Nineteenth Century Art - A Critical History.pdf

E

H E N

P

F.

ElSENMAN

NINETEENTH

CENTURY ART

A CRITICAL HISTORY

THOMAS CROW

•

BRIAN LUKACHER

•

LINDA NOCHLIN

•

FRANCES K.POHL

Nineteenth Century Art A Critical History

Nineteenth

A Critical With 369

illustrations, 51 in color

STEPHEN

F.

EISENMAN

Century Art History

THOMAS CROW BRIAN LUKACHER

LINDA NOCHLIN

FRANCES

K.

POHL

THAMES AND HUDSON

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A number of individuals have generously assisted in the eompletion of this book: the contributing Thomas Crow, Brian Lukacher, Frances Pohl, and Linda Nochlin have been unstinting with am very grateful to them. David Craven has their time, their helpful criticisms, and their kindness.

authors

I

offered

encouragement

of the composition of the book; he alone knows

at crucial stages

of the ideas about method are indebted to him, and Eric Frank,

my

art historical

how

well or poorly they have

for a

number of the works

has been a smart and stimulating debater about matters that live-in editor

and interlocutor of

collaborators' regard for intelligence,

me

colleague and friend at Occidental College, has been generous in helping

and iconographical sources

me and

companionship,

about nineteenth-century

Graduate Program

in

first resort,

loyalty,

and

Mary Weismantel

love. Finally,

would

I

University of

has by her efforts both preserved

measurements are

in

my

cannot adequately thank her for her

I

thank the people

like to at

who

taught

me

Albany, the Williams College

— Robert Kinsman, George Heard Hamilton, Thomas Crow.

Daniel Robbins, Albert Boime, and

In the captions to the illustrations,

discussed. Abigail

New York

Art History, and Princeton University

identify the

Solomon-Godeau concern women and Paul Gauguin. As my

propelled forward the entire effort.

art at the State

how many

been represented.

inches (centimeters in parantheses), height before

width, unless otherwise indicated.

Any copy of this book not by

way of trade

issued by the publisher as a paperback

is

sold subject to the condition that

it

shall

or otherwise be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's

prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in similar condition including these

(C)1994

First published in the

which

words being imposed on

Thames and Hudson

United States of America

500 Fifth Avenue,

New

in

York,

Ltd,

Library of Congress Catalog Card

it is

published and without a

subsequent purchaser.

London

1994 by

New

a

Thames and Hudson

Inc.,

York 10110

Number

93-61271

ISBN: 0-500-23675-5 (hardback) 0-500-27753-2 (paperback)

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CONTENTS Introduction: Critical Art and History 7

Classicism and Romanticism 1

Thomas Crow 2

Thomas Crow 3

The Tensions

Brian Lukacher Nature

Young

Ingres 14

Classicism in Crisis: Gros to Delacroix 51

Goya 78

of Enlightment:

Lukacher Visionary History

4 Brian 5

Patriotism and Virtue: David to the

Historicized:

Painting: Blake and His Contemporaries 98

Constable, Turner, and Romantic Landscape

Painting 115

New World 6

Frances K. Pohl Old World,

New

World:

Frontiers

The Encounter

of Cultures on the American

Frontier 144 7

Frances K. Pohl Black and White

in

America 163

Realism and Naturalism 8

9

The 10

The Generation

of 1830 and the Crisis in the Public Sphere 188

Rhetoric of Realism: Courbet and the Origins of the Avant-Garde 206

The Decline

of History Painting: Germany, Italy, and France 225

Modern Art and 11

Manet and

Life

the Impressionists 238

12

Linda Nochlin

13

Mass Culture and Utopia: Seurat and Neoimpressionism 274

Issues of

Gender

in Cassatt

14 Abstraction and Populism: 15

Symbolism and the 16

The

and Eakins 255

Van Gogh 288

Dialectics of Retreat 304

Failure and Success of Cezanne 337

Chronology 351 Selected Bibliography 365 List of Illustrations 368

Index 373

.»

GUSTAVF. COURBET

Portrait of Baudelaire ca. 1848. 20 7s x 24 (53 x

61). Detail

INTRODUCTION: CRITICAL ART AND HISTORY ART DISCUSSED IN THIS BOOK THE Europe and North America during

WAS MADE

a period

profound

social

and

epoch of change not, of course,

political transformation.

— now almost

a

IN

of rapid and

The close of that

hundred years distant

end the drama of modernization. In

— did

fact, far

from slowing down, the dynamic of change begun

in the

nineteenth century was accelerated in the twentieth. Soon the

terms "imperalism," "assembly line," and "mass culture" entered

modern European and American

the

lexicons,

century, the social upheaval that had begun with the bloody

dispatch of the French Bourbon monarchs in 1793

—

the event

that appears in retrospect as the exclamation point at the

of the feudal sentence cratic,

and

end

— was becoming more mature, demo-

inclusive. In 1848, the increasingly self-cognizant

working classes of France, Germany, Austria,

England rose up

in

arms

Italy,

and

(or in the latter case organized

themselves into a political movement) to combat the vestigial aristocratic,

and the new bourgeois,

who maintained

elites

supplanting an earlier vocabulary that included "nation,"

economic and

"industry," and "the popular." Yet

soon followed by profound failures to transform the economic

shifting their arenas facts

and changing

if actions

and words were

their meanings, the basic

of crisis and everlasting uncertainty remained the same.

Indeed,

if the

history

compelling today,

and culture of the nineteenth century are

it is

largely because the twentieth century

accepted and embraced their legacy of political and cultural

The rudiments

revolution.

of that historical

legacy

are

generally familiar but bear retelling.

The end

and

political status quo.)

final

was overturned by

women and men

By

boom and

agricultural

and

in the politics

stood a capitalist and bourgeois economic and social

edifice.

This epochal reconfiguration of European economy

and society

— long

in

coming but no

for its gradual preparation

revolution in

dramatic

in the

for a generation,

— inspired

in 1776,

wars of colonial indepen-

by Enlightenment principles of

consent and social contract

— were

political

waged and won

in

new

city alike,

and the

efforts of

women

rival in intensity the

to achieve

ongoing

class

and

ethnic struggles. In the United States, the genocide of Native

Americans was nearly completed by 1890 (the year of the

Wounded Knee

Massacre), even while large numbers of new

European and Asian immigrants arrived Pacific

harbors.

restlessness

at

and violence that had characterized

ary century was

Atlantic and

As the twentieth century dawned, the becoming

imperialism that reached

internationalized.

its

apogee

in the

a

revolution-

The new

age of

decade before 1914

the

accomplished the dividing of the non-European world into

turn

colonies for the benefit of a half-dozen Western states, yet

the core nations of Europe, accelerating already

notably failed to secure either peace or generalized prosperity.

Americas, the Caribbean, and Mexico. These victories

rebounded

end

marked by outbreaks of

Europe and the Americas. Beginning

and continuing dence

— was

less

become

and culture of the West. Economic

and industrial technologies transformed country-

side

now

driven at times by moral

bust followed close upon each other,

emancipation began to

survived for seven centuries. In the place of feudalism, there

a half later, the slave

the last quarter of the century, change itself had

entrenched

and rigidly hierarchical productive and

had

decade and

outrage and at others by economic calculation.

dissolution of feudalism in Europe, a primarily agricultural social order that

A

plantation system of agriculture in the southern United States

cycles of

of the eighteenth century marked the

dominance. (Quick successes were

political

in in

existing

demands

political

enfranchisement. By the middle of the nineteenth

for social justice,

economic equality, and

Indeed, imperialism soon generated vastly destructive wars

its

own

antinomies:

between the imperialist nations were

— among

fought, broad (though fragile) alliances were forged

and formal perfection passed down, generation

politan bourgeois culture itself was on the point of being

from archaic Greece

dethroned.

enlightened France. Yet

The

century

nineteenth

was

punctuated

thus

beginning, middle, and end by revolutions trial,

and

cultural

— and

by the

less

—

workers,

women, and indigenous peoples

The

its

indus-

political,

freedom and

for

suggests that

to

modern,

examination of the

a close

same time the

represents at the

it

to generation,

Middle Ages,

to the Christian

picture-

cultural

and

between the past and

ethical divide increasingly felt to exist

the present.

Exhibited

epoch were also indelibly

(the

and insurgency; they too were

art),

visual arts of the

restiveness, change,

at

violent struggles of

equality.

marked by

1827

in

at the

most prestigious venue

Salon Carre of the Eouvre palace in Paris for the display

The Apotheosis depicts the blind

I

of works of

lomer, enthroned

shaped and figured by the irruption of classes and interests

before an Ionic temple and crowned with laurel by a winged

formerly excluded from the domain of national culture. (The

Victory (or Fame). At his

insight into a link

of a society and

elites, art

between the

its art,

we

ethics, politics,

shall

soon

see,

and material

life

was an achievement

No longer the reliably pliant vehicle of entrenched

of the age.)

was often now the contradictory, unpredictable, and of diverse individuals, subcultures, and interest

critical voice

groups.

The

figures of

prints, drawings,

and paintings of the English William

postures that recall the

feet, in

Day and Night from

Tomb

Michelangelo's

of

Giuliano de' Medici, are seated allegorical representations of

The Iliad (beside resting

on her

a

sword) and The Odyssey (with an oar

To Homer's immediate right are

lap).

Phidias (with

Pindar (offering the

lyre)

arm extended, holding

left

the three

and Euripides, and

great tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, his left the poet

to

and the sculptor

a mallet).

Ranged

Blake and the Spanish Francisco Goya, for example, offer

around and below these Greeks are other ancient and modern

clear instances of the responsiveness of artists to the cultural

luminaries indebted to

crises of the early nineteenth century. In Blake's illustrated

hand, Virgil guides Dante, Moliere (holding the mask of

poetic books such as America (1793) and Europe (1794), he

drama) stands beside Racine, and Shakespeare accompanies

lamented the

country to embrace the

failure of his native

Poussin

(in the left

Homer: Apelles

leads Raphael by the

foreground, pointing to Homer). Omitted

revolutionary upwellings in the United States and France. In

from the picture, but everywhere

Goya's

included himself in a preliminary version),

series of etchings called

condemned

Los Caprichos (1799), he

the prevailing ignorance and prejudice of the

Spanish monarchy and clergy, and espoused the emancipa-

French Enlightenment. Yet more than

tory principles of the

simply proclaiming the value of democratic and Enlighten-

ment

ideals,

and Goya

Blake

found

ways

embody

to

revolution in the forms and subjects of their

Each

art.

implicit,

Ingres (he

is

who

as recent

Academician and proud recipient of the Legion d'honneur, saw himself as the honored the Greeks.

especially,

matters of Art,

I

In

to

1818,

Poussin,

Raphael, and,

Ingres proclaimed: "In

have not changed. Age and reflection have,

hope, strengthened still

heir

my

taste,

without diminishing

worship Raphael, his century, and above

all

its

ardor.

I I

the divine

represented the political and social crises of their day in the

Greeks." For Ingres, therefore, ancient Greece represented

language of solar and Manichean metaphors: Light erases

both the childhood of Europe

Darkness,

Day combats

Night,

God

confronts Satan, Master

opposes Slave, Ore (Blake's personification of desire) battles

Urizen

(his

figure

of reason), Truth

(Goya's

allegory) tries to vanquish Ignorance. Perhaps

able of all, however, their

is

the fact that Blake and

themes and protagonists

dialectically

preferred

most remark-

Goya

—

represent

that

is,

they

describe them as various and mutable. Neither light nor dark,

reason nor unreason, neither

and

eternal; like the

God

nor the devil are singular

dawning revolutionary age

itself,

they are

—

the origin of European

culture from the fourteenth through nineteenth centuries

and the

full

swell of a maturity that could never be superseded.

Commissioned

for the ceiling of the

newly decorated room

of Egyptian antiquities in the Louvre, The Apotheosis of

Homer proclaims Classicism an indisputable canon guaranteeing a stable cultural foundation for the present. The painting suggests that present French and European culture

is

the

culmination of a continuous line of development beginning archaic Greece, and passing through the

Roman

in

empire, the

multiple and protean, contingent upon the political and social

Christian Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the time of Louis

perspectives of the spectator.

