Imagining the motherland: Puvis de Chavannes, modernism, and the fantasy of France - Puvis de Chavannes' mural 'Summer'

Jennifer L. Shaw

If there is one word that, today, seems to express a noble and pure idea, it is the word patrie; governments know how to manipulate this word with singular cleverness, and men who sincerely detest tyrannies allow themselves, nevertheless, to be tyrannized without protest in the name of la patrie. Who would dare confess themselves nonpatriot?

- A-Ferdinand Herold, 1893(1)

What Rembrandt is to Holland, Puvis de Chavannes will be to France, he is ours; thanks to his "thusness," our art will become national again. - Alphonse Germain, 1891(2)

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes occupied a remarkable place in the culture of late-nineteenth-century France.(3) The quotations I have chosen as epigraphs give us some sense of both the admiration he elicited in the last two decades of the century and the complex political and aesthetic background into which Puvis's art must be set if we are to understand fully the significance of his work. There is no better place to begin than with the painting that was widely seen as Puvis's crowning achievement: Summer, 1891. This mural marked the culmination of an artistic career. Indeed, the critical responses it generated provide a window onto some of the most important aesthetic and political controversies of fin de siecle France. Summer was part of a decorative scheme for the Hotel de Ville in Paris, to which the artist contributed several works.(4) More than any of Puvis's murals, Summer was imagined by its viewers to embody a vision of France and to give a sense of Frenchness.

However, such a task was particularly difficult to achieve at a moment when French culture was marked by political division. The end of the nineteenth century was characterized by the emergence of both syndicalism on the Left and extreme forms of exclusionary nationalism on the Right. France saw the consolidation of trade unionism in the form of the Confederation Generale du Travail, but also the codification of the racist and anti-Semitic nationalism that would become Action Francaise. This was the time of anarchist bombs exploding in Paris and the beginning of the Dreyfus Affair. While the mid-1880s saw a return of both the extreme Right and Left in France to parliamentary political power, it was not merely that the different political factions disagreed on matters of policy.(5) The division went much deeper. Along with opposing political positions went very different conceptions of what Frenchness was. There was disagreement about which regions best represented France and which historical moments were authentically French. For example, those on the Right believed the French Revolution of 1789 was an aberration that had put the country on the wrong course. Republicanism seemed to them to be a form of government at war with the true nature of France. Others saw the Republic as the founding moment of the nation, the beginning of a tradition of democracy that defined Frenchness itself. During this period, the republican government did its best to instill its own version of Frenchness in the citizens of France. The centennial celebration of the French Revolution (which coincided with the Paris International Exposition in 1889) and the reconstruction and decoration of the Hotel de Ville in Paris were among the grand gestures employed as part of this ideological strategy. The state commissioned work by Puvis on both occasions.(6)

If the definition of France was an ideological battleground in the 1880s and 1890s, the visual and literary arts were polarized in ways that had complex and often contradictory relationships to the politics of the time. Naturalism was out of fashion in avant-garde circles, but so, too, were the old academic paradigms of idealization and transcendence. These academic paradigms were still promoted, however, by a legion of conservative critics with legitimist leanings. The development of a dealer-critic system, combined with a relaxation of publishing laws, led to the proliferation of avant-garde practices and the promotion of individual artists and styles by critics.(7) In this climate there was little agreement, even within self-consciously advanced artistic circles, about the direction painting should take. Artists and critics had strong opinions about the proper direction for art and the proper relationships between culture and politics, but even within particular avant-garde circles there were few simple correspondences between aesthetic and political positions. For example, critics who championed symbolist form paradoxically might hail from the extreme Left or from the neo-Christian Right.(8) What is particularly striking about this moment for our purposes, however, is that virtually all the artists and critics of the day admired Puvis de Chavannes. His admirers hailed from the political right, left, and center, from the avant-garde, the academy, and the state. Almost everyone agreed that Puvis de Chavannes was France's greatest national painter.(9)

Art historians have long been puzzled by Puvis's wide appeal. Until recently he was dismissed as a watered-down symbolist or academic hack (despite the fact that he had almost no academic training) - an artist who pleased everyone by inoffensive compromise. With the exceptions of Margaret Werth and Claudine Mitchell, art historians who have recently endeavored to write extensively about his work have, for the most part, not fully elaborated the intersections between aesthetics and politics that define it.(10) The catalogue of the Puvis de Chavannes exhibition held in Amsterdam in 1994 alludes to some of the issues that are central to Puvis's oeuvre: classicism, nationalism, and modernism.(11) However, because the catalogue maintains a monographic perspective it fails to change our perspective on the political and artistic importance of the artist's work.(12) Even after one has read the most recent published materials about Puvis de Chavannes, one is still left with the sense that Puvis de Chavannes's wide appeal in his own day derived not from aesthetic innovations but from aesthetic conservatism - from what Robert Goldwater described fifty years ago as "the neutral character of [Puvis's] style."(13)

I intend to show that nothing is further from the truth. On the contrary, I will argue that Puvis's unique pictorial mode, what the critic Alphonse Germain called his ipseisme (which we might translate as his "ipseity" or "thusness"), was responsible for the reverence that was paid to him. Germain was referring here to Puvis's style - to its particularity, its power, and its absolute difference from anything else on offer in the 1890s. And he implied that Puvis's painterly style would be the salvation of French art: "thanks to his 'thusness,' our art will become national again [grace a son ipseisme, notre art redevient national]." Puvis painted Summer during a time when critics regularly complained that the grand French tradition of public decoration, whose aim was to edify and educate the collectivity, was dying out. Germain was among a legion of critics who feared the death of a national idiom but saw a glimmer of hope in the work of Puvis de Chavannes. The republican critic Andre Michel concurred with Germain, saying that Puvis had "brought to French art, at a critical hour in its history, the eloquence for which it had the greatest need."(14) Ironically, fears about the end of public art in France emerged most strongly at the very moment when the state was commissioning more public decoration than ever before.

However, much republican-sponsored public art seemed to abandon the traditional task of education in favor of pure decorative pleasure.(15) Marie Jeannine Aquilino has argued that during this period there was "a shift from mural painting as public edification to decorative painting as a new and intimate mode of public art," which emphasized "individual subjectivity and feeling, personal fantasy and taste, and the pure aesthetic of the marketplace."(16) Puvis de Chavannes's murals stand apart from those large-scale public decorations that imitated the styles of market-oriented easel painting as well as from murals that held to the rules of academic correctness. The artist used large flat areas of color, rhythmic compositions, and suggestive subject matter to appeal to the individual subjectivities and feelings of viewers, and he also simultaneously maintained the aim of public edification. Puvis's pictorial mode injected new life into the tradition of idealism in public decoration. With his uniquely modern form of high art Puvis had, in the words of Michel, "saved idealism, which had fallen into disrepute, less as a result of attacks from its enemies than by the unintelligent and sterile formalism of its followers and official representatives."(17)

Puvis's Modernism

When Maurice Denis made his celebrated assertion, "before it is a battle horse, a nude woman, or an anecdote, a painting is a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order," he had Puvis de Chavannes's work in mind. This statement appeared in "Definition of neo-Traditionism," an essay in which Denis attempted, in terms slightly different from Michel's, to describe the ways in which "modern" painterly form might rejuvenate the tradition of French art. Denis's dictum was followed by a parody of an audience straining to see Puvis's easel painting Poor Fisherman (1879) as trompe l'oeil. Later in the essay Denis discussed Puvis's hemicycle for the Sorbonne, in order to critique the notion that the painting should be read as a legible allegory. Instead, he implied, its message and its power derived from the suggestiveness of its visual form.(18) Puvis de Chavannes's easel paintings and murals were Denis's chief examples of work whose meaning lay in the suggestiveness of formal qualities rather than in subject matter.

Puvis de Chavannes's work was thus central to the nineteenth-century formulations of modernism that would later give legitimacy to modernist formalism - the art historical approach to painting most famously elaborated by Clement Greenberg.(19) Denis's essay supports the notion that modernism encompassed a body of avant-garde practice that called on increasingly abstract form, and in doing so also brought to the fore the particular qualities of the chosen medium. However, when we look at Puvis's work in its original context, it becomes apparent that the characteristics of Puvis's painting that Denis was addressing had meaning far beyond those now often attributed to forrealist abstraction. The account of modernism suggested by Puvis's work differs, therefore, from that espoused by the late Greenberg and his followers, for whom the procedures of painterly practice ultimately culminated in hermetic self-referentiality and flatness. Rather than suggesting that a focus on the formal means of making paintings involved the rejection of history, culture, and politics, the qualities that Puvis's contemporaries saw to be characteristic of this abstraction - sensuousness, materiality, indefiniteness of rendering, suggestiveness - themselves had cultural, even political, significance. Close scrutiny of Puvis's work and its place within the wider cultural milieu thus allows us to enrich our understanding of modernism while maintaining an interest in its characteristic formalism.

The enthusiasm for Puvis's work - the widespread belief that his murals provided the best hope for a continuing tradition of high art in public decoration - derived from the ways in which his paintings used formal qualifies associated with avant-garde practices - large, flat areas of color and generalized, disjunctive forms - to mobilize individual subjectivity and personal fantasy for the purpose of public edification. By commissioning work from Puvis de Chavannes, the state attempted to forge a new aesthetic for public decoration that would put individual fantasy to the task of instilling a sense of collective identity in the viewing public. Puvis painted murals whose primary aim was to educate their audiences on national themes. Yet they are also characterized by a modernist formal mode. The murals thus provide a site where the social consequences of the address to the unconscious provided by modernist abstraction could be explicitly theorized and debated. And nowhere did this debate emerge with greater clarity than in the critical reception of Puvis's mural, Summer.

The decorative scheme for the Hotel de Ville included many works by many different artists. When the building was inaugurated critics complained that it was too eclectic and pandered too much to the tastes of the market.(20) It looked more like an exhibition of works for private consumption than a program meant to educate the public. However, even the building's harshest critics thought Puvis's murals provided something quite different from most of the works on display. In fact, Puvis de Chavannes's contributions were virtually the only paintings unanimously found to be worthy of praise. And none more than Summer, the mural destined to decorate the space around the doorway of the Salon du Zodiaque, a reception room leading onto the southern entrance hall.(21) An oil sketch that closely resembles the mural in both color and composition was completed in 1891 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. The final version of the mural [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED] was first exhibited at the Salon de la Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1891 and then again at the Durand-Ruel galleries later that year before being installed in its place at the Hotel de Ville.(22) Its pendant, Winter, 1892, was installed on the opposite wall the following year.

From the outset, critics responded to Summer's formal qualities. In Summer, Puvis embedded local distortions and disjunctions into an overarching rhythmic and coloristic design. This rhythmic interaction of color - as direct and sensual as Puvis ever gets - is surely meant to captivate the viewer. And the critics in 1891 were captivated. One critic, a Republican administrator and champion of the decorative arts, Louis de Fourcaud, explicitly linked Summers appeal to its simplified formal means, which were powerfully visible even from a distance: "The more distantly one perceives it," he suggested, "the more it attracts and enchants, if only by its masses and its radiant harmony." He saw the landscape as a series of alternating bands of color:

a very blue sky; distant violet coasts; a zone of tender green cut by a band of golden wheat; . . . a blue river that cuts across the landscape in a soft curve; some thin trees boarding the shore whose tops rise vaporously toward the azure; finally, personages enveloped in the whole form an integral part of this dreamed reality.(23)

This description is particularly interesting for the way the rhetorics of distance and desire intermix. The seductiveness of the painting is attributed to the play of light that results from the alternating masses of blue, violet, green, and gold stitched together by the curve of the fiver and the vertical tree trunks. The figures are the last to draw the critic in. From a distance, anyway, it is not the bodies but the sensual affect of color and the bold abstract pattern that attract and enchant. This emphasis on large areas of color and abstract patterning is an important element of Puvis's modernism; it is surely one of the things that made him such an important figure for painters like Matisse and Picasso. However, the pleasurable sensuality of the patterning itself had meaning. It lent the painting a dreamlike atmosphere. Fourcaud's description of Summer suggests how much, in response to Puvis's late public murals, the language of modernist formalism overlapped with a language of dream.

