Paris Salon Research Articles

Orientalist aesthetics: art, colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880-1930

Lavishly illustrated with exotic images ranging from Renoir's forgotten Algerian oeuvre to the abstract vision of Matisse's Morocco and beyond, this book is the first history of Orientalist art during the period of high modernism. Roger Benjamin, drawing on a decade of research in untapped archives, introduces many unfamiliar paintings, posters, miniatures, and panoramas and discovers an art movement closely bound to French colonial expansion. Orientalist Aesthetics approaches the visual culture of exoticism by ranging across the decorative arts, colonial museums, traveling scholarships, and art criticism in the Salons of Paris and Algiers. Benjamin's rediscovery of the important Society of French Orientalist Painters provides a critical context for understanding a lush body of work, including that of indigenous Algerian artists never before discussed in English. The painter-critic Eugene Fromentin tackled the unfamiliar atmospheric conditions of the desert, Etienne Dinet sought a more truthful mode of ethnographic painting by converting to Islam, and Mohammed Racim melded the Persian miniature with Western perspective. Benjamin considers armchair Orientalists concocting dreams from studio bric-a-brac, naturalists who spent years living in the oases of the Sahara, and Fauve and Cubist travelers who transposed the discoveries of the Parisian Salons to create decors of indigenous figures and tropical plants. The network that linked these artists with writers and museum curators was influenced by a complex web of tourism, rapid travel across the Mediterranean, and the march of modernity into a colonized culture. Orientalist Aesthetics shows how colonial policy affected aesthetics, how Europeans visualized cultural difference, and how indigenous artists in turn manipulated Western visual languages.

Alfred de Musset's Romantic Irony

The year of 1797, though somewhat arbitrary in terms of historical significance in German and French drama, marks German philosopher and theorist Friedrich Schlegel's initial efforts to establish irony as a philosophical as well as literary concept. The concept of irony was then being rediscovered and redefined by the early Romantics and is now considered by scholars of Romanticism essential to the understanding of the Romantic doctrines. As Friedrich and his brother August Wilhelm Schlegel drew inspiration from the early (Shakespeare and Cervantes) as well as the contemporary moderns (Sterne, Diderot, and Goethe) in analyzing and theorizing art and literature, the French also noticed the dominance of Shakespeare in English and German literary criticism as well as of eighteenth-century sentimentality. Sterne's A Sentimental Journey and Tristram Shandy were widely read in France and gave him a near celebrity status during his visits to numerous literary salons in Paris. Diderot deliberately copied Sterne's model when writing his Jacques le fataliste and prompted the French literary circles to reflect on the use of humor and the role of the author in the creative process and the relation to his work and audience. The transition from the classic to the is most notably fostered by Mme de Stael and her group at Coppet. Under the impact of eighteenth-century sentimentality, the promotion of German literary theory by the Coppet Group as well as the anti-classicist sentiment developed within the French literary circle, a number of writers, such as Hugo, Stendhal, Musset, and Vigny, produced works that recognize the merits of the new Romantic ideals and advocate what their German counterparts had done decades before. In this article, I will examine the dramatic works of Musset in the light of Romantic irony, an irony that synthesizes conflicting forces to produce a universal type of poetry and reveals the nature of artistic creation by a self-critical writing process of the author while preserving the art work's function to describe the author's duty to the society and to reflect his own time. Among the French Romantic dramatists, the theories of Hugo, Vigny, and Musset on modern drama and the role of the author bear most striking resemblance to that of Friedrich Schlegel. This is in no way accidental. The Schlegels' discussions of humor, irony, and poetry are not unfamiliar in the French literary circle thanks to translations of the Schlegel brothers' works, the Schlegels' debates with the French literary and publishing circles about the Romantic/classic contrast, and the publications, Stael's De l'Allemagne in particular, and literary discussions of the Coppet group. Nor has the subject gone altogether unnoticed. At the time when Hugo and Vigny were primarily poets, the younger Musset also started his career writing poetry. However, he found himself lacking passion as a poet, and after the indifferent reception of his first staged play La Nuit venitienne in 1830, he also lost enthusiasm for writing plays for the stag. Instead, as the title of Un Spectacle dans un fauteuil (1832) indicates, he went on to write plays for reading. Most of these were not meant to be performed at the time of their writing, though they were staged later, thanks to the advancement of stage technology. Quite ironically, his place as one of the greatest dramatists of his time was established through these then unstageable works. These works, along with those of Hugo and Vigny, are generally considered the best exemplars of Romantic irony in nineteenth-century French drama. Some personal traits of Musset group him with Hugo and Vigny, while others distinguish him from the latter. On one hand, Musset belongs to a younger generation of the French Romantics (with Gautier, Nerval, and others) than that of Hugo and Vigny (who are his seniors by eight and thirteen years respectively). Yet, though only in his twenties, he produced, contemporaneously with them and all in the short span of two years (1833-34), such brilliant dramatic works as Les Caprices de Marianne, Fantasio, On ne badine pas avec l'amour and Lorenzaccio. …