XIV, and

William Blake and Francisco Goya were surely exceptional,

among nineteenth-century political perspicacity.

critical

artists,

figures,

facts of

modern

static

painter and critic

and retrospective

such as

Journal des debats when he praised Ingres for dispensing with

active,

social change.

Ingres's The Apotheosis of Homer (1827), for example, appears

INTRODUCTION

Etienne Delecluze described the

The

aspects of the Apotheosis in his Salon review for the 1828

D. Ingres, often manifested an

engagement with the

the present age of Charles X.

and

for their radicalism

Yet even conservative

the arch-Classicist J. A.

63

canon of physical beauty

to represent Classicism as a timeless

oppressed European and non-European peoples, and metro-

the pretension of artistic originality in his painting and instead

graciously accepting the formal "archetypes" provided by the great personages he represents. Delecluze writes:

all

— The

men

individual originality of these

but what placed them beyond

and circumstances under which they himself

Dante

traditions;

Homer found

lived.

point for giving

at the ideal

incontestable,

is

comparisons were the era

all

mythological

life to

for fixing the poetic theology

born

in the

century; Shakespeare for transfusing the ideas of the

fifth

south into northern brains; Phidias for clothing symbolic

man's image; and Michelangelo

idols with

the

Middle Ages. But once

these great combinations

all

have been fashioned and fixed,

modify the archetypes

for incarnating

all

that can be

done

is

to

modern works

according

of "archetypes,"

was

Delecluze,

to

Ingres's

achievement. Yet this was in fact an achievement more of a negative than of a positive kind:

and

historic

and dissonance and the

difference

artistic

involved the erasure of

it

and Apelles gives way

of Dante (as he leaves behind his guide Virgil on the threshold of Paradise), the alienation of Hamlet, and the stunning

what remains

anticlassicism of the aged Michelangelo;

is

only

and sardonic

Bryson's word for this representation of absence or loss

but

"desire,"

the

am more persuaded

I

and

seems

term

of the

passivity

that

what

is

at

work

change

much

Precisely such a knowledge of cultural crisis and

it.

— featured

in the art

work of

as in the

of conservatives such as Ingres as

radicals such as Blake

century Gustave Courbet

—

is

and Goya, or

the distinguishing

of the most salient art of the nineteenth century; this

the art

am

I

Taking our cue from the

of the period

art

itself,

the authors of this book intend to consider

Although

this

approach has been adopted

in

therefore,

it

critically.

many

of the

the Classical past and present

previously been used in surveys of nineteenth-century

vitality, Ingres's

it

complexity and

Apotheosis comes to resemble an attack upon,

more than an homage

to,

the legacy of

Homer, and

it

should

not surprise us that most critics of the painting found

it

if

we now

look again at the Apotheosis of Homer,

how much more

notice

it

bands echoing the horizontal and foreground and columns

but

fail

to

grotesquely

or

interact

abbreviated

we

resembles a crude pastiche than an

paradigm of Classicism. Figures are ranked

ideal

in the

in rigid

steps

vertical

in

the

background; they hold hands

engage the repoussoirs

the

—

the

— poignantly,

breakdown

tradition in the

in

flatness,

of the Classical

modern world?

of The Apotheosis

less to the

relief to the

its

painter's technique as

laws of linear perspective than to laws

of a perspective that one could

more

modern

call

figures

chronological ... in giving

and gradually weakening

colors as he reaches the semi-fantasy figures of

Linus,

who

authors of most earlier surveys, beginning with Richard

Muther (1907) and Leonce Benedite

(1910),

and extending

his

Orpheus and

are on the furthest plane of the picture." In the

hands of Ingres, the ancient world shadows, and

loss;

arc destroyed

— the

the great

is

to

Rosenblum/Janson (1984) and Lorenz Eitner (1988), were

upon

the

model of investigations

art historical data

names and biographies, anecdotes, and subjects, key

dates,

methods

in the natural sciences.

proceeded by induction, collecting

titles

—

They

artists'

of artworks, genres

developments, and the

stylistic

documented responses of patrons,

critics,

and the public

the confidence that "there can be nothing so remote that

cannot reach

Even

nor so recondite that we cannot discover

it,

Fritz Novotny's idiosyncratic

one of blindness,

monuments of Greek

antiquity

Athena Parthenos, the Colossus, the

volume

we it."

for the Pelican

History of Art (1960) generally conforms to this model.

Although he frames

when he described

art.

and then assembled them into "long chains of deductive

reluctantly, perhaps even help-

the authority

has not

reasoning," in the words of empiricism's parent, Descartes, in

Delecluze himself half understood the problematical nature

"submitting

it

the

despite

awkwardness, and stiltedness of the picture than that Ingres

lessly

volume,

extreme fore-

viewer, in

ground. Can there be any other explanation for the

was recording

that inform the writing of this

empiricists in the sense that they based their research

objectionable.

Indeed,

The

is

calling critical.

monographs

that gave

felt

of the Classicism of his day and could not avoid

febrility

depicting

costume, cliche, and hollow splendor. In thus purging from all

an

is

Ingres saw and

critical intelligence.

is

me

to

(however much he may have lamented) the weakness and

trait

pessimism of Euripides, the devastating loneliness

to the ironical peering

'smile of reason' of Voltaire [at the lower right corner]."

later in the

irrational

you

Norman Bryson

as the art historian

expressions, at their nadir in the busy scribbling and sarcastic

from the Classical tradition

Ingres's painting are the

no comparable

are

generality of countenance evident in such figures as Phidias

substitution of a bland and conflict-free Classicism. Banished in

there

has written, elaborating Delecluze, "the more the nobility and

active, restless,

This subtle crafting and modification of the Classical corpus

— and

to take their place. Indeed, the further

modern world,

enter the

misleading;

indefinitely.

of Apelles

oeuvre

entire

his chronological survey (1780- 1880)

with references to the "spiritualization" of art in the hands of the philosopher less

Kant and

speaks of his

entails,

own approach

in empiricist terms: his

book

he says, the study of the "laws which govern the

development of art" and ment." Indeed subject

the painter Cezanne, he neverthe-

for

its

"prevailing lines of develop-

Novotny, scholarly

matter are

perfectly

(scientific)

method and

merged, since he sees the

nineteenth century as "defined |by| the study of the external

appearance of nature.

|It is|

the century of Naturalism."

Empiricism has dominated studies of nineteenth-centurv

1VIROIH CTION

— art

but has rarely been explicitly acknowledged as

logy.

An

exception to this silence

methodo-

a

John Rewald, who

is

questioning what they see as the myth of an interest-free science and scholarship.

Art history

especially

itself,

art

popular and indispensable

history of the nineteenth century (with the notable exception

History of Impressionism (1946; 4th revised edition, 1973). In

of its basic survey texts), has been significantly transformed in

honestly champions

his introduction,

it

his

in

Rewald approvingly

nineteenth-century

French

Coulanges: "History

is

science,

it

not an

art,

it is

Fustel

historian

political

the last two decades by this

new

de

been especially redefined

in

all

structural linguistics in the late

words of the

pure science.

.

.

.

Like

consists in stating the facts, in analyzing them, in

drawing them together and

The

cites the

bringing out their connections.

in

deducing from the

historian's only skill should consist in

documents

that

all

is

them and

in

in

adding nothing they do

manner not

dissimilar to Rewald, Robert

in the introduction to his

Rosenblum

and H. W. Janson's Nineteenth-

Century Art (1984; Art of the Nineteenth Century, English

and absolutist

edition), rejects "the purist tyranny of abstract

systems," insisting that "art historians should be as flexible, various,

and comprehensive

and be willing

as possible in their approaches,

to consider anything

from the history of

technology to the abiding mysteries of genius and psychology as potentially illuminating their ever

more

Rosenblum and Janson

to their words,

the role of the artist or author as the isolated genius inventor a

modernist

fiction

— and

in the

as a dispassionate observer

overturning the history

could

formerly

be

told

prevailing

as

a

ideology of

artists,

The word

Among

art history.

audiences, and

By ideology

requires brief elaboration.

lists

the Bible,

bodies of knowledge, belief, imagery, and expression that

unified art historical

and

friction,

is

it

mechanism in

to construct a

more

or less

that functions noiselessly

and

which contradiction and superfluity

as nearly as possible eliminated. Like earlier writers, too,

these authors remain deeply

committed 1

analysis, seeing in the details of artists lives

is

there and

view the large

class,"

economic, and

mid-twentieth-century

Friedrich Engels (the

political

offered a brief but compelling

still vital

first

Louis

theorist

to

The

Althusser

example of one of the ideologies

dawn of the nineteenth century but which

is

to class stability today:

[According

ideology of freedom, the bourgeoisie

to] the

lives in a direct fashion its relation to its conditions

existence: that

is

to say,

it

comprehends

its real

of

relation (to it

which holds back from into an imaginary relation (the idea that

political forces

all

people are

free,

determin-

while

permitting

and patronage

factors

the

to

small

pass

formal,

before

the

By

this

(somewhat tendentious) example of the way

in

which

the ideology of freedom masks the severely circumscribed

recent scientific and theoretical investigation.

many

critics

and researchers

— from

the fields of literature and philosophy to jurisprudence and

•

Marx and

power, and are an

"The ideas of the ruling

including "free" workers).

Rarely, indeed, have as

10

political

in

empiricist attitude maintains a traditional Cartesian

—

wrote Karl

and commissions,

separation of facts from values, an approach which goes

physics

group by another. Ideologies both

the laws of a liberal capitalist economy), but incorporates

production,

much

and are

theorize ideology), "are in every epoch the ruling ideas."

that arose at the

scholarly gaze.

against

class or

from economic and

instrument for achieving that control.

must be accepted," instead of the

acts as a kind of sieve

social,

biographical,

reality,

thus an effective (because surreptitious) instrument for the

conscious and unconscious "activities of society as a whole."

Empiricism thus

to their subjects

coherent image of their lived relation to social

1937 described the harvest of empiricism, "a sum-total of facts [which]

in

about the world. They provide their possessors with a

to a micrological

Max Horkheimer

as the Frankfurt School social theorist

is

all

unbeknownst

moment

workaday assumptions or commonsense notions

follow

similar to that of survey

it

meant the character-

are created by a particular social class at a given

domination of one

authors that came before:

is

istic

sources and

descriptive

in the 1960's,

more

many

in-

art

has already been used several times in this introduction;

graphy. Yet, however open-minded the authors are, their is

movement

True

the relevant themes for

that

critics.

cultural criticism during the student

opera, ballet, tuberculosis, syphilis, prostitution, and photo-

and achievement

straightforward,

are certainly

study cited in his introduction, Rosenblum

The

not wholly

confidence

vast subject."

wideranging discussions of the

documents of

art

if

"ideology," which re-emerged as a term of

as a set of

ing

critic or historian

narrative independent of the interests, politics, gender, or

history. Ideologies arise largely

without

view of the

today questioned

is

inclusion of diverse artists outside the established canon and

overall goal

960's and the emergence of

various critical successors. Previous scholarly confidence in

catholic than their predecessors in their near encyclopedic

in their

1

discipline has

of the revival of

light

rejected. Marxist philosophy has also played a signal role

not contain." In a

its

The

attitude.

the

joined their voices together as they

INTRODUCTION

now have

in

liberties of

workers in

a liberal capitalist

seen that ideology perse

is

economy,

an imaginary representation of social and

and an actual lived relation mimetic works of art represent

reality

a

can be

it is

both

material relations

to reality. Ideologies are thus like

in their

in

it

powerful precisely because

dualism of illusory and

conventional

and

an

real;

they

historically

They

contingent fashion.

which

history

solely

is

are

what

is

concerned with

person are other than those of the non-social person. Only

out of an art

filtered

detail

and

through the objectively unfolded richness of people's

objectivity.

