Nineteenth-century French Art Research Articles

The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age, 1867–1893

A lively, informative and meticulously researched empirical consideration of the American taste for nineteenth-century French art in the Gilded Age, Leanne M. Zalewski’s volume is a worthy and welcome contribution to the body of existing scholarship on the topic. Focusing on the post-Civil War period, the volume examines the American enthusiasm for contemporary French academic painting and the creation of a commercial and museal infrastructure that allowed the market for it to flourish. A fundamental question underpinning the book is that of the philanthropic endeavours of the collectors under scrutiny, together with their role and that of their collections in the formation of the institutions that have shaped New York’s cultural landscape. One of the many strengths of the volume lies in its clear chronological chapter structure, which expertly traces the rise of the taste for French academic art and its ultimate demise in favour of Impressionist works. The introductory chapter introduces the key research questions and positions the study within the body of existing research. Taking as a starting point the 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle, the second chapter analyses the critical and often scathing reception of American art, and the overall perceived failure of the American contribution to the exhibition. The episode was a catalyst for the American taste for French Salon paintings; the chapter sheds intelligent light on its pivotal importance in the changing commercial fortunes of French contemporary paintings and the voracious appetite of outre-Atlantique collectors for acquiring them. The third chapter offers an examination of the commercial networks of exchange that underpinned purchases, and the dealers who facilitated such transactions. While the chapter adequately considers key auction sales and the impact of taxation on the fortunes of French academic art in America, the reader is nevertheless left wanting to know more about the relationships between dealers and artists, a topic that is almost entirely skimmed over.

A poesia de Mallarmé encontra a pintura de Manet

Dentre os trabalhos críticos que o jovem Mallarmé dedicou à pintura, “The Impressionists and Édouard Manet” (1876) talvez seja o mais importante, mesmo sendo provavelmente o mais desconhecido. Nesse texto, Mallarmé comenta a prática dos colegas impressionistas, sobretudo de Manet, estabelecendo uma analogia entre os caminhos da pintura e os da poesia em fins do século XIX francês. Este artigo busca explorar a abordagem analógica de Mallarmé em “The Impressionists”, valendo-se das reflexões que o poeta elabora sobre Manet e sobre o impressionismo para investigar como esse pensamento encontra par em seus próprios trabalhos. Partindo das quatro linhas de força que, segundo Bertrand Marchal (2011), Mallarmé observaria nos trabalhos desses artistas (ar livre, simplificação, perspectiva e descondicionamento do olhar), assim como de textos mallarmeanos tão diversos quanto La Musique et les Lettres (1895) e “Don du poëme” (1866) – mas sem perder de vista a historicidade de ambos –, o intuito aqui consiste em mostrar como as trajetórias da poesia e da pintura se tocam, naquele fim de século, através de alguns pontos de encontro entre a obra de Mallarmé e a de Manet.

The Janus-Faced Modernity of Toulouse-Lautrec and Jules Chéret

Late nineteenth-century French art is among the most often studied topics, yet posters, which were one of the most prominent phenomena in the visual culture of the 1890s, have remained on the margins of art history. This article proposes that by analyzing posters, one gains new insights into modernity. Focusing on Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) and Jules Chéret (1836–1932), it demonstrates that these artists represented opposing views of modernity and argues that these constituted divergent responses to industrialization, commodification, mass culture, and urban life—one exposed its melancholy, the other countered it with a dreamland of pleasures.

