The Swan Song of Modernity

        It is to John Rewald that we owe some of the most scathing pages ever written against a current of French art history that, starting in the late Sixties, has turned the unearthing of all the forgotten artists of the second half of the nineteenth century into a true mission. The philippic he wrote as a preface to a catalogue on the work of Pissarro that was published on the occasion of a 1981 Paris retrospective stands in sharp contrast to the diplomatic tone commonly employed. Thus, at the end of a life devoted, since the late Thirties, to the study of the “lifeblood of the genuine current of history,” he compared such attempts at rehabilitation to a “dangerous sort of manipulation” that favors “powerful and active reactionary” artists who had combined their efforts in order to “bury the living.”
        Rewald had denounced, behind the deceptive appearance of “commendable” historical work, an intolerable attempt at restoration that was undertaken as much on the aesthetic level as on the political one. In his view, such revisionism was all the more pernicious as some “isolated” conservative “provocations” from the Sixties had since been followed by the “danger” of a new antimodern vulgate, sometimes with revanchist overtones almost redolent of the Count of Monte Cristo. In 1981, the year of the second retrospective on the works of Jean-Louis Gérôme, the earlier one of 1972-1973 in the United States was praised in retrospect as a “revenge exhibition.” In the early 1980s, erosion of the grand modern narrative à la Greenberg had encouraged the scourges of the “cocoon of modernity” to pursue their “courageous” rewriting of French art history, which would finally be freed of “sclerotic assumptions.” Celebrating itself in the military mode of bitter defeats inflicted against “modern dishonor,” this rediscovery of the nineteenth century was going to, among some redressers of wrongs, take a more and more “unapologetic” [décomplexée] turn, to use a recurrent term in catalogue literature. The relief some felt at seeing the end of the “Bauhaus Terror”--the “modernitarian” taboo erected with the help “of the often murderous tools of the human sciences”(1) --would at times turn into a euphoric triumphalism and even into bursts of laughter at “the lappings of the broken wave of modernity.”(2)
        In this postmodern context of challenges to the narratives of emancipation, Rewald’s charge could not help but go unheeded. Indeed, it prolonged in a nostalgic sort of way another mythology, that of Impressionism, which, at the time of the Liberation, had been erected into a pictorial symbol of the selfless triumph of freedom and progress. “Would it not be simpler to brush aside once and for all the anecdotic works of minor practitioners?” Rewald also wondered, employing the rhetoric of a righter of memorial wrongs that was itself strangely reminiscent of the rhetoric of his detractors. This approach naturally failed to reckon on the missionary fervor of historians who had already bartered these modern brooms of “merited oblivion” for the bright new helmets of super-retentive firemen [pompiers hypermnésiques], who, as against a tabula rasa approach, had substituted instead “dust farming” and the comforting smell of library stacks, said to be the source of the “eternal laws” from the good old days.

“Let us restore the principle of authority!”

