Reading for detail: on Zola's abandonment of Impressionism1

Abstract

Many studies of émile Zola's art criticism have explored why, toward the close of his career as an art critic, Zola rejected Impressionism. They usually conclude that he was simply wrong, that Zola's ultimate dismissal of Impressionism represents an error of judgement. Just as Charles Baudelaire's choice of Constantin Guys as the model for his essay Le Peintre de la vie moderne is frequently seen as ‘mistaken,’ critics tend to lament Zola's ultimate abandonment of Impressionism and wish he had been more insightful.2 Much of this sentiment comes from the fact that Zola did not pick the winning team. With historical hindsight on our side, we can easily see that the precursors to abstraction (Impressionism and Post-Impressionism) won, whereas Realism/Naturalism lost.3 The Salon artists Zola favored in the final years of his art critical career (in this article I will be primarily discussing Henri Gervex and Jules Bastien-Lepage), who were highly successful artists in their lifetime, are today relegated to minor status.4Artists like Bastien-Lepage and Gervex usually fail to measure up to the achievements of édouard Manet and the Impressionists because they do not so easily pre-figure Modernism, nor do they represent early incarnations of what we eventually came to call the avant-garde. Bastien-Lepage and Gervex remained committed Salon painters and thus fall into the category of academic, thus uninteresting, art. Painters like Bastien-Lepage and Gervex were even part of the debate and fundamental obstacle to the creation of the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, as art historians and curators debated the utility of bringing Salon art out of the basement and exhibiting it alongside pieces from the period's more respected, and more popular, independent art movements.5 Instead of considering Zola's later support of Salon art as a mistake in judgement, I would like to examine those images he did prefer. Zola's choice of these supposedly inconsequential artists does not represent so much a break or turning point in his art criticism so much as the continuation of ideas that were present from the beginning of Zola's writings on art. Zola's fondness for Gervex and Bastien-Lepage corresponds more agreeably with his early praise of Manet and the Impressionists than is first apparent.6 The way in which artists like Bastien-Lepage, Gervex and Manet and the Impressionists relate to each other in Zola's theory of art reflects the moment before the lines between academic and avant-garde were neatly drawn, the moment when later-determined binaries coexisted on the same pictorial plane. In fact, Zola's choice of these artists relates directly to our own present-day discussions of academic art, independent art, and what to do after (post)modernism.