French Painting Research Articles

"Rats' Alley": The Great War, Modernism, and the (Anti)Pastoral Elegy

“Rats’ Alley”: The Great War, Modernism, and the (Anti) Pastoral Elegy Sandra M. Gilbert (bio) I read a Biography of Tennyson, which says he was unhappy, even in the midst of fame, wealth and domestic serenity. Divine discontent! . . . But as for misery, was he ever frozen alive, with dead men for comforters? Did he hear the moaning at the bar, not at twilight and the evening bell only, but at dawn, noon, and night, eating and sleeping, walking and working, always the close moaning of the Bar; the thunder, the hissing, and the whining of the Bar?— Wilfred Owen, letter of August 8, 1917 (written from Craiglockhart, mental hospital for shell shock victims) 1 Life contracts and death is expected, As in a season of autumn, The soldier falls. He does not become a three-days personage, Imposing his separation, Calling for pomp. Death is absolute and without memorial, As in a season of autumn, When the wind stops, When the wind stops and, over the heavens, The clouds go, nevertheless, In their direction. Wallace Stevens, “The Death of a Soldier” 2 In “The Owl in the Sarcophagus,” a major elegy for his good friend Henry Church that he composed not long after the end of World War II, Wallace Stevens announced a new poetics of grief even as he theorized the demise—or at least the disintegration—of the very genre in which he was writing. Arguably our century’s noblest artificer of absence, Stevens had meditated on death as “the mother of beauty” throughout most of his literary career, but in “Owl” he frankly declared that what he called his “inventions of farewell” were rooted in a set of new assumptions about both death and grief. Imagining a muse/ [End Page 179] mother who stands “tall in self not symbol . . . . With a sad splendor, beyond artifice,” the famously skeptical poet of “Sunday Morning” asserted that This is the mythology of modern death And these, in their mufflings, monsters of elegy, Of their own marvel made, of pity made. (CPP 374) Defining his own efforts at memorializing the dead—his own gravest imaginings—as in some sense monstrous, Stevens was calling attention to the mutations of a genre infected by its own belatedness, its surprising modernity. But though the death of Church, one of his closest and most admired companions, elicited what is probably this artist’s most beautiful statement about a poetic form to which he was deeply yet ambivalently drawn, Church’s demise was by no means the first event to evoke the poet’s thoughts on procedures for mourning. Indeed, Stevens’s views on both the modernity of death and the concomitant monstrosity of the (modern) elegy might be traced back to the early, tersely solemn “Death of a Soldier” (1918), which I have used as my second epigraph here. One of Stevens’s most frequently anthologized texts, “The Death of a Soldier” formulates a view of bereavement in which traditional funerary customs have been annihilated as definitively as the dead soldier, who does not become a three-days personage, Imposing his separation, Calling for pomp. (CPP 81) On the contrary, powerfully prefiguring the conditions of all “modern death,” the soldier’s death “is absolute and without memorial” or at least without the kind of memorial associated with the “three-days personage” of long-established ceremonial lament. After this first (modern) death, as Stevens ultimately implies in “The Owl in the Sarcophagus,” there will be every other. Given what would become Stevens’s emphasis on death’s historicity, it is especially significant that “The Death of a Soldier”—so often detached from its original context—was first published in the grimly historicized World War I sequence entitled “Lettres d’un Soldat” (1917–1918). Based on letters from the front written between August 1914 and April 1915 by the French painter Eugene Emmanuel Lermercier (who was killed in combat in 1915), the sequence concludes with a Stevensian vision of wartime death that prescribes just the “monsters of elegy” this poet and [End Page 180] his contemporaries were beginning to produce. Like all the other poems in the series, this piece (XIII) is prefaced by a quotation from...

Matters of resistance and acquiescence

L’Art sans frontieres is the misleading title bringing together several essays by Thomas W. Gaehtgens. The first part of this book, a fascinating history of the way Berlin’s museums came into being, is actually completely steered by an analysis of the effects of boundaries and their formidable effectiveness. The second part, focusing on encounters made by German artists with French painting from 1848 onward, also highlights the power of boundaries on the most «border-straddling» of artists. T...