        In order to dispel the nightmare of the adventure of semiotics and thanks to a return to the virtues of narrative and to the self-evident truths of clear-minded thinking--“If there exists a snobbery of simple things, here is the moment to indulge in it”--it would no longer be a matter just of ladling out works with modesty, nor of helping oneself to them. A few historians indulged with such zeal in this “snobbery” that, in the face of the overtly restoratory fervor for certain “reconsiderations” of this past, one could speak of a return to Bouville, the city in Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée. In that novel, Roquentin’s visit to the museum, that civic temple to the glory of order and of the great men who made Bouville, resembles a descent into the catacombs. Like a vault, everything there appears in half light; all is sleep, mourning, and even detachable collars shine like white marble. The Grand Hall, that municipal Holy of Holies where the portraits of Bordurin, the local Rome Prize winner, had pride of place, parodies and disparages the realism of the Third Republic, bringing it down to the mere rank of official art and making the paintbrush an accessory for the saber and the holy-water sprinkler. The portrait of Deputy Blévigne, whose small stature is concealed by an artful pretense, reveals his real size in the main motto for his life: “Let us restore the principle of authority!” “Never,” writes Sartre, “had the slightest doubt crossed their minds.” At the origin of the sudden turnaround in taste back toward various forms of academicism, conviction about the work’s absolute value--an attitude so ridiculed by contemporary art--has found its natural extension in the phobia about sacrificing the notion of the author. This conviction will be confused still more broadly with the refusal to give up the grand narratives that had impeded the dilution of national memories. The anxious prospect that one might little by little become an orphan of this particularist and victorious memory cult upheld by both Gaullists and Communists since the Liberation allows us to understand the extent to which real political antagonisms might be cushioned with the help of a deep-seated complicity on the cultural level. National heritage policy was to become one of the preferred tools of this ideological alliance that focused with even greater enthusiasm on the defense of a near and distant national heritage deemed worthy of admiration because it was so despised. Around the year 1980, the climate thus proved eminently favorable to the reappropriation of this “other nineteenth century,” for the ideological contours of this recognition of the past had been enlarged to the traditional dimensions of the French political arena without the least exclusion. Launched under French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and completed under French President François Mitterrand, the Orsay Museum would become the perfect symbol of such continuity.
         The consecration of a return to various forms of nineteenth-century academicism is therefore fully contemporary with the rise of a “republicanist” current in France. In the laborious apprenticeship and the “sweat” of academic painters, the cast-off “virtues” of the Third Republic--identified here as a golden age of education and meritocracy--would encounter an exemplary social metaphor. Expression of a new taste for republican realism would thus remain bound to a nostalgia for the power of the Nation-State, Jacobin authority, and the sense of conviction residing among its educational authorities, who bask in their never-lost prestige. As for contemporary creative work, it would be viewed as having never been anything other than the distressing symptom of the end of transmission of the classics: “the cultural” (as opposed to culture). Planned and set in motion by “the democratic egalitarianism of a tabula rasa attitude,”(3) this deterioration of France’s “sacred depository” (Péguy) was said to have revealed, above all, the country’s inability to assume our role as heirs. Marc Fumaroli thus described the Orsay Museum as a Noah’s Ark, the frozen theater of the (still Parisian) world of the arts when “nothing had yet been lost”--in other words, before the modern deluge and the end of the Beaux Arts system, considered tantamount to the death of art. That is why so much emotion comes across in the narration of the training of pompier artists, the last ones to be true to their art. This “lesson to be pondered” metamorphoses almost inevitably into a lament upon the bankruptcy of modern schooling. It is undoubtedly not by accident that in 1986 the scholarly exhibition on “The Rome Prize Competitions” and on the painted-sketch competitions, organized by the French School of Fine Arts, met with such a critical success and aroused the enthusiasm of Claude Lévi-Strauss, author of a much-talked-about 1981 article on the loss of craftsmanship.
        Faced with a present so distressing that it has taken on the appearance of an irreversible past, the historical and cultural totality of the “broad” nineteenth century began to take on the comforting appearance and consistency of an opulent resource. For these “devourers of the nineteenth century” who feed in the present on such a past, gathering around the great eclectic banquet of decorative detail was a way of reliving the federative fulfillment of an era that dates from before the death of art, so that they might, to borrow Péguy’s distinction, escape the sadness of a period--our own, that of modernity, which is indigestible beneath its estranged Lenten mask. “Far removed from our harsh twentieth century, . . . it is undoubtedly logical and healthy to rediscover this self-assured universe in which one unhesitatingly develops noble sentiments and edifying legends with the assurance that makes great civilizations. What the official artists of the nineteenth century experienced the least was doubt.”(4) This same author outdoes himself: “One clearly sees what a resolutely modern and self-satisfied critique may not like in such a state of affairs . . . , and then this apparent ease of creativity, where anxiety seems alien and where a clear conscience reigns. So much the better, after all.”(5)
        What the Antimoderns therefore were contrasting with the open-ended work of art, which they identified with a wavering of meaning and with a rage for the new, was the closure of the work of art around the unequivocal, the purely explicit--which, according to Roland Barthes, is the source of a “great sense of security.”

1984

        Let us recall the scathing response Roquentin gave to the “one-hundred-and-fifty pairs of eyes” that seemed to challenge his very right of existence: “So long, you bastards.” In 1984, on the occasion of the William-Adolphe Bouguereau retrospective, the manifesto-like preface written by Thérèse Burollet,(6) director of the Petit-Palais in Paris, seems to be a delayed and uncompromising response to Rewald-Roquentin as much as a Bouvillois program for the rehabilitation of all Bordurins, “bastards” on their way to becoming heros all over again (let us think, today, of the exemplary case of Henri Bouchard). Far from the relative diplomatic caution that would characterize the future Orsay Museum, the Petit Palais, followed later by some museums in the French provinces, had become in the 1980s the emblematic and unapologetic site for a rereading of the nineteenth century that had abandoned all superego--to the point of embodying the “Id” in its pure state of holding forth in a discourse of rediscovery. The demand for retrospective justice had therefore found its ideal theater in the courtroom-like setting of the Petit Palais: James Jacques Joseph Tissot, Bouguereau, and Franz Xaver Winterhalter were thus exhumed, retried, and rehabilitated; unsurprisingly, the sculptors of the Thirties would follow: Paul Belmondo and Paul Landowski, the author of the Fantômes, those emblematic dead who rise up again to demand justice. Their art, unscathed by any sort of modernity, had come to offer salvatory reparation for the injuries twentieth-century art had continually been inflicting upon the modern body. Art history would serve as substitute for public reparation in order to dispel--but “at what cost?”--the “mistake,” the “sin”of those “terrible years,” which, if one is to believe the victim-centered rhetoric of rediscovery, were devoted to “selection,” “confinement,” and “extinction.” Every discourse and every exhibition would begin as an administrative effort to prove crimes and misdeeds committed by the “modernitarian Terror.” Once this process of legitimation had been achieved, what followed--“it is but justice”--would be exhumation (in other words, the resurfacing of artworks that had been forced “to go under the ground [they] should never have left”) and restoration as the ultimate metaphor for reparation.