Fellow men: Fantin-Latour and the problem of the group in nineteenth-century French painting

Near the end of her new study on the group portraits of Henri Fantin-Latour, Bridget Alsdorf notes: “The history of nineteenth-century French art is a field fascinated by movements and collective politics, yet still dominated by accounts of singular artists and oeuvres. Although we depend on groups to give structure to history, as artists depended on them to provide camaraderie and support, it has proved difficult to imagine the artistic self as formed fundamentally by way of others” (227). Her book Fellow Men: Fantin-Latour and the Problem of the Group in Nineteenth-Century French Painting goes a long way toward rectifying this scholarly imbalance. As her subtitle indicates, Alsdorf treats the group as a problem in more than one sense: she approaches it both from the perspective of representation, through a series of close readings of multi-figure portraits by Fantin and his contemporaries, and as a social, and indeed gender, issue relating to the dynamics of male interaction in the mid-nineteenth century. At the heart of her argument is a meditation on the necessary tensions generated by the conflicting pressures of mutuality and individualism—by the opposing needs for progressive artists to assert a group identity in the face of an indifferent or hostile public while at the same time cultivating the distinct creative personality increasingly demanded in the cultural marketplace. Alsdorf reveals traces of these tensions in the visual structures of the works she so persuasively explores, and gestures toward a broader analysis of their centrality in shaping individuals and groups within the artistic community, and among bourgeois males of the period more generally.

Notes from the Field: Contingency

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsLinda ConnorLinda Connor, professor at the San Francisco Art Institute and founder of PhotoAlliance, has had her photographs exhibited nationally and internationally. Her book Odyssey: The Photographs of Linda Connor was published in 2008. Among other honors, she received the Society of Photographic Education's Honored Educator Award in 2005 [San Francisco Art Institute, 800 Chestnut Street, San Francisco, Calif. 94133, Lindaconnor@earthlink.net].Giovanna BorradoriGiovanna Borradori is professor of philosophy at Vassar College. She is a specialist of Continental philosophy, the aesthetics of architecture, and the philosophy of terrorism. Her last book, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, was a “philosophy best-seller,” which appeared in eighteen languages [Department of Philosophy, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, N.Y. 12604].Marcia BrennanMarcia Brennan, associate professor of art history and religious studies at Rice University, teaches courses on modern art, mysticism, and the medical humanities. She is the author of several books, including Curating Consciousness: Mysticism and the Modern Museum, and a forthcoming study on the visual culture of the end of life [Department of Religious Studies, MS 15, Rice University, PO Box 1892, Houston, Tex. 77251–1892, mbrennan@rice.edu].Mary Ann DoaneMary Ann Doane is Class of 1937 Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Emergence of Cinematic Time, Femmes Fatales, and The Desire to Desire. In 2007, she edited a special issue of Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, “Indexicality: Trace and Sign” [Department of Film & Media, University of California, Berkeley, 6216 Dwinelle Hall, no. 2670, Berkeley, Calif. 94720–2670].Angus FletcherAngus Fletcher is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY (City University of New York). His books include A New Theory for American Poetry; Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare; and a newly expanded edition of his Allegory (Princeton University Press) [The Graduate Center, CUNY, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016].Peter GeimerPeter Geimer is professor of art history at the Freie Universität Berlin. His publications in English include “Picturing the Black Box: On Blanks in 19th Century Paintings and Photographs,” Science in Context (2004) and “Image as Trace: Speculations about an Undead Paradigm,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (2007) [Freie Universität Berlin, Kunsthistorisches Institut, Koserstrasse 20, 14195 Berlin, Germany, peter.geimer@fu-berlin.de].Gloria KuryGloria Kury, PhD, is director of Gutenberg Periscope Publishing. Before serving as executive editor of arts and humanities at Penn State University Press from 1999 to 2006, she taught art history at Vassar College, New York University, and Yale University [Periscope Publishing, Ltd, 150 West Hutchinson Avenue Cottage, Pittsburgh, Pa. 15218, gjkury@gmail.com].Mark LedburyMark Ledbury is Power Professor of Art History and Visual Culture and director of the Power Institute at the University of Sydney. The author of books and articles on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French art, he is currently completing his latest project, “An Eccentric History of History Painting” [Department of Art History and Film Studies, University of Sydney, Sydney NSW 2006, Australia, mark.ledbury@sydney.edu.au].C. Brian RoseC. Brian Rose is James B. Pritchard Professor of Mediterranean Archaeology in the Department of Classical Studies, University of Pennsylvania, and curator-in-charge of the Mediterranean Section of the Penn Museum. He was an academic trustee (1994–2000), first vice-president (2002–6), and president (2007–11) of the Archaeological Institute of America [Mediterranean Section, Penn Museum, 3260 South Street, Philadelphia, Pa. 19104, roseb@sas.upenn.edu].Frances SpaldingFrances Spalding is an art historian, critic, and biographer. Her books include British Art since 1900, a centenary history of the Tate, and lives of Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, and Stevie Smith. She is Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art [Department of History of Art, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, U.K., Frances.spalding@ncl.ac.uk].Chris SpringChris Spring is an artist and a curator of the African Galleries, the British Museum. Among his publications are Angaza Afrika: African Art Now (2008), African Art in Detail (2009), and African Textiles Today (2012). His work in Africa included support for Triangle artists' workshops in Mozambique, Ghana, and Nigeria [Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, the British Museum, London WC1B 3DG, U.K., cspring@thebritishmuseum.ac.uk].