Althusser's use of the term ideology, however, was polemical

essential

and often mechanistic; as

sensibility (a musical ear,

a Structuralist Marxist,

he rejected

altogether any link between imaginative representation and

material

An

art history that

acknowledges ideological forces need

sense

— whether Marxist, Feminist — has been both

Structuralist, or it

and material conditions, and

and regardless of the a passive attitude

impossibility

all

cases,

their

however,

specific critical perspective of the author,

of scientific dispassion

since

it

assumed

is

is

seen to be an

the

that

situation

of

The new

even

discussion above has summarized a few of the tenets of

critical as

if

opposed

to a purely empirical art history.

Yet

these recent scholarly transformations had not taken

more

the firm hold that they have, the need for a broader and critical

approach to nineteenth-century

art

should have been

apparent empirically through close attention to the material itself.

For

if

the nineteenth century saw the

first

flowering of

the application of empiricism in the humanities,

it

also first

divined and theorized the critical interconnections between seeing and knowing and between vision and society.

From

Hegel to Marx, from Carlyle to Ruskin, from Baudelaire to Bergson, nineteenth-century authors and links

critics

explored the

between perception and history. The most complete

discussion of the question effectively It is

is

found

in the writings

of Marx,

summarized by Horkheimer when he wrote:

not only in clothing and appearance, in outward form

and emotional makeup that humans are the product of history.

Even

the

way they see and hear

the social life-process as

The

.

.

is

inseparable from

has evolved over the millennia.

which our senses present

facts

preformed

it

to us are socially

through the historical character of the object

.

perceived and through the historical character of the

Marx's point

is

by Marx of the historical character of

perception in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts oj

1844

is

more complex. He wrote

alien, objective

that the transformation of the

world into a subjective world of consoling

"human reality" depends upon the human senses:

which only occurs

virtue

to

of the five senses

down

is

a

to the present.

humans by

the state of development of

society in

which the person

which does not subscribe

And

finally,

society

Marx

in

the senses are

all

is

or

literature

—

in

which

its

sensual

Communist

society

clearly different in

to the concept of private property.

stands his argument about the impact of

cultivation of the senses

its feet

— whether

by arguing that the

form of art, music,

in the

turn plays a significant role in the

its

historical unfolding of a society.

Giving material form

to

our

sensual instincts or capacities, both theoretically and practically, "is

required," he writes, "to

as well as to create the

human

sense

make

people's sense human,

corresponding to the entire

wealth of human and natural substance."

A

similar if

return later

(I shall

to this question of the active or formative role

making of modern

of art in the

society.)

somewhat narrower formulation of the

between history and material culture, or between ideology, was achieved a decade after

and esthetician John Ruskin. revival of the arts in

An

Marx by

art

and

the moralist

important figure

mid-century Britain and

link

in its

in

the

medieval

"On the Nature of Workman therein" (1853)

revivalism, Ruskin wrote in his essay

Gothic and the Function of the that:

"The

art

of any country

political virtues.

The

under laws

a

is

the exponent of

art or general is

its

social

and

productive and formative

an exact exponent of

its

ethical

life.

noble art only from noble persons, associated

fitted to their

time and circumstances." Ruskin's

observation led him to compose a body of art history and criticism that

is

at

once finely tuned

to the subtlest formal

nuances of the works of architecture, painting, or sculpture

under

his

sides

this reason the senses of the social

humans

lives: a capitalist society in

upon the human senses on

purview and unabashedly partisan

ing of those works that

for the

Moreover,

historically.

or perceptual capacities from a feudal or

opinions.

most beautiful music has no sense

their nature as

differently developed according to the nature of the particular

and

unmusical ear ... for

the

a

the absence of their specific development and cultivation,

Just as music alone awakens in people the sense of music, just as the

.)

— — word, human — come be by

have senses and perceptions, these are rude and unformed

You can have description

The forming

that while

energy of any country,

perceiving organ.

The

humanness of the senses

the sense of having dominates

spectators affects their perspective.

a

the

.

empirical and

has implicitly argued for a simultaneous consider-

expression in class and gender ideology. In

.

For not only the

in

etc.)

labor of the entire history of the world

Structuralist, Post-

ation of observable facts

—

love,

(will,

of humanized nature.

not be as doctrinaire as Althusser. Indeed, the best recent art

critical;

senses

practical

historical scholarship

an eye for beauty of form

senses but also the so-called mental senses

five

volition.

human

of subjective

richness

the

is

either cultivated or brought into being.

and he denied the existence of human

truth,

autonomy or individual

being

A

conformed

to his

in its

champion-

moral and ethical

closer consideration of Ruskin reveals that the

of his critical

practise

are

both

informed

by

two his

appreciation of art as a form of labor. Ruskin's insight was

INTRODUCTION

summarized

later

sentence by his student, the author,

in a

"Yet the

designer, and political activist William Morris:

essence of what Ruskin then taught us was simple enough, like all

great discoveries. It

was

really

epoch must

that the art of any

this,

nothing more recondite than of necessity be the

approach that recognizes and highlights the ideological

between present and to

tion has

two functions:

human

shaped past

art,

expression, which on the other hand our social

of

forbids

life

him."

At about the same time that Marx, his essay

a

German, was writing

concerned with the historical character of the senses,

and the Englishman Ruskin was publishing that every age to

had

own unique vision and

its

peculiar ethical and social

its

life,

a

corresponding

French poet and

was suggesting much the same thing.

journalist

Baudelaire

who

view

his radical

art

It

was Charles

provocatively argued that artists and writers

more

links

of this recognition can

be-

more

the present, in a sense,

simultaneous familiarization and aliena-

distant. In turn, this

ing of the

that the social life of the

and

social life,

its

make

bring the past closer and

Middle Ages allowed the workman freedom of individual

expression of

The effect

past.

first, it is

to heighten our understand-

choices and cultural contingencies that

and secondly,

it is

to assist in the

achievement

"distanced" reckoning with

the

contradictions and potentialities of our present culture.

The

a

objective or

contemporary culture and ideology,

art historican, situated in

cannot easily separate these two operations; indeed, the one informs the other.

Only the course of subsequent events and developments,

makes

often dozens of years later, artists,

and monuments

historical.

moments,

certain earlier

Thus an

art history that

seeks to understand causes cannot be content to

let

the

The uniqueness

of,

for

own time; it was he who established the critic who is profoundly and passionately

example, the revolutionary paintings of J.-L. David or Goya

any notion

cannot be understood by the facts of patronage or the

of Classical "archetypes," as found for example in Delecluze,

circumstances of exhibition alone. Without a reckoning with

be resolutely of their

model of the engaged with

his subject

and setting the tone modernity, he wrote

be the one

quality,

future

who can

"The

how

great

may

its

Next year

let's

hope that

thinkers as

all

forms that are

time, but

changing, historical factors. early

is

its

itself,

sensual embodiment,

is

contingent upon a host of

Thus empiricism, born

in the

Enlightenment and maturing alongside positive science

in the

nineteenth century, had already begun to shrink in

stature beneath the wilting gaze of nineteenth-century critical

consciousness. As a

method of understanding the world

was dependent upon experiments,

it

a stationary observer

that

and controlled

could not withstand the social and political

itself.

the larger ideological sea-change, apparent only in distant

of which

retrospect,

these

pioneers,

the

are

artists

the

extraordinariness of, say, David's Brutus (1789) or Goya's

10

Courtyard with Lunatics (1793^4) may be seen only as the

80

anomaly or even denied altogether. By

result of psychological

the

same token, the contradictions

movements, such

subsequent history: includes

its

that

marked

critical

cognizance of the movement's

in the case

of Impressionism, this legacy

ubiquity

museum

in

exhibitions,

scholarly

we

shall dis-

publications, and advertising. Impressionism,

cover,

was

challenge to

later art

as Impressionism nearly a century after, are

unobservable without a

Morris and Stephane Mallarme, discovered that vision

not given for

our

that followed, Baudelaire, as

well as such later nineteenth-century critical

as well as the artistic

in

epic

newV

and others

this essay,

845

grant us the extraordinary delight of

celebrating the advent of the

With

of today

life

and poetic we are

cravats and our patent-leather boots.

the true seekers

1

to

true painter we're looking for

snatch from the

feel

encomiums

critical

conclusion of his review of the

at the

and make us

his epoch. Jettisoning

for

Paris Salon exhibition: will

and

record speak for

historical

matter and forms both a radical

in its subject official,

academic conventions and an expression

of the highest aspirations of an enlightened bourgeoisie

who

increasingly dominated the French political and economic arena.

The

very duality, however,

is

only understood by

considering the contradictory development of modern popular

culture and leisure

—

a subject clearly outside the limited

chronological frame of the Impressionist

movement

proper.

Similarly, an art history that attends only to primary

revolutions that jolted the century.

sources and documents

inadequate

if

not in

The critical method employed in this survey of nineteenthcentury art therefore receives much of its authority from the

sense impossible. Equally dubious, however,

is

the status of a

nineteenth century

would be

itself.

To

claim more than this, however,

to fall victim to the very

the scholar

is

— —

empiricism

the

memory

that

society's unbiased

myth is

that

being

criticized.

Remembrance,

even as

records the past; just as memories are aroused by

it

recent events, so history

like history, exists in the

is

stirred

by contemporary

Although based upon empirical research, rejects the interest-free claims of

12

INTRODUCTION

present

this

History of

"Social

is

at least

Modern Art"

seeks

include

to

comprehensively, as the scholar of nineteenth-century art Albert

Boime has

Mozarts] of the

written, "the 'Salieris' [as

been ranked according arbitrary

to

and even capricious standard."

book thus

enormous, the method

in fact

if

the

Although

the

admirable, and Boime's research

is

achieve:

to the

who have

what only can be considered an

democratic sentiment

possibly

opposed

art world, the so-called mediocrities

life.

empiricism in favor of an

that

a literal

purports to a breadth

entirety

it

cannot

of an epoch's cultural

production

nightmare

how can

equally worthy of study,

is

ever have boundaries? terror,

(a

the project

How can the writer avoid the historicist we

shall

frequent

see,

among

the

nineteenth-century revivalists) of simply re-presenting the entirety of the historical record

endless? In addition,

which the

— unchanged,

art historian,

of

all

scholars,

attend: the discrimination of major

and

undistilled,

Boime would abjure the

responsibility to

asked most of all to

is

from minor, primary from

secondary, instrumental from incidental, and

critical

from

accommodating.

By

formal quality, the social

this relative indifference to

historian of art

bathwater.

baby with the

guilty of throwing out the

is

Boime

is

right, of course, to criticize the pretension

of generations of scholars and artists

who claimed

work was beyond material

pecuniary influence. In

or, indeed,

the work of connoisseurship and

fact,

ments

— the

of

all

its

that their

accoutre-

catalogue raisonne, the searching for provenance

or pedigree, the formal analysis that reads like stocktaking

accurately described as the proper

But

in

dismissing judgments of artistic formal

significance as merely "arbitrary"

one

is

and "capricious," Boime

reverting to the neopositivist (or empiricist) position

of dichotomizing content

(seen

primary)

as

Boime himself undercuts

(secondary).

introduction to the

first

social content.

reproducing pre-existing ideas, then, determinant of

just

what

is

language of art

Far from merely

artistic

form

Marx wrote

No

an

in 1844, in the

a

greater

role

in

about

bringing

(or,

at

least,

compellingly addressing) historical change.

