Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. - book reviews

After two decades of silence, a book has finally been published which treats the work of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. The artist was one of the most important painters in France in the second half of the 19th century. Hailed in the 1880s and 1890s as the only viable representative of the French tradition of classicism, Puvis de Chavannes was arguably France's last national painter. He kept a tradition of public painting alive, offering images of France in a pictorial mode that was at once convincingly modern and appropriately public. Puvis's admirers hailed from a wide political and aesthetic spectrum - from the avant-garde, the academy and the state, from the literati of small Symbolist journals to the old men of the Institute. Yet he has barely entered into art-historical accounts of the period.(1)

The catalogue of the Puvis de Chavannes exhibition held in Amsterdam in spring 1994 goes some way toward remedying this. It is the first book to be published in English on the artist in a generation, and the first ever to include a significant number of color reproductions of the artist's easel paintings and murals. It will therefore be an important resource for anyone interested in 19th-century French painting. Drawing extensively on private collections, the catalogue makes public many works which have heretofore been inaccessible. In particular, the inclusion of preliminary drawings for some of Puvis's major commissions makes the catalogue a rich resource for scholars interested in Puvis's most important works - public murals now situated in Amiens, Lyons, Rouen, Marseilles, Paris, and Boston.

If Puvis's oeuvre has not always impressed art historians to the same degree that it impressed his contemporaries, this is partly because his most accomplished works, the murals, cannot be exhibited beyond their original sites. Aside from a few major paintings (Summer, Young Girls by the Seashore, The Poor Fisherman, etc.) which the artist conceived as major statements on a par with his murals, Puvis's small-scale production consisted of preliminary studies and paintings for the market - quick reproductions of the murals or anecdotal scenes excerpted from them. This second kind of production was often second-rate. Unfortunately (but inevitably), it dominated the exhibition in Amsterdam. Thus, although the catalogue aims to be a representative monographic study, the catalogued works cannot present an adequate picture of Puvis's oeuvre. The organizer of the exhibition and editor of the catalogue, Aimee Brown Price, has attempted to remedy this impossible situation. At the exhibition, the murals were represented in an exquisite slide show. In the catalogue, Price has included photographs of many murals in situ as well as reproductions of the major easel paintings.

The essays in the catalogue provide a good introduction to the artist's work and reputation. Genevieve Lecambre contributes "Puvis de Chavannes and the Artistic Establishment of his Day," a useful discussion of Puvis's participation in the Salon, his attitude toward official bodies such as the Institut de France, and his standing among his immediate peers. Jon Whiteley's essay, "The Role of Drawing in the Work of Puvis de Chavannes," also provides an informative treatment of an important aspect of Puvis's work. Whiteley's account of Puvis's drawing practice offers us valuable insights into the artist's working materials and methods - in particular, his reliance on careful and repeated preliminary studies for his major works. In addition to her extensive and thorough entries on particular works, Price contributes two essays, "The Poor Fisherman: A Painting in Context" and "Pierre Puvis de Chavannes: The Development of a Pictorial Idiom." Price traces the artist's major works and stylistic development while also touching on wider cultural issues such as modernism, classicism, and nationalism. These essays will form the groundwork for further examination of the important cultural meanings of Puvis's oeuvre. (A more extensive framework for the study of Puvis will soon be available in Price's forthcoming monograph on the artist.)

While the essays in the catalogue are excellent in many respects, their monographic perspective means that they ultimately give us a narrow focus on Puvis's work. There is a tendency throughout to limit inquiry to Puvis de Chavannes and his immediate circle and to fix the ultimate meaning of both formal means and subject matter by deferring to the artist's point of view. This is, one could argue, an appropriate approach for a catalogue, especially when there is such a dearth of information available about its subject. However, the approach also has its drawbacks. It prevents us from seeing the wider social and political implications of the very issues raised in many of the essays. The catalogue thus offers a telling example of the limitations of art-historical work that proceeds from a monographic perspective. Lecambre's otherwise excellent discussion limits itself to Puvis's personal negotiation of narrowly artistic institutions such as the Salon and thus never considers the political implications of important state commissions such as the Sorbonne and the Hotel-de-Ville de Paris.(2) Similarly, Price's essay answers the central questions of classicism, nationalism, and modernism from the artist's point of view, thus obscuring the central place of Puvis's oeuvre in important debates of the day. Price attributes the artist's interest in classicism to his lycee education in the classics and describes him as perpetuating "a nostalgia for a Hellenizing Golden Age" akin to the Parnassian poets. Nationalism is acknowledged as central to the artist's work, but is only explicitly discussed in instances where France is specifically allegorized in response to the Franco-Prussian War (Hope, The Pigeon, The Balloon). All of this is accurate. Yet it only begins to touch upon what is most interesting about Puvis de Chavannes's art.