From Exquisite to Transgressive Moderns? The Goncourt's "Decadent" Eighteenth-Century Art Revival

As avid collectors of French eighteenth-century art, the Goncourts' contribution to its nineteenth-century history is well-known. This article, however, explores a less welldocumented aspect of their L'Art du dix-huitième siècle (1858-1875): that is, its articulation of an art of latency and decadence prior to the term's fin-de-siècle association with explicitly transgressive cultures of modernity. Indeed, the paper argues that the Goncourts were amongst the first writers of their age to use the art of an age linked with political and cultural decay, to foreground latently decadent tendencies in mid nineteenth-century French art and culture. In so doing, they were to produce a paradigm of "decadence" defining not decline, but a new and highly modern artistry of heightened aesthetic expression. The article will explore these ideas in two principal ways. First, it considers neglected relations between the Goncourts' and Taine's ideas on art, and specifically, the Goncourts' use and exploitation of Tainean indicators of decadence, broached in Taine's study on La Fontaine (1861), for opposing artistically and culturally productive ends. Second it develops these ideas in a discussion of the three artist-studies in L'Art du dixhuitième siècle in which the Goncourts' developing theme of "decadence" is articulated with especial force and prescience: in "Boucher" (1861), "Greuze" (1863) and ‘Fragonard' (1864). These, as the paper argues, suggest particularly defined channels for the Goncourts' engagement with key Tainean ideas of the period, offering related opportunities for their promotion of corruption, vice and decline as aesthetically and culturally compelling. In repositioning Boucher's sensualism as "indécence", Greuze's "innocence" as "perverse" and Fragonard's Italianate expressivity as "impure", the Goncourts not only situate their "histories" in the vanguard of a new, transgressive aesthetic understanding of eighteenth-century art, they re-appropriate its Romantically exquisite aspects as emblems of an art of exquisite corruption and as triggers for recreation.

Empire of Landscape: Space and Ideology in French Colonial Algeria (review)