By

contesting

received

visual

institutionalized relation to

advanced modern

its

well

as

ideas,

as

art's

public, formally or technically

was alienated from the prevailing

art

way

ideology of society in such as

as also to challenge the

existing social orders. This survey of nineteenth-century art, therefore,

works

upon canonical modernist

mainly

focused

is

— mostly paintings made

in

"canon" represents

and

politically alienated works.

cite the useful

retains

the

potential

represent conflicts and contradictions

Indeed, what here

is

in the belief that

embrace and

to

still

forceful today.

most extraordinary about the art under review

the degree to which the

questions

artistic

own

is

—

The "modern tradition," to oxymoron, alone among nineteenth-century

traditions

artistic

just

France

such a body of formally advanced

this

it

same contentious

political

and

addressed continue to reverberate in our

day; these issues include the debates over the value of

local versus national,

and popular versus

elite cultures,

the

question of the existence of a "canon" of great authors and

and concerns with the

artists,

sexuality, social class, gender,

century

artists also

artistic

representation of

and ethnicity. Nineteenth-

confronted for the

first

time in the history

of art the emergence of techniques for the mass-reproduction

and distribution of their works

as well as the vexing question

of the politics of public exhibition and

museum

display. In

addition, the critical modernist project they initiated

was

intimately engaged with the forms and imagery of mass and

non-European culture tration It

is

—

for example, with

magazine

illus-

and Native American Mandan hide paintings. of course possible to

commonalities between

insist

art issues past

too strongly on the

and present, but the

constellations are often convincing. Indeed,

we

believe that if

mere obedient servant

our texts raise contemporary political questions concerning

passive mirror) of ideology, artworks are one

representation, whether of class, gender, ethnicity, or sexua-

instrument with which humanity makes and remakes this

is

expressed, and thereby

evolution of society and history. less,

his

languages are

all

plays a formative material role, as

(even

in

art as "essentially a

social constructions, the formal

must be imbued with

essential

view

this

language of signs that transmits ideas." Since

by definition

from form

volume of A Social History of Modern

Art (1988) when he describes visual

too

is

art

and auction houses rather than of independent

dealers scholars.

for

—

domain of commercial

played

way, formally innovative works of visual art

may

itself.

in fact

they will have succeeded in more closely approaching a

In

lity,

be

nineteenth-century

judged more significant than conservative ones because they

historical

and

art

critical

in

which

there

emerged

a

new

consciousness of society and culture.

IVI'ROIH CTION

13

Classicism and Romanticism 1

•

•

PATRIOTISM AND VIRTUE: DAVID TO THE YOUNG INGRES THOMAS CROW THE CULT OF CIVIC VIRTUE

be slavishly adjusted to the contingent habits and costume of one's country; to mirror one's compatriots as one found

NO ONE

FRANCE HAD THE SLIGHTEST IDEA

INthat1781, a revolution would begin before the decade was out, an

would be merely

upheaval of every social institution which would not spare the

republics of ancient Greece and

IN

traditional fine arts.

But

were ready

artists

advance to

in

to

reproduce and endorse

An

unequal society.

ideal

a

Rome

live

French public would confront

civic

virtue worthy of comparison

the artist's vocation:

a novel idea

no longer the dutiful servant of the

and the church who defines success

in

of

state

new-model

his

independence from the dictates of royal patrons and

artist (invariably

assumed

to be male) vaunts

postures of conformity; he speaks over the heads of insiders

and bureaucrats

to

make contact with

the large audience

who

thronged the spaces of the public exhibitions, the so-called Salons, which took place in the old palace of the

By

two

years.

this

audience begins to change.

and passive crowd,

it

Where it had been becomes the embodiment

public opinion, a palpable force with a role

one

—

Louvre every

virtue of this appeal, the perceived character of

— even

of active

dominant

common ground between

artist

and audience can

be defined by two terms: patriotism and virtue. stand them, however,

power and use

it

is

To

under-

necessary to reconstruct their

in the period. Patriotism did

the chauvinistic overtones which

encumber

the

with the self-denying

The

philosophical and political debates of the 1760's and

had separated the inheritance of Classical antiquity from

'70's

normal

its

the

role of providing

symbols of authority and

previous century, Louis

XIV

rule. In

had customarily been

likened both to Alexander the Great and the sun god Apollo;

Classicism was a catalog of

pomp and

magnificence. But in

these years approaching the Revolution, Classical culture was

more

likely to call to

mind

a

toughened citizen-soldier or

stoic philosopher living in voluntary poverty with

ordinary

Frenchman with some education might

whom

a

an

identify.

The very words patriotism and virtue summed up this change. This growing gap between the Classical tradition and the

determining the success of painting or sculpture.

in

This new

specific

a

a floating

a

heroes of antiquity.

terms of official favor,

the

An artist who

demands would thereby demonstrate

could

eight years, the

were called on to

corrupt present.

overturn old norms and customs of art-making. Over the next

to these

them

the defects of an

was therefore required, and the

provide a counter-example to

up

all

not carry

word today;

needs of the ruling order created a new space could operate. exploited

it

The

artist

who

which painters first

and

with the greatest power was Jacques-Louis David

(1748-1825). In 1781, he was 33 years old,

young and

in

recognized this

relatively untried artist.

still

considered a

He had undergone

the

nor did virtue connote a priggish or self-satisfied private

lengthy and laborious training required of any ambitious

morality. Devotion to the nation, to la patrie, represented a

aspiring

painter,

which included years of long sessions

universalized allegiance to one's fellow citizens and to the idea

devoted to drawing from prints, then from plaster casts of

of the general welfare, usually at odds with obedience to the

ancient sculpture, and finally from the live model. This

dictates of the state

and accepted

social

custom.

The duty

of

the artist was to set an example of individual emancipation, to

break

free, at least subjectively,

from government patrons who

represented only a self-seeking minority.

14

Nor was

one's art to

sequence of study elevated the inheritance of Classical the direct evidence of living nature, which the

art over

young student

could only approach once he had thoroughly absorbed an idealizing abstraction. All of David's formal artistic education

i

Jacques-Louis David

took

place

within

Belisarius Begging

the

Royal

Alms

7 1781. 9'5£x io'2 8 (287.3x312.1)

Academy of

Painting and

Sculpture, which had been established under Louis

XIV

to

were given their

surrounded

final

at first

induction into the great tradition,

hand by the remains of ancient

organize and perpetuate a clear hierarchy of ambition and

exemplary classicizing

honor among

had extended his stay

artists.

Only those painters capable of producing

complex narrative compositions on Classical themes

('history-

in the

rewards that the state could

loyalty

The

culmination of a successful youthful career, which

David reached

at

the age of 26, was the

Rome

Prize.

This gave

the winner a scholarship period, lasting three years or longer, at

the French

Academy

in

Rome. There

the best

young

artists

now

and the

of the Italian Renaissance. David

for nearly six years,

and when he

returned in 1781 he seemed more than ready to take his place

paintings' as they were called) could aspire to the highest offer.

art

art

and

normal succession of history painters, one whose

would be

its

His

duty

first

to

to the established traditions

of the

first

Academy

embellish the aura of the monarchy.

painting for the Salon, however, began to probe the

potential of traditionally Classical subject matter to exploit the

new

dissenting constructions of patriotism.

CI

He produced

LT OK CIVIC

\

1R II

I

a

15

officials

who

believed that reform was necessary in order to

put the French monarchy back on secure social foundations.

The character of Belisarius thus two camps

to put his feet in

provided

)av id with a

1

power and

patriots outside the corridors of

means

both that of dissenting

at once:

that of a small

group of reforming bureaucrats who were themselves

isolated

and on the defensive within the government. David needed

happened

appeal to this latter group, as

it

administrator responsible for the

Academy and

David obligingly put

sentimental regret, his hero's misery and

2

Pierre Peyron The Death ofAkestis

its

contrast with an

mute appeal

exalted former state constituting a

A

success of the Belisarius with both

how

the Salon exhibitions, with their free and open access to

camps demonstrated

everyone, could put vivid images of the virtue of the ancients 1785.

10'8 x 10'6 (327 x .125)

a

on the theme of the blind Belisarius begging

alms. This character was the actual

According

Emperor

to legend, Belisarius

Emperor ordered

Roman

for

general largely

Justinian's extensive conquests.

became the victim of jealous

intrigue at court. Falsely believing

him

that he be blinded

David's painting, an old soldier

incendiary.

The

The

reduction of a complex story to a

few figures and eloquently simple gestures was

responsible for the

for a renewal

— and nothing more

CALL TO ORDER

into public circulation.

large canvas

the visual arts.

on emotions of pity and

his stress

of lapsed royal benevolence

to

to include the

guilty of treason, the

and dispossessed. In

who had

itself viewed as

reproach to the profusion of subsidiary figures and ornament

in older

academic

art,

which seemed more about the vanity of

display than the communication of moral truth. In terms of

David's career,

it

had the effect of securing the first of a regular

succession of state commissions for large-scale narrative paintings: he had arrived as a history painter.

With

that arrival

came

number of students attracted

a large

by his synthesis of daring

leader in

his

command

dependent condition. The painting amplifies

this

received their formal training in drawing at the Academy, they

veteran's shock of recognition through the contrast between

acquired their practical instruction in making paintings in the

the magnificent triumphal arch, redolent of glory and rule,

studio

victorious pitifully

with the

campaigns recognizes the

fall

from glory enacted

of charity from a passing

The theme

had published

exiled

general

denouncing the eroding the

in a beggar's abject

acceptance

woman.

a

is

The

writer Jean-Francois

novel with that

made

to

title in

deliver

1767, in

of the French

lengthy

state:

official

were

religious

and the domination of favoritism over merit.

company of his faithful general,

himself comes in secret, in the

heir Tiberius, to listen to his once

who

and ever-

can no longer see him.

This hopeful parable of the ruler coming

was

own

students, he

as a whole.

life

In contrast to the

a far more open, egalitarian atmosphere. At a time when most young artists abandoned formal education in their

early 'teens, he laid

students

down

know Latin and

the requirement that

Academy, would provide

all

of his

thus have independent access to

Classical learning. His studio, rather than the their

hidebound

primary locus of intellectual

discussion and moral identity. Together they began to act on

artists

modern French

of the Greeks,

novel had attracted the support of certain embattled state

their

CULT OF CIVIC VIRTUE

his

encouraged

creative liberty

•

With

authoritarian hierarchy observed by other masters, David

not ungrounded in political reality. Marmontel's embattled

16

his

concerns to include the philosophical and practical

the belief that to his senses

David had served

took devotion to the example of the ancients beyond strictly

organization of studio

monologues

artists

apprenticeship with the most rigorous Classicist of the older

artistic

Eventually, the sanity of his message induces the mighty again to seek his counsel: Justinian

master.

individual

Marmon-

intolerance, a parasitical nobility, the reign of luxury over civic virtue,

of an

which the

social evils that his creator believed

vitality

of the Classical tradition. While aspiring

generation, Joseph-Marie Vien.

of Belisarius was not just any item from the

catalog of ancient virtue. tel

fallen

political allusion with

impeccable

served in his

who

artists

(so

it

could behave as had the

was argued) were granted

and thus were inspired

communities

to express the ideals

in perfected physical form.

of

3

JACQUFS-LOL'IS DAVID The Oath of the Horatii Between

the

Hands of Their Father 1785.

In a short time, David's studio began to preempt the functions of the Academy.

When his most favored apprentice,

Jean-Germain Drouais (1763-88), came

Rome

to

compete

for the

Prize in 1784, both master and pupil treated the result

as a foregone conclusion.

When

Drouais was predictably

successful, they effectively declared themselves independent

of the state by financing the journey from their

The bond between them was so him

to

Rome and

students also

made

close-knit studio

During

tight that

own

resources.

David accompanied

touchstone of Classical drama

person the

in the

way

that

English-speaking

concerns the settle the city's

triplet

known by any educated French

Hamlet or Macbeth would be known world.

The

narrative

of the

champions of early Rome, summoned

war with neighboring Alba by combat with

champions, their own cousins, the likewise

Curiatii. In the tangled ties of kinship that

in

play to

that

triplet

gave Corneille his

other

tragic material, the wife of the

the trip, so that something of the

same

warrior of the six to survive, was sister to the Curiatii, while

for nearly a year.

environment could be transferred

his time in

to Italy.

Rome, he completed, with Drouais's

breakthrough to dominance over French painting for the life:

the seventeenth-century tragedy Horace by Pierre Corneille, a

Two

remained

assiduous assistance, the work that would give him his

of his long

10'9J x 13'1 1J (329.9 x 424.8)

The Oath of the Horatii Between

Their Father (1785). His subject matter

came

the

rest

Hands of

indirectly

from

his

own

sister,

Camilla, was betrothed to one of his victims.