Organizing Sight, Seeing Organization: The Diverging Optical Possibilities of City and Country

This paper contrasts the optical possibilities of a single instrument, the polarimeter, within and without the location of the city. It follows the work of François Arago and Jean-Baptiste Biot in the years after 1821, when, following an explosive argument between the two men, Biot retired to the country and Arago became a prominent figure of Parisian salon life. The different cultural spaces they inhabited had distinct rules of communication in place, which governed how the visual products of their instruments circulated and in turn what these visual effects represented. Arago's public polariscopic displays, subject to a process of collective viewing, became the basis of a new color theory of immediate expression, while Biot's own use of the instrument to distinguish between organized and unorganized matter relied upon personal authority to make claims about the ultimately undepictable mystery of life.

Conservative Tradition in Pre-Revolutionary France: Parisian Salon Women, by Jolanta T. Pekacz

<i>Conservative Tradition in Pre-Revolutionary France: Parisian Salon Women,</i> by Jolanta T. Pekacz

A Picture of Chardin's Making

He's an ordinary lad, really (fig. 1). Not the sort of begrimed ragamuffin that the brothers Le Nain might have recruited a century before for one of their essays at picturesque poverty, nor a boy formally portrayed with the finery and bearing that in ancien régime France spoke of noble birth. A commoner, then. A commoner, but one who would go far. He--or, more likely, one of his two or three nearly identical clones--put in an appearance at the prestigious Parisian Salon of 1739 held in the royal palace of the Louvre (after which the brood scurried into various private collections). 1 Many of his peers, those figuring in the forty-odd genre scenes painted by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin in the years surrounding 1740, fared even better. The lass being prepared for public outing in The Morning Toilet (fig. 2) was spirited out of the Salon of 1741 by the Swedish ambassador Count Carl Gustaf Tessin (the Salon catalogue lists the work as belonging to him) and soon joined court life at the royal palace at Drottningholm. Closer to home, in 1740, Louis XV welcomed, as a gift from the artist himself, the children of Saying Grace (fig. 3) and The Diligent Mother into that always-growing crowd of dutiful subjects depicted within the paintings of the French royal collections. By now, my opening conceit is showing its strains. Of course, not the children themselves but their painted images enjoyed elevation into social circles well above the apparent rank of the sitters, perhaps even to be revered there. The [End Page 251] transmutation into oils makes all the difference, for the canvas could well have functioned like an intervening curtain that protected viewers from any actual commerce with the viewed. We are all familiar with the social practice, proper in Chardin's day and in our own, of hanging paintings that represent all sorts of suspect people and things within the tasteful apartments of the most privileged. And yet my initial rhetorical gambit has it purpose: it highlights how quick the leap from depiction to depicted can be during a consideration of Chardin's paintings of children--perhaps in any discussion of simple genre scenes. It is as if the essential characteristics of a genre painting--its values, its meaning, its purpose--are in some manner selfsame with those of the people and milieu to which it gives pictorial form. Put another way: we quite easily assume that Chardin's pictures of children are basically about those children, and that, accordingly, an appreciation of the painting necessarily involves an appreciation, perhaps even an endorsement, of the way in which they live their lives. Bourgeois subject matter--to risk, for a moment, the lurking cliché--means bourgeois painting. And reciprocally (reciprocity being an indispensable aspect of this particular interpretation), bourgeois painting reflects the values of the bourgeois subject matter it portrays. Painting as protective curtain, painting as reflective mirror: I've introduced two competing figures for Chardin's art in the previous paragraph, one close upon the other. We needn't, however, take on the task of sizing up the relative [End Page 252] merits of these two accounts and deeming one to be correct. The significance of Chardin's genre scenes--I will be using Soap Bubbles (fig 1 as the principal vehicle for my analysis--resides not in their authorization of one form of meaning over the other, but rather in the manner in which they allow for the possibility of a number of different interpretations, and thereby fashion a social relation between the audiences that ostensibly activated each. This essay will pursue such multiple meanings in two stages: first, by investigating the characteristics attributed by these pictures to their sitters; and second, by attending to Chardin's painterly technique. What to make of Chardin's Soap Bubbles? That which the painting makes of its variegated viewers, both anticipated and real. [End Page 253] The Merit of...