Reviewed by: Empire of Landscape: Space and Ideology in French Colonial Algeria Kurt Rahmlow Zarobell, John . Empire of Landscape: Space and Ideology in French Colonial Algeria. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010. Pp. xv + 196. ISBN: 978-0-271-03443-0 Historians of nineteenth-century French art have been slow to embrace post-colonial critiques of Western culture. Although Linda Nochlin took up Edward Said's project in 1983, it is only since the mid-to-late 1990s that post-colonial theory has had a notable impact on the scholarship. Beginning with work by John MacKenzie and Todd Porterfield, and gathering some momentum in the early years of the new millennium with studies by Darcy Grigsby and Ronald Benjamin, historians of nineteenth-century French art have gradually, but increasingly, developed an interest in the links between art and imperialism. At the same time, authors have tended to restrict their inquiries to the cultures of the elite. These two features of the discourse—the reluctance to undertake post-colonial critique and the emphasis on high art—structure Zarobell's intervention in Empire of Landscape: Space and Ideology in French Colonial Algeria. Zarobell addresses these concerns by employing Said's concept of orientalism to examine works that have traditionally been neglected within the discipline. In the process, he offers a sustained analysis of a genre that has received surprisingly little attention in post-colonial criticism. Instead of persons, peoples, or identities, the author considers representations of the land itself—a subject that, at the risk of stating the obvious, features prominently in the rhetorics and processes of imperialism. Zarobell argues that "since colonialism is about control of space—literally seizing territory—its complement is the imposition of the colonizer's understanding of space onto the colonized" (5). His goal, then, is to demonstrate how popular or otherwise nontraditional landscape reflects and propagates official colonial policy pertaining to Algeria. Zarobell develops his inquiry over the course of six chapters and a brief epilogue, organizing the volume as a series of case studies (several of which have appeared in print before). The author opens with a discussion of a lost popular work, Jean-Charles Langlois' Panorama of Algiers (1833). He then treats the large-scale watercolor series of the Portes de Fer executed for the Museum of French History in Versailles in 1840-41 by the highly regarded and well-traveled illustrator Adrien Dauzats. Next, he considers the illustrated volume Journal de l'expédition des Portes de Fer (1844), a privately commissioned, and limited run, celebration of Prince Ferdinand Philippe's journey through Algeria. In Chapter 5, the author surveys photographic landscapes, discussing a variety of works, but returning regularly to Félix-Jacques-Antoine Moulin's ambitious [End Page 153] multivolume album, L'Algérie photographiée (1856-57), another project that failed to achieve wide circulation and that, indeed, may never have been completed. Along the way, Zarobell offers sustained discussions of oil paintings by Horace Vernet, Eugène Fromentin, Gustave Guillaumet, and in his epilogue, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Henri Matisse. Instead of concentrating exclusively on high culture, Zarobell, unlike his predecessors, attempts to sample the "amazing variety of forms" that colonial imagery assumed (1). The book does have a few problems. More demanding readers will be irked by occasional passages of turgid prose (in contrast to what is generally a readable study). And there are a few moments in which arguments either fall short of their stated goals or simply fall flat. For instance, despite the author's introductory remarks in Chapter 4 (in which he asserts that "Fromentin's artistic practices manifested [a] broader historical development" [77]), he neither details a large-scale shift in colonial policy in the early 1850s nor clearly relates it to Fromentin's paintings of the period. And although he develops his discussion of late-Second Empire policy fully and effectively in Chapter 6, Zarobell fails to offer a compelling reading of Guillaumet's remarkable oil painting The Desert (1867), which he situates as his culminating analysis. On a structural note, the book's epilogue, which treats single works by Renoir and Matisse, undercuts the unity of what is otherwise a...

The view from the bridge: Zola's L'Œuvre and its many composites

Emile Zola's 1886 novel of the art world, L'Œuvre, has for some time been understood as a fairly fractured account of one of the most famous historical narratives of Western art: the challenge pose...

Journal (review)