She became one

in

her turn

mourning her beloved and As

youngest Horatius, the only

kills

when Horatius

finds

her

her on the spot.

fixed in a surviving preparatory drawing, the subject

which had been assigned David was the father of the clan successfully defending his son before the

1

Roman

M.l.

people for

TO ORD1.K

i:

4 ELISABETH-LOUISE

18

•

VlGEE-LEBRUN

ENTERPRISE OF

WOMEN

Marie-Antoinette With Her Children 1787. 9'ixX4£ (275x215)

the latter crime. This scene,

a free adaptation

is

where the elder Horatius pleads

before the king of

Rome. But

of Corneille's

for his son's

murderous

victor

by the three sons

is

forgotten; the

triumph or die

to

pardon

the final composition does not

The

depict the event described in his commission. the

final

new

subject

defense of is

a

pledge

mutual recognition between them,

combat (this oath appears nowhere

any

in the play or in

to offer

no release

space beyond the starkly symmetrical colonnade

contemporary standard, these were

into

deep

— by every

daring and dissonant

all

simplifications.

honor of Rome, an

for the

event imagined by the artist to have occurred before the fateful

the male and female groups with no mediating transitions or

It

was through

this rhetoric of style that

David's painting

spoke most forcefully to feelings of patriotic discontent with the established cultural order. In the eyes of

admirers,

its

its

of Corneille's ancient sources). In order to equal the visual

harsh notes and impatience with compositional subtleties

impact of any other painting

elevated the

he enlarged without

in the Salon,

permission the previously agreed dimensions of the canvas by fifty

percent.

Thus David was

also taking over responsibility for setting

mind and moved

private emotions

away from

center stage; the pride and inflexibility of the early

Romans, so

foreign to

modern mores and

had come

alive

so telling a reproach to them,

on canvas.

the scale and subjects for his paintings, despite their being

paid for by the state. This went hand in hand with calculated defiance at the level of style. His invention of the oath-taking

allowed him to

striking unity, an almost primitively elemental configuration

of bodies.

would demonstrate how much strength history

It

The

of David and his group depended on a large

initiatives

and secure

level

of state subsidy for history painting, the sheer

painting could gain from an austerity of means that seemed at

scale of which left

one with the stoicism of these early Romans. At the same time,

had been

David took advantage of the inherent problem faced by

communicating

history painters in

the heights of the

room

Like no one

else's painting,

the spaces of the

memory

in the

of

exhibition,

its

its

narrative across

and leave

male bodies

its

starkly

permanent

as a

dialectical sharpness of the

new

austere and declamatory voice, stood in pointed

its

contrast to the intricately embellished pictorial rhetoric of his

An example would

academic colleagues.

shown

Alcestis,

Peyron

(

is

a wife's self-sacrifice so that her

David's innovations

atmosphere, seem involved to

a

mode of composition

group of female

figures,

the

a

darkened, softening

in the civic arena.

retained a similar

all

husband might

thing of the past, too subtle and self-

make an impact

That David

in his self-contained

but exclusively there,

made

the

more emphatic.

income from private commissions

From

works.

talents of the

new generation were drawn

this left a

vacuum

the admission

in painting.

inseparable from

violations of

his audience's habitual expectations as to

compositional press

all

skills

into the production

in the other

genres of art. Almost instantly a

places for only four)

— Adelaide Labille-Guiard (1749

its

how such

implicitly rejected

a scene

the developed

of generations of academic painters.

To

of the figures into the same foreground plane, to join

1803)

and Elisabeth-Louise Vigee-Lebrun (1755-1842). In terms of both quality and patronage

on

to

at the highest levels, they

dominate portraiture during

Regime

— including

this final

would go

decade of the Old

which were

portraits of the royal family,

virtually equivalent in status to Classical history paintings.

The

latter artist,

had the easier path had been Saint 1

5,

28 years old

at the

to recognition.

a portraitist

and teacher

Luke (the survivor of the old

time of her reception,

Her

Louis Vigee,

father,

in the lesser

artists' guild).

Academy of By

the age of

her precocious talent was attracting well-born and wealthy

clients,

and

in

1779 she sealed what would be

married a successful

her

conventions of narrative

It

and decorative

women came to the fore. The year 1783 saw of two women to the Academy (there were

to overturn the accepted

should be organized.

for portraits

on

of highminded (and usually mediocre) public paintings, and

ducted herself as

is

artists relied

1775 onwards, however, the ambitious male

relationship with the

David's withdrawal from Paris and his gathering of the

painting

a decade. Previously

sponsorship of the highest genre had been more often a

independent forces of his studio helped strengthen his resolve

The impact of the

Such support

for dissenting gestures.

no longer than

matter of lip service rather than actual funds;

made Peyron's compactly interwo-

ven grouping of figures, emerging from

contrast

be The Death of

his principal rival Pierre

1744— 18 14), whose theme, taken from the drama of

Euripides, live.

same Salon by

in the

official

room

in place for

cohort of talented

viewers.

The abrupt transitions and painting,

were hung near the

contemporary engravings).

would beam

it

crammed

calligraphic configuration of

image

Salon audience from

to the

large canvases

(all

distant ceiling, as can be seen in

2

THE ENTERPRISE OF WOMEN

the complexities of the story into a

distill

a

continuing

young Queen Marie-Antoinette. She art dealer, J.-B.-P.

Lebrun, and con-

a significant figure in society,

own soirees and attracting regulars from

presiding over

the upper spheres

of Parisian culture and state administration.

The

reigning

tone was one of elegant simplicity on antique models.

Vigee-Lebrun and David maintained ship; the latter's education

colleague, but his patriotic

and

style

a

war) social relation-

made him

commitments

a

natural

occasionally caused

ENTERPRISE OF

\\o\ll.\

1

whole seems

\TKI\1()\N

fullv

drawn out along

its

continuous lower contour,

it

is

in fact

twisted unnaturally at the center along a harshly incised transition. Its languid extension

violated at the center of the

is

torso in a contraction that reads as an involuntary one of pain.

The

raking light further throws that area into shadow so that

body

the

is

divided by zones of light and dark as well as by

disposition in space.

The

light

is

the zone of control; despite

the wrenching pain, the warrior's reaction to

dark zone; he resists and contains overall

composure of

costs the warrior right

is

his figure

its

is

it

it is

limited to the

so thoroughly that the

undisturbed.

The

effort

it

registered in the contrast of the supporting-

hand with the

left.

What had been no more

than the

definition as artists. carrier of

They would

complex meaning

had attempted impatient to

at

test

the

-develop

beyond anything

far

their elders

also

himself directly against his master's example.

his obligatory student

beyond

potential as a

same stage of life. Hut Drouais was

With David's encouragement, he worked

project

its

work

his years

and

in

in secret,

neglecting

order to throw himself into

station,

one plainly intended

a

for

the public arena of Paris.

The subject which life

they chose together was a

moment in the late Roman

of Caius Marius, a general and consul of the

Republic. This episode comes

Marius's

career

into

in

Roman

fact

from the decline of

and tyranny.

corruption

Under a down his

model's fatiguing effort to maintain the pose, becomes an

sentence of death by the

inner determination to hold the body upright to the end, to

executioner by the sheer force of his presence; in the next

refuse collapse into unconsciousness.

moment the soldier drops his sword and flees. The malign side

This

is

the

mark of the

hero,

and

it is

meant

to enlarge the

of the

"hero"

is

not,

Senate, he faces

however,

immediately

apparent,

aura of heroism beyond exploits of the fictional warrior to take

resembling as he does the severe but benevolent patriarch of

achievement as

the Horatii. Its minimalist pairing of two soldierly male

in the suffering artist's

would became a pattern figure as a

8

24

for

Drouais,

it

young artists to use the single male

primary focus for their early ambitions and

Jean-Germain Drouais The Dying

•

well. After

VIOLENT PATRIMONY

self-

Athlete 1785. 49}x7i}(i25xi82)

characters extended David's Corneillian esthetic tical

—

the dialec-

sharpness, abrupt transitions, self-aggrandizing utter-

9

Jean-Germain Drouais Marius

9

at

Minturnae 1786.

9' x 12'2

(274.3 x 370.8)

ance, and single-minded stress on pride and inflexibility in the

mores of ancient

Rome

—

to a degree that eliminated even

David's small allowances for prevailing

But the Marius ( 1 786)

at the

same time

artists. It is

young

reveals something of

figured most of all in the cloak with which the

soldier shields his face,

which Drouais uses

to turn his painting diametrically against

Horatii.

The theme

its

as a device

model

in the

of the latter painting was one of solidarity

between the generations, the authority of the father passing his sons along with the swords: in rapt attention to the tense

same

intensity.

is

of the painting, and

all

end

to

went into

advantage. Despite

its

impression

it

conveys of

making, worked

its

in the

moral ambiguities, the

its

a bristling, barely

contained energy

could readily be understood as the sign of virtue condemned to perpetual struggle in an unjust society.

was put on display

in the

When

Drouais family home

the Marius in the early

spring of 1787, public response was wildly enthusiastic.

The

David's heroes were engaged

triumph without the necessity of a Salon. Thomas Jefferson

point of contact between them,

But when that same spectator puts himself

blindness and isolation.

at the heart

painting was capable of creating the excitement of a Salon

or herself in the place of either protagonist in the effect

unresolved

to

and the vision of the spectator was vicariously engaged with the

left

the visible signs of the strain involved in controling the refractory materials that

taste.

the tense emotional and psychological interplay between the

two

blindness,

The

Manus,

the

deceptively noble face of

Marius was one that Drouais refused

to contemplate; he put

joined the stream of spectators and

by the experience: "It fixed hour, or half an hour,

I

me

like a statue a

do not know which,

of time, even the consciousness of intensity of the painting,

unresolvable

which

banished

visage and himself.

otherwise eminently capable of

rational

is

from

reflection

for

my

quarter of an I

lost all ideas

existence.''

in large pari a result

of

contradictions

an abyss, a cancellation of vision, between that implacable

This simultaneous affirmation and denial, vision and

came away overwhelmed

meaning,

its

temporarily

one spectator

least

at

The of

it.

Drouais never had the opportunity to overcome this anxietj

\

101.1

\

1

i>

\

1

imio\i

of influence in a comparable painting, not could he

smallpox while

Rome. His death

in

still

fulfill

the

1788 he died of

hopes of his Parisian admirers. Early in

the age of 26 was

at

ment of Brutus' sons

unit

virtue;

David was inconsolable. Those unrealized

and

expectations

of his

circumstances

the

romanticized into legend that had

a

were

death

powerful effect on several

generations of young artists

who

would want success

and on terms guaranteed not by

early

followed him. Like him, they

training and experience but by special inner qualities set the artist apart

from the routine existence and dulled

perceptions of others.

modern

the

artist

which

It

would henceforth be the burden of

perpetually to be called on to demonstrate

— glossed over

By

widely ascribed to his zealous overwork in pursuit of ideal artistic

is

the unseen event which defines

dismemberment of

the living figures, and the

in the Horatii

—

and composition, the painting can be decidedly ambivalent about the costs of the hero's

women

as a

The

grieving

light), the

unheard

political resolve.

group (who alone catch the

protest of Brutus' wife (whose outstretched entire composition), are treated with as

sympathy. The painting allows room

Greek that

hand

much

for

a truly tragic recognition that the social

the condition of humanity violates the

There was an unintended coincidence between David's grief

for the Salon of 1789,

and

engagement with the subject even more

this surely

made

intense. In his Lictors

new

political order. It

of their mother,

who was

the monarchy.

Under the law

him

to deliver

it

and

order for

was through the

who must contemplate

it

is

their

end

And David

in the

former

is

exploits an even

The immobile

central actor

shadowy

of the canvas, most conspicuously the grief-

stricken female nurse at the far right.