The dreamlike nature of the composition can also be attributed to the strange disjunctions that characterize Summer. The mural alternates back and forth between a sense of the flatness of the surface, established by the mural's decorative color patterning, and a sense of recession, which is achieved through the diminishing size of the figures. However, rather than presenting us with a seamless gradation into space, Puvis provides us with three distinct planes. The first is peopled by large figures that seem to have little narrative purpose. The second, which is situated at the vertical center of the canvas, is occupied in the wings by smaller figures - a fisherman in a boat on the left and a nursing mother on the right. Finally, just above the fisherman on the far banks of the river, the background is peopled by smaller and less clearly articulated figures who reap the harvest of the fields or lounge on the riverbank. The painting seems to shift perspectival registers as the viewer's eye moves from foreground to middle ground to background. In both the preliminary sketch and the final mural, the background scene is clearer than the foreground from a narrative point of view. We can identify the activities of fishing and reaping. In each painting Puvis exaggerates the rules of perspective to make the figures in the background much smaller and less accessible than they need logically be. In the final mural, the middle ground has been made slightly larger and more legible, emphasizing the figure of the mother nursing her child and the background figures have been slightly diminished. We almost have the sense that the action in the background is part of a different perspectival world from that of the foreground, both because of the disjunction in size and because of the difference in narrative strategy that exists between the two registers. Puvis had employed this compositional strategy a few years earlier in Ancient Vision, 1886 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED], part of the decorative scheme for the Musee des Beaux-Arts, Lyons, in which tiny white horses inhabit a background that seems impossibly distant from the foreground figures. He would use it again in Winter, 1892, placing tiny horses and riders at the hunt in the background. In the final version of Summer, there is an even greater discrepancy between the harvesters of the hay, who occupy this impossible distance, and the figures who lounge inexplicably in the foreground than there had been in the sketch.

In fact, many responses to the painting commented on the contrast between background and foreground. This underlines the importance of the compositional device Puvis employed here. The painting hinges on the disjunction between a background that, while comprehensible from a narrative point of view, is so small and so roughly painted that it verges on the illegible - seems always just out of reach - and a foreground that is impressively present, yet also disturbing. This contrast between the inaccessible and the disturbingly present was also considered to be part of the painting's language of dream. Furthermore, in Summer, figures are not arranged hierarchically or logically. Instead, they are dispersed in a circle that both echoes the movement of the river around the central grassy area and surrounds the gap formed by the doorway. Viewers are thus made physically to traverse the center of the picture, to be encircled by these figures as they cross from room to room.

Fourcaud's reaction to the mural provides some clues to the processes of identification and desire that were thought to be evoked by the painting. His description of the figures is particularly striking: "Enveloped in the whole," says Fourcaud, they "form an integral part of this dreamed reality." It is significant that Fourcaud used this sentence to sum up his analysis of the mural's alternating bands of color. Fourcaud had just been describing his own feelings of envelopment by the color and design of the composition - recounting, that is, how he was "attract[ed] and enchant[ed] . . . by its masses" of color and "radiant harmony." Fourcand's rhetoric thus involves a telling slippage between what the painting's composition does to the figures on display and what it does to Fourcaud himself, as a viewer. Who, after all, is dreaming the reality of the painting? Fourcaud the viewer, or the figures that occupy the space of the mural? Standing in front of the mural Fourcaud, like the figures, has the experience of being enveloped in the landscape.

This shift in Fourcaud's rhetoric between his experience of the painting and his description of the bodies on display becomes even more interesting when we begin to look closely at the figures themselves. If Summer is, in some sense, "dreamed" by Fourcaud (and by other viewers who experience it), that "dream" is dependent on both the painting's pleasures and its disjunctions. The critical responses to the painting make clear that those disjunctions hinge on the experience of viewing Puvis's strange configuration of the body. In Summer, incomplete or inexplicable bodies are set into what seems from a distance to be a pleasing composition aimed at delighting, rather than disturbing, its viewers. However, while the painting, taken as a whole, appears harmonious because of its decorative patterning, it is less so when the viewer focuses on individual figures.[24]

The foreground of the rental wraps around the frame of the door. Each side is dominated by nude or semidraped figures of a large size that encourages careful examination of their bodies. When one undertakes such an examination, the figures become increasingly strange, even unintelligible. To begin with, it seems as if their bodies have been brought in line with the overall design of the landscape, even at the risk of distortion. In the group to the left of the doorway [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED] the side of the woman playing with a child is stretched to an uncomfortable rigidity as it is made to parallel the vertical of the door frame. The figure who emerges from the water is perhaps even more difficult to read. Because it is seen from behind, we have no clear signs of this figure's gender. The general body type seems to hover between male and female. It is neither strongly muscular nor excessively curvaceous. The hair does not give much more information since it is neither short nor long. For several critics, the figure was masculine - the husband and father to the bathing mother and child."(25) For others, the figure was not only feminine but one of the most seductive of all the female figures.(26) Thus, in the area of the foreground that initially seems to promise a simple narrative of a family group bathing, this figure raises uncertainties about gender that destabilize the meaning of the scene. If nineteenth-century viewers had expectations of legible narrative and correct anatomy, these were certainly not fulfilled by Puvis in Summer. Instead, the painting set parameters for reading by hinting at narrative content, then raised questions rather than providing a story. The narrative was ultimately left open to individual interpretation.

The figures to the right side of the doorway [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 5 OMITTED] push this refusal of narrative closure to an even greater extreme. These three women seem to have no narrative purpose whatsoever and are even more impressively massive than those on the left. Their sheer size, amplified by their situation at eye level for the viewer who stands before the mural, is enough to command attention. One could argue that each of these figures is drying herself after a bath, but their gestures seem too bizarre and belabored for that explanation to carry much weight. If their gestures serve no logical purpose, neither do their positions suggest conventional allegorical meanings. They hold no allegorical attributes with which a viewer might be familiar. Instead, they exhibit various stages of dress and undress and a variety of body positions. A nude figure reclines on the bank, the line of her back echoing the edge of the shore. To her right, another female figure stands half draped, precariously clutching her left foot with her right arm in a strange and inexplicable self-reflexive pose. Yet another woman is seated and holds drapery above her head.

Especially in these three figures, Puvis aimed to make the body evocative while maintaining decorum in a public mural. Each of the three bodies is deliberately painted so as to look indeterminate and strange. For example, instead of presenting her body as a harmonious whole, the reclining woman threatens to decompose into ungainly parts. Her arm looks cut off at the elbow and her head looks almost detached. It is impossible to decide exactly where her lower legs sit in relation to her huge hips and torso. Puvis outlines her body starkly, but this line distorts rather than idealizes her form, emphasizing even more the body's disjointedness. Within the boundaries of this outline the artist uses modeling, light, and shadow in ways that work against their conventional functions. The upper half of her body is characterized by a confusing play of light and shadow: the side of her shoulder could as easily be her armpit. It is difficult to determine the position of her breast in relation to her head. The more one looks, the more the side of her body becomes a shadowy field stretched and magnified in size to emphasize its blankness and indeterminacy.

Similar difficulties arise with the other two figures. For example, the arms and feet of the standing figure seem to stretch and fall away as they are aligned with her massive body. They are elongated to the point of distortion. The modeling of the standing figure's chest, shoulders, and head does less to define her body than to obscure it. The breasts look almost detached. It is impossible to determine the relationship between head and shoulders. In the seated figure shadows obscure the relationship between arms and torso, between head and neck.

The figures are positioned in a rhythmic interaction with each other and with the landscape. This whole section of the mural is composed of a series of bodily echoes that send the eye from figure to figure and encourage us to make comparisons between them. For example, the seated figure's gesture, arms over head, echoes that of the reclining figure. The lower half of the seated figure's right leg is aligned with the thigh of the reclining figure. The lower half of the seated figure's left leg parallels the standing figure's down-stretched arm. The standing figure's limbs are arranged in a series of verticals and angles that echo the edge of the canvas, the frame of the door, and the angled limbs of the other two women. This repetition of generalized body types - naked and half draped, hair held up and hair let down, standing and sitting and reclining - seems to be more about portraying the body as a site for imaginative theme and variation than a vehicle for narrative or allegorical knowledge.(27) The figures evoke bodiliness without specifying it too concretely - bodiliness that is instinctive, in which some deep-seated and innate principle, rather than knowledge and convention, governs the interactions between figures and landscape.

All three figures, with their classical drapery and bather's poses, invoke a tradition of depicting the female body that aims at idealization. Yet none of them provides the sense that the body has been mastered by the artist and presented in an idealized form to the viewer. The more one looks at these figures, the more one wants to look, and the more one looks, the more disturbing they become. Ultimately, one feels a desire to compensate, in the mind's eye, for these indeterminacies - to find some way of imagining these bodies whole again. This kind of strange undecidability of the body permeates Puvis's work. Critics had already established a mode of reading Puvis's figures that took into account their evocative nature, even made it central. In 1884, for example, in response to Puvis's murals for the Musee des Beaux-Arts, Lyons, the critic Henri Fouquier stated, "Instead of searching for an ideal the artist contents himself with evoking the notion in our minds. He leaves us, in sum, to make threequarters of the painting."(28) Gustave Geffroy put the matter even more clearly: "Puvis de Chavannes's willed abbreviations are not drawing errors, but voluntary and necessary sacrifices. Nothing has been precisely indicated in the bodies and clothing of these noble young women who live only in our imagination."(29) Thinking back to Fourcaud's identification with the figures, interesting questions emerge. What, after all, would it mean to identify with figures such as these?

When the painting was exhibited at the Salon, the critics who complained about the three women used terms that indicate the problematic nature of Puvis's configuration of the body. One critic described the women as "too athletic in their richness."(30) Another thought they were, "constructed . . . with a vigor that sometimes seems to have gone too far."(31) These critics react as if they were overwhelmed by this abundance of distorted and undifferentiated matter-cumflesh. Not surprisingly, conservative academic critics were the most hostile both to Puvis's painting and to the general republican message of the Hotel de Ville as a democratic gathering place. They were thus also most likely to give detailed descriptions of the ways in which the composition was incoherent. The royalist critic Claudius Lavergne predictably denigrated Puvis's "trees and bathers," which were "only decorative if we agree to observe them from a distance."(32) He mocked the praise showered on the artist by republican critics. Critics like Lavergne, who wrote for royalist newspapers, still defended the strict academic paradigms for high art that remained associated with the academy and the institute. Despite the fact that the state had taken control of the academy in the mid-1860s, extremely conservative critics still championed a vulgarized and simplified version of old academic paradigms for art. In a sense these paradigms seemed to be some of the last remnants of pre-Revolutionary culture, and legitimist critics wanted to preserve them at all costs.(33)

Such critics were generally hostile to republican aesthetics, which they believed promoted base materialism rather than art aimed at transcending the material world through the cultivation of ideal form. At the end of the nineteenth century, academic aesthetic theory had degenerated into an extreme and conservative form of idealism. The last bastions of academic theory were dominated by critics like Lavergne, who held to a peculiar mixture of neo-Kantian ideas of aesthetic disinterestedness (in which the experience of beauty was divorced completely from physical desire and pleasure) and traditional notions that art should be the servant of morality. Both parts of this unstable amalgam depended on the fiction that aesthetic ordering would transform the vulgarities of the physical world into an ideal form with a moral message.(34) The concept of ideal form was associated with both spirituality and esprit, that is, with mind as opposed to body. Underlying all of this was a belief in the ability of the mind to transcend the physicality of the body and to keep the phantasmic elements of bodily pleasures under intellectual control. This paradigm for high art, which had been most notably described by Charles Blanc, imagined human subjectivity (of healthy French males anyway) as autonomous and unified, capable of intuiting the Ideal via high art through an act of the intellect.(35) By the late nineteenth century, this vision of the relationship between subjectivity and representation was sustained by those, like Lavergne, who saw themselves as the upholders of tradition.

Given Puvis's manner of painting the body, it is not surprising that Lavergne thought Summer was a failure. Two years prior to his comments on Summer, Lavergne had launched a critique of Puvis's mural for the New Sorbonne that was more hostile and that made even clearer the degree to which aesthetics - and aesthetic idealisms in particular - had become sites of battle with political significance:

When M. Jules Ferry conferred upon M. Puvis de Chavannes the title: Knight of the ideal, of what had he wanted to speak? It must have been the opportunist ideal. Well! I declare that the opportunist ideal is much too floury [enfarine] for my consumption; I myself remain firmly in favor of the intransigent ideal.

From which it follows that if I come to touch upon decorative painting, upon the ideal, upon the serenity of M. Puvis de Chavannes, I will raise the opposition of the liberal conservative factions, those more or less united on the Left, and those supporting universal suffrage; it's serious! still, that is what awaits me, I know it, but a person forewarned is equal to four who are ignorant.(36)

Lavergne's comment about Puvis de Chavannes is aimed at invoking and critiquing admiration for Puvis that came from the political center and left - admiration such as that voiced by Michel, who felt that Puvis's murals might be able to rejuvenate the idealism that had become stale in the hands of academic practitioners. Lavergne names as the republican admirer of Puvis no one less than Jules Ferry, the man who, as Minister of Education during the early 1880s, had been responsible for a series of reforms that wrested control of education from the Catholic church and put it in the hands of the state.(37) Such reforms were, of course, anathema to this ultramontaine Catholic critic. Lavergne opposed his own l'ideal intransigeant - a form of idealism derived from the steadfast traditions of academic high art - to Ferry's ideal opportuniste, a vision of the ideal at odds with this academic tradition and, like Ferry's educational forms, aligned with the secularizing and materialist impetus of republican philosophy. Lavergne described the opportunist ideal as too "enfarine" for his consumption. On one level the term enfarine, which means floury but can also mean "mealy-mouthed" or "smattered" with something, is meant to belittle opportunism as a doctrine without principles. Yet the term also evokes the materiality of substances meant for bodily consumption, in particular the flour (la farine) that makes the daily bread. With the description "enfarine," Lavergne opposes the spirituality of his intransigent ideal to the materiality, even materialism, of republican aesthetics, which he characterizes using metaphors for a body that consumes in accordance with its basic needs. This metaphorics of the body immediately makes clear that Ferry's version of the ideal is diametrically opposed to Lavergne's. After all, for Lavergne, idealization was meant to lead to transcendence of the mere physicality of the world and point to higher truths. Lavergne seems to have felt that Puvis's aesthetic was doing to high art what Ferry's reforms were doing to French culture: transforming them from a spiritual into a material enterprise. Indeed, the quotation suggests that Puvis's very mode of representation struck Lavergne as the visualization of a challenge to an aesthetic epistemology guaranteed by God.

Alphonse de Calonne, who wrote for another royalist newspaper, Le Soleil, was also hostile to the mural. He described Summer as a dream and contrasted its dreamlike composition with the clear intellectual communication of ideas he expected from decorative allegory. However, Calonne's vituperative rhetoric was not just a defense of worn-out formulas for academic composition. In its most extreme invective Calonne's language spoke eloquently of the anxiety that accompanied the painting's evocation of fantasy. The figures in Summer, he said, did not "lift themselves from the background." They were "feeble and limp." "They pass as if in a dream without vigor or movement." Distinctions between things were becoming blurred, he suggested, just as they are in dreams. Even worse, the overall composition did not display the orderly and unified thought expected of high art. Rather than making a clear and hierarchical composition, Puvis dispersed his figures across the canvas: "He doesn't compose," said Calonne, "he scatters the figures. Never a mass, never a group, nothing but isolated personages." The problem was not just Puvis's disregard for academic convention. Calonne was also worried about the effect these figures might have on their viewers, for Puvis's figures did not use conventional gestures to transmit clearly legible ideas. Instead, the role of the figures was provocative and indeterminate. Calonne implies that their inability to signify clearly will encourage each individual viewer's fantasy. Here is Calonne, describing the artist's refusal to direct the painting's meaning using conventional strategies:

He places them on the canvas for the viewer, not for the action, not to create a subject to be interpreted, not to bring an idea to light. Everything is nebulous in thought and execution. In addition, his paintings are enigmatic and empty. If he uses allegories, which is the defining character of his compositions, he imagines them to be obscure, hidden, even shadowy. . . . [emphasis added]38

This passage contrasts the legibility and clarity that the critic expects from high art with the indeterminacy he feels Puvis's painting actually delivers. The point of the painting, Calonne suggests, is not to portray an action with a moral message or to "bring an idea to light" that might edify the viewer. Rather than working together to secure a definite meaning, the figures are depicted "for the viewer." Responsibility for the meaning of the work is transferred, the critic implies, from artist to audience. And it is the viewer who ultimately supplies meanings for the allegorical body. What Puvis gives instead of the usual fare is a combination of indeterminacy and sensuality that encourages a far greater range of individual response than this critic thinks is wise.

The lack of differentiation between figure and ground, the shadowiness, even "emptiness" of the canvas - these are descriptions of Puvis's tendency toward abstraction. Clearly, this pictorial mode threatened to provoke viewers' imaginative processes rather than telling them what to think. And the processes that were set in motion had less to do with intellect as Calonne conceived it than with sensation, memory, and desire. To admit this play of fantasy as a legitimate effect of high art would have been to acknowledge that intellect and desire were intertwined. Thus Calonne, who proffered the aesthetic views of a royalist paper invested in upholding the academic tenets of aesthetic disinterestedness, could not fully admit the power of Puvis's mural; to do so would lend legitimacy to materialist aesthetics and to all that they implied about human subjectivity.

Yet, even this conservative critic, who inveighed against Summer's compositional incoherences, had to grant the pleasures afforded by the painting. He attributed these to the very qualifies he had been denouncing. Suddenly, in the midst of his complaints, the disgruntled critic waxed poetic and pointed metaphorically to the very absences he had complained about. "It seems," he said, "that one [has exited] from an infernal music, and enter[ed] into an imaginary country where even the birds themselves refuse to sing."(39) Despite his academic bias, Calonne recognized that Summer's rhythmic sensual structuring transported him into an "imaginary country" - a world of the imagination. Like so many other critics, he was seduced by the dreamlike structure of Summer. At the same time, he was uncomfortable with its effects on him - with the way it asked him to fill in the imaginary spaces left by the mural, which he poetically described as an emptiness left by silent birds. Summarizing the painting Calonne declared, "It is a lot, but it is not enough."

While he wanted to dismiss Puvis's painting for political reasons, Calonne identified and described Puvis's mode of address rather accurately. Not only was he able to link Puvis's compositional and painterly strategies to the seduction of the viewer, but he also made clear, through the conflicted nature of his own rhetoric, the movement in Puvis's work between pleasure and disturbance. The very tone of the criticism admits the sensual pleasure provided by Summer and suggests a longing that is provoked by the way the figures themselves ultimately undermine that initial pleasure, providing in its place a sense of disturbance and a desire to regain the sensual plenitude that the painting initially (and from a distance) proffered. This double address to the viewer - this embedding of distorted and evocative bodies into an overall decorative patterning - is one of the key aspects of Puvis's painterly mode. It both defines his modernism and provides his work's powerful address to the imagination. It is of course true that any painting, and especially any painting of the body, will ultimately speak to the unconscious desires of its viewers. However, Puvis's painting wears its fantasy on its sleeve. It does not even attempt to maintain the fiction that viewing should lead to knowledge and edification. Instead, as the critical responses to it will continue to make clear, it aims straight for the phantasmic elements of imaginative processes. And this, as was recognized even in Puvis's own day, was the very property that made Puvis de Chavannes such a powerful public painter.

Puvis's paintings were part of a general cultural trend in which the classical goals of order, clarity, unity, hierarchy, and idealization that had been associated with both literary and visual academicism and tradition were replaced by modes of representation that focused instead on the sensuousness and materiality of the work. Aesthetics in the 1890s were characterized by a widespread debate over the proper direction for representation that revolved around these terms: order, clarity, unity, hierarchy, tradition, idealization versus sensuousness, materiality, indefiniteness, fantasy. This debate encompassed both literary and visual production. Symbolist poetry's stress on repeated sounds and rhythms, Stephane Mallarme's use of the blank page as a medium in itself, the experiments in increased abstraction carried out by painters of the avant-garde, all of these were characterized as modern by Puvis's contemporaries not because of their self-referentiality but because of their emphasis on sensuousness and materiality and the tendency of these to encourage the proliferation of fantasy in their audiences. The very writers and poets who battled over these terms in the literary realm among themselves also wrote and spoke about Puvis's work.(40)

It is of course true that associating academic practice with order, clarity, and idealization and modernism with sensuousness, materiality, indeterminacy, and fantasy involves an oversimplification of a complex history of representation in which the terms on each side of the opposition often intermix. It would be impossible to trace that entire history here. What is important for our purposes, however, is the fact that in the last decades of the century the dissolution of the academy, the increased privatization of artistic production, and the developing interest in new psychological paradigms meant that the artistic and literary field was polarized around these oppositions. Looking at the way they played themselves out in the discourse surrounding Puvis's work helps us to understand how modernism itself was conceived at the very moment when its most basic terms were being formulated by people like Maurice Denis.

It is not enough, therefore, to correct the outworn formulas of modernist art history by turning our attention back to subject matter, which formalists have ignored.(41) We must also ask about the social meanings of the formal properties themselves. And, to oversimplify a bit, the materiality and sensuousness of modernist form, and its refusal to offer precise meanings, were seen by Puvis's contemporaries to present a particularly powerful challenge to old paradigms of representation. The problems modernist form posed for classical paradigms of representation corresponded with, reinforced, indeed, were part and parcel of broader challenges to the notion of the autonomous human subject that were implied by those paradigms. Modernist form was itself intimately linked with a general reconceptualization of human subjectivity that took place with what Henri Ellenberger has called the "discovery of the unconscious."(42)

In order to understand fully the relationship between Puvis's particular form of modernist aesthetics and the politics of the day, we must also understand the political and ideological role played by this discovery of the unconscious in the kinds of aesthetic and political discourse that were amenable to the state. It is neither anachronistic nor ahistorical to speak of the unconscious in the current context. At the very moment when Puvis was painting his murals, the "discovery of the unconscious" was taking place in France.(43) Thus, by 1891, the same year Summer was first exhibited at the Salon, the social philosopher Alfred Fouillee could summarize recent psychological discoveries in the Revue des Deux Mondes by stating definitively, "Contemporary psychology has shattered the illusion of a bounded, impenetrable and absolutely autonomous ego."(44) Along with the discovery of the unconscious came a wholesale reconsideration of the structures of human subjectivity, which had profound consequences for contemporary politics and aesthetics and was integral to the development of modernism.(45)

The most explicit theorization by Puvis's contemporaries of an aesthetics that bypassed intellectual conventions and aimed straight at the unconscious came from the republican philosophers Jean-Marie Guyau and Alfred Fouillee. Their social theory was aimed at achieving republican solidarity.(46) In fact, they proposed that art was a tool that could be used to transform unconscious desire from a source of anxiety into a source of political power. In the early 1880s, Guyau challenged the notion, which dominated academic aesthetic theory at the time, that high art provided an aesthetically disinterested intellectual experience. In Les problemes de l'esthetique contemporaine, Guyau offered a version of aesthetics that recognized sensation, pleasure, and desire as integral to the experience of art:

In sum, nothing is more inexact than the complete opposition . . . between the feeling of the beautiful and desire: that which is beautiful is desirable by the same criteria. . . . There is no aesthetic emotion that does not awaken in us a multitude of desires and needs which are more or less unconscious. . . . Certain musical phrases . . . are a sort of loving caress which, so to speak, give birth to a kiss on our mouths. . . . There is pleasure in desire itself and the period of desire often leaves us with a state of mind that is more delicious than sexual pleasure [la jouissance]. (Guyau, 27-28)

Guyau's primary argument contested the notion that aesthetic contemplation was disinterested and consciously controlled and that it transcended desire. Such a view, he believed, turned art into an intellectual game, abstracted it from the material world, and thus trivialized it. Guyau's argument was directly pitted against philosophical theories that posited an absolute and transcendent form of beauty. These theories, of course, underpinned nineteenth-century academic aesthetic theory of the kind critics like Lavergne championed.(47) Rather than conceiving art as an attempt to grasp and make a moral example of transcendent and absolute forms of beauty, Guyau explicitly acknowledged a sexual component in the desire through which works were created and received: "Certainly, art is in large part a transformation of love, which is to say of the most fundamental needs of our being. To consider aesthetic feeling independent of the sexual instinct and its evolution thus seems to us . . . superficial. . . ." (23). Guyau's focus on the unconscious components of aesthetic reception, as well as the links he makes between the unconscious and sexual instincts, drives, and desires form the unconscious base of a continuum of feelings of pleasure that may be evoked, he suggests, by the experience of works of art.