The issue of nationalism, for example, haunts all of Puvis's public murals from the mid-1880s on - even when it is not the declared subject. As I have argued elsewhere, nationalism and classicism were integrally linked over the period of Puvis's production in complex and shifting ways.(3) The most compelling intersections are to be found less in overtly nationalist subject matter than in Puvis's vaguely classicizing public murals. Although (or perhaps because) these did not picture France specifically and directly, but evoked the nation through vague, dreamlike images of classical and feudal pasts, they were thought to be the only convincing vision of France on offer - convincing because they allowed room for the vicissitudes of individual fantasies of nationhood. By the end of the century, in the wake of Boulangism and the Dreyfus Affair, consensus on the definition of the French nation was impossible, and categories of classicism and nationalism that Price takes for granted were intimately intertwined and extremely fraught. Puvis's work offers us a window onto the conflicted attempts to understand, define, even enforce "Frenchness."

Because it was thought to be both "national" and "modern," Puvis's art became a focus for battles over the true definition of France and the direction of French art. In fact, the artist and his work were such a locus of contention that by the end of his life anarchist, republican, socialist, and royalist critics, as well as members of the academy and the avant-garde, all tried to appropriate them for their own purposes. Seizing on Puvis's classicism, some saw in his work a vision of France as the race blonde, a pure race which excluded "barbarians" of all stripes. Others pointed to Puvis's images of a medieval Christian heritage to claim France as a land of Catholic faith opposed to the secularizing impetus of the Third Republic. Still others thought Puvis's pastoral images pictured France as anarchist utopia. Because the catalogue raises only the question of what the artist wanted his work to stand for, the very contestation which made Puvis a central figure in the 1880s and 1890s is never even broached.

Similarly, in her essay on the Poor Fisherman, Price explains Puvis's modernist pictorial mode as an unintentional result of his explicit project, which was to pursue a mural aesthetic. While Price is right to claim that the artist developed his style in the course of this pursuit, the respect for the site and for the integrity of the wall which mural painting requires goes only part of the way in addressing the significance of Puvis's aesthetic innovations. Price locates Puvis's modernity solely in "private" works - easel paintings such as the Poor Fisherman and Young Girls by the Seashore. For her, Puvis's late public murals are inherently more conservative and stylistically tempered than the "private works." This is an artificial division. For, I would argue, the major easel paintings were statement pieces meant to stake a claim against the dominant practitioners of high art. They were, therefore, as much public works as the murals. It is clear that even in his public murals, the artist's stylistic innovations were in direct dialogue with the central aesthetic issues of the day. Puvis's murals were, after all, painted on canvas and exhibited at the Salon before they were installed in buildings. In that context they were, in a sense, easel paintings meant to be evaluated alongside other large-scale works. And the murals, like the easel paintings, were seen to offer a modern alternative to academic conventions of high art. One need only look at the constant contrasts which were made in contemporary criticism between Puvis and the icons of the academy, Bouguereau and Baudry, to see that this is the case.

A similar approach to the question of Puvis's modernism is taken by Whiteley. Whiteley's main aim is to distance Puvis from the younger generation of avant-garde painters he so clearly influenced (Maurice Denis, Seurat, Signac, and Picasso are obvious examples). Though he acknowledges that the artist was largely self-taught as a draftsman and never trained in the academy, Whiteley implies that because his improvised schooling was based on academic models of the life class, his emphasis on drawing should still be aligned with tradition. Like Price, he is more interested in the artist's intentions than in the cultural meanings of his work. "Puvis," says Whiteley, "was not well understood by his contemporaries." Furthermore, Whiteley claims, "in the divide which separates the painters/draughtsmen of the nineteenth century from the avant-garde, Puvis belongs to the side of the Old Masters, with Ingres, Gericault, Bouguereau, Degas, as heir to a tradition of fine drawing which was fatally undermined by the innovators of the 1890's who admired and imitated Puvis but rejected the ancient practices of the drawing class on which his art was founded"(p. 35). While one must agree with Whiteley's assessment of the importance of drawing in Puvis's work, we might want to question whether an interest in drawing necessarily aligns an artist with "tradition" or more specifically with the academy. For what is particularly striking about Puvis's painting is the deliberateness with which drawing is used to distort, rather than idealize, the body. At a moment when, in the hands of artists such as Bouguereau, accuracy in drawing had come to stand for an easy mastery of the figure with implications beyond the artistic realm, Puvis reinserted in his overemphasized outlines and strange manipulations of the body a sense of the difficulty of the transformation of the three-dimensional world of objects into the two dimensions of the picture plane. At the same time, the decorative rhythms established by his distortions were partly responsible for what viewers in his own day described as the dreamlike effect of his murals - an effect whose poignancy was related to the fascination with the unconscious. Perhaps Puvis's admirers in the avant-garde understood this better than Whiteley thinks.