One

great gap occupies

the opposition between male and female,

between clenched angularity and supple, curvilinear form, verges on disassociation. Meaningful connections are

not so

much

rather in the

in the actions

mind of the

be the closest the art of painting has its

own,

pictorial

it

terms

same

questions one of the fundamental assump-

drama going back

to Aristotle:

that great

The nurse, isolated own private world of

passions are the property of the well-born. at the far

sorrow,

edge of the composition

is

in

her

the chief formal and thematic counterweight to

Brutus himself.

histrionic

corner; other key elements of the action are likewise scattered

it,

may

rendering tragedy in

The

tension visible in her jawline, neck, and

making the response of the noble matron seem somehow

vacates the center of the composition and sits in a

the center; across

its

was mandatory, and the law

starker syntax of disassociation in order to call the categories

to the sides

have

oppose the smooth, uninflected rendering of Brutus' wife,

the sacrifice of his male offspring for

of male heroism into question.

will

had himself brought

to witness the execution.

ignominious.

as the existence of society

shoulder, the lean and austere grandeur invested in her body,

good of the country. But where

the

heroic, here

body can

rather than merely illustrating those of the stage. At the

made

and expressions depicted, but

viewer, which

and silences between separate and

is

activated by the gaps

distinct elements.

The

and inadequate by comparison.

The power of that

Like the Horatii, the painting concerns the rigor of a father

3

It

in the plot to restore

that Brutus

into being, a sentence of death

obliged

own

related to the expelled

two sons had been enlisted

king, that the

to

tions of tragic

corpses of his two male heirs, executed at his

ties

come

time, however,

Caesar's assassin), as he might have received the beheaded

treason against the

David's Brutus ever

the

is

and

to say,

transgression of

continuum of nature, so nature

Republic, Junius Brutus (namesake of

Brutus the Bodies of His Sons, the hero

Roman

his

itself;

is

revenge.

over the loss of a virtual son and the theme of the painting he

blood

same time

human community.

EQUALS

to

his action,

praised," that Brutus' character was at one and the

come into being only by means of a temporary

founder of the

not greater

"cannot be sufficiently condemned or sufficiently

it

encompasses

Returning

if

both halves of the

TRAGEDY AND THE REPUBLIC OF

was preparing

stabilizes the

famous judgment on

historian Plutarch's

simultaneously above and below the

10

consequence.

is its

virtue of its disruptions of normative order in technique

"that of a god and that of a savage beast," which

that exalted state.

of

all

the family

light of evidence that

figure it

becomes even more

recruit to the studio, Francois as crucial a detail as the

striking in the

was not painted by David but by

a

new

Gerard (1770 1837). Likewise,

head of Brutus may have been painted

by Girodet. In any event, the two young painters had been

drawn

into an intimate collaboration parallel to that

David and Drouais on the

Horatii. It

is

between

today an old-fashioned

expression to refer to the students or followers of an artist as constituting a "school." But

meaning of the word

it is

important to restore the basic

in this instance:

no

Trudaine, David's studio had become

less

than the circle of

a place of collective

learning and experiment within the Classical tradition, but

with the added pressure and risk of a high-stakes project to

be accomplished and tested in public.

And

the practical

character of their interaction generated a different kind

of

art,

an interrogation of the idea of civic virtue which

is

a

formal dismemberment of both composition and surface

world away from the comfortable philosophical pieties of

becomes not only means but metaphor,

the Socrates.

26

•

for the

dismember-

TRAGEDY AND THE REPUBLIC OF EQUALS

io

JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID

These were lessons

—

attending

Lictors Returning to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons 1789.

to

which Girodet

in

particular

was

the concentration of bodily eloquence within

10'7J x L3'10| (322.9 x 422)

admirers

in the press

between

the

found

shadowed

much

to praise in the contrast

background

with

its

suggestive

contours of a compact geometric simplicity, the evocation of

mystery and the vividness of the foreground group of figures

inexpressible sorrow and loss through absence and a drastic-

with

reduction

of pictorial incident. Through his aristocratic

family he gained a commission, unusual for such a artist, to

paint a large-scale

work (11}

feet in height)

young on the

startling

its

of color and unsettling

juxtapositions

naturalism in the treatment of Christ's body. Girodet's painting was on a directly analogous subject and

was almost as

large.

His conception both pays homage to

and challenges him

subject of the Virgin with the dead Christ. In so doing, he was

Regnault, his master's

responding to the other major event of the 1789 exhibition,

Davidian terms of austere rhetorical grandeur. The

which had seen something of a revival (temporary of course)

subject from the public scene of deposition and lamentation to

large-scale religious painting.

in

Twenty-one canvases, more

the private

mourning

of the

than half of those in the "historical" category, had been

elements of the story to

commissioned by the

Marius,

Christian subjects.

A

state or

by various church bodies on

Lamentation of Christ by Jean-Haptiste

it

plays

saturated

its

rival,

a laconic

a

large

minimum. Like Drouais's figures, field

marked by

narrow beam of illumination. For both

Regnault, a state commission intended for the main altar of

penetrated

fledgling history painters, this device allowed

attention before the late arrival of the Brutus. Enthusiastic

the complications that

a

vividly

of indistinct gloom

the chapel at Fontainebleau, received the largest share of

by

the

Virgin allows him to reduce the

two highlighted

hues, against

in

shift in

come with

a

large

them

to avoid

complement of

TRAGEDY VND THE REPUBLIC OF EQJ MS

1:

had been. In

a Classical

manner, Girodet boldly carves

his

signature in a Active inscription at the foot of the sarcophagus,

proudly appending his age of 22.

FIGURES OF REVOLUTIONARY VIRTUE The

curtailment of religious painting was but one effect of the

changes

in the

French

Bastille in 1789.

art

world

set off"

by the taking of the

David and the painters

in his circle

sympathetically engaged with the Revolution from the

but decisive changes

minded

in their art

artists in Paris

put their

were slow initial

would take place the

momentum

The

first

in Italy rather

si

art,

coming. Reform-

energies into a drive for

Academy, including open

egalitarian reorganization of the

access to the Salons.

in

were

important

artistic

innovation

than France, generated out of

established in David's studio in 1789.

Girodet, having

won

his

Rome

Prize, left Paris in 1790

determined to extend the independent identity he had staked out in his Pieta. In order to live up to the ideal of precocious genius, he had to contend not only with David's powerful influence on him, but with Drouais's example as well. intransigent attitude he displayed in

contempt

12

JEAN-BAPTISTE REGNAULT Lamentation of Christ

II

1789.

figures

13'Il*x91j- (425x233)

and

at the

same time gain the

instant sense of gravity

and profundity conveyed by darkness and

Even

isolation.

more than Regnault, he has forsworn obvious Christian symbols; there are virtually none in the painting.

The

shroud, sarcophagus,

accessories are Classical or natural:

cavern, dawn. Girodet has fused the bodies of Virgin and

Christ into one continuous outline, a union of

And

expressed in basic bodily terms.

sorrow

in

Regnault's Virgin

inclination

of the

conforming

to

head,

the

is

life

and death

the open expression of

transformed into

eyes

in

an oppressive horizontal

veiled

a

shadow, the neck

line, in a direct

echo of

the veiled form of Brutus' grieving servant.

But 10

for all

of the painting's indebtedness to rhetorical ideas

present in the Brutus, the Pieta represented a

moody gloom and

quiet of Girodet's

marked departure from what anyone

would have expected of the Davidian group. precocious and risky painting, particularly in

its

was

It

a

effective

manipulation of a vast area of virtually featureless painted surface,

28

and was

as impressive in its

way

as Drouais's

Marius

TRAGEDY AND THE REPUBLIC OF EQUALS

for the

Academy and

Anne-Louis Girodet

its

Pieta 1789.

Rome,

The

his expressions of

teaching, followed the path

1

r

x 92* (335 x'235)

13

ANNE-LOUIS GlRODET The

laid

down by

Sleep of Endymion 1791.

And

his late colleague.

19£ x 24+. (49 x 62)

Drouais, he had to

like

manifest that resistance while meeting the requirement that

he paint the male nude.

How then

example of independence and

was he

to imitate Drouais's

transformation of the

his

academic nude into an emblem of that independence without

dependent imitation of

falling into a

He found

13

his subject in a

his predecessor?

realm of mythology

far

immediately after his work on the picture, that

work owing absolutely nothing would spare no

removed

by an

artist.

And

is

expiessed

he evolved

to a systematic reversal of

its

salient traits of Drouais's prototype in the

Roman

athlete

Endymion, the Selene

His painting, completed

fell

beautiful boy with

whom

into desperate infatuation. In

in

1791, depicts

the

moon goddess

some accounts she

put him into perpetual sleep so that he would always be

had been tense, maximally

suffering, yet ready with his is

to

be

a

independence.

so

modern

vividly

and

form through what

almost every one of the

from the vigilantly martial world of David's and Drouais's heroes.

was

instance in which that very

form of youthful rebellion

amounts

this

David's example and that he

effort necessary to achieve this

It is difficult to cite a prior

insistently

to

Dying Athlete. The

alert,

disfigured

and

weapons. Endymion, by contrast,

drained of tension, never conscious, physically flawless and

in a

perpetual state of

The

bliss,

with weapons discarded in the

available to her nocturnal visits. Girodet has rendered her as

foreground.

immaterial moonlight, whose passage through the overhang-

athlete with an unnatural clarity; the soft moonlight envelops

ing branches

combined

He

is

traits

stated

facilitated

by

a

smiling figure with

the

of Eros and Zephyr.

repeatedly,

in

letters

the

hard

clay light

body of Endymion with

a

delineated the body of the

diffuse but entirely natural

obscurity.

written

during

and

More

than Girodet realized, his painting reached beyond

I

1

C.

I

RES OF

Rl.\

()l. I

TK>\ \RY

\

1R II

1

29

14

JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID The Oath of the

the

Tennis Court 1791. 26 x 41 £ (66 x 105)

Brutus back to the philosophical

Socrates.

apparent androgyny

Its

narrowing of a

male realm,

world of David's

more

precisely

the

of human beauty into an exclusively

total ideal

a

is

move which pays homage

not only to the

trasts with

David's simultaneous immersion of his art into the

flow of living history back in Paris. In 1791, in the

first

Salon

of the Revolution, his master showed a highly finished

drawing which predicted

a

new kind of history

painting. This

moment

homoerotic bias of ancient Greek culture but also to the bonds

was the Oath of

of exclusively masculine fellowship within the studio

during the Estates General of 1789 when the delegates of the

Girodet had

itself.

out to prove that the internal complexity of

set

the Tennis Court, celebrating the

Third Estate pledged themselves

to

remain

in

potential appropriate to the hero could be articulated even

assembly until they had achieved

without Drouais's intercutting between the poles of grandeur

"die rather than disperse until France was free."

and beauty, that latter category.

it

could be accommodated entirely within the

The

result

yet never decays; that

sensual pleasure yet like

is

is

is

a

body

that

is

removed from

never exhausted by them; that

is

trained

an athlete of antiquity for war yet remains forever

untouched by violence, knowing death only ecstatic

in the

midst of

animation of the nerves, muscles, blood, and skin.

As he was completing the Endymion, Girodet was becoming an

He would between artist's

also

active participant in the Revolutionary process.

go on to lead Republican

with the Vatican. So

30

life

subject to perpetual repetitions of

political

it is

difficult to

artists in violent clashes

draw obvious connections

and esthetic commitments. The younger

preoccupation with ideal mythology markedly con-

FIGURES OF REVOLUTIONARY VIRTUE

permanent

a constitution: they

To

would

capture

moment David conceived a vastly multiplied oath of the Horatii, which now bound the assembled representatives of the

the nation to a

The

new foundation of civic

order.

source of the commission was not the state, but an

unofficial political

body

calling itself the "Society of the

Friends of the Constitution," more the old monastery in which

it

commonly known,

held

its

after

meetings, as the

Jacobins. Its commission to the artist was organized as an

expression of the national

with

its

life-sized

will:

three thousand subscribers,

image

in return.