However, unlike many aesthetic theoreticians of this period, Guyau is not worried about the unknowable and uncontrollable nature of aesthetic desire. Rather, Guyau suggests that art's powerful address to the unconscious should be used for political purposes to unite viewers "in the same pleasure" (la meme jouissance). Guyau's project was to use desire as a tool of morality and national solidarity. However, he was also well aware of the problem his reintegration of desire into aesthetics would cause for many of his contemporaries. If the aesthetic experience was not about disinterested contemplation, what would prevent it from being nothing more than a spur to individual fantasy with the potential to release unconscious forces beyond anyone's power to control? Introducing desire as a component of intellectual processes seemed to threaten a total dissolution of the structures of civilization.(48) Guyau combated such challenges to his aesthetics by dismissing the notion that desire and pleasure are necessarily egoistic. Instead, Guyau imagined desire as the force that could most profoundly bond viewers together: "How can one object that desire is essentially egoistic and divides human beings, when aesthetic pleasure always brings them together in the same jouissance and unites them? We refuse to admit the irremediable egoism of desire and the pleasures that go with it. . . ."(49) According to Guyau, instilling solidarity would require the manipulation of the popular will. This could be achieved if all members of the public could be made to desire the same things. However, achieving this concordance of desire would require a manipulation not of conscious reason but of "sensations" and "sentiments." Guyau's student Alfred Fouillee(50) summed up this view of the socializing potential of desire in an introduction to Guyau's L'art au point de vue sociologique:

. . . the social union toward which metaphysics, morality, and the science of education have tended is not yet achieved: so far there is only a community of ideas and wills; it remains to establish an actual community of sensations and feeling; in order to assure social synergy, we must produce social sympathy: this is the role of great art, art considered from a sociological point of view. Sensations and feelings are, in the beginning, what divides men the most . . . nevertheless, there is a means of socializing them and rendering them identical for the most part from individual to individual: it is art. From the incoherent and discordant depths of individual sensations and feelings, art disengages an ensemble of sensations and sentiments that can be held in common by everyone at once . . . and that can give rise to a concordance of pleasures [jouissances]. And the characteristic of these pleasures is that they do not exclude one another, in the manner of egoistic pleasures [plaisirs egoistes], but are, on the contrary, in essential "solidarity."(51)

At the heart of Guyau's theory, then, was the problem of how to integrate individual will into collective will, how to bridge that gap between individual sensations, feelings, and needs and collective necessity. And it was art's unique potential to influence the unconscious that seemed to provide the solution:

. . . art lifts the individual from his own life to make him partake in the life of the whole, not only through the communion of ideas and beliefs, or by the mere communion of wills and actions, but by the very communion of sensations and feelings. . . . all art is a means of social concord, which is more profound than any other; because to think [penset] in the same manner is already a lot to achieve, but it is not yet enough to make us desire [vouloir] in the same manner: the great secret is to make us feel [sentir] in the same manner, and that is the marvel that art accomplishes.(52)

Fouillee thus implied that the French state should make use of the new understandings of subjectivity, which were the result of the psychological research it had fostered. As we saw from his summary of the state of psychological research in France, Fouillee believed that the discovery of the unconscious showed that the moi was not autonomous, and that the intellect was always already structured by desire.(53) Yet if the subject was decentered by desire, Fouillee suggested, why not capitalize on this fact? Why not use works of art to instill a concordance of feelings and desires? Art's powerful address to unconscious desires through the senses could be used, he and Guyau maintained, to instill a sense of solidarity at the deepest levels of the psyche by making viewers "feel in the same manner." Embedded in Fouillee's rhetoric is a movement from conscious intellect to sensation and desire. And the passage from intellect to feeling is also the defining feature of Puvis's revision of academic definitions of the aesthetic that had previously dominated public painting.

Imagining the Motherland

Puvis de Chavannes's murals took the French nation as their subject matter. However, they did not depict France specifically and directly. If they had, the breadth of their appeal would have been lost. Instead, they spurred individual desires for and fantasies of France. What is particularly important to understand about this moment is the extreme degree of self-consciousness that existed about France's self-definition. During this period it was generally acknowledged that nationhood was historically contingent. As one of Puvis's close friends, Ernest Renan, famously put it, "The modern nation is a historical outcome brought forth by a series of facts converging in the same direction . . . it is the glory of France to have, through the French Revolution, proclaimed that the nation exists in itself."(54) By this Renan meant that the nation was not (as legitimists would have it) a matter of dynasty set up by divine right. Neither, claimed Renan, was the nation simply a result of common race, language, or religion. Instead, it was a matter of a sense of belonging felt by its citizens, and a matter of the desire of those citizens to participate in nationhood. This sense of belonging was not just a result of conscious consent. It went much deeper; it was, in fact, almost impossible to articulate in words: "A nation," said Renan, "is a soul [ame], a spiritual principle" (54). Renan invoked soul and spirit not to point to specifically religious content. On the contrary (and writing slightly before the notion of the unconscious had been adequately formulated), Renan was searching for a vocabulary that would suggest the depth of feeling involved in a sense of national belonging. As he attempted to define this principle he continually returned to a language of desire: "the desire to live together, the will to continue to value the received heritage . . . we have chased from politics metaphysical and theological abstractions. What is left after that? Man is left, his desires, his needs. . . ." (pp. 54-55).

Renan was already formulating in the second half of the nineteenth century what has by now become, thanks to Benedict Anderson, a classic formulation of theories of nation:

. . . the nation . . . is an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. Renan referred to this imagining in his suavely backhanded way when he wrote that "Or l'essence d'une nation est que tousles individus aient beaucoup de choses en commun, et aussi que tous aient oublie bien des choses." [The essence of a nation is that all the individuals have many things in common, and also have forgotten many things.](55)

Like Anderson, I want to highlight this notion of the imaginary component of nation-ness to emphasize the fact that an awareness of that imaginary component existed in Puvis's day and was cultivated by those with ideological purposes. First and foremost among them was the republican government, which was actively consolidating its hold on notions of Frenchness in the face of rivals on both the Right and the Left.(56) Renan's words "spirit" and "soul," Anderson's evocation of the term imagination - each of these designates a realm of subjectivity for which no adequate description seemed to exist. And each points us to processes of mind that are more or less unconscious. Frenchness only existed to the degree that it commanded belief, and inevitably it did so to varying degrees and with different content in the individuals who made up France. This belief was not simply consciously chosen. Rather, it depended on memory and forgetting, and on those unconscious processes, those desires and identifications that were beyond conscious control and that made a sense of belonging seem to inhabit the very depths of subjectivity.(57)

Anderson's account of nationness is also valuable for its powerful claim that nations are distinguished from one another by "the style in which they were imagined" (15). Puvis de Chavanne's "style" of depicting the nation has much to tell us about the ways that France was imagined at the end of the century. Puvis's painterly mode, like Renan's description of Frenchness, depended as much on forgetting as on remembering. We have already begun to see how this dialectic of forgetting and imagining works in Summer in the shadowy and incomplete aspects of narrative and bodily depictions and the imaginative processes they spurred. Indeed, the very location of the mural already suggests the appropriateness of this strange mnemic parameter. What better place for such a mural to be situated than in a building that was itself a monument to this style of imagining: the Httel de Ville of Paris?

The Hotel de Ville was burned during the Paris Commune, 1871, in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, at the very moment when the Third Republic itself was established. In the 1880s it was reconstructed by republican administrations wishing to promote the success of the republican state and to wipe away the memory of the German occupation of Paris and the violence of the Communard experiment. Conservative opponents of the Republic pointed to the Commune as an example of the dangers of revolutionary politics whose origins lay in 1789. For republicans, on the other hand, the Commune was, by the end of the century, generally regarded as an aberration in the history of democratic politics.(58) The resurrection of the Hotel de Ville gave the state an opportunity to temper the events that reminded the nation of division and trauma. The opportunist Republic rebuilt the Hotel de Ville in the image of its predecessor, only on a grander scale. The new building represented continuity with the past in which 1870-71 had been edited out and prospects for a future France no longer marked by those traumas? Integral to this reconstruction was a decorative campaign in which Puvis and many other artists participated.(60) The commission overseeing the decoration agreed "that all works of art be the direct expression of nature, free from allegory and myth, and committed to casting off the past."(61) Thus, the official mandate for the building itself included a rejection of the academic forms of allegory and myth and a forward-looking agenda in keeping with the purpose of the reconstruction as a whole.

In addition, the building was a monument to national unity. Despite the cultural distance between Paris and the rest of France, it was meant to be not just the place where Parisians could gain access to their municipal government but also a town hall in which the entire population could take part in Frenchness.(62) The reconstruction of the Hotel de Ville was thus a tool in the implementation of an ideology of civic participation promoted by the Republic. Puvis was by now famous for the patriotic images of Paris he had painted during the war and the Commune.(63) He was ardently antiGerman and anti-Communard.(64) The commission for the new Hotel de Ville surely held a special significance for the artist. And it did for the state as well. The decoration was the visual seal healing the wounds to the collective body of France, a site for imagining France while forgetting that the Commune and the Franco-Prussian War had ever taken place.

So far I have claimed that imagining and forgetting go hand in hand, both in the structure of Puvis's paintings and in the more general terms by which France imagined itself through the Hotel de Ville. I still need to elaborate this claim through an analysis of Summer. Before I begin this analysis, however, I want to make it clear that what I am calling a style of national imagining should be understood as historically contingent. The kind of imagining I will elaborate is not just a product of Puvis's painterly style but is dependent on wider cultural phenomena - a deep desire for national unity in a time of instability and division, the lingering need to come to terms with the humiliations of 1870-71, and the sense, which infiltrated virtually all realms of culture at this moment, that human subjectivity itself was far from autonomous, that human subjects were moved by things to which they had no conscious access, and that many of these were found in the realms of representation and the arts. Without this conjunction of circumstances Puvis's painting could never have meant as much as it did.

The comments of conservative academic critics who complained about Puvis's painterly mode have provided us with insight into some of the ways Puvis's modernism worked. We still need, however, to unpack the kinds of fantasy that critics less resistant to the murals thought Summer opened up for its viewers. Many of them acknowledged the strange effect the painting had upon them and they, like Calonne, used particularly evocative language to describe the mural. However, the majority of critics viewed the very same qualities that were the source of Calonne's dissatisfaction with Puvis's mural as positive qualities. The often overdetermined critical rhetoric used to describe the mural demonstrates how badly the critics wanted to see in Summer a vision of France as a plentiful land without dissonance of any kind. Many thought the bodies of the three female figures epitomized the general theme of the painting. One critic, for example, said Summer was a scene of both painterly and material plenitude - replete with "infinite depth, all exuberant with vigor," which pictured "warm light," "harvesters who load wheat on an overflowing cart," and "fishermen tending their nets."(65) He described the massiveness of the female bodies as a metaphor for the fertility and plenitude of the landscape. In particular, the "supremely beautiful" standing woman who has an "abundant torso" becomes an emblem of "summer itself, in all its majesty." In a striking choice of vocabulary, this critic characterized the woman's torso as "plantureux" (abundant, fertile, rich) - a word that could equally apply to the landscape and which is commonly used to describe a meal (as in the phrase "un repas plantureux").(66)

Such descriptions of the fertility and plenitude of Summer are commonly matched by attributions of sensual plenitude to its form. We have already seen one example of this in Fourcaud's account of the painting's enchanting and radiant harmonies. Fourcaud provides just one example of an extremely common response, which emphasizes the feeling of the viewers as they stand before Summer. Another critic commented that the mural "would not suffice to convince our minds if our eyes did not also get their due thanks to an incomparable sense of harmony and a voluptuous concordance of tones."(67) This passage underlines the extent to which the power of Puvis's paintings was attributed to those aspects of his painterly mode that should be aligned with modernism - the large expanses of color and decorative patterning that Fourcaud had explicated in his account of the painting. Furthermore, it makes clear that Guyau's and Fouillee's theorizations of the importance of feeling as a component of aesthetic address was already integral to art criticism of the period. Like Fouillee, this critic, Alfred Ernst, who was writing for the republican paper Le Siecle, described the necessity that a painting make its viewers feel in the same way before it could be convincing, for it was only through this emphasis on the sensual aspects of light and paint (on the "voluptuous concordance of tones") that the sense of design was achieved.

Moreover, these comments indicate that color was imagined by Puvis's critics to offer the most direct address to feeling. Significantly, all of the critics who commented on it associated color with fantasies of an enveloping caress - "so sweet," said one writer, "and yet so powerful!"(68) The same critic who commented on the standing woman's "torse plantureux" also attributed particular meanings to the feeling of sensual plenitude that the painting provided: "It is experienced like a caress. . . . once more it is this same enveloping poetry of the master that we find again and which cradles us [que nous retrouvons et qui nous berce]"(69) In addition to attributing the role of nourishing and nurturing to the women in the foreground, this critic described the painting itself as a place where something akin to an enveloping and cradling maternal body can be reexperienced. Both the form and subject matter of Puvis's Summer led critics to link the landscape pictured in Summer, the landscape of France, to a fantasy of the maternal body: found again, voluptuous, abundant, enveloping, nourishing, cradling. It is fitting that critics who wanted to promote the unifying message of Puvis's painting called on such maternal rhetoric. In using this metaphorics of the mother to describe Summer, the critics were evoking a fantasy of origins that cut across political affinity, race, class, and gender to the degree that everyone who exists has been born to a woman.(70)

The analogy between Summer and the maternal body was also encouraged by another element of the painting. Directly behind the standing figure, reclining at the far edge of the near bank, a woman nurses an infant. Through this figure the abundance of the French landscape is linked with the productivity of the female body in no uncertain terms. A formal echo is established between the bounteous hay cart in the background [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 6 OMITTED] and the nursing woman before the bush in the middle ground [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 7 OMITTED]. Thus, the analogy between the productivity of the earth and the fruitfulness of the female body is made plain. Though relatively small, the nursing mother, like the harvesting figures, was often remarked on by the critics. One critic made the parallel between the mother and earth, harvesters and child clear: "There is a young woman who nurses her child; in addition, the harvesters reap the hay; and a sense of the calm nature extends throughout this pleasant countryside. . . ."(71) The sequence of the description, from the suckling infant to the gathering of hay, makes the final phrase seem like a summary of the first two. Summer thus provoked in the critics a vision of the French landscape as a nourishing, maternal power.

What needs to be emphasized, however, is the overdetermined nature of all the rhetoric of the maternal we have seen so far. Summer was particularly convincing as an image of nation because it combined the gaps, distortions, and absences I have already pointed to within an overall pleasurable design. The painting set up expectations of pleasure and abundance and mimicked the maternal embrace through its initial, sensual address. It reinforced those associations through its subject matter. But it also withdrew that comfort by disturbing conventional viewing patterns in its deployment of figures. It asked its viewers to react to both the pleasures and the disturbances on the level of feeling. The mural demanded that its viewers submit to the sensual pleasures of the design, that they identify with the stretches and pulls of the bodies on display, and that they compensate for the bodily distortion of Puvis's figures through their own individual imaginations. The disturbing qualities of the painting played dialectically off its pleasurable aspects to set up a desire for a plenitude that could never quite be achieved. That plenitude was literalized by Puvis in the middle ground and in the distant landscape and through these elements was implied to be a property of France itself. It was this France that viewers were encouraged to desire. If Calonne and others made clear the extent to which the insufficiencies of the painting called for imaginative compensation on the part of its viewers, the descriptions I have just given of the painting are examples of such compensation. They are descriptions of the painting as a dream - or as Fourcaud put it, a "dreamed reality" - a "reality" dreamed by the critics themselves. But not without the guidance of Puvis, who set the parameters of their dreams through a careful choice of subject matter.

The depth and poignancy of the response to Summer could never have been evoked if this subject matter had been more overt - if, for example, we had been given one big nursing mother on a pedestal formed by a hay cart in the foreground. This would have turned the experience of Summer into the kind of intellectual game of decoding allegory or narrative that viewers expected from decorative painting cycles. Instead, the very disjunctions, the gaps in meaning, ultimately provided the spur to the flights of imagination that gave the painting its power, that evoked in its viewers a desire to be cradled by mother France. Puvis did not tell his viewers, "You belong to France." He inspired in his viewers a feeling of desire for mother France. Describing Puvis's style in the year Summer was painted, Alphonse Germain, the critic who was so convinced that the artist's "ipseisme" would be responsible for making French art "national again," chose the term "the indecipherable" [l'indechiffrable] to describe Puvis's style: "he enigmatizes so perfectly . . . that no one performing pictorial exegesis would know how to fathom it."(72) Puvis's painterly style was itself representative of France's style of national imagining, an imagination dependent on forgetting and spurred by the desire to recapture what had been lost.

The Politics of Plenitude

Summer evoked - in both its form and its subject matter - the desire for pleasures and comforts retrospectively fantasized as having existed in infancy. Furthermore, because Summer was universally assumed to be an image of France, the painting aligned the maternal with the national. It is worth noting that Puvis painted a reduced version of Summer meant for private sale and consumption.(73) In this market-oriented canvas [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 8 OMITTED], Puvis eliminated the cutout door and, more significantly, left out the elements that made the analogy between nation and mother most explicit - the harvesters and the mother suckling her child. The reduced version centered on the three female figures, and since it no longer aimed to promote national solidarity, its phantasmic power was limited to inducing individual fantasies of femininity.(74) The contrast between the two versions of Summer suggests that Puvis was well aware of the links to be made between maternal imagery and national sentiment. During the period the mural was painted and exhibited, France was at the height of a nationalist, pronatalist campaign meant to address fears about France's falling population.(75) Thus, maternity and national sentiment were being linked across the cultural sphere.

The background of the mural [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 9 OMITTED], with its inclusion of a nursing mother and rich fields, is explicitly figured as a moment when France placidly renders up her bounty to its people, be it in the fruits of the breast or the fruits of the earth. However, here its explicitness ends. Rather than a situation that is immediately given to the viewer, it seems to represent a past that might be regained or a future that might be attained. Puvis had found a way not to picture plenitude but to hint at it just enough to provoke the viewer's desire for it.(76) In Summer, a feeling of what plenitude might be like is provided by the pleasurable form of the picture. This feeling was meant (to use Guyau's phrase) to unite viewers in the same pleasure. But, as we have seen, the painting offers a feeling of pleasure through its decorative harmony only to disturb it with inexplicable bodies and unclear meanings. These disturbances set up a desire for the pleasures initially promised. Pleasure and desire are thus intermixed. Ultimately, the painting hinges on provoking a common desire for plenitude: a desire for the mother was recast as a desire for the motherland.

Though virtually all the critics who wrote about Summer thought that the painting pictured an ideal France, the consensus ended there. In the charged political situation of the 1890s, no one could agree on exactly what an ideal of France added up to politically. Puvis's mural allowed for great variation on both sides of this equation between mother and nation; the images of maternity and nation the painting offered left themselves open to a wide range of individual maternal and national fantasy. The painting's evocativeness and inexplicitness were therefore the key to its power.

Given the fact that Summer was a republican commission, it will hardly be surprising that responses to the painting from republican critics disavowed its compositional disjunctions. Andre Michel, for example, thought he saw a land of complete harmony and abundance. In fact, Michel even denied the strange dreamlike quality of the picture, describing it instead as representative of a quintessentially French version of classicism derived from Nicolas Poussin:

Because of the rhythm, the eloquent and simple ordering of lines, the powerful and gentle resonances of broadly juxtaposed tonality, this is an admirable piece of natural architecture and at the same time, it is the most intense expression and plastic exaltation of the ardors, the fecundities, and the splendors of Messidor.(77)

The painting pictured not just any summer, he said, but a vision of "the ardors, the fecundities, and the splendors of Messidor" - the summer month of the republican revolutionary calendar. Simplicity and order were put to the task, Michel suggested, of representing ardor and fecundity. The image of France Puvis offered was thus described by Michel as the direct result of the republican values of reason, liberty, equality, and fraternity, which the republicans claimed had been initiated in the French Revolution and now sustained the Republic itself.

The socialist critic Gustave Geffroy described the painting in terms that more explicitly evoked the themes of dream, plenitude, desire, and the maternal body, but these added up to something quite different from Michel's republican vision. Geffroy began with a description of the three female figures in the foreground and emphasized the way their body positions were meant to harmonize with the design of the landscape:

These are large and strong creatures, quickly indicated and summarily modeled, conceived, above all, with sights set on achieving harmony between positions of figures, their flesh tones, and the landscape that unfolds behind them, and celebrating summer by the wholesome joy of their damp bodies and their calm countenances.(78)

The sense of bodily well-being that Geffroy attributed to these figures, a sense with which he believed the viewer would empathize, was, he thought, encoded into the picture by the overall compositional harmony among bodies and between the bodies and nature. This harmony resulted from Puvis's summary mode of depiction. Even more than the female figures, the landscape, with its gently curved blue river and encompassing bands of green and gold intersected by vertical gray poplars, enticed the viewer's participation in the pleasures of summer. Geffroy, like Fourcaud, described the painting as a series of interlocking color planes over which the eye, like the pictured river, could wander at ease.

However, at the center of this pleasurable space Geffroy identified an unexpected element of darkness and shadow, whose meaning was inaccessible to the viewer:

And look, at the height of this beautiful cultivated slope, in the midst of these fields, beyond the light bushes, under the profound and luminous sky which is penetrated by the sun's ardor, here is an impenetrable clump of a hundred trees, dark, hoary, opaque, standing at the center of this lightness and fluidity of air. All the shadows of the valley are gathered there, in the interstices of the leaves which are like clefts and crevices in the rocks at ground level, surrounding enormous stocky trunks full of low branches.(79)

It was as if Puvis had separated out all the threatening aspects of nature and relegated them to the mass of trees. The beneficent space that was thereby created in the rest of the painting allowed for nothing other than a sense of well-being. This orchestration of pleasure around the central block of trees constituted, for Geffroy, the main activity of the painting. Nature, rather than humanity, became the protagonist of this drama, because aside from the constant reminder of the unknown and of mortality, which loomed in the trees, there was no distinction to be made between people and other living beings:

Here and there, human activity is visible. On the water, a boat passes, a woman seated in the front, a man standing behind her throwing a net. A woman takes shelter with a child in the shadow of the willows. Workers come and go around a cart of grasses. All of this is scattered, lost in the landscape, people meld halfway with things, living beings are tinted with the pink and green reflections of the light and soil. It is the life of one day which flutters and unfolds around this formidable mass of trees, so ancient in appearance, so fierce, so overwhelming, so constant that one could believe them without end, immutable and eternal.(80)

The painting, Geffroy suggested, spoke of a dream of unity between human and Nature, of the disintegration of boundaries between subject and object where "people meld halfway with things." Puvis's figures blend into the rest of a landscape "tinted with the pink and green reflections of the light and soil." Geffroy read this disintegration of boundaries as a metaphor for complete harmony. Such a melding of one being with another is, of course, one aspect of a fantasy of the maternal - of the moment before distinctions between self and world have been firmly established. But note that in Geffroy's description people meld only "halfway" with things. Rather than fantasizing a return to complete coalescence with mother/nature Geffroy imagines a space where human subjectivity can remain separate but harmonious.

