. The continued life of the paintings is shown in responses to them. To start from response and attempt to account for it to ask why it might be that the pictures continue to excite interest is to attempt an analysis of the living paintings, instead of trying to reconstitute a long dead artist. One particularly interesting, if not entirely typical response to the bather/odalisques is that of Georges Wildenstein: