When devoted to a specific
time period, two types of works are produced in the history of art:
those that, by offering new information, allow us to nourish our thinking
with previously unknown examples, but without, for all that, changing
our view of the topic at hand, and those that redefine this topic, thanks
to the originality of a special point of view. Richard Thomson’s
book belongs to the second category, that of publications which, for
years to come, mark a milestone in how a period is approached, and in
which the student or the researcher will be led to find ideas likely
to fuel substantive debate.
There is, in the title
of Thomson’s book, The Troubled Republic: Visual Culture and
Social Debate, 1889-1900, the announcement of a program. Let us
note, first of all, that the relatively limited period on which this
book bears includes a wealth of stylistic upheavals of all kinds and
appears to be one that, by its very essence, is difficult to make out
in its diversity. The author’s goal is to analyze the different
ways in which art expressed certain social and political aspects of
the Third Republic and to find out how, in turn, images were able to
exert an influence over society. While Naturalism becomes here, as one
might expect, the object of a major reevaluation and while many pictures
which once had place of pride in our history textbooks and in our provincial
museums are rescued from oblivion by their inclusion in his copiously
illustrated pages, the author does not limit himself solely to artists
whose intentions and statements were connected in clear-cut ways to
social and political questions. Impressionists, Symbolists, and Nabis
also are made the object of detailed and erudite analyses. Through these
analyses, one gradually discovers that the notion of the painting’s
subject, which had been evacuated by Formalism in the twentieth century,
definitely remained present in works one had been taught to consider
only in terms of their plastic-art meaning. Thus, for example, by relying
on an in-depth knowledge of late nineteenth-century literature and by
making use, in particular, of a text by the columnist Léo Taxil,
the author is able to decipher allusions to lesbianism in Le Rond-Point
des Champs-Elysées (1889, p. 39), one of the most famous
pastels by Louis Anquetin, a major artist of Cloisonnism whose work
has until now only rarely or superficially been the object of iconographic
analysis.
This observation of
different forms of interaction between art and society is basically
founded upon the documentary method. Instead of offering a vast panorama
of his topic, Thomson fastens upon significant examples presented in
a special light. Without ever losing contact with the argument in his
text by making tiresome and overlong digressions, the author nevertheless
sticks to the general historical context, biographies, and political
ideas of the various artists examined, endeavoring to describe the expository
structures of their works and the dissemination thereof as well as the
practical stylistic details on which an ongoing search for novelty,
characteristic of this period, was based. This meticulous restoration
of the context in which the work of art was perceived casts revealing
light upon a fin de siècle period that, notwithstanding
an increasing number of works over the past twenty years, remains relatively
neglected or at least still fragmented among the specialized disciplines
of history, social history, art history, and the history of literature.
Thomson, by way of contrast, lets these different disciplines communicate
with one another. The rare instances where we have seen comparable attempts--such
as René Jullian’s Le Mouvement des arts du romantisme
au symbolisme (1979)--which were more concerned with being exhaustive
and always focused on more extended periods of time, exhibit less detailed
approaches to their subject matter. His work, and this is not the least
of its merits, does indeed benefit from firsthand knowledge of forgotten
literary texts and of works of art, some of which are lost in the back
of museum storerooms or decorate the staircase of some subprefecture
building. Similarly, this work also demonstrates that its author is
perfectly well informed about the most recent publications concerning
the major artists of the period. His view of the end of the nineteenth
century thus presupposes an abolition of the binary division between
formally innovative artists and those who upheld or followed tradition.
Indeed, nineteenth-century historiography has long been based upon precisely
this division.
The main originality
of Thomson’s book resides in its structure. Far from exhibiting
a superficial search for unity, it audaciously divides its subject into
four major iconographic themes. In each of the book’s four chapters,
the notion of the image is confronted on the one hand and as
regards the most conventional sorts of artistic production, with the
necessities of its social function, and, on the other, with the freer
position innovative artists were to adopt in relation to this notion.