The Life of Marie d'Agoult, Alias Daniel Stern

Marie de Flavigny (1805-1876). Countess d'Agoult, was one of France's free and independent women long before feminism came into its own. She was Franz Liszt's lover a friend of George Sand and a writer under the name Daniel Stern. She bore two children by her marriage with Count d'Agoult and three by Liszt, including Cosima, who would leaver her first husband to marry Richard Wagner. Despite strains in her personal life (she never gained legal custody of her children and was disinherited by her own family), she made her Paris salon a multilingual centre of European artists, writers and revolutionaries. Through them she partook in and wrote about the great events of her lifetime, including France's 1848 revolution. History has not on the whole treated her well, despite her stature in her own time - much of what is know has been written by partisans for Liszt or Sand. In this biography, the author aims to remove Marie d'Agoult from the shadows of Liszt and Sand and allow her to be recognized in her own right.

The Parisian worlds of Frederic Chopin

In 1831, Chopin stopped in Paris on his way to London, fleeing his native Warsaw after Russia's brutal repression of an insurrection there. Entranced by the lively social and artistic scene in the city, the musician remained there until his death in 1849. In this engaging book, William Atwood recreates the Paris that Chopin knew, providing vivid details about its places, people, and politics, and showing how these affected the sensitive musician during an enormously fruitful period in his career.Drawing on many contemporary sources, Atwood brings to life the musicians, writers, artists, courtesans, salon hostesses, politicians, doctors, businessmen, and messianic Polish emigres who lived in Paris. He describes the theaters, music halls, and salons of Paris as well as its less glamorous worlds filled with the political conflicts and economic fluctuations of the July Monarchy. He tells about the city's newly awakened social consciousness and the philosophers and writers (including George Sand) who fostered it. The book sheds brilliant new light on both Paris and Chopin and will be delightful reading for lovers of the city or the musician.

L'enseignement des sciences physiques fut-il révolutionnaire ? La physique expérimentale à Nantes, du collège oratorien à l'école centrale

Hervé Grau, Was the teaching of physical sciences revolutionary ? Experimental physics in Nantes, from the Collège Oratorien to the Ecole Centrale The creation of the Ecole Normale and the Ecole Polytechnique established a tradition of scientific education that would provide the structure for the hierarchy of the French educational system. All the same, even before the Revolution, experimental physics was taught in colleges as well as technical and military schools in the possession of physics laboratories. A study of the Collège Oratorien allows us to note the existence of an effective program of education in the physical sciences, all the more remarkable as the school was a long way from the scientific furor centered on the salons of Paris. The materials, the conditions and the place of experiment, the teachers, the timetables : all these data allow us to evaluate the value of this teaching. With the Revolution, the Collège de Nantes became an Ecole Centrale where the physical sciences continued to be taught in the same problematic conditions as before. Does the Revolution simply mark the continuation of a tradition initiated under the Ancien Régime ? In fact, even though the practical conditions of the teaching evolved little, the Revolutionary period saw innovations in the conception of the place of this teaching and, to use a modern term, the pedagogy. Moving from an experimental science to an approach akin to that of natural sciences, the Revolution turned the physical sciences into a science of models based on mathematical knowledge.

Ingres and the theatrics of history painting

The careers of Paul Delaroche and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres touch at many points. One of the earliest, and the first public occasion, was the Paris Salon of 1824, where both men exhibited important paintings — Joan of Arc in Prison and the Vow of Louis XIII (figures 1 and 2). The artists were a generation apart—Delaroche was 27 years old and Ingres 43 that year—yet both were addressing the same problem, how to represent history. Negotiating the meaning of the past was a central concern of European culture, particularly in France, in the decades following the French Revolution and Napoleonic Empire. I want to compare the different ways that Delaroche and Ingres visualized the historical imagination of their day, beginning with works from the 1820s, a defining moment in each of their careers.