:German and French Paintings: Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

:<i>German and French Paintings: Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries</i>

Napoleon and History Painting: Antoine-Jean Gros's "La Bataille d'Eylau, and: Painting and History during the French Restoration: Abandoned by the Past (review)

Reviewed by: Napoleon and History Painting: Antoine-Jean Gros’s “La Bataille d’Eylau”, and: Painting and History during the French Restoration: Abandoned by the Past Dorothy Johnson Christopher Prendergast. Napoleon and History Painting: Antoine-Jean Gros’s “La Bataille d’Eylau” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Pp. 223. $85 cloth. Beth S. Wright. Painting and History during the French Restoration: Abandoned by the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Pp. 269. $70 cloth. The two books under review here could not be more different in perspective. While Christopher Prendergast’s book offers an extended meditation on one painting, Beth Wright’s work is a study of the interrelationship between historical writings and historical paintings during the Restoration. Prendergast is a literary critic bringing the insights of literary theory (in a Brysonian manner) to bear upon an analysis of Gros’s painting, and, by extension, history painting during the Napoleonic period. Wright’s book is deeply historical and reflects her profound familiarity with French painting of the period. Gros’s vast, complex, and often written-about Battle of Eylau of 1808 certainly warrants a book-length study, for the painting is central to the development of French Romanticism and is one of the most important works commissioned by Napoleon during his campaign to utilize the visual arts for cultural and political propaganda. As in his Napoleon in the Pest-House of Jaffa of 1804, Gros’s subtle and profoundly psychological painting contains mixed [End Page 155] messages about the heroism of Napoleon and the validity and success of his military campaigns. In this work, in fact, Gros transforms the academic genre of battle painting as it had been codified during the late seventeenth century. But this is not the subject of Prendergast’s book. In a series of seven chapters Prendergast explores certain aspects and issues related to history painting, especially battle painting, during the Napoleonic period. Two chapters (chaps. 1 and 6) engage the Battle of Eylau in some detail. In chapter one, Prendergast chooses to focus on a detail of the right foreground, more specifically the gaze of the fallen Prussian soldier that expresses terror and horror, and informs us that he will use this detail to stand for the central arguments of his book: “For to start with a detail, especially with this detail, is both to make a move (routinely unremarkable) and yet to raise a question, a fundamental question, about the character of Gros’s painting. The move is a standard one, the adoption of a kind of synecdochic shorthand, using the detail as an anticipatory marker for a more general claim or argument about the picture: indeed there is an important sense in which the whole argument of this book can be made to converge on the implications of this one detail” (4). Indeed, Prendergast follows the method he has described and does not disappoint. In several chapters, he singles out details for discussion or meditation whether from paintings, historical narratives, or aesthetic treatises of the period. In some instances, this method leads to the presentation of new perspectives which give food for thought, and many pertinent questions are raised throughout the book. A few critical historical circumstances are described in detail, such as that of the commission of the Battle of Eylau and certain aspects of the Napoleonic propaganda campaign in painting. Several key issues in history painting are discussed at length in theoretical terms such as the choice of a significant moment and the debates concerning the “beau idéal” (chap. 3). For the latter discussion, Prendergast aptly focuses on the leading protagonists in the debate, the early-nineteenth-century aesthetic theorists Quatremère de Quincy and Emeric-David. His narrow focus on a few isolated passages in the published texts of these authors, however, leads him not to take into consideration the broader context, so that he states “Even in the writings of Quatremère and Emeric-David it [the “beau idéal”] is already well on its way to the intellectual graveyard” (58). This is mistaken, for the debate on the “beau idéal” in art would be central to the heated polemics of the Romantics versus the Classicists in the...