Geffroy recognizes that this image of utopian unity with all beings and things is only a beautiful dream. Yet, the melancholy poeticism of his rhetoric makes clear how powerfully Summer asked him to imagine such a dream as the possible future of France:

It is beautiful to fix thus the surroundings in which we live, the surroundings in which we manifest our vain desire for happiness, the mysterious dream of our destiny which has no possible explanation. Things are expressive and speak to us, we know what bonds unite us to everything that surrounds us. . . . and our spiritual fellow feeling and our joy and our melancholy all gravitate toward those aspects of matter that existed before us, that will exist after us. This is the highest purpose of . . . the poetry of Summer by Puvis de Chavannes. The artist knows how to make the clouds, the waters, the fields, the trees, speak to us - all this unconscious nature in which we take refuge as we would with an accomplice or a friend.(81)

This is a passage characterized by longing. It describes the French landscape - "the surroundings in which we live" - as a vehicle for social unity and a spiritual bond among Frenchmen. But it also admits that the place where "we know what bonds unite us to everything that surrounds us" is only a product of Puvis's production of an imaginary site. In Summer, an evocative vision of nature acts as the catalyst for fantasies of unity and wholeness, of a space beyond time and division. In Puvis's painting nature takes on characteristics of maternal fantasy - it becomes a preexisting and all-powerful form of materiality that provides a sheltering and beneficent home. The French landscape is described as both a physical and emotional refuge, and the collective fantasy of it as the means by which a socialist ideal will be achieved.

The political implications of Geffroy's account of Summer were made even clearer in an essay published in 1892, when the mural was inaugurated as part of the Hotel de Ville's decorative scheme. The painting represented, Geffroy suggested, not an idealized memory of France but a contemporary vision of a future ideal. Summer encouraged its viewers to imagine a vision of "the future of today's man." It pictured the goal toward which past struggles had tended in a building that was itself a very site of those struggles: "here, in the heart of Parris, in this Hotel de Ville reconstructed on ruins, after so much fire and so much blood, in the full and visible social evolution of today."(82) Puvis, he suggested, had been able to "translate our upheavals into images of restless beauty" and to represent "the desire for justice that one senses trembling in the new masses, the philosophical equity of the enlightened" through an image of "the unconsciousness of nature, eternal scenery of all our sentiments and passions."(83) Geffroy believed Summer represented a utopian vision of France that partook of socialist values.

A very different interpretation of the kind of landscape pictured in Summer was provided by Vicomte Eugene Melchior de Vogue. Vogue was an aristocrat, a member of the literary academy and a founder of the neo-Christian movement.(84) Unlike the royalist Calonne, a narrow-minded and predictable academic critic, Vogue was one of those paradoxical figures of the 1890s (like Germain and Denis) who wed modernist aesthetics to neo-Christian conservatism.(85) Of all the critical voices who addressed Summer, the vicomte de Vogue offered the most poignant and imaginative account of the painting. His essay "Before Summer" ("Devant l'ete") became a touchstone for discussions of Puvis's work in the 1890s, and this was because it encapsulated and gave power to the whole cluster of issues that surrounded Puvis's oeuvre. According to Vogue, Summer imaged neither the republicanism of the day nor a socialist utopia. Summer was not, as Geffroy had implied, a Parisian outskirt. Instead, said Vogue, "it is far from Paris . . . the true countryside where we grew up when one lived as one should live"(86) - a countryside bound up with Vogue's own childhood memories. The painting, he thought, would spur its viewers to a memory of the "true" nature of France, characterized by the social hierarchy of a pre-Revolutionary feudal order, and this would be a memory that contrasted sharply with the conditions of modernity. Vogue was one of the many figures on the Right who rejected the French Revolution and the secular values derived from the Declaration des droits de l'homme that went with it. He, like many on the Right, thought France should return to preRevolutionary values and morality.(87) Summer, he thought, had the power to facilitate such a political transformation.

Vogue's account of Summer is particularly interesting for our purposes because it makes so explicit the way the painting evoked individual and national fantasies of origins that overlapped with a more general symbolism of France as mother. Here is Vogue's description of the landscape portrayed in Summer:

Of this maternal land, men are born; ancient and simple creatures who have elevated the life of these waters, these fields and these woods to the human level without perverting it. They work, but their work evokes neither the idea of loss nor of profit; it is a rite, a communion with the Mother.(88)

In this passage, Vogue imagines Puvis to have painted a landscape in which nature and mother are synonymous and man's ritual cultivation of nature is a transformation and elevation of her as well as a form of communion. Rural labor is pictured not as work but as an innate and inevitable activity. Summer thus elicited from Vogue a fantasy of the "true" nature of France rooted in his own aristocratic past. Vogue's characterization of rural labor as a natural activity is surely meant as a critique of the development of France's modern industrial economy. By suggesting that the landscape was a return to origins, Vogue imagined Summer to evoke a nostalgic "memory" of a social order that had disappeared - the feudal hierarchy of which he, as an aristocrat, was a remnant.(89)

At the outset Vogue valued the mural as an escape from the turmoil of modernity - an escape that worked on the level of feeling. This escape, Vogue implied, depended on Puvis's use of a modernist formal mode. He pointed to the inappropriateness of both Calonne's criticisms of Puvis's incorrect drawing and Michel's rational, analytic approach to the mural. Instead, he argued, one must allow oneself to be taken in by Summer's vision of a dream:

They say that there are drawing faults, flaccidity and indecision in the contours. That is quite possible; I know nothing of it, not having approached the issue myself. Do they need to draw so near to the painting, with their magnifying glass, their compass, their bag of critical instruments, in order to tear open the dream?(90)

Vogue assumed from the start that this painting was addressed to the unconscious, rather than the rational, mind. It thus required a qualitatively different kind of critical attention. He encouraged a mode of viewing that would allow the painting to evoke desire:

One must regard M. Puvis de Chavannes's promised land from a distance; it is necessary to stop thirty steps away, even better forty, forget the world around you, which has the crazy pretension of being the real world, and let the indescribable serenity which permeates the painting penetrate your eyes, descend into your soul, and insinuate itself throughout your whole being.(91)

In this passage, Vogue describes a slow insinuation of desire as the viewer is teased with a land promised but not given. From the beginning, then, Vogue assumed a relationship between viewer and mural that was intuitive rather than rational. In Vogue's essay the viewer is first imagined as a passive recipient of sensation that penetrates and insinuates itself.

While Vogue described the sensation proffered by Summer as serenity, his language hinges on a metaphorics of desire. For example, he recounts the relationship between the viewer and the three female figures in the fight foreground thus:

We love them, these anonymous daughters of the Earth, because they are complacent and available forms where each of us gives body to the ideas, the feelings, the memories which people for us these fields. They are our lost and our dead, those who rise from the lands we have traveled, reminding us of the parts of life, which are already lost to us. Because each of us is left piecemeal in many tombs, there will be very little left to put in the one which carries our name, the one we think will enclose us whole.(92)

The "anonymous" bodies of the three female figures in the foreground do not direct the viewer to particular meanings. Instead, their very lack of definition both evokes desire and makes them "complacent" - "available" to the vicissitudes of individual fantasies. They become spaces where "the ideas, the feelings, the memories" of individual viewers can be "given body," where the "lost" and the "dead" are conjured, made once again to "people th[e] fields" of the memory and fantasy that structure subjectivity. They become, that is to say, screens for the projection of individual fantasies of plenitude. Yet the "reality" that must be covered over by such fantasies, the reality that the indeterminacy of the women's bodies (and the mural as a whole) ultimately represents, Vogue suggests, is that subjectivity itself is "piecemeal" - is shot through with desire, division, and loss.

As the passage continues, Vogue imagines himself standing before Summer and, in the space of a dream, trying to fulfill the desire for plenitude the painting has provoked:

We must stay here tonight.... just as Summer must be beautiful when the moon rises from behind the forest. And the moon will surely come.... By its light, these women will appear harmonious. Perhaps, during the time when the night liberates these immobile forms, the nebulous site will become a remembered site, the anonymous images will become those we have summoned. Why must it end so soon?(93)

This account of the experience of standing before Summer alludes, I think, to the shadowy and distorted forms of the women's bodies, and to the way that bodily disjunctions provoke in viewers a desire for harmony. Vogue gives an account of his own attempts to compensate in his imagination for the indistinct, distorted, and ungainly aspects of the women. Furthermore, he suggests that the processes of imagination provoked by the bodies ultimately call on his own memories of harmony, memories that are nonetheless inaccessible and difficult to conjure. This fantasy of harmony, it is implied, conjures up primordial memories of the female body and is thus related to Vogue's description of the painting as a return to origins. In the dreams spurred by Summer, suggests Vogue, viewers will summon from the painting's nebulous and anonymous images their own particular memories, will attempt momentarily to regain all that is lost to them: an impossible task. Vogue's language, with its constant repetition of what "must be," turns to a desperate pleading as his fantasy of plenitude is shattered by his final question: "Why must it end so soon?"

Vogue further elaborates on the kind of viewing Puvis's modernist formal mode requires through a parable in which the relationships of viewers to the fantasies of plenitude provoked by Summer are allegorized. He imagines a deluded king who desperately seeks to allay the disjunction between the contemporary world and the landscape offered by painting:

If I were queen of Bavaria, I would have the useless frames that distract attention removed.... If I were king of Bavaria, I would have poetry harmonious with the work of the painter engraved on the panel surrounding Summer, the verse of Homer in beautiful purple Greek letters... in letters of azure, the verse of Virgil, in letters of gold, the great, calm verse of Leconte de Lisle.... If I were king of Bavaria, I would place an invisible orchestra, which would play the Pastoral Symphony in the neighboring room; and every day, after council, I would come here to forget the foolishness my ministers had recounted to me, I would come here to forget all that a king must suffer, when he thinks of the evil his subjects do - If I were queen of Bavaria, I would pierce this canvas in order to see the horizons that it predicts by way of those it shows; I would shatter the illusion and I would find the wall, the wall that one always finds, the wall that is behind everything.(94)

Three times his musings begin with the line, "If I were king of Bavaria," and the repeated "if" both emphasizes the impossibility of Vogue's wishes and sets up an expectation of repetition. Thus when, in the fourth proposal, Vogue shifts to "If I were queen of Bavaria," the change shatters the illusion through which the reader had followed Vogue, just as the queen's tearing of the canvas has shattered the king's fantasy. The king's embellishment of the mural allegorizes the viewer's own relationship to the mural, suggesting that the possibilities of plenitude Summer offers depend on the viewer's imaginative compensation. When the queen shatters the king's fantasy, the parable reminds us of the desire for plenitude that emerges for viewers of Summer as the disturbing qualities of the female bodies in the right foreground become more and more evident. It reminds us, that is, of the experience that provoked Vogue's question, "Why must it end so soon?"