Reviewed by: Journal Wendelin Guentner Delacroix, Eugène. Journal, Nouvelle édition intégrale établie par Michèle Hannoosh. 2 vol. Paris: José Corti, 2009, Pp. 2519. ISBN 9782-7143-09999-0 It is a rare scholarly event indeed that inspires words such as “revolutionary” and “historic,” but Michèle Hannoosh’s long-awaited edition of Eugène Delacroix’s Journal amply merit them both and many more. Although in tracing the publication history of Delacroix’s intimate writings in her Introduction Hannoosh is gracious to both past and future editors of Delacroix’s Journal, her own edition is clearly a game changer, and this, very likely, for generations. Anything previously published on the Journal and, indeed, on Delacroix’s pictorial oeuvre, must be revisited and almost certainly revised in light of the new information and masterful contextualization that Hannoosh provides. Reference libraries will be deficient without it, as will the personal libraries of any serious student of nineteenth-century French art or of its cultural life in general. The last edition of this work was brought out by the Librairie Plon in 1996. A re-publication of the André Joubin edition that Plon originally published in 1931–32, it is a substantial book of 942 pages. However, with its 2,519 pages the Corti edition more than doubles this. The “Supplément,” which runs 100 pages in the Plon addition, reaches more than 450 pages in the Corti. These statistics provide a graphic – though superficial—image of the ambitious project Hannoosh courageously embraced and successfully brought to fruition. Of the new material added to the repertory of Delacroix’s writings much comes from private collections, notably that of Achille Piron, the artist’s residuary legatee, and that of the writer, art critic and art historian, Claude Roger-Marx. In the introductions to these materials, Hannoosh describes how she tracked down the textual fragments which she used to reconstitute some of Delacroix’s notes and notebooks. Notable among these is the “Cahier autobiographique,” which covers about seven years beginning in 1853 and which is from the Piron collection, and Delacroix’s “Cahier de lectures” for 1843–44 taken from the collection of Roger-Marx. These introductions sometimes read like detective stories whose action takes place in both public and private collections over two continents. Earlier editions of Delacroix’s Journal revealed an artist with a highly developed intellect who through his intimate writing engaged in constant dialogue with the superior minds in the Western tradition from both the [End Page 191] past and present. We might expect Delacroix to show sustained interest in the vision and work of other plastic artists and Michelangelo, Raphaël, Correggio, Titian, Veronese, Rubens, Rembrandt, J.-L. David, Géricault and Ingres all figure prominently in his Journal. However, he was likewise captivated by the æsthetic dimension of musical compositions by Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Rossini and Berlioz. The authors in the French literary tradition who are most often cited range from Montaigne, Corneille, Molière, Racine, Pascal and Voltaire from earlier centuries, to his contemporaries, including Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Balzac, Gautier, Hugo, Baudelaire, Sand and Alexandre Dumas père. Among the foreign authors whose works captured his imagination we find Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe and Byron. The Corti edition publishes for the first time many passages which Delacroix copied from their works, as well his reflections on them, one example being notes the artist took after reading Stendhal’s L’Histoire de la peinture en Italie which were found in the Roger-Marx collection. As an example, it is in part because of these many additions that the conclusions I reached in my 1998 article, “Pratiques de la citation chez Delacroix: les auteurs contemporains” —including which authors and categories of texts the artist quoted and how often, the contents of the quotations, their forms and modes of insertion into the Journal, and their discursive and autobiographical functions—all have to be re-examined. Other supplementary material is not from Delacroix’s pen. For example, the new edition publishes for the first time 1852 journal notes by his student and collaborator, Pierre Andrieu. In them Andrieu traces the progression of a decorative series Delacroix prepared for the H...

After the Revolution: Antoine-Jean Gros, Painting and Propaganda Under Napoleon (review)