GEORGES DE LA TOUR, COPIES AND STUDIO PAINTINGS

GEORGES DE LA TOUR, COPIES AND STUDIO PAINTINGS

NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH PAINTING PRACTICES AND MATERIALS IN THE TROPICS: A CASE STUDY OF THE OEUVRE OF ROBERTO LEWIS IN PANAMA

NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH PAINTING PRACTICES AND MATERIALS IN THE TROPICS: A CASE STUDY OF THE OEUVRE OF ROBERTO LEWIS IN PANAMA

A Woman’s Place: The Gendering of Genres in Post‐revolutionary French Painting

The subject of this essay is the painter Angélique Mongez, who was a student of Jacques‐Louis David. Specifically, this essay examines how Mongez negotiated a place in the all‐male domain of history painting and how her contemporaries, that is the critics, responded to her claims to be a history painter. My discussion centres on the Salon of 1802, when she made her debut with a large historical composition, Astyanax taken from his Mother, but extends to the Salons of 1804 and 1806, when the issue of the woman history painter was debated more fully. Mongez’s challenge of the tradition that considered history painting an endeavour reserved for men was possible because she had access to serious instruction and to the Salons, unencumbered by the restrictive policies of the Royal Academy. For in the post‐revolutionary period one could not exclude women from history painting because any outright proscription was in conflict with democratic principles. The strategy, then, adopted by those who argued against women history painters during this period, was to encourage women artists who restricted themselves to genre painting. At the Salons of 1804 and 1806 the genre painter Henriette Lorimier served as the paradigm of the woman painter and the recommended alternative to Angélique Mongez.

French eighteenth-century painting techniques

Recent conservation treatment of several eighteenth-century French paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art allowed the authors to examine French painting techniques from this period more closely. The paintings proved to have unexpectedly complex layer structures that were revealed initially in the examination of paint cross-sections. Thin, non-pigmented, fluorescent layers were found isolating double grounds and paint layers. Polarized light microscopy and fluorescing stains were helpful in determining the nature of some of these layers. Additional examination using Fourier transform infrared spectrometry (FTIR) and gas-chromatography/massspectrometry (GC-MS) identified the media used by the artists. Energy dispersive X-ray microanalysis (SEM-EDX), electron-probe microanalysis and X-ray fluorescence (XRF) identified the pigments in the multiple paint layers. These findings are discussed in connection with relevant seventeenth- and eighteenth-century lectures and treatises.

Corot in Italy: Open-Air Painting and the Classical-Landscape Tradition

Galassi, P. (1991). Corot in Italy: Open-Air Painting and the ClassicalLandscape Tradition. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 258 pages. ISBN 0-300-04957-9 (Cloth), 0-300-06710-0 (Paper). Reviewed by Greg M. Thomas Purdue University This book is about much more than Camille Corot's work in Italy. In demonstrating his central thesis-that Corot's great innovations in landscape painting grew out of the conventions of his academic art education-Peter Galassi writes two other histories. First, his book is a sweeping survey of an entire tradition of landscape painting in oils around 1800, a tradition that laid the groundwork for many subsequent innovations of Modernism. Second, and of particular relevance for art educators, it is by far the most in-depth study to date of how men trained to become artists in the early 19th century. In re-creating the early history of outdoor oil painting, Galassi first explains, in chapter 1, the centrality of outdoor nature drawings in the theory and practice of the classical landscape tradition-the tradition established by the French painters Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain working in Italy in the 17th century. Galassi then describes how, in the 1780s, Neoclassical painters from northern Europe made the outdoor oil study an essential component of academic training, particularly in Italy. The aim of such studies was established by Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, the most influential teacher and theorist of Neoclassical landscape. In his treatise of 1800, Valenciennes explained in great detail how to capture the fleeting effects of light and atmosphere through rapid outdoor oil sketches of the kind for which his own superbly subtle and spontaneous studies could serve as examples. But Valenciennes saw such empirical analysis only as a tool for the elaboration of synthetic, artificial compositions that could carry noble classical meanings. Based on this theoretical interdependence of study and invention, Galassi argues in chapter 2 against the received idea of an opposition between progressive naturalism and conservative classicism in French art. He shows that around 1800, virtually all French landscapists imitated either 17th-century Franco-Italian models or 17th-century Dutch models, and he characterizes naturalistic outdoor painting as an inherent part of trying to revive these classical traditions. This Neoclassical impulse was further reinforced by a pervasive tourist culture in Italy, which is reconstructed in chapter 3. Empirical study became mixed up with view-making, and Galassi goes to great lengths to demonstrate that artists followed set itineraries and depicted canonical sites in an effort to realize the tourist desire to imbue every aspect of the Italian countryside with ancient associations. While thus reconstituting the artistic goals underlying early outdoor painting, the book also builds up a rich appreciation of how men learned to make art. Oil studies were part of student training, and the Neoclassical context of chapter one clarifies how students were inculcated with Neoclassical values and vision. Chapter 2 becomes more specific, rigorously documenting the surprising extent to which students alternated between copying prints of standardized views and copying actual sites. And chapter 3, focusing on Italy's tourist culture, emphasizes that the coherence and mutual reinforcement of the artist community in Rome was essential in advancing landscape skills. These first three chapters serve, as Galassi asserts at the outset, as a background to the fourth and final chapter. Here he draws on the contexts of the outdoor painting tradition and Neoclassical training to illuminate the book's ostensible main subject-Corot's oil studies from his first visit to Italy in 1825-28. …