Art History or Pompier Memory?

        Denouncing Roquentin’s sentence--in other words, employing history to stand up against the tendency to forget (“history, it talks about what has existed--never can an existent thing justify the existence of another existent thing,” wrote Roquentin before abandoning his biography to write a novel)--is a way of exercising responsibility. Unfortunately, the specter of irreparable harm--brandished as a standard, but almost always conjured away--is often only a pretext for erecting a statue to its rediscoverer as a “magistrate of posterity,” to use Péguy’s formula. It is thus appropriate to inquire into the ideological nature of this sort of history, whose demand for justice is not unreminiscent of the rhetoric of reparations found in current demands for memorialization. If, in the objective mode of the Barthesian “it goes without saying,” one decrees that “modernism is the rejection of historical knowledge” (Fumaroli), that “the blazing flashes of Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Moreau are bearers of the death of so-called Western art” (Bruno Foucart), one can then ask oneself whether the kind of history being invoked is not an empirical manifestation of what Nietzsche described in his second Untimely Meditation as “critical history”: “the kind that judges and condemns.” Salvatory history very much allows its spokesmen to reinvent, a posteriori, tailor-made “olden times,” bygone days that are to their liking. The resentment of the righter of memorial wrongs will thus constitute a decisive feature in the narration of this pseudopast, this nineteenth century “of the reinventors of a legendary past.”(7) A worthy inheritor of Deputy Blévigne, this insular Bouvillois history of art firmly sets out to “restore the principle of authority” by setting out, first, to restore the honor of the inviolable dogma of “author-ity”: the monographic reiteration of forgotten artists thus answers, on both the qualitative and the symbolic levels, to the mythified weight of a prohibition against biography.

“A helmet is a hair-do/That fits their faces/A helmet of a Fireman [Pompier]/That makes one almost look like a warrior” (Quat’zarts song)

        In L’Art pompier, Thérèse Burollet makes the apparition of the figure of the painter Henri Regnault, a volunteer during the 1870 war, into an emblem of virility--though this choice was in no way inevitable, even among the most skeptical commentators on modernity. In Le Mécontemporain (1991), for example, which rehabilitated the contested figure of Charles Péguy (who had himself died fighting in August 1914), Alain Finkielkraut based that writer’s nationalism on an awareness of vulnerability; as early as 1987, Finkielkraut himself had denounced, in The Defeat of the Mind, an ethnic concept of the nation in the name of an elective conception thereof. With the figure of Regnault, on the contrary, the glorification of heroism is mixed up with a duty-bound defense of “matrimony.” The individual, like the artist, is never anything but a limitative emanation of national genius. One can see the rise of this identity-based and sacrifice-oriented matrix in the attempt to give equal pictorial value to blood and milk (in the aforementioned Regnault’s Execution Without Hearing Under the Moorish Kings and Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Perrette and the Milk Pail)--all the better to confuse the motherland with the biological mother. Summoned up in an obsessional way by a number of their champions, the heroism of pompier artists will never have been anything other than the self-proclaimed courage of an antimodern stance.
        The arguments the author invokes in order to deny the Impressionists’ superiority over pompier painters are deliberately designed to abolish any distinction between the aesthetic dimension and moral argumentation. Barthes had already pointed out the political dimension of a concerted effort to confuse these two levels. In Criticism and Truth, he had analyzed “the ideological brand” of these sorts of attacks, which “delve into this ambiguous cultural relationship where something unfailingly political . . . seeps into one’s judgment and into one’s language.”(8) In order to do justice to Bouguereau as well as to his colleagues, it will thus become conceivable to contrast “military paintings [that] suggest courage, mourning, and revenge”--that is, pompier art, which “glorifies the desperate resistance of the combatants of 1870”--with “the Impressionists’ indifferent attitude toward defense of the fatherland.” As absurd as that might be, an argument aimed at stigmatizing the cowardice “of some of the Impressionist painters [who], despite their poverty, found the means to take shelter in London or in Brussels” fits this rereading of the past into a schema whose perfect ideological consistency cannot be ignored. Erecting Impressionism into the art of defeat is to play havoc with the categories of plausibility in order to anchor the rehabilitation of pompier art upon the conviction that Impressionist painters would never have been anything other than the artisans of a defeat of art. In the middle of the Dreyfus Affair, when the pompier artists were reflecting life in their realistic works, what was Monet doing? He was painting “reflections on water”!