The meanings suggested by the parable are multiple, and they point us to some of the deepest implications of Summer and of Puvis's painterly mode in general. Only a king, with the ability to embellish the situation in which he views the mural according to his whims, could fail to be aware of the contrast between the images offered by the mural and the contemporary political situation. Only a mad king blinded by his own compensatory fantasies could fail to be disturbed by the disjunctions between elements within the mural itself. If Summer is, for the king, a complete escape from contemporary events, it is only at the price of his own sanity. The "truth" about the painting, from Vogue's point of view, lies in the way it both offers and denies images of plenitude: first through the distant vision of France's idealized past; then in the distorted images of the female body. Taken together, these add up to a desire for a return to origins in which individual and national fantasy occur simultaneously. The mural provoked these fantasies, Vogue suggests, in order to instill a desire for a particular vision of the future of France - for a vision of France as a land of plenitude characterized by feudal hierarchy and an agrarian economy. However, if this image of France was to be effective, the mural's viewers would have to experience the plenitude depicted as always already lost - lost, but perhaps attainable once again.

As we have seen, the sense of plenitude that the painting offered was also withdrawn in several ways: by the disjunctive composition, by the disturbing female bodies, and by the relegation of the nursing mother and reapers to the middle ground and background. The key to Summer's power, Vogue suggested, came from the ways it asked its viewers to compensate in fantasy for those lacks. Summer did not incite a superficial desire for a feudal past merely by picturing it. Rather, the painting instilled that desire at the deepest levels of subjectivity by making viewers actively participate in their own individual fantasy of plenitude. Thus, if Summer could, as Vogue stated, actually "predict [horizons] by way of those it shows," it did this by channeling primary and individual fantasies of plenitude toward particular political ends by aligning those fantasies of the maternal with fantasies of France as a feudal hierarchy.

The desire instilled by the painting, Vogue implied, would lead ultimately to social action. Even as Summer instilled a sense of loss, it offered a particular vision of rural, pastoral, feudal France as the site of plenitude, which would be an antidote to that loss. In fact, Vogue spoke directly of Summer's power to use this fantasy to interpellate different kinds of individuals. The king of Bavaria's fantasy was male and aristocratic - as was Vogue's. As we have already seen, Summer offered the aristocrat an image of "the work [that is] the richest in memories of childhood joys"(95) - it offered, that is to say, a detached and mythologized vision of the harvesters in the fields, which evoked childhood memories. However, Vogue believed that the mural would address urban workers as readily as aristocratic lords, as these "children of the field suffocated by Parisian factories" would also long for their origins as they stood before Summer. "I truly believe," said Vogue,

that they will stop before Summer, as they stop to hear a country song; their lungs will breathe in a gust of native air; they will find what they seek each Sunday at the gates of the city, a little communication with the earth from which they were torn. For them, too, there is peace and recollection in this evocation of origins?

This ability to stir a desire for common origins in individuals of different classes and from different regions was, said Vogue, what made Summer the best - perhaps the only - example of "democratic painting."

If Summer evoked a common desire for the "true" France, it was able to do so by mining fantasies of the maternal that were common to all, although with infinite variations. Thus, Vogue described the painting itself as a mother and the experience of viewing it as a moment of desire that ultimately taught a moral lesson about the present:

Eternal and indifferent, she [Summer] will see the passing, like the harvested hay, of her daily masters; she will suckle them all with the same indulgence... because they are all her children. She will teach them, in addition, truth and piety; she will tell them always that there must be a God to create a beauty such as herself.... A station before Summer in the morning, that is the best cordial for recharging one's life with obedience?

Summer taught its moral lesson, Vogue implied, not by presenting clearly legible allegories of universal values (the old academic paradigm) but by making its audience feel a common desire for maternal plenitude and by connecting that feeling to the feudal hierarchy that he believed was pictured. Ironically, then, this neo-Christian conservative proposed the same means of ideological manipulation though art that the republican theorists Fouillee and Guyau had imagined. Summer was, Vogue said, "like a landscape of last judgment" on the political and social situation of modern France - n the stark divisions between Right and Left that characterized the 1880s and 1890s, and on the instability of a political situation recently threatened by General Boulanger's near toppling of the government - which would make its viewers long for the stability of the past. The experience of the painting would be not only a political but also a moral balm.

We might ask, however, whether there were limits to the viewing public Vogue imagined being addressed by Puvis's mural. If the painting's efficacy is determined by an overlap between memories of the maternal and memories of France's past, what place did Vogue think it could offer to citizens whom he did not consider authentically French - to Jews, to recent immigrants, to colonial subjects? Could the fantasy of the maternal on which the painting hinges operate in the same manner for women as it did for men? Another way to pose this question would be to examine the role of the queen in Vogue's parable. It is, after all, the queen who shatters the king's illusion. Unlike the king, she does not participate in the fabrication of the fantasy. Yet the reasons for this are left ambiguous. On one reading we might imagine that the queen pierces through the illusion of Summer not because she believes it to be an illusion but because she is so duped by it. We would then imagine the queen looking at the mural as she would look at a window on an enchanted world, accidentally tearing the mural as she tried to enter the plentiful land. In this case, the queen would neither understand nor participate in the processes of signification that the king, even in his madness, can attempt to control. On this reading, only the king has mastery of the production of fantasy, whereas the queen is simply in it.

Yet we could also interpret Vogue to imply that the "horizon" the painting suggests is, because of its decorative flatness, the wall. On this reading, the king would seem to be not the controller of representation but the slave to his own fantasy and to his belief in representation without lack. Here the king would occupy the position of a human subject fooled into believing in his own autonomy and in the complete transparency of language and representation. Now the queen would appear as a bearer of truth who shatters the king's illusion by showing him what is behind the painting. If the queen is representative of one who understands the truth about the illusion, if she knows what is behind the fantasy, perhaps that is because she understands the culture's gendered codings of subjectivity. Perhaps she understands that the place assigned to femininity is, in the model of representation Vogue outlines, the place of absence, the place of the "anonymous daughters of the earth," the loss of the "tomb," the blankness of the wall that also allows for the productivity of the "womb." On such a reading, "the wall that is behind everything" is envisioned as an emptiness that underwrites the subjectivity of both men and women and is masked by male fantasy through the creative activity of the unconscious. Again, the shift to the shattered illusion would suggest the explicit coding of the fantasy as a male prerogative - incessantly warding off an acknowledgment of the division of the subject in representation, temporality, and death - a "reality" of which the queen is already well aware. But where does this leave the queen? Either so fully within the illusion that she cannot manipulate it or so fully aware of what it is masking that the creative process becomes untenable. The queen remains stuck in an impossible double bind.(98)

Unlike his more conservative literary peers, who held onto a notion of representation as transparent and universal, Vogue gave positive weight to the individual and phantasmic aspects of representation. In his parable of the king he imagined not two forms of subjectivity - the king and the queen - but three. Remember that his narrative began with the refrain, "If I were king of Bavaria.... "Clearly, Vogue saw his own subjectivity as distinct from both the mad king and the queen. Vogue himself represented a position in between the two - the position of the enlightened subject, the male subject who is aware on some level of the piecemeal nature of his own subjectivity, of his own efforts to people the fields of memory and fantasy through a projective enterprise that takes Puvis's female figures as its starting point. Unlike the king, whose unselfconscious embellishment of fantasy through representation was a sign of his madness, Vogue imagined himself to be at least partially in control of this process. What he offered was a model of creative subjectivity that embraced the unconscious, memory, and desire and channeled them to creative ends. The model of creativity Vogue described in his response to Summer would apply equally well to the poetry of Mallarme, with its emphasis on the sensual characteristics of words and its cultivation of the void. This should come as no surprise, for this model of creativity was part of the wider cultural matrix known as symbolism. Puvis's Summer was, Vogue claimed, not only the result of such a creative process but a work that would encourage that process in other creative subjects. Thus, the concluding line of the essay earnestly commands: "Symbolists, my friends, hail your master."(99) Vogue imagined a model of creativity that was quintessentially modern It depended on a modernist formal mode, and it capitalized on the discovery of the unconscious. In addition, he suggested that the kinds of fantasy enabled by this modernist model of creativity could be harnessed for ideological manipulation.

The critics who responded to Puvis's Summer held widely divergent political views. What they all shared, however, was an appreciation for the aspects of Puvis's aesthetics that made him an important early participant in modernism: the decorative patterning of color, the refusal of traditional composition, narrative, and allegory, and strange and evocative portrayals of the body. As we have seen, Vogue, the neo-Christian, took the wide appeal of Summer as evidence that feudal hierarchy was the natural and appropriate structure for France. He hoped the fantasies of an ideal past that Summer provoked would incite a desire for a return to this feudal order, or at least a new piety in a country dominated by secular republicanism. For the socialist Gustave Geffroy, on the other hand, Summer represented not the feudalism of the past but the socialism of the future. Its popularity was evidence of "the desire for justice that one senses trembling in the new masses."(100) In the extremely polarized political climate of the 1890s, Vogue and Geffroy could agree on only one thing: the importance and poignancy of Summer. Each critic tried to make his own political use of Puvis's modernist formal mode and of Summer's rhetoric of the maternal and each thought that he was in control of the painting's rhetoric. Yet the language employed by these critics suggests that Summer was working on them as well. That the painting generated such sustained and passionate longings for the motherhood of France in critics with such opposing views is a testament to the power of its invocation of fantasy.

Coda: Puvis de Chavannes - National Painter

All the art critics have been unanimous, once more, in exalting the genius of he whom they call "the most magnificent artist of our time." ... It has seemed to me that our worship of the art of M. de Chavannes has been a wholly abnormal psychological phenomenon without any correspondence to our admiration for this or that other painter.... We are taken by a thirst for dream, emotion, and poetry. Saturated in a light that is too vibrant and too crude, we have breathed in the fog. And this is why we are so passionately attached to the poetic and foggy art of M. de Chavannes. We have loved it for its worst faults, for its drawing errors and lack of color.... The art of M. de Chavannes has thus been for us a cure; we have become attached to it like the sick to a new treatment. But we must beware that the treatment does not, in its turn, become a malady. - Teodor de Wyzewa, 1894(101)

I can only sense, with a sensual pleasure that I cannot describe, a feeling, a taste, an understanding of art that gives me the very idea of perfection, of a fraternal perfection in which I recognize the image... of the men of our blood. - Charles Maurras, 1895(102)

Puvis became incontestable, national. - Gustave Kahn, 1925(103)

If there is one word which, today, seems to express a noble and pure idea, it is the word patrie.... Who would dare confess themselves nonpatriot? - A-Ferdinand Herold, 1893(104)

Four years after Summer was unveiled to the public a banquet was held to honor Puvis de Chavannes's seventieth birthday The banquet included over five hundred participants and occupied two rooms of the Continental Hotel There were speeches by government officials, by artists, and by critics. The avant-garde journal La Plume consecrated a special issue to Puvis, and the symbolist poets associated with the journal offered Puvis a book of poetry written for the occasion. (105) The artist was also presented with a sculpted medallion.

The banquet was a site for the universal approbation of Puvis's oeuvre and his canonization as France's most important national painter. Puvis, it was believed, had saved the grand tradition of high art by rejuvenating idealism and reclaiming it from the academicians, in whose hands it had become so unconvincing. As Andre Michel, a republican critic who had commented on Summer, put it in an article about the banquet that appeared in the Journal des Debats:

... we simply wanted to try, in the context of this celebration, to indicate why we owe him every token of our gratitude for having brought to French art, at a critical hour in its history, the eloquence for which it had the greatest need, for having saved idealism which had fallen into disrepute, less as a result of attacks from its enemies than by the unintelligent and sterile formalism of its followers and official representatives or defenders.(106)

Republican critics like Michel saw Puvis's practice as a modernization of the means of painting, which would allow for a newly rejuvenated French high art. But there were others, like the conservative academician and editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes, Ferdinand Brunetiere, who wanted to cast Puvis's work as the maintenance of traditional classicism. When he gave the keynote speech at the banquet, Brunetiere recognized the political importance of claiming a painter of such national importance as a beacon of the traditional values he espoused. He characterized Puvis's work as exemplary of the order and unity of traditional French classicism. His speech was met with heckles and jeers from a younger generation of writers, symbolists among them. Brunetiere was, in the end, part of a minority of critics - all of them conservative - who took such a position. Leftist and republican critics all described Puvis as the most important representative of modernism in public art.