Reviewed by: After the Revolution: Antoine-Jean Gros, Painting and Propaganda Under Napoleon Andrew Carrington Shelton O'Brien, David . After the Revolution: Antoine-Jean Gros, Painting and Propaganda Under Napoleon. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. Pp.288. ISBN0-2710-2305-8 The publication of David O'Brien's long-awaited and lavishly produced volume, After the Revolution: Antoine-Jean Gros, Painting and Propaganda Under Napoleon, constitutes a major advance in the scholarly understanding of early nineteenth-century French art and culture. Although promoted as the first comprehensive account of Gros's career in well over a century, O'Brien's book is less a traditional monograph than a wide-ranging exploration of official arts policies and practices during the Napoleonic era. It combines significant original research with a thorough and intelligent synthesis of previous scholarship to produce the most complete and compelling overview to date of the rise and fall of contemporary history painting as the focus of ambitious artistic activity in Post-Revolutionary France. Written in clear and forceful jargon-free prose, this book will be as accessible and entertaining to undergraduates as it is illuminating to specialists and scholars; it should, in short, be considered required reading for all students of Napoleonic France. O'Brien's text unfolds chronologically, deriving its structure from the tumultuous political history of France between 1795 and 1815. This provides the basis for O'Brien's careful consideration of the vicissitudes of Gros's career. O'Brien deftly traces the painter's emergence as yet another talented pupil of Jacques-Louis David in the mid 1790s and early adventures as a kind of artistic journeyman in Italy, his rise to preeminence [End Page 153] as artistic propagandist-in-chief to Napoleon, and his tragic demise under the Bourbon and Orleanist regimes. (Although O'Brien focuses his attention squarely on the Imperial period, the last chapter of his book, devoted to the almost wholly unexplored final two decades of Gros's career, provides one of the most original and illuminating accounts yet of late neoclassicism.) All of Gros's major canvases are discussed in detail, from the career-making Bonaparte at the Bridge of Arcole of 1796 to the literally life-ending Hercules and Diomedes of 1835 – it was largely in response to the negative criticism generated by this work that Gros committed suicide by throwing himself into a tributary of the Seine. Although O'Brien writes insightfully and compellingly of all these pictures, he is ultimately less concerned with Gros's paintings as works of art in and of themselves than as documents revealing the underlying logic of the various arts administrations that oversaw their production and display. Most particularly, O'Brien is interested in the rise of public opinion as the supreme arbiter of all things artistic during the course of the Revolution and the challenges this situation presented to a Napoleonic regime intent on appropriating monumental artistic production for purely propagandistic ends. The key development here is the emergence of what O'Brien refers to as the "Republic of the Arts," adopting the phrase coined by reform-minded critics and theorists of the late eighteenth century to describe an ideal (and, it must be said, wholly mythic) situation in which artists operate as free creative agents beholden only to the judgment of an enlightened and disinterested public – this as opposed to pandering to the dictates of despotic and self-interested patrons. According to O'Brien, Napoleon's authoritarianism proved insufficient to overcome this belief in the fundamental autonomy of art, creating a dilemma for those artists who sought – voluntarily or otherwise – to enlist their brushes too blatantly in the service of the imperial regime. It is this emerging belief in the fundamental incommensurability of art and partisan politics – a belief that O'Brien himself curiously seems to share – to which much of the alleged blandness and mediocrity of official painting under Napoleon is attributed. Gros is saved from this fate by the persistence of what O'Brien describes as his personal pictorial flare – all that Rubensian color and lush painterliness – as well as his penchant for graphic violence and the macabre – the stomach-churning piles of dead and...

Imagery and ideology: fiction and painting in nineteenth-century France

Literature is ostensibly a sequential and thus temporal medium, and painting a static and spatial one; yet writers like George Sand and Emile Zola have attempted repeatedly to represent visual and spatial phenomena in literary texts, just as painters like Eugene Delacroix and Claude Monet have sought consistently to capture effects of time and movement on canvas. The incorporation of elements from one artistic medium into another creates a dynamic interplay of image and ideology, both between art forms and within individual texts and paintings, which constitutes the crux of this book. Each chapter involves the detailed analysis of a text and a painting, related through topic, theme, and technique.By juxtaposing the works of ten major writers and ten painters of comparable stature, the book explores the various modalities and layers of meaning in nineteenth-century French art, both verbal and visual, and proposes ways of reading the ambivalent artifacts of modernity. William J. Berg is Professor of French at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Hugh Blaker: doing his bit for the moderns

Nowadays Hugh Blaker is remembered only as adviser to Gwendoline and Margaret Davies of Gregynog; it was his taste that influenced the sisters in the formation of their renowned collections of nineteenth-century French art, which they bequeathed to the National Museum and Gallery of Wales, Cardiff. The role of consultant has, however, overshadowed his many other activities; he was also a painter, writer, art critic, museum curator, collector, dealer in Old Masters and, against overwhelming public opinion, an indefatigable advocate of avant-garde tendencies in art. Blaker, passionate and opinionated, ridiculed official conservatism and was an ardent supporter and promoter of young artists: ‘I am trying to do something for the moderns’, he protested, ‘but they won't let me!’ This article examines his significant, and as yet largely unrecognized, contribution to the course of art history in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century.