Authority, Again

        A good patriot, Regnault is therefore a great painter. There is nothing very new in this appropriation of the heroic figure of Regnault. These sometimes risky shifts between aesthetics and politics merely repeat the peremptory statements made by the newspaper polemicist Paul de Cassagnac, who was managing editor of L’Autorité, a newspaper founded in 1886 “For God, For France!” In order to denounce the organization of a 1891 exhibition of French artists in Berlin--a project based on the idea of the universality of art--Cassagnac published on February 24 of that year “The Holy Hatreds” [Les Saintes Haines]. He brandished the avenging example “of patriotic painters killed by the enemy in 1871, like Henri Regnault, who are turning in their graves.” “The place for artists,” he added, “is where our soldiers can be found. . . . French Art must serve the flag. Where the French flag does not go, Art loses its way.”(9) While Van Gogh’s pointless self-mutilation brought back up the odious specter of the body fragmented by modernity--unless it constituted a parody of post-Sedan lost territorial integrity--Regnault himself died for the fatherland at Buzenval in January 1871. This chivalrous death on the field of honor is said to have conferred upon this pseudo-Géricault of official art the aura of a romantic pompier artist. Pompier hero versus draft-dodgers in London, the time now seemed to have come to choose sides--“without false shame”--between the bravura that makes great painters and bad painting, the kind that exposes deserters. Was not the cowardice of the latter an affront to “the unfailing conviction to uphold tradition” that constituted the strength of pompier artists--thought!--and still more, writes the author, an affront to “the idea of the common fatherland,” thus destroying the republican and Jacobin dogma of the one and indivisible fatherland?

Dying on the Front Lines

        The admirable Regnault was not content to enjoy just the Christ-like destiny of the artist struck down in the prime of youth. He had not only given his blood to the canvas (the red stain on his Execution Without Hearing), his intact body to painting, determined as he was to maintain the depth of “thought” over against the facile pleasures of the surface; he had fallen on the front lines. The idea of an artistic rearguard, from which the author wishes to redeem pompier artists, is, as one knows, a term taken from military strategy: it designates the forces that bring up the rear as opposed to the vanguard, those who head up the marching formation. To insist with such panache on the courage and the “desperate resistance” of pompier painters is in fact tantamount to overturning criticisms based on judgments of taste by introducing considerations of a political nature: since Regnault and his colleagues cannot be made into avant-garde painters--an execrated concept is there ever was one--such salvatory death on the front lines had the distinctive merit of making the association of pompier art with a rearguard fight ideologically suspect. The same year, Jacques Thuillier proposed using the generic term pompier art to characterize all painting between 1848 and 1914.

Against the Bourgeoisie

        Thérèse Burollet’s insistence on the aristocratization of formal art, as compared to the national, popular, and virile authenticity of republican art--“Roll’s solid masons and Jules Breton’s proud woman gleaners” contrast their fertile dignity against the “brothel girls sprawled on their divans” who are neither “honored nor defended” by the effeminized [dévirilisés] Impressionists--will constitute the other side of this moralistic swing of opinion toward artists “from humble backgrounds.” As for the Impressionists, they had “lost interest in the poor and in workers.” This is the retrospective revenge of the real country against its elites, of “official ‘villeins’” against “the ‘noble’ Impressionists,” where the concept of “bourgeois formalism,” dear to postwar Communist criticism, likewise makes its reappearance. This deliberately tactical confusion of aesthetic boundaries and political cleavages was thus undeniably part of the “reconsideration” of the forgotten aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. One need only think of the “public dishonorable discharge” of which Derain, a new Dreyfus, would have been made the victim as a way of punishing his aesthetic break.(10) The discipline’s desire for insularity is undoubtedly related to the climate of relative approval that in France was to greet these unbridled manifestations of antimodern criticism. Behind a nostalgic reaffirmation of norms and hierarchies, the denunciation of the cultural relativism imputed to modernity has nevertheless not ceased to rest on a paradoxical practice of aesthetic leveling and a contradictory justification of the equivalence of all things. By steeping too long in the endless escalation of “I could say even more” rhetoric, this historical enquiry has constantly oscillated between Mr. Thomson’s memorializing suspicion and Mr. Thompson’s search for the irrefutable indication of the great future of the past, which is never anything other than the art of following in one’s own footsteps. To summon up Edouard Detaille’s “other modernity” or to compare Paul Baudry’s foyer for the Paris Opera to Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel--is that not to follow with a magnifying glass the obstinate example of two brilliant detectives while tripping over the carpet one would have oneself laid down in order to conceal this modernity one cannot “endure to look on”?(11) Undoubtedly so, but: “Heap it under your kat.”(12).

Notes