Manet's Modernism, or, the Face of Painting in the 1860s

Modernism, or, Face of Painting in the 1860s is the culminating work in a trilogy of books by Michael Fried exploring the roots and genesis of pictorial modernism. Building on his earlier studies of the central anti-theatrical tradition within Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment French painting, Fried argues that existing accounts of Edouard Manet as the first modernist painter are based on a simplistic reading of the situation Manet inherited and, partly as a result, fail to grasp the specificity, complexity, and ambition of his great canvases of the 1860s. By placing Manet squarely within his generation (along with Henri Fantin-Latour, Alphonse Legros, and James McNeill Whistler), as well as in the context of the critical debates of his time, Fried aims to transform our sense of Manet's artistic project. Instead of emphasizing Manet's orientation to flatness and visuality, Fried focuses on aspects such as: his repeated allusions to Old Masters sources, his efforts to annul the absorptive basis of the modern French tradition, and above all his pursuit of facingness and strikingness as a means of reconstructing the relationship between painting and beholder. The book should help the understanding not only of the art of Manet and his generation, but also of the way in which the Impressionist simplification of Manet's achievement has determined subsequent interpretations of his modernism.

The art of visual neglect

paintings showed fluctuating left visual neglect and loss of depth. A French painter, after his stroke, continued to produce elegant line drawings, but characterised by neglect of the left of the sheet and some neglect of the left side of figures across the picture space. Otto Dix (1891–1969), Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), and Anton Raderscheidt (1892–1970) all had right hemisphere strokes. In a drawing that Dix made 4 days after his stroke, there was a clear neglect, but his later drawings and lithographs, though freer than before, showed no impairment. Raderscheidt and Corinth made slower recoveries, which can be traced through their work completed after stroke. There is also one report of right neglect after left hemisphere neoplasm in a right-handed painter. We here describe the case of a well-known English artist whose left neglect after stroke initially impaired both his drawing and his painting, as reported in previous studies. We also show how neglect can affect the ability to sculpt.

Book Reviews: The Death of Class, Social Change and the Middle Classes, Practical Sociology: Post-empiricism and the Reconstruction of Theory and Application, Environmental Sociology: A Social Constructionist Perspective, Knowing Machines: Essays on Technical Change, Daniel Bell, Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World, Theorizing Museums, Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital, Food, the Body and the

Book Reviews: The Death of Class, Social Change and the Middle Classes, Practical Sociology: Post-empiricism and the Reconstruction of Theory and Application, Environmental Sociology: A Social Constructionist Perspective, Knowing Machines: Essays on Technical Change, Daniel Bell, Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World, Theorizing Museums, Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital, Food, the Body and the

French painting in the seventeenth century

Surveying the works of artists such as Poussin and Vouet, this work includes an examination of art in relation to literary, political, philosophical and social developments of the period; and a discussion on the influence of Mazarin on artistic developments.