The Salonnieres and the Philosophies in Old Regime France: The Authority of Aesthetic Judgment

The Salonnières and the Philosophes in Old Regime France: The Authority of Aesthetic Judgment* Jolanta T. Pekacz During the eighteenth century a significant shift occurred in the perception of the authority of aesthetic judgment in France, from a group usually referred to as “polite society” and widely considered the exclusive source of taste (goût) to various competing groups arrogating to themselves the right to judge artistic matters. 1 In the present article I discuss the changing recognition of the genders as arbiters of taste, exemplified by Parisian salonnières on the one hand, and the philosophes on the other, during two eighteenth-century quarrels over the French and Italian operas: the Querelle des Bouffons in the 1750s and the controversy between Gluckistes and Piccinistes in the 1770s. I argue that by the end of the 1770s, as a result of the collapse of the old paradigm of “polite society” of which salons were a part, Parisian salon women lost the position (however illusory it might have been) which they enjoyed in the seventeenth century as arbiters of taste. While the philosophes attended feminine salons, [End Page 277] they rejected the idea of consulting salonnières on the matters of taste (and on other matters), as was previously the case, and relegated them to formal, if not merely decorative, roles of guardians of good manners and propriety, the roles accepted by salonnières. The ousting of the salonnière from aesthetic arbitration exemplified by the two operatic quarrels may be viewed as a continuation of the process of exclusion of salon women from discursive development that began in the seventeenth century, as discussed by Erica Harth in Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (1992) and, most recently, by Joan DeJean in Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle (1997). In the seventeenth century the norms of feminine bienséance (decorum, propriety) allowed a woman to establish a salon but made it impossible for a salonnière to create a space intellectually comparable to that of the French Academy. After having lost a gendered competition for intellectual space with the Academy by the 1680s, the salon, as Erica Harth put it, “proved a discursive dead end for women.” In this essay I carry through this argument into the eighteenth century and demonstrate that salon women lost a competition with the philosophes not only in the intellectual but also in the aesthetic sphere. Salonnières did not choose not to make aesthetic judgments out of respect for the exclusive right of the philosophes to make such judgments 2 but rather were silenced by the philosophes and complied in order not to violate the limits of feminine bienséance in the public sphere, that is, to survive as salonnières. The seventeenth-century ideals of feminine bienséance taken over by eighteenth-century salonnières were no longer perceived as sufficient (or legitimate) to recognize women as arbiters of taste. In fact these ideals proved to be as detrimental as a source of authority for salon women in the siècle des lumières as they were ambiguous in the grand siècle. Ironically, not only were the eighteenth-century Parisian salonnières ousted from aesthetic arbitration, but neither did they succeed in their roles as guardians of propriety and good manners for the philosophes, that is, in keeping the Enlightenment discourse civil. In both operatic quarrels the dominant genre of discourse was a pamphlet, a libelle, not a salon conversation. While during the Querelle des Bouffons the philosophes were unanimously pro-Italian, the Gluck-Piccini quarrel caused a deep split among them, followed by fratricidal fighting, which seriously undermined their authority in public matters. I. The negative connotation associated with the epithets pedant, savant, and their derivatives in seventeenth-century French treatises on honnêteté indicates [End Page 278] that the authority of judgment of “persons of quality” in matters of taste resulted from the code of bienséances in social relations. Blaise Pascal probably best summarized arguments for the superiority of an honnête person (as opposed to a professional) in the realm of aesthetics; being an...

