Chardin’s Time: Reflections on the Tercentenary Exhibition and Twenty Years of Scholarship Frédéric Ogée (bio) Chardin, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris (7 September-22 November 1999); Kunsthalle and Kunstmuseum, Düsseldorf (5 December 1999–20 February 2000); Royal Academy, London (9 March-28 May 2000); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (19 June-17 September 2000). Catalogue ed. by Pierre Rosenberg (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1999). Pp. 360. Color and black-and-white illustr., 31 x 23 cm., FF. 240 (English edition: Yale University Press, forthcoming March 2000, $60.00/£40.00). Ever since their creation and initial presentation at the “Exposition de la jeunesse” (1728) and subsequently at the Salons of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, Chardin’s paintings have set a daunting challenge to art critics, often embarrassed, exasperated even, by the undeniable attractiveness of their silent rhetoric. The realization that these works are clearly conceived as pictures which resist any form of verbal presence in or around them fatally undermines the normal possibilities of analytical discourse, since it seems as problematic to put words into them as to put them into words. Yet the test case they represent has fostered a remarkable profusion of often oblique discursive strategies which all try to account somehow for the discursive [End Page 431] elusiveness of what Diderot frustratingly called, for lack of anything better, Chardin’s “mute compositions,” 1 a discursive elusiveness, a “muteness,” which were immediately perceived by the most astute critics as a definite form of pictorial avant-garde, and which Cézanne, most prominently, would pick up a century and a half later. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin, La Raie (1728). Paris, Musée du Louvre. From his first striking attempt in still life, La Raie (The Skate: 1728, Paris, Musée du Louvre, fig. 1), which remarkably led to his immediate admission within the closed ranks of the Academy, Chardin’s works kept sowing confusion among his contemporaries, like so many cats among academic pigeons. Both historically, within the traditional artistic categories and discourse of his time, and technically, as the creator of mysterious and unnamable artworks, Chardin was soon perceived as a strange artist “in his own way,” whose sole concentration on pictoriality caught everybody unawares. Chardin’s official status at the Academy, as a painter of animals and kitchenware, 2 was the lowest in a hierarchy whose categories, with history painting at the top, were in fact entirely dependent upon the quantity and quality of discourse which the works could generate. The more text they relied upon and the greater “verbalization” they produced, the more highly valued they were. The academic frame of reference was that of a normative and textual conception of visual culture and, as Norman Bryson has famously shown, it ensured the supremacy of the discursive over the figural in a manner which has never quite left our appreciation of painting. As Bryson writes, “We have not yet found ourselves able to dispense altogether, in our dealings with the image, with some form of contact with language. And language enormously shapes and delimits our reception of images.” 3 This is an opinion shared by René Démoris, when he explains, in the Prologue to his analysis of Chardin’s “matter”: “A painting is not a text and my purpose is not to produce another variation on the theme of talking pictures. But we are linguistic beings (êtres de langage) and it is as such that we perceive any image. Pictorial representation produces its effect through the relationship it entertains with networks of words in which we are caught.” 4 It is therefore easy to understand the enormous embarrassment which Chardin’s pictures created—and still, to a certain extent, create—since his works, particularly his still lifes, can be seen as experiments in pure figurality, with almost exclusive concentration on “those features which belong to the image as a visual experience independent of language.” 5 Chardin’s amazing technique and appeal were as undeniable as they were problematic, for they appeared within an academic and critical environment which had neither the intellectual...