Moreover, analysis of these different themes rests on a constant to-and-fro
movement between public sphere and private sphere. Thus, the first chapter
sets up a confrontation between public images of the human body and
intimate, erotic representations thereof. The second one, which is devoted
to the theme of the crowd, puts a commemorative painting like Alfred
Roll’s Le 14 juillet 1880 (p. 112) into perspective along
with the crepuscular urban visions of the Symbolist Charles Lacoste
(pp. 104-105) and Vallotton’s wood engravings (p. 109), which
show the Parisian crowd battling with the authorities. Here, one can
see quite well the way in which Baron Haussmann’s city planning
could have given birth not only to the modern city but also to the modern
crowd, wherein the individual falls into line and steps back so as to
blend into an ambivalent mass, either well policed and orderly or openly
hostile, depending upon the circumstances. The author does not confine
himself to painting but sets out, instead, to explore the phenomenon
of how different artistic disciplines influence one another as well
as the interferences that can take place between art and people’s
mentalities. Sculpture, posters, prints, photography, and architecture,
but also bodily postures and clothing habits, are taken into account.
The last two chapters broach, from different angles, the question of
the persistence of the notion of historical painting at the very end
of the nineteenth century. One of those chapters is devoted to the relations
between art and the sacred and concerns the debates convulsing the Church
and the State on the topic of religious art and Catholicism’s
revival in Symbolism as well as the anticlerical current. The other
one raises the problem of painting military subjects in a nation traumatized
by the war of 1870 and brings out the subterfuges by which, through
the use of images, artists tended to transform this defeat into hope
for victory.
Some of the questions
posed by Thomson prove to be quite topical. Let us take up here just
one example, that of images of eroticism (chapter 1). The nineteenth
century witnessed the invention of advertising, which came to shatter
the status of images. This period also invented modern sexuality, with
all that that presupposes in the way of interferences between one’s
private world and the public world. Nowadays, this theme in art has
gained such an importance, be it only in quantitative terms, that it
is worthwhile wondering about its remote sources. The second half of
the nineteenth century did indeed witness the progressive decline of
the gallant world of old and the appearance of a sexuality tinged with
severity and irony, in the tradition of Rops and Baudelaire, while sexual
imagery began to undergo increased circulation and affected, especially,
the artistic sphere. The examples of Degas (commented on, in particular,
by Félix Fénéon), Rodin, Bonnard, and Charles Maurin
here become the object of especially pertinent analyses that relate
changes in mores to a minor literature that has by now been forgotten
but that at the time authorized a new approach in certain quite famous
paintings, like those of Toulouse-Lautrec. Thomson rightly makes use
of Max Nordau’s work, Entartung (1892), which was translated
quite soon into French, as the basis for reflecting upon the idea of
decadence that underlay Third Republic society’s take on its own
moral outlook. Nordau’s book Degeneration was indeed
one of the linchpins in the relationship between individual psychology
and such mass phenomena as could be described at the time in newspapers
and novels. The notion of decadence--which one will see being used during
this period by literary critics before a few poets, including Verlaine,
began to champion it by giving it a positive meaning--had been the object
of speculations of a sociological nature that were based upon prior
medical research. Nordau had read Cesare Lombroso, whose L’Uomo
delinquente (Criminal man, 1876) had indeed been translated into
French as early as 1887. The likening of the national body to an individual
suffering from a disease was then a commonplace. It is curious that
Nordau, whose approach fit into the positive sciences, would have placed
such a large emphasis on art and literature as symptoms of the degeneration
he was diagnosing in society at the time. Here we have a paradigm shift
that in itself offers a validation for Thomson’s approach, based
as it is on a rigorous analysis of displacements of the borders between
art and that on which art is nourished.
The genuine subject
of this book resides in its study of the phenomena of porosity among
fields we had been taught in the history of art to define as autonomous,
or at least rather clearly separate. The reflection carried out here
as concerns a limited period of time can in this way help to open up
broader perspectives for ourselves. Thomson restores the concept of
the image to its genuine place in late nineteenth-century art.