Antonin Personnaz

Abstract Antonin Personnaz (1855–1937), French art historian and the second director of the Musee Bonnat in Bayonne, was one of the earliest patrons of the Impressionist painters. The significant bequest of his large collection of Impressionist paintings to the Louvre upon his death in 1937 has assured him an influential place in the history of nineteenth-century French art, acknowledged in the ‘Salle Personnaz’ transferred intact from the Jeu de Paume and now in the Musee d'Orsay, Paris.1 Surprisingly, little is known today of this museum director's own works of art in colour photography. A life-long enthusiast of photography and an active member of the Société française de photographie from 1896.2 Personnaz's many experiments in the newly invented art of colour photography resembled the instantaneous quality of the Impressionists in their capture of the transitory effects of nature on to canvas. In the hundreds of early and hitherto virtually unknown autochromes, Personnaz achieved images as lyrical as the paintings of the contemporaries he so much admired and collected.

Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society

Long-awaited, this full-scale revision of Impressionism immediately supersedes all other studies in the field. Herbert rejuvenates even the most famous paintings by seeing them in a dense and flexible context touching on everything from the hierarchy of theater boxes to the role of beer-hall waitresses. His mind and eye are as supple as his lucid prose, and his command of sociological data is staggering. In this classic of art history, both art and history are triumphantly reborn.-Robert Rosenblum, New York University This remarkable book will transform the way we look at Impressionist art. The culmination of twenty years of research by a preeminent scholar in the field, it fundamentally revises the conventional view of the Impressionist movement and shows for the first time how it was fully integrated into the social and cultural life of the times. Robert L. Herbert explores the themes of leisure and entertainment that dominated the great years of Impressionist painting between 1865 and 1885. Cafes, opera houses, dance halls, theaters, racetracks, and vacations by the sea were the central subjects of the majority of these paintings, and Herbert relates these pursuits to the transformation of Paris under the Second Empire. Sumptuously illustrated with many of the most beautiful Impressionist images, both familiar and unfamiliar, this book presents provocative new interpretations of a wide range of famous masterpieces. Artists are seen to be active participants in, as well as objective witnesses to, contemporary life, and there are many profound insights into the social and cultural upheaval of the times. A social history of Impressionist art that is truly about the art, informed by a penetrating analysis of the ways in which its pictorial structure and qualities communicate its social content. Herbert brings that society to life, but above all he makes some of the most familiar and frequently discussed works in the history of art come wonderfully and vividly to life again.-Theodore Reff, Columbia University Robert L. Herbert is Robert Lehman Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. He is the author or editor of numerous books and articles on nineteenth-century French art.

Editors Statement: Nineteenth-Century French Art Institutions

This collection of articles on nineteenth-century French art institutions is intended to demonstrate some of the new approaches of revisionism that are transforming our readings of the period. That such studies often seem to evoke nostalgia for “the good old days when art historians looked at works of art” (how often have I heard that complaint!) is to miss the intention of such scholarship. It is not intended to replace the work of art or architecture as the primary document; rather, it is to establish a new base from which new evaluations and interpretations can proceed.

Picturing the People: Images of the Lower Orders in Nineteenth-Century French Art

Picturing the People: Images of the Lower Orders in NineteenthCentury French Art If the images that artists create directly connect to the culture of their time, then the pictures painted, etched, and drawn in France between 1815 and the i86os should be rich in representations of the people-of the people as peasants and workers, of the people seen as the lower orders in crowded slums or rural hovels, and as the classes dangereuses who filled social commentary. The expectation that the lower classes should be frequently depicted in nineteenth-century French art would rest on more than the naive assumption that art must illustrate its era, for the sights of that age-thousands of immigrants and endless construction while the population of Paris trebled, new machines and industries, political demonstrations, barricades, and revolutionmight well have stimulated the artistic eye. The culture as a whole was greatly concerned about these matters. They were the subject of novels (many of which are still read) and of systematic field studies (now remembered primarily for contributing to the birth of modern social science). They were the object of important political and religious movements and of innumerable programs for reform. They were discussed at the meetings of the Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, in sermons, in parliament, and in pamphlets and daily newspapers. Not only were pauperism, prisons, crime, illegitimacy, and illiteracy recognized as critical problems for modern France, but contemporary French history was also believed to have played a peculiarly exemplary role in the course of modern civilization.1