Assembly

itself,

the gargantuan final picture,

foreground figures, was to be paid for by

The

who would

receive a print of the

canvas was to hang

in the

National

to hold before the nation's legislators both the

14

foundation of their authority and an ideal model of the general

the great Revolutionary festivals, with their myriad floats,

will in operation.

Both

and image hark back

act

patriotic fervor

and

self-sacrifice

But

vividly in his- earlier work.

moment

the primal less a

to the antique

models of

which David had figured so bonding of art and

this literal

of Revolutionary public

way forward than

life

proved to be

cul-de-sac for history painting.

a

when

lesson of David's experience

is

the distance of metaphor,

the actual

that

The

the artist forsakes

public sphere will

perpetually escape representation. This was the fate of the

Tennis Court

To

project.

finish

France

Jacobins

to join the external

into antagonist monarchist

split

factions (the

enemies of the Revolution, the

more

and republican

group retaining the name); the

radical

dream of accord emblematized

in the

Oath of the Tennis Court

temporary architecture, and sculptural props.

costumes,

David, as he was drawn into the radical

political leadership,

took on the role of supervising this entire apparatus as the organization of political pageants and ceremonies turned into a

year-round industry. But he would eventually return to

painting at the behest of his political

came

and

allies,

in

doing so

to affirm the value of his pupil Girodet's concentration

on the eloquent male body.

would have required an

it

impossibly stable political consensus. After the King tried to flee

and enormous enterprise of symbol-making: the creation of

Early in 1793, following the King's execution, a royalist soldier

had murdered

who had

a deputy, Lepelletier

memorial

to paint a

to the political

conventional

rather

de Saint-Fargeau,

voted for the death sentence. David was called upon

martyr and produced

image of the Classical hero on

deathbed reminiscent of his own

fallen

a

his

Hector from 1783 (and

had vanished. Amid the growing factional struggles, perpetual

gave over most of the actual painting to Gerard). That

economic

summer another, more incendiary assassination took place. The extreme populist writer and deputy Jean-Paul Marat was attacked in his bath by a counter-Revolutionary zealot named

crisis,

and panic induced by military attacks on

France, today's hero was likely to become tomorrow's

This process of

historical

change would not stand

traitor.

to

still

accommodate the atemporal and time-consuming medium of

By 1792 David had

painting.

all

but abandoned his canvas

with only a few of the central figures sketched in the nude. His pupil Gerard

won

a state

competition with

memorialize the effective fall,

moment

10 August 1792, but likewise never

working

it

a similar project to

of the monarchy's

moved

down-

to the stage

of

up on canvas.

Charlotte Corday. Marat was the hero of the organized sansculottes,

movement of

the

neighborhoods of the

FIGURES OF REVOLUTIONARY DEATH

demands of

the popular

virtually

making, and viewing

every

Both the

art.

aspect

David put

of conceiving,

practical

and esthetic

summoned

to

produce

a

The

was worried about

movement and

propensity to

its

The Terror was about

view terror had to be

strictly controlled

to begin,

is

but

in

from above.

that ambivalence into paint. In his

Last Breath, the martyr

affecting

poor

in the

major symbolic tribute was

leadership, of which the artist was a part,

their

upheaval

A

painting to stand in for the lost martyr. But the Revolutionary

the

vicissitudes of these projects were part of a general

and workers

artisans

city.

required, and David again was

spontaneous violence.

The

Marat

at

His

the saintly "Friend of the People."

papers on the edge of his rude writing stand show that he

had been dispatching some money to surprised by his killer (whose

own

a soldier's

false letter

widow when

requesting an

ambitions of painters and sculptors had been formed for

audience he

generations within stable governing institutions that took

metaphorical and actual mark of heroic stature, in that he

responsibility for training, advancement, housing,

the most favored artists

— assuring

a livelihood.

and

That

—

for

tradition

and those institutions were suddenly overturned, and by 1792 a

new Republican government was instructing young artists to

The

despise everything for which the old order had stood.

church, long puritanical

increasingly

source of patronage, was under siege.

a

austerity

in

enforced

as

private a

sign

life

A a

still

carried

typically

holds). His nudity could be read as both a

on

his

duties

through the pain of an

excruciating skin disease, which he could soothe only by

immersion

in a

medicinal bath. While the subject's passion for

equality and fraternity

image

meant

is

is

plain, he

past

is

to console its viewer far

all

action and the

more than

incite

Marat's pose, the instruments of violence, the inscriptions, the plain

wood of the upright

box, the insistently perpendicu-

succession of revolutionary regimes asked artists to invent

lar

forms for philosophical and ideological messages wholly new

without leaving the factual realm of secular historj

to public art. Unfortunately, those

money

to pay for

back on their

regimes lacked the

what they required, and

own

artists

will

and

were forced

resources in the midst of a shattered

economy.

Some artists and craftworkers found employment

him

or her to a rage for vengeance.

was encouraged and

of civic virtue, while

compositional order,

guidance

in this delicate task,

experiment

in religious

conjure up Christ's sacrifice

all

.

For

he called on the absent Girodet's

painting from

1

790, in w hich his pupil

had already diminished overt Christian trappings

in

favor of

atmosphere and the body's own eloquence. Amid numerous in a

novel

15

borrowings, the most obvious sign of David's reliance on

IK,

I

RES OF

Rl

\

oil Tl()\

\m

1)1. \

III

16

— Girodet's Pieta

is

the tracing of the contour along the head and

2

1

shoulders of the Virgin into the line of the sarcophagus; in a startling transposition, this has line

of Marat's head and body as

become almost it

precisely the

emerges above the bath

the key division of the composition between a lower zone

of incident and

an

full

upper zone of shadowy, meditative

stillness.

For the third of

his

Revolutionary martyr portraits, the

Death of Barn (1793), David returned imagine

a

boy-victim

of the

to the Classical

canon

counter-Revolution

as

to

an

unblemished, eerily beautiful ephebe, suffering but without

wounds, dreaming more than dying, near

visible

within the fury of combat.

we are invited do with

to identify,

The regard of the artist,

but not

to

with which

appears to have scandalously

little

to

civic virtue or battlefield heroism, despite the charge

to the painter.

The sensuality of the body seems to go beyond a

youthful beauty appropriate to

its

age and innocence, and

commentators have assumed with near unanimity

that the

painting suffers from an overbalancing from public to private

preoccupations.

But

15

ANATOLF. DEVOSGF.

after

JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID The

Death of Lepelletier de Saint-Fargeau 1793. 16

JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID Marat

18^ x 15J (46.7 x 40)

at His Last Breath

1793. 63| x4

(.7

61

treatment had been pioneered. French psychiatry in this

modern therapeutic approach

period had developed the

which mental one

seen as continuous with normal

is

whom

aristocracy in

life;

as a kind of

argument even presented the insane

line of

modern

illness

in

the Revolution's democratic

acquainted there

slumped boys

in 1817,

in the left

and Delacroix posed

for

foreground of the Raft.

one of the

When

older artist received a state commission for a Sacred Jesus, he surreptitiously passed

it

on

the

lean of

1

to his grateful protege.

Hut the ambition of the younger very quickly surpassed such

He

emancipation of individual thought and feeling had simply

routine

reached an insupportable extreme.

painting for the Salon of 1822 in place of competing for the

Gericault's surviving portraits display a sympathetic objectivity

which

According

attitude.

congruent with

is at least

to

late

this

new

nineteenth-century testimony,

each represents a particular psychological malady,

mania'

contemporary parlance. Each sufferer

in

scientific

'a

is

mono-

depicted

Grand

works.

pressed himself to complete a major

Rome. The

Prix dc

was

result

exercise on a literary theme, the

a strikingly original

Bark of Dante and

I

irgil,

depicting the passage of the two poets across the marshes

surrounding the His

first

fifth circle

of

hell.

Salon entry demonstrated that he would absorb his

according to the portrait conventions of the time, particularly

Italian

culture outside the normal institutional channels.

dress and technique which David had

Where

Gericault had only postponed his pilgrimage to Italy,

the plain dignity in

developed

(and self-portraits) of the Revolu-

in his portraits

tionary period. Gericault conveys the underlying texture of

muscle,

fat,

and bone

each face with startling economy and

in

with a mobile technique which he effect

is

able to vary to surprising

an occasion for the simultaneous

is

discovery of an individuated person and of the uncertain traces

would

development of any ambitious painter (he of North Africa,

later travel to the exotic territory

following French colonial expansion, as a kind of substitute).

The

from subject to subject.

For the viewer, each

Delacroix would forgo the passage that once had been deemed essential in the

considerable intellectual and technical

highest genre had, nevertheless, to be

recourse to the Divine

met

Comedy marks one

demands of

in other

the

ways. His

solution: cultivation

of impersonal, objective conditions; each prompts

of the most advanced literary taste, which in this period was

which knowledge of other selves

elevating alternative poetic traditions over the legacy of

reflection

on the degree

to

always entails the unstable convergence of the two. In their

French Classicism: Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Byron over

way they answer the same demands

Racine and Voltaire. Delacroix would

for

elevation

and

complication in the single figure which Gericault had pursued

Reversing the Raft's passage through the

in his public art.

of these

illustrate all

foreign writers during the 1820's.

Searching for the means to make

a

painting of such literary

more

colossal to arrive at the intimate, each portrait begins within a

sources, however, he turned to a

confined and homely approach to one isolated figure but

mode: Gericault's Raft. Indeed almost all of his major work of

deploys

its

plain-spoken manufacture and modestly sus-

prompt

pended judgment

to

commensurate

scale

in

in the

viewer mental events

with those elicited by the most

paintings pursue one latent implication of the Raft's

construction of heroism, that

is,

the heroic subject

may

necessarily be an effective actor in the world; heroism

subjects

and vulnerable individuals. One's approach is

through

not

may

which overwhelm

well be manifested in resistance to forces isolated

decade can be read as

to such

simultaneous diagnosis of the threaten-

a

slough, Delacroix chose to

turbulent sea.

He exploits

punishments of hell

the

nude

young Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863),

would move toward the

latter

of these two poles.

same tense combination of

filiation

existed within the circle of David. father in infancy

and

his

mother

in

and

The

rivalry that

latter

had

adolescence.

He

had

lost his

shared

Gericault's background in the upper bourgeoisie (his legal father Charles early

his

68

•

had been an important diplomat) and also took

training

in

Guerin's studio.

The two became

PUNISHMENTS OF THE DAMNED

calm and misty

vessel threatened

by

a

the Inferno to recall the predictable

Gericault himself had quoted Dante's

man cradling

mind

The damned

souls clinging to the bark

the bodies on the fringe of the

a mindless,

devouring hunger.

of bodies, Delacroix has constructed

a

On

raft,

and

that platform

compositional pyramid

capped by the poet's beckoning gesture toward

a distant

horizon.

Gericault and Delacroix had between them something of the

(as

adolescent).

one exhibits

innovative project in historical painting of the

show the

cannibalistic Ugolino in the vignette of the older

mind induced by confrontation with

a hostile external world.

him

equation of the Medusa survivors' suffering and sins with the

call directly to

1820's, that of the

meditation on one or another

virtually the entire previous tradition of historical painting. In

ing conditions and identification with the extreme states of

The most

a

and immediate

aspect of that work, which concentrated and filtered for

spite of Dante's description of passing over a

sweeping narrative.

The

this

local

If the painting lacks the Raft's

movement

into depth, this

can perhaps be explained by the differences

in

stages of

competence between the two

its

summary

technical

artists.

In

application of paint, compression of space, and emphasis of surface pattern, Delacroix's Dante and Virgil exhibits the

same

Where

traits as

confident

some of

Gericault's Charging Light Cavalryman.

command

of drawing

is

lacking, there

is

a

66

62

THEODORE GERICAUET

63

Jean-Alglsi

The Raft of the Medusa 1819. 16'lx23'6 (490.2x716.3)

e-I)o\iim(ji

1.

INGRES Tht

tpotheosis »/

Homer

1S27.