The White Woman and the Native Male Body in Vanderlyn's Death of Jane McCrea

Few images contribute as much to the picturing of American history as the representations of native peoples in the paintings of Benjamin West. To West, the Indian represented a timeless ideal of the natural man, a combination of innocence, intelligence, thoughtfulness and masculinity. He is thus depicted in Death of General Wolfe, 1770, and the often reproduced Penn's Treaty with the Indians, 1772, with which most American schoolchildren are familiar. But there is another image of the native man, of thirty years, and a revolution later: John Vanderlyn's painting Death of Jane McCrea of 1804 (fig. 1 ). Clearly not the and noble savage, free from society's encumbering practices and living in harmony with nature, as Vivian Green Fryd has described West's images, the red men in Vanderlyn's painting are the epitome of unbridled violence (Fryd 80).1 Moreover, this violence is directed against a white woman, alone and undefended, in a wild and isolated forest. Despite the notoriety of West's elegant and sympathetic depictions of natives, known widely in the early Republic through etchings, it is this image, one of horror and unimaginable atrocity, that has dominated American visual and literary history since the early nineteenth century. Why was it Vanderlyn's representation of the native male that caught the imagination of white America rather than West's? What happened to the heroic red man between 1770 and 1800 to so greatly diminish the esteem in which he had been held, at least by some Americans? Further, why is it this image, as a threat to virtue and thus to civilization, that has proliferated over the last two centuries into a Hollywood stereotype that still persists today-in the character of Magua, for instance, in Michael Mann's 1992 film, Last of the Mohicans? One answer can be found in the 1826 novel on which that film was based and on the relationship between the novel and the painting. It was James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) who, through the medium of storytelling, marketed the model on which later representations of native peoples would rest, both in literature and in art.2 This essay will examine the relationship of Cooper's novel and Vanderlyn's painting to history, captivity literature, and the tradition of patriarchy that influenced the development of the American identity. A Great Tory Death of Jane McCrea was commissioned in 1803 by Joel Barlow (1754-1812) as an illustration for his epic poem Columbiad, then in progress.' painting was shown at the Paris Salon in September of 1804 and at the American Academy in New York in November the same year.4 It was the first visual interpretation of a story popular since first reported in the Connecticut Courant on August 5, 1777 (Namias 319).5 A girl had been reported shot and scalped. According to the Courant, The girl was a sweet heart to an officer in the enemy's service, and a great Tory. true events surrounding the death of the historical Jane McCrea (1752-1777) will never be known, so much has her story become enmeshed in the fabric of American mythology. Murdered on her secret way to meet her lover in the British army, herself a rebel to the pro-Revolutionary cause, Jane was nonetheless to become a symbol of the colonies themselves. She is here portrayed as an innocent and trusting girl, betrayed and abandoned, only to be slaughtered on her wedding day by the servants of the very king who had promised to love and protect her. Thus runs the patriotic subscript to the story, but underlying even that text is the discourse of dominance inherited from Europe and naturalized through history into the melting pot of American folklore. Despite Republican sentiments in postRevolutionary America that independence should extend across gender lines, an underlying fear persisted that women, when given choices-who to marry, for instance-would not know how to make the right choices (Namias 121-28). Jane's independent nature was, after all, responsible for her own horrible death at the hands of men: the self-proclaimed protectors (and punishers) of women. …

"A Nose-Length into the Matter": Sexology and Lesbian Desire in Djuna Barnes's "Ladies Almanack"

In 1928, while her lover Thelma Wood lay convalescing in a Paris hospital, Djuna Barnes began work on Ladies Almanack. Organized according to the months of the year and accompanied by twenty-six original pen and ink drawings, the book presents the adventures of Dame Evangeline Musset and her circle of acquaintances, interspersed with parables, songs, poems, and discourse on the joys and pitfalls of love. Proclaimed the one book all ladies should carry about with them, the Almanack is a satiric tribute to the women who frequented Natalie Barney's Paris salon in the 1920s.' The Almanack was not originally intended for publication although Barnes eventually agreed to have 1,050 copies privately printed. The original book was distributed among an intimate group of associates, dealt boldly with sexuality, and is remarkable for its opposition to the fixed classifications of gender advanced by the new science of sexology. This paper examines how the fixed and gender-specific categories of sexology were challenged by Barnes's interpretation of desire in the Ladies Almanack as thoroughly multiple, shifting, and contradictory, every Law of Love and Desire ... long ago ... mixed as a Contortion of Traffic (38). Barnes wrote her linguistically dazzling LadiesAlmanack in a climate of newly valorized heterosexual comradeship and romance. As an intervention into medical codifications of normalcy, the Almanack directly engages sexological formulations of gender, identity, and desire through the central character of the Almanack, Dame Evangeline Musset, who parodies the era's most pervasive model for homosexual desire, the sexual invert. The idea of inversion has its source in Havelock Ellis's 1897 work by the same name, one of the earliest comprehensive treatments of human sexuality in English, which exhaustively treats the genesis, development, and deportment of homosexuals. The works

Academic Outsider at the Paris Salons of the Revolution: The Case of Drawings a la maniere noire