What contemporary artists and critics saw as Puvis's modernity consisted in precisely the qualities which Price and Whiteley wish to align with tradition. Modernism was, at this moment, developing through a complex dialectic between "tradition" and "modernity." (Indeed, Denis's modernist dictum, "Remember that a painting - before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote - is essentially a flat surface covered in colors arranged in a certain order," was part of a series of aphorisms entitled "Definition du neotraditionisme.")(4) We should, I believe, take seriously Puvis's modernism and view it in relation to broader cultural concerns. Many of Puvis's contemporaries - not only artists but also critics such as Octave Mirbeau and Gustave Geffroy - saw his pictorial mode as distinctly modern because of its sensual formal address, its promotion of individual projection and fantasy, and its supposed ability to access the viewer's unconscious. Puvis's murals thus offer us the unique opportunity to examine the consequences of asking a modernist formal mode (with the potential to promote individual retreat into fantasy) to pursue the socializing aims of public mural painting. Because Puvis painted murals on national themes which had the aim of educating their audiences, they provided a site where the social consequences of modernist abstraction could be explicitly theorized and debated. Yet, despite the cultural debates which framed his murals, both Price and Whiteley defer to the artist's stated intentions and wish ultimately to deny the modernism of the murals. They can therefore never bring the central significance of these murals into focus.

Puvis's work posed the questions of modernism, classicism, and nationalism in terms which could not be extracted from contemporary aesthetic and political debates no matter how much the artist himself might have wished to stay out of the fray. Perhaps the embeddedness of his work in the central cultural conflicts of his day is precisely the reason why Puvis fell out of the modernist art-historical canon in the mid-20th century at its moment of high and hermetic formalism.(5) That moment is now over, and it is high time that the work of Puvis de Chavannes is reconsidered. This important catalogue will provide a valuable starting place.

1. I hope to remedy this with my forthcoming book Dream States: Puvis de Chavannes and the Fantasy of France. See also Jennifer L. Shaw, "Nation and Desire in the Paintings of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes from 1879-1895," Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1994. Claudine Mitchell's "Time and the Idea of Patriarchy in the Pastorals of Puvis de Chavannes," Art History, x, June 1987, 188-202, is perhaps the only published article which successfully situates Puvis's work in its cultural context. The catalogue editor, Aimee Brown Price, has also published several articles on the artist, including, "'L'Allegorie reelle' chez Pierre Puvis de Chavannes," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6th ser., LXXXlX, Jan. 1977, 27-40; and "Puvis de Chavannes's Caricatures: Manifestoes, Commentary, Expressions," Art Bulletin, LXXIII, no. 11, 1991, 119-40. Previous exhibition catalogues include Richard J. Wattenmaker, Puvis de Chavannes and the Modern Tradition, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 1975.

2. Daniel Imbert has published an excellent essay on the Hotel-de-Ville commissions but does not consider Puvis's paintings in detail. D. Imbert, "L'Hotel-de-Ville de Paris: Genese republicaine d'un grand decor," in Le Triomphe des mairies, exh. cat., Musae du Petit Palais, Paris, 1986.

3. See Shaw, 1994 (as in n. 1).

4. Price rightly points out that Denis wrote this dictum under the spell of Puvis's painting. See Maurice Denis. "Definition du neotraditionisme," in Theories, 1890-1910: Du Symbolisme et de Gauguin vers un nouvel ordre classique, 4th ed., Paris, 1920. The essay was initially published under the pseudonym Pierre Louis (Art et Critique, Aug. 1890.)

5. Since the centenary of Puvis's birth in 1924, when several books and articles took stock of his work and reputation, little has been published on him. The series of celebratory biographies which began in the late 19th century seems to have largely died out by the 1920s. Some fifty years ago, Robert Goldwater's "Puvis de Chavannes: Some Reasons for a Reputation," Art Bulletin, XXVIII, no. 1, 1946, 33-43, attempted to reassert the importance that Puvis held for his contemporaries. Yet even in doing so, Goldwater legitimized Puvis's by then marginal status, stating (33), "little that is today considered praiseworthy by either the aesthetic right or left has come out of the manner he established."

JENNIFER L. SHAW Department of Art Stanford University Stanford, Calif 94305

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