L2'8

-

urn

(386

«

^1 5 6)

PI

\1s11\11.\ is

of THE

i)

\\1\1

i)

(,

si

"Lo que puede un

sastre!"

("What

a

6 (21.7 x 15.2)

1

\l

Hil.

OF THE

1*1

l.lll.O



later manifestations

primitivism and mysticism in nineteenth-century

Laocoon

ca. 1820.

iojx8j- (25.2 x 21.2)

PROPHECY AND PREHISTORY

Agreement

to

One by Another, I for One do

which

Certainly a happy state of

not Agree."

IK)

5

•

•

NATURE HISTORICIZED: CONSTABLE, TURNER, AND ROMANTIC LANDSCAPE PAINTING BRIAN LUKACHER

LANDSCAPE INSTINCTS AND THE PICTURESQUE

took surprisingly sensitivity

little

KNOW, Ti'HERE DOES NOTEXIST,ASFARASI example good world

of a

a single

the production of

it

a task

is

may propose

century

Ruskin, from the third

IN

THE

historical picture;

.

.

.

which the closing nineteenth This comment by John

to itself."

volume of his

treatise

Modern

Painters

instinct

was

had reached

apogee in the

its

The predominance

nineteenth century.

of this landscape

him symptomatic of the current degeneration

to

"Of Modern

of humanity of what he described in his chapters ,

Landscape" and "The Moral of Landscape " crisis

human

solace in his assertion that

landscape

to

as "the present

of civilization." Responsible for the making of this

were Ruskin's

betes noires

of modern

crisis

society: faithlessness

in the spirit

of a

bred by the scientific objectification of nature; untoward faith

lament. But the failure of history painting, and the

dim

in

(1856),

might

easily be

mistaken as being

the redemptive promise of technology and utilitarian

remaining decades of

reform; and moral insensibility brought on by excessive,

the century, was not an issue of overriding concern for Ruskin.

materia Lj ejf-interest in an industrializing world. With space

possibility of its successful revival in the

As the most

prolific

and profound commentator on

society during the Victorian epoch,

ing and

facilitating

art

and

Ruskin was both identify-

the eclipse of historical

painting by

landscape painting, in effect signaling one of the more

important practise. v

transformations

His

that

its

84.1 tn I860,

was devoted

justifiably believed

cultural

character of the

whether

1

Painters,

artistic

whose

to the

five

study of

author called "the lanrkrapp instinct " an instinct

Ruskin

modern

in

monumental Modern

olumes spanned

what

nineteenth-century

life

had come to prevail over

and that had determined much of the

Romantic imagination

earlier in the century,

in literature or painting.

Although the raison d'etre

for

Modern

Painters was to put

artist, J.

M. W. Turner,

the

scope of Ruskin's study eventually encompassed not only an entire history of

European landscape

into the scientific

and

spiritual

art

but also an inquiry-

conditions of the

human

pe rception of nature, and of the primary interrelationship

between natural environment and

railroad

social

development. Ruskin

as

and the telegraph, the refuge humanity needed world was

in the natural

itself

nineteenth-century search

for,

'the

scape esthetics

his

is

of,

the

elements of

progress and decline being strangely mingled in the

mind." Although

the

to find

no longer guaranteed. In the and seeming conquest

landscape, Ruskin detected, in his words,

modern

own merging of social criticism and land-

frequently qualified as being an anxiously

Victorian misreading of Romanticism, Ruskin recognized that the

Romantic experience of nature

as a presentiment for spiritual also

forth a passionate defense of the lifework of England's leading

and most controversial landscape

and time vanquished by such modern inventions

had an inescapably

social

(the landscape encounter

and psychological

reflection)

dimension, one

which the

Romantic landscape could be revealed contested In

site

English

in

as an ideologically

of material progress and historical struggle. art

criticism,

the

national

preference

for

landscape painting over history painting had been remarked

upon

well

Writing

in

before the time of Ruskin's Modern Painters. 1807,

an anonymous

critic

Panorama applauded the emergent, native art,

but

in

doing

so,

also

felt

for

The Literary

taste for

compelled

to

landscape

make some

US

distinctions based on the academic hierarchy of the genres:

designers.

"The

side

own

landscape scenery of our island

and these afford scope

features,

is

distinguished by

its

for the sublimest efforts

of art. History Painting has not been the forte of this country.

Our

a branch of art not suddenly brought to perfection.

It is

artists

seldom allow due time

to their works; they

them by perscverence and study. What tions suggest they execute instantly

no friend argues

to histor i cal excellence ^,'

genre

the

that

;

their

seldom ripen

m ental concep-

but instant execution

By

of landscape

was more-

painting

were

often cited by art critics of the day as the chief inhibitions to

painting

here

of history

that

is

characteristic of artistic traits in England, while

also allowing the country's painters to

service

Landscape

painting).

accommodated the impulsive mental freedom

deemed

perform

a

public

by displaying the indigenous esthetic wealth of the

this

and on the other,

i

nsisted that th cjiicturesque vista had to bejeept free of scene s

of rural labo r and industrial pro duction

— those very sources

of economic growth and national strength on which England

The

depended.

resistance of picturesque sightseeing and

landscape design to the agrarian demands and social relations of the countryside was

itself

as witnessed in the novels

of

the subject of satirical

comment,

Thomas Rowlandson. As

late as 1834, the art critic

Anna

Jameson recounted her somewhat uncomfortable experience of trying to

the esthetic interests of "an independent

elicit

English yeoman"; after describing the picturesque beauty of

unsigned

critic

spoke of the English recovery

scenery met with this riposte from the farmer, " 'PicturesqueV

he repeated with some contempt; picturesque, but / say, give

at

time revolved around the notion of the picturesque J Made

during

the

late

eighteenth

century

by

the

you have something

for

'I

don't

know what you

me a soil, that when you

turn

call

up,

it

your pains.' " Judging from

this

anecdote, the cult of the picturesque, of such popular appeal

published travelogs of the Reverend William Gilpin, the

precisely

picture squ£_£Sthetic encouraged discerning tourists to eval-

cultural pretensions of landscape appreciation, could not

uate and classify the scen i c qualities of topographic locales

overcome the

^rm-rjjngtn

pictorial

mnHps nf lsnrkrspp pajnting_Fngli«h

scenery could be exoticized (and acculturated) in the eye and

mind of the picturesque

by virtue of

tourist

its

resemblance to the seventeenth-century landscape

passing art

of

Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa, the picturesque imagina-

and

tion often seeking to reconcile the contrasting styles

moods of these

Italianate

models (the pastoral serenity of the

former with the rugged violence of the

latter).

The tourist well

The

because

it

appeared to democratize the

social divisions of class, profession,

picturesque,

whether touching on

elitist

and gender.

the

formalist

connoisseurship of the landscape or on the social engineering of

life

within the landscape, was often restrictive in

its task.

Treatises on the picturesque invariably employed illustrative plates to demonstrate, through contrast

and comparison,

modifying esthetic principles. In Gilpin's Essays:

On Picturesque Beauty, On

summa

Picturesque Travel,

its

Three

and On

Sketching (1792), two landscape etchings are set opposite one

The

shows

unmodulated compo-

versed in the playful formalism and classifying criteria of the

another.

picturesque could take visual possession of a prospect and

sition,

thereby entertain an illusory dominion over nature: the land

nature that Burke had designated earlier in the century as "the

transformed into

a

landscape through the refining and

encompassing act of perception.

all-

As Gilpin advised

his

readers, "the_pro yince of the

nature; not to in a

p ictur esque eye is to survey anatomize matter. It throws its glances around

broad-cast

stile. It

comprehends an extensive

tract at

each

grand sweep."

first

a symmetrical,

embodying the maternal, orderly protectiveness of

The second shows

beautiful."

Gilpin's

picturesque

re-

arrangement of these primary landscape features: the terrain

and

foliage

now

seen with irregular outlines and variegated

surfaces, a serpentine path directing the eye through the

interlocking,

shadowy

From its initial project of cultivating the visual semantics of

receding passages of the scenery, and two

figures plotted in the foreground

— perhaps — who

in "pursuit of the object" (to quote Gilpin)

travelers

are in turn

nature-seeking tourists (both from the landed gentry and the

echoed compositionally by the paired outcropping of ruins on

burgeoning middle

the distant promontory above them.

classes), the

became the subject of theorists,

116

<

of Jane Austen and the caricatures

popular terminology for the esthetic claims of landscape

fashionable

cultural

a

picturesque

landscape park of ever varying visual pleasure, particularly so

of nature in terms of "the sublimest efforts of art," the most

this

a

the surrounding landscape, her admiring remarks about the

national scenery.

Although

reform,

imperative for promoting rural England as

during wartime. Gilpin and other landscape estheticians

c ommercial vagaries of artistic taste (both of these factors

cultivation

agrarian

scientific

land and

inference, this writer

habits which were themselves due in part to th£

British

common

through accelerated enclosure of

yield

since travel to the Continent had to be drastically curtailed

absence of an established academic tradition and to th e

the

the locus of conflicting interests: on the one hand,

there was an economic imperative for increasing agricultural

is

conducive to the capricious, instantaneous habits of_E ngljsJi artists.,

With the Napoleonic Wars, the English country-

became

tireless

associationist

picturesque esthetic soon

polemical debate

philosophers,

and

among

art

landscape

LANDSCAPE INSTINCTS AND THE PICTURESQUE

Here one finds the kind of

permutational interplay between the natural and the that

was so central

to

artificial

arguments about the picturesque. As the

111-12

William Gilpin, plate from Three On Picturesque Beauty, On Picturesque Travel, and On Sketching 1792. 6J x 9

1 1 1

Essays:

(15.5x22.5)

William Gilpin, plate from Three On Picturesque Beauty, On Picturesque Travel, and On Sketching 1792. 6Jx9 112

Essays:

(15.5x22.5)

literary historian

the picturesque art wrestling

Martin Price has observed, "The drama of

is

readily cast into the

commerce," VRepton's^ proposals

form of the energies of

landed estates rarely strayed

far

the

for

from

a

improvement of

domesticated pictur-

esque idiom. In preparing his garden designs for prospective

with the materials of nature, or the alternative

form of the genius of nature and time overcoming the upstart

clients,

R epton would also utilize "before" and

achievements of a

of th e

sam e landscape,

Within

this

fragile,

but assertive art."

picturesque contest between nature a nd

equipped with

art,

and between land andjandscape, the outward signs ofjociaL diversity^

device in the 1816 design for his

pragmatic and professionally active of picturesque landscape

Humphry Repton

own

Street, Essex.

(1752-1818), was sometimes

troubled by the unsightly impingements of rustic designs for estate parks and villages.

More

his elaborate watercolor

village scene

The

life in his

so than most

drawin gs

and overlays that would help dramatize

the transformation of the view at hand.

were not particularly welcome. Even the most

gardeners,

flaps

"after" scen es

He made

own garden

use of this

prospect in Hare

Repton amends the prosaic character of the

by distancing and obscuring

village green,

once

a

common

its

unseemly

details.

for grazing livestock,

appropriated by Repton for his private garden preserve,

is

its

landscape gardeners swept up by the picturesque tide, Repton

curving, hedged boundary replacing the rigid linearity of the

attempted to reconcile the social and economic requirements

fence

of a property with

its

scenic potential; consequently, he spoke

his writings

often expressed

weathervane

of

on the theory of landscape gardening

favored

by

"successful

sons

that

had barely kept crippled

bay (the loitering figure episode

most

in

probablv

Rcpton's "before" identifiable

as

an

indigent war veteran). Flowering shrubs and arboreal trestles

disdain for the picturesque as a faddish taste

at

improvement

of "humanizing as well as animating beautiful scenery."

Although

along his property

vagrants

protect the eye from the distractions ol passing stagecoaches

and

ol

I

local

shopkecping.

The

picturesque garden functions as

VNDSCAPE INSTINCTS VND THE PICTl RISQUE

a

117

113

14

ii3

HUMPHRY REPTON

own

cottage, in Essex," before, 1816.