3. Isabey exhibited drawings described as being dans la maniere anglaise at the Exposition de la Jeunesse organized by the painter and dealer J.B. P. Lebrun in the summer of 1791 (no. 101), where they were reported to have attracted the attention of the public (Exposition des tableaux faite par mm. les artistes libres, Collection Deloynes (Cabinet des Estampes, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris), vol. 17, no. 428, p. 8) and again at the Salon of the same year, although they were not listed in the livret (La Bequille de Voltaire au Salon, seconde et derniere promenade, Coll. Deloynes, vol. 17, no. 439, p. 319). This paper describes one way in which French artists from outside the Academie royale de peinture et sculpture took advantage of developments during the Revolution to invade the Paris Salon. Their works were enthusiastically received, but other artists, former academicians and their pupils, mounted a press campaign against the newcomers. It was not public debate which finally produced a return to more traditional values, but the changing cultural requirements of the ruling elite. The issues raised in the debate, however, helped to redefine the status and qualifications of the professional artist in a post-academic society.' In 1791, the Academie lost its control of the Salon, the biennial exhibition of paintings and sculpture held at the Louvre. The source of its sinecures and status disappeared in 1792, when France ceased to be a monarchy, and the Academie itself was abolished in the following year. Academicians and their pupils were thus deprived of privileges which had included the exclusive right to exhibition in the capital and a monopoly of official commissions. At the same time, economic upheavals and the emigration of wealthy royalists led to a creaming-off of the top end of the market for contemporary art. Academicians complained that their livelihood was threatened by these developments, but it would be a mistake to interpret them as an unmitigated disaster for artists in general. The commissioning of portraits, in particular, was so bound up with social practices, such as courtship and marriage, as to survive all but the worst economic catastrophes. It was, moreover, the humbler sort of portrait specialist who stood to gain most from the demise of the Academie, since such artists were at last free to display their products to potential clients at the Salon. Among those who took advantage of this opportunity were several miniaturists, some of whom modified the appearance of their works in ways evidently designed to enhance their impact at the Salon. Jean-Baptiste Augustin, for example, an artist from Lorraine who had settled in Paris during the previous decade, attracted attention at the Salon of 1796 with a selfportrait en grande miniature (Fig. 1). Over nine inches high, this was a painting large enough to compete with many of the smaller oils on show and much too big to be incorporated into a piece of jewellery, the traditional destination of portrait miniatures.2 Its uselessness for all practical purposes confirmed its status as a work of art.

Academic outsiders at the Paris salons of the revolution: the case of drawings a la maniere noire

Journal Article Academic Outsider at the Paris Salons of the Revolution: The Case of Drawings à la manière noire Get access Tony Halliday Tony Halliday Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Oxford Art Journal, Volume 21, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 69–86, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/21.1.69 Published: 01 March 1998

Threats of Correspondence: The Letters of Edith Wharton, Zona Gale, and Willa Cather

In 1922, Edith Wharton's good friend and long-time correspondent Sara Norton died, leaving behind a Wharton who felt lonely and out of place in the post-war world, despite her recent Pulitzer Prize and the record earnings of her books. To some degree, of course, Wharton had felt out of place her entire life, but in letters to Sara Norton, she had been able to find a faithful and literate friend, who praised her successes and was discreet about her failures. Although Norton never achieved the success that her more famous friend did, she did send her writing to Wharton, and Wharton was both encouraging and complimentary about it, which is somewhat surprising, given that Wharton is rarely thought of as a mentor, particularly not for other women writers.(1) What Susan Goodman has recently called Wharton's inner circle was formed primarily of men; the women with whom Wharton was close were not, generally speaking, literary. It has long been the view, in fact, that Wharton deliberately kept herself separate from other women, particularly other women writers. She did not want to be connected to them in reviews or in the public eye. She attempted to distance herself from contemporary feminist debate and from women who might be considered her peers: Gertrude Stein, Willa Cather, H. D., Zora Neale Hurston. Wharton's detachment is curiously similar to Cather's, who also held herself separate from other writing women. Cather's intimate women friends were not writers; her women friends who wrote were either not as successful as Cather or were not among her intimates. Both Wharton and Cather wanted to be seen as individuals in the landscape rather than as members of a group of women writers, a label that in their eyes collapsed aesthetic differences under the essentializing rubric of gender. They did not join the various communities of women writers forming around them, communities that ranged from the avant-garde modernist salons of Paris to the radical feminist group in New York known as Heterodoxy to the women journalists and editors in New York and Paris.(2) Wharton and Cather's shared aloofness from the world around them, particularly the world of other women writers, is more complicated than a simple desire to be seen separately from their female peers, however. Even as they make distinctions between themselves and others, there is a competing desire to make connections with those women writers who might understand their dilemma: caught between the marketplace's rigid definition of literary on the one hand and, on the other, the desire to create an authorial self impervious to such marketplace considerations. Their ambivalence pervades the letters each wrote to Zona Gale, the writer who replaced Sara Norton in Wharton's correspondence and who wanted Cather to come live and work in her father's house. It is one of the ironies of history that Wharton and Cather remained unaffiliated with one another and yet chose the same woman writer with whom to initiate and maintain a long correspondence. Both Wharton and Cather sought out Gale's friendship and commentary, but they also kept her at arm's length, not fully committing themselves to what Wharton called, in her first letter to Gale, the of spirit that existed between like-minded writers. Reading the correspondence between these writers allows us to understand why it was so difficult for Wharton and Cather actually to join that community of spirit; we see enacted within the pages of their letters a personal version of the larger and more public negotiations that allowed them to re-define the role of the American woman writer. Although Gale is not well-known to readers today, in the twenties and thirties she was a well-respected, highly successful novelist and playwright who received a Pulitzer Prize in 1921 (the first awarded to a woman dramatist) for her stage adaptation of her novel Miss Lulu Bett. …