Olivier Debré aux États-Unis, 1959-1963 : échec d’une réception

Éric de Chassey : Olivier Debré in the USA, 1959-1963 : A Failed Reception. The history of the artistic relationships between Paris and New York in the nineteen-fifties has usually been viewed as though it were a territorial feud, biased by the power of the Americans or by the tradition of the French. This article summarizes the reasons why Olivier Debré, a French painter, distinguished by European critics for his supposed «american-ness », failed to be accepted by the American art world, after his works were introduced on the New York and Washington art markets, in 1959 and 1963. Placed in the context of the end of Abstract Expressionism and the failure of Abstract Impressionism to impose itself as a valid successor, the paintings of Debré seemed outdated. In fact, his art addressed several issues that had been resolved by the New York School ten years before and numerous formal strategies that had been discarded in the USA as trop français and old-fashioned. For the American art scene of the fifties, it was neither formalist enough, which would have placed it in the « post-painterly » trend, nor was its subject matter momentous enough. The negative reception that Debré ’s work received in the United States is significant in that it reflects an environment in which two different art scenes co-existed and, yet, were not truly contemporary — an environment that elicits further research.

French realist painting and the critique of American society, 1865-1900

French realist painting and the critique of American society, 1865-1900

Hidden treasures revealed: Impressionist masterpieces and other important French paintings preserved by the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

The wave of change that has swept Russia since the fall of Communism has now revealed masterpieces hidden away and guarded as state secrets including some of the finest works by Degas and Van Gogh. The Hermitage Museum put them on show for the first time in half a century. This book displays the paintings in full colour, together with details and associated or complementary works to show their context.

Modernity and Modernism: French Painting in the Nineteenth Century

Modernity and Modernism: French Painting in the Nineteenth Century

The Problematics of Collecting and Display, Part 2

Part of a special section on the problematics of collecting and display. A discussion of modern French painting and the art museum. In contrast to America, with some exceptions, in European museums, 19th-century French painting is either segregated from earlier art or is almost entirely absent. In the last generation, however, international scholarship on Impressionist and Postimpressionist French painting has tried to rethink, reattribute, redate, retitle, and research virtually every artist, medium, artistic movement, and critical stance in French art from 1850 to World War I. This has affected the permanent collections in British and American museums, leading, ironically, to a situation in which an art created in opposition to general art museums is no longer avant-garde. The writer examines the role of museums in the canonization of Impressionist and Postimpressionist painting and the need for art museums to reappraise their installation strategies.

The gene for pycnodysostosis maps to human chromosome 1cen-q21.

Pycnodysostosis (OMIM 265800) is an autosomal recessive skeletal disorder first described by Maroteaux and Lamy that is characterized by short stature, increased bone density, delayed closure of cranial sutures, loss of the mandibular angle, dysplastic clavicles, dissolution of the terminal phalanges of the hands and feet, dental abnormalities and increased bone fragility. Patients have a typical appearance secondary to prominence of the calvarium, smallness of the facial features, prominent nose and micrognathia. The French painter, Henri de Toulouse Lautrec (1864-1901), is believed to have had the disorder. Although more than 100 cases have been reported, we are aware of only two large consanguinous pedigrees in which the pycnodysostosis disorder segregates. We have studied the segregation of the pycnodysostosis phenotype in a large consanguinous Mexican pedigree, the clinical features of which are very similar to those described in the Arab pedigree studied by Edelson et al. Here, we report linkage for the pycnodysostosis phenotype in the 1cen-q21 region of human chromosome 1, and discuss candidate genes for this skeletal disorder.

Review. Modernity and Modernism: French Painting in the Nineteenth Century. Frascina, Francis, Nigel Blake, Briony Fer and Tamar Garb

Review. Modernity and Modernism: French Painting in the Nineteenth Century. Frascina, Francis, Nigel Blake, Briony Fer and Tamar Garb