Cezanne and the End of Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art

Drawing on a broad foundation in the history of nineteenth-century French art, Richard Shiff offers an innovative interpretation of Cezanne's painting. He shows how Cezanne's style met the emerging criteria of a technique of originality and how it satisfied critics sympathetic to symbolism as well as to impressionism. Expanding his study of the interaction of Cezanne and his critics, Shiff considers the problem of modern art in general. He locates the core of modernism in a dialectic of making (technique) and finding (originality). Ultimately, Shiff provides not only clarifying accounts of impressionism and symbolism but of a modern classicism as well.

'Reactions to Renoir keep changing'

'Reactions to Renoir keep changing'

Artists and Models: Women in French Art from 1880 to 1930

From the origins of democracy to the aftermath of the Great War, French society reflected the nuances of social change. The painting and photography of the epoch remain to belie the oft-held beliefs that Impressionism was the only revolution in nineteenth-century French art and that French art in the early decades of this century began and ended with the Cubist controversy. All of the new schools of art however widely varied they were as to theory and technique were, as they always have been, in basic agreement as to their preferred subject matter. In 1885, Edmond Duranty wrote, It takes immense genius to represent, simply and sincerely, what we see in front of us. What most painters and photographers saw in front of them, at one time or another, was woman. In this slide presentation, I shall examine various works of art of the periodpaintings, the most part, and some photographs, which have this common subject. I have included the works of certain revolutionary and influential male artists in this brief survey, more in order to reestablish the particular cultural context in which women painted and were painted at this time than to create a basis comparative competence between the two sexes. Just prior to and in contrast with the Impressionists-who were engaged in heated polemics with Manet-another innovative movement ended in Symbolism with Gustave as its leader. According to Sarane Alexandrian, Moreau had one great love during his life which led him to remain unmarried and which is at the origin of his feminine evocations: his mother. They lived together in proximity, she continued, for twenty-two years in jealous intimacy like a 1. Gustave Moreau, Les Licornes. c. 1885-1890. Musee Gustave Moreau, Paris.

Paul Chenavard

ON AN April evening in 1848, M. Ledru-Rollin, Minister of the Interior in the new French revolutionary government, had two visitors.2 In the midst of his pressing duties he had found time to grant an interview to his friend Charles Blanc, the Director of Beaux-Arts, and the painter, Paul Chenavard. It was their hope that the minister would commission Chenavard to decorate the Pantheon with a cycle of historical subjects, the sketches for which the artist had under his arm. Ledru-Rollin looked at them one by one, listening to the exposition of each with careful attention. It was a long recital, for the dawn had come up over the city before it was done, but a deep impression had been made. Two days later, apparently on his own authority, the minister signed a decree awarding the gigantic task to “Citizen Chenavard,” the mysterious and really almost unknown artist from Lyon.3 Thus was begun one of the most bizarre and ill-fated enterprises in the history of western art. Had this panorama of human destiny been installed, it could not thereafter have failed to attract the attention of the learned, while simply mystifying the casual spectator. Instead, its forgotten fragments lie rolled up in the basement of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, while the name of its author can scarcely be found in any of the innumerable histories of nineteenth century French art. Yet only an accident of history prevented its being placed in its intended location, the accident of the return of the building to the Church at the time of the coup d'état in 1851. Its substance was far too unorthodox, not to say heretical, for acceptance by the clergy. When, in 1885, St. Genevieve once more became the Pantheon, Chenavard was too old and angry to take up the task again.