Henri Fantin-Latour's Ariane abandonnée

In 1867 the American painter Thomas Eakins was rather surprised by the large number of nudes at the Parisian Salon: `The rest of the pictures are of naked women, standing, sitting, lying down, flying, dancing, doing nothing which they call Phyrnes, Venuses, nymphs, hermaphrodites, houris, and Greek proper names' (qtd in Hendricks, 39). The situation had not changed much when Henri Fantin-Latour exhibited his Ariane abandonnée, a pastel on canvas, in the Salon of 1887 (Fantin-Latour, 135). Fantin's Ariadne fits the category of nude that Bram Dijkstra has coined, `the nymph with the broken back,' of which Alexandre Cabanel's Venus, in his Birth of Venus (1863), is the first and most famous example.

Romantic French Song, 1830-1870

Romantic French Song, 1830-1870. Edited with translations and commentaries by David Tunley. New York: Garland, 1994 (vol. 1)--1995 (vols. 2-6). [Vol. 1: Early Romances by Berat, Berlioz, Duchambge, Grisar, Meyerbeer, Monpou, Morel, Panseron, and Romagnesi; Selected Songs of Louis Niedermeyer and Ernest Reyer. Pref., p. ix-x; gen, introd., p. xi-xx; Gilbert Duprez on pronouncing French when singing, p. xxi-xxii; the composers and their songs, p. xxiii-xxxvi; song texts and translations, p. xxxvii-lxii; scores (facsim. reprod.), p. 1-243; index different settings of the same text in vols. 1-6, p. 245 (repeated as the final p. of each vol.). ISBN 0-8153-1360-8. $98.00. Vol. 2: Songs by Felicien David (1810-1876). Pref., etc. (as in vol. 1), p. vii-xlix; scores (facsim. reprod.), p. 1-218; index, p. 220. ISBN 08153-1359-4. $95.00. Vol. 3: Songs by Henri Rebel (1807-1880); Six romances populaires (1849), Six melodies de Victor Hugo (1855), and Five Other Songs by Edouard Lalo (1823-1892). Pref., etc., p. vii-liv; scores (facsim. reprod.), p. 1-161; index, p. 163. ISBN 0-8153-1356-X. $95.00. Vol. 4: Songs by Victor Masse (1822-1884), including Chants bretons (1853); and Songs by Georges Bizet (1838-1875), including Feuilles d'album (1867). Pref., etc., p. vii-li; scores (facsim. reprod.), p. 1-259; index, p. 261. ISBN 0-8153-1358-6. $99.00. Vol. 5: Songs by Charles Gounod (1818-1893); Songs by Leo Delibes (1836-1891); Six poesies d'Armand Silvestve by Alexis de Castillon (1838-1873). Pref., etc.. p. vii-lii; scores (facsim. reprod.), p. 1-267; index, p. 269. ISBN 0-8153-1537-8. $99.00. Vol. 6: Songs by Jules Massenet (1842-1912), Louis Lacombe (1818-1884), and Auguste Vaucorbeil (1821-1884). [Pref., etc., p. vii-xlvi; scores (facsim. reprod.). p. 1-192; index, p. 194. ISBN 0-1853-1361-6. $90.00. Cloth; acid-free paper. ISBN 0-8153-1355-1. $576.00 (the set).] From the early romances of Antoine Romagnesi and Hippolyte Monpou the mature melodies of Hector Berlioz and Henri Duparc, the French romantic song is one of the most expressive genres in music. Unfortunately, much of this rich repertory, though enormously popular in its day, has been virtually ignored for over 150 years. With this recent Garland publication of six volumes of French romantic songs edited by David Tunley of the University of Western Australia, however, we can now begin fill in some of the gaps. According the general preface, Tunley includes over three hundred romances and melodies composed during the forty years that saw a blossoming of the romantic: spirit in all the arts in France (vol. 1, p. ix). While Berlioz, Charles Gounod. Eduoard Lalo, Georges Bizet, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Leo Delibes, and Jules Massenet are among the most recognizable composers from the period represented in the collection, Romagnesi, Monpou, Pauline Duchambge, Frederic Berat, Albert Grisar, Auguste Morel, Augusre Panseron, Louis Niedermeyer, Ernest Reyer, Henri Reber, Victor Masse, Felicien David, Alexis de Castillon, Louis Lacombe, and Auguste Vaucorbeil were relatively minor figures and will be virtually unknown many potential users of these volumes. Each volume begins with a general preface that explains the coverage and intended aim of the collection to reproduce (in facsimile) songs that have long been out of circulation (vol. 1, p. ix). The preface is followed by a general introduction in which the editor offers a brief historical precis of the period covered--from the July Revolution the Franco-Prussian War. Herein Tunley discusses music-making in Parisian salons, and offers an overview of the genre's development as it was transformed from the simple, strophic romance in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries into the mature melodie, with all of the delicate attention textual detail, expansive lyricism, and expressive harmonic shading that characterize the best representatives of the genre. The introduction is followed by an excerpt in English from an 1882 edition of Gilbert Duprez's singing treatise L'Art du chant (Paris: Heugel, 1845) on the proper pronunciation of sung French. …

Style

Messenger, Michael Coalport 1795–1926Duncan, Alastair The Paris Salons 1895–1914: Vol. 3 FurnitureSnodin, Michael and Howard, Maurice Ornament: A Social History Since 1450Jourdan, Uwe Oriental Rugs Vol. 5 Turkoman

Salon Theatre: Homemade Bread

In January of 1502, in a letter from her father's court in Ferrara, Isabella d'Este wrote to her husband in Mantua describing the theatre that had been prepared in the palace for the performance of six comedies and intermezzi for the celebration of her brother Alphonzo's marriage to Lucrezia Borgia. Ten years earlier, the Ferrarese gentleman Bernardino dei Prosperi wrote in his diary describing stage apparatus that had been set up in the garden of the Palazzo Madama for a comedy that began sometime in the wee hours of the morning. And at a dinner in Ferrara given by Ercole d'Este for his father, Ariosto's La Cassaria was played in a room with tapestries greatly embellished.' So we find theatre at court, in rooms transformed by elaborate tapestries, or with scenery and machinery for the occasion. As part of a long evening of conversation, dancing, and eating, the guests are entertained by plays both classical and modern, eclogues in the manner of Virgil, morescas danced by nymphs and warriors, verses recited by costumed virtues and vices, triumphal chariots drawn by fantastic animals, meals served by demigods and heroes, songs sung, and music played. The audience consists of honored guests, friends of the court, scholars, and the finest citizens, and the occasion might be a joining in marriage of two great houses, the announcement of a cardinalship, the birth of a child, or the reception of a visiting monarch. These theatricals d'occasion play an integral part in the history of theatre and represent one unfolding of the theatrical impulse. On a much more modest scale, but in a similar vein, we have the salontheatre at home-in a construct of invited guests and proposed topics, as personal theatre, described with perspicacity by Sue-Ellen Case in Feminism and Theatre (1988). The salon is a locus for witty dialog, repartee, readings of poetry, and sometimes full performances of scripts and staged pageantry. Case uses Rahel Varnhagen's Berlin salon and Natalie Barney's Paris salon to characterize the way women composers, writers, and performers have, since the late I7th century, gathered to share their work with sophisticated friends and colleagues. Case is keenly aware of the class exclusivity of the salon tradition but sympathetic to its efficacy in nurturing voices, particularly those of women.

History and ideology in Proust: a la recherche du temps perdu and the Third French Republic

No major writer of the twentieth century seems a less likely candidate for Marxist analysis than Marcel Proust. A wealthy dilettante and notable fixture in the Parisian salons, Proust chronicled and anatomized the world of France's upper classes, earning a reputation among both contemporaries and subsequent generations for aesthetic refinement and social snobbery. Yet in a reconsideration of Proust's masterpiece, A Ia recherche du temps perdu, Michael Sprinker reveals Proust to be an acute observer of the struggle between the bourgeoisie and aristocracy in the Third Republic. Drawing on historical scholarship on the Third Republic, Sprinker shows how Proust's novel can extend our understanding of this period, particularly in areas less well mapped in standard historical studies such as nationalist ideology and gender roles.