The voices I invoked in the epigraph to this section (with the exception of Herold) were speaking of Puvis de Chavannes at the time of the banquet and the accompanying retrospective exhibition of Puvis's work.(107) I juxtapose them to make explicit a claim that has been lurking, in various forms, throughout the body of this text. Puvis's paintings held a particular power for his contemporaries that made such critics as Wyzewa uncomfortable. As the passage above makes clear, the paintings seemed to signal a collective desire for a vision of "the real" that obscured, rather than exposed, its details. For Wyzewa, the reaction to Puvis's work was proof of the demise of aesthetic realism. Yet the desire for "poetic and foggy art" identified by Wyzewa had a much wider significance. This was implied in Wyzewa's characterization of Puvis's painting as a cure that itself threatened to become a disease--something akin to a collective addiction to a drug with narcotic effects.

Puvis's art answered a need (which became stronger as the century drew to a close) for a convincing and cohesive public representation of France. This need was perhaps most strongly signaled by the deeply felt and overdetermined responses given to Summer. The texts I have chosen as epigraphs for my conclusion also indicate an awareness of that need. The lines from Kahn, for example, come from an essay celebrating the banquet as a triumph of the modernist literati over the forces of the academy and the institute. Puvis was one of la jeunesse, he wanted to claim. And if this was the case, he implied, then the nation itself was best represented by the voices of modernism. In his description of the painter, Kahn equated incontestable with national. In this single celebratory sentence, he pointed to the crux of Puvis's importance in the 1890s. This equation signals the depth of the need for a national idiom - a need that Puvis de Chavannes seemed to fill. It also suggests that it was only through a disavowal of the conflicted and fragile nature of the nation that national identity could begin to be secured. Puvis's paintings, with their address to fantasy, encouraged the mechanisms of disavowal. The range of interpretations of his work we have already seen are evidence of this. Puvis was national we might say, because he was incontestable. To question the adequacy of his painting to represent France might, it was implied, undermine one of the last viable public sites of a vision of France that inspired belief. If the rhetoric used to describe Puvis's painting by critics such as Geffroy, Michel, and Vogue seems utterly overdetermined, it is perhaps because they themselves wanted so badly to believe Puvis met this impossible need.

It is therefore fitting that the banquet celebrating Puvis's life and work took place on January 5, 1895, the very day when the fragile political leadership of France was again shifting as President Perrier resigned, to be replaced by Francois-Felix Faure. Mathias Morhardt described the initial worry that the government's homage to Puvis might be left out of the banquet due to the political crisis. However, in the end, according to Morhardt, the fall of the government did not ruin the celebration. Both ministers, Georges Leygues and Raymond Poincare, attended and Leygues "spoke in the name of the government, despite the fact that it no longer existed."(108) What a perfect parallel to the critical responses to Puvis's painting this makes: the minister of a nonexistent government speaking to the painter whose work was made to represent a vision of the collective unity of France when the work itself, in many ways, undermined that very possibility, and when the vision it was meant to represent had never, in truth, existed.

The words I quote from Charles Maurras exemplify, in the most extreme form, the part that Puvis's painting was often made to play in the consolidation of nationalist fervor. Maurras began his early career as part of the literary avant-garde but soon became the spokesman for an extreme monarchist Right. Maurras would propose that true Frenchness belonged to an elite intelligentsia.(109) Its powers of thought were described as the product of a particular lineage linked to Classical Greece and Rome, which would properly flourish only under a royal regime. In Maurras's gloss on Puvis's painting we can already see a conservative nationalism, which would become more virulently anti-Semitic as the century drew to a close. In his essay, published in the royalist Gazette de France, Maurras turned the very interest in voluptuousness (volupte), which had fascinated symbolist poets, into a sign of innate French taste (un gout). "Le Gout de Puvis de Chavannes"--the taste for "fraternal perfection in which I recognize the image... of the men of our blood"--stood as proof, for Maurras, that their "blood" was passed down (among French brothers) from generation to generation. This racist view, which was at this moment the domain of the extreme Right, would permeate the national consciousness all too soon.

The example of Maurras makes clear that if changes in political and aesthetic positions were taking place in the middle of the 1890s they tended, for the most part, to amplify extreme positions. Days before the banquet, on December 22, 1894, Dreyfus was sentenced to deportation. On the very day of the banquet, Dreyfus was publicly degraded in the courtyard of the Ecole Militaire.(110) These events were the prelude to the full flowering of an affair that would polarize an entire nation. By the time of Zola's "J'accuse," personal political identity revolved largely around the terms dreyfussiste and anti-dreyfussiste. The banquet took place in a climate where such polarizations were already beginning to make themselves felt, where right-wing nationalism with its racist and anti-Semitic contingents was already on the rise. The discourse through which this type of nationalist rhetoric was framed had its origins in the aesthetic discourse of classicism. The terms through which it developed were already well inscribed in the language used to define and describe both literature and painting. Not only Maurras, but Brunetiere and Vogue as well would eventually play active roles in the organization representing this most extreme form of exclusionary nationalism, Action Francaise.(111)

Along with my examples of critical glosses on Puvis's oeuvre, I have cited, once again, a passage by Herold from an article on the notion of la patrie that appeared in the periodical Entretiens Politiques et Litteraires a few years before the banquet. This excerpt gives a sense of the climate of the time, the way it forced individuals to proclaim their attachment to the collectivity. The pressures were so strong that they provoked Herold to ask in a tone both cynical and a bit worried: "Who would dare confess themselves nonpatriot?" This question was rhetorical, and it had its roots in a moment when intellectuals themselves were being politicized and when questioning la patrie could itself be a rather risky business.

The 1890s witnessed a revolt against the increasingly repressive policies of the state with regard to literary production and a collective mobilization of writers in protest against censorship. While initially the petitions against censorship were signed by writers and artists from across the political and generational spectrum, the government's imposition of the lois scelerates against the "promotion" of anarchism by intellectuals forced the literary avant-garde to begin taking political sides. In July 1893 L'Ermitage published "an artistic and social referendum," which polled intellectuals of the day, offering them "the choice between liberty and discipline." When the publication of the second edition of Jean Grave's La societe mourante et l'anarchie coincided with the anarchist attacks of Emile Henry and Auguste Vaillant, Grave was arrested for his "incitement" of anarchist violence. This led to a protest by writers in support of Grave, which cemented a relationship between intellectuals and politics. (Significantly, Emile Zola refused to sign the petition because Grave's book was an explicit political tract, not a censored work of fiction, and thus, Zola claimed, signing would suggest sympathy with Grave's politics.)

In August, during the trial of suspected anarchists, the Proces de Trente, the state attempted to prosecute artists and writers along with anarchist agitators. The neo-Impressionist painter Maximilien Luce was arrested as part of this anarchist conspiracy but was released after a petition was circulated that bore the signatures of respected national artists. First on the list was the name Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.(112) These and other events suggest that by the beginning of the Dreyfus Affair in 1894, a new conception of the political role of the intellectual was in place, and along with it new conceptions of the means for the expression of political views - including the petition and the enquete. We should, I would claim, also add to this the highly publicized banquet. And no event could have had more at stake than a banquet for the artist who seemed to offer the only viable image of the collective identity of France - the painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.

Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine.

1. A-Ferdinand Herold, "Quelques notes sur la patrie et le patriotisme," Entretiens Politiques et Litteraires, Feb. 25, 1893, 156.

2. Alphonse Germain, "Puvis de Chavannes et son esthetique," L'Ermitage, Mar. 1891, 140-44.

3. This paper is part of a larger project, Dream States: Puvis de Chavannes and the Fantasy of France, currently in preparation and is derived from my dissertation. See Shaw.

4. These include Winter, 1892, which hung opposite Summer in the Salon du Zodiaque, and the decorative scheme for the ceiling of the ceremonial staircase of honor, Victor Hugo Offering His Lyre to the City of Paris, 1894.

5. The Third Republic, which began its life in the early 1870s in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, remained in place. By 1885 it had lost its majority in parliament and had to govern by coalition. Ministries seemed to change from month to month and were beset by numerous scandals (the most important being the Wilson affair in 1887 and the Panama scandal in 1892). Despite these political divisions, the period was characterized by a common desire to recover from the humiliating defeat of the Franco-Prussian War. The fear that waning birthrates left France still vulnerable to German competition in both the industrial and military realms was another common denominator among political opponents. Out of this fear emerged nationalist sentiments that often had racist, anti-Semitic components. The desire for the reform of a government viewed as corrupt led, in 1888, to a crisis in which the government was nearly overthrown by General Boulanger, a former cabinet minister and prominent military figure with a strong nationalist agenda, whose support paradoxically came from radicals on the left and conservatives with Catholic and Royalist leanings. The political extremism of the period is perhaps manifested most clearly in the rise of anarchism in the 1890s and the attendant bombings and stabbings that were carried out in its name. During the period between 1892 and 1894 thirteen anarchist attacks were carried out on institutions of authority, most of them with dynamite. The most famous incidents were the bombing of the Chamber of Deputies on Dec. 9, 1893, and the stabbing of President Sadi Carnot in Lyons on June 24, 1894. See Jean Marie Mayeur and Madeleine Rebarioux, The Third Republic from Its Origins to the Great War, 1871-1914, Cambridge, 1987; Theodore Zeldin, France 1848-1945, Politics and Anger, Oxford, 1979; Richard David Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin-de-Siecle France, Lincoln, Neb., 1989.

6. The artist's hemicycle for the main lecture hall of the New Sorbonne inaugurated as part of the centennial festivities was arguably the most important work commissioned to coincide with the event. For a discussion of this mural and the inaugural festivities in 1889, see Shaw, 150-227.

7. My sense of the polarization of the aesthetic milieu in the late-nineteenth century comes from my dissertation research, which involved reading large amounts of criticism firsthand. There are many excellent accounts of this period. See, for example, Carol Armstrong, Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas, Chicago, 1991; T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, Princeton, 1984; Marie-Claude Genet-Delacroix, Art et etat sous la IIIeme Republique, le systeme des beaux-arts 1870-1940, Paris, 1992; Nicholas Green, "All the Flowers of the Field: The State, Liberalism, and Art under the Early Third Republic," Oxford Art Journal, x, no. 2, 1987, 71-84; Michael Marlais, Conservative Echoes in Fin-de-Siecle Parisian Art Criticism, University Park, Pa., 1992; Debora Leah Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siecle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style, Berkeley, 1989; Martha Ward, Pissarro, Neo-Impressionism and the Spaces of the Avant-Garde, Chicago, 1996.

8. For example, Alphonse Germain (who, as we have already seen, praised Puvis for his "thusness [ipseisme]") was a young, aesthetically advanced critic, traveling in circles associated with literary symbolism and neo-Impressionism, but he was also ardently Catholic and linked his support of modernist aesthetics to an extreme form of neo-Christian idealism. Germain combined this Catholic stance with right-wing politics and an anti-Semitic emphasis on authentic Frenchness that was influenced by Charles Maurras, the founder of Action Francaise. On Alphonse Germain's criticism, see Marlais (as in n. 7), 171-83. In the 1880s Germain wrote for socialist papers, but by the early 1890s his politics had shifted to the Right. See Ward (as in n. 7), 204-10. The Nabi painter Maurice Denis was certainly at the forefront of modernist practice and criticism in the 1890s. He is best known for formulating the dictum that has become a cornerstone of modernist art histories of the period (Maurice Denis, "Definition du Neotraditionnisme," in Theories, 1890-1910: Du symbolisme et de Gauguin vers un nouvel ordre classique, Paris, 1920, 1). However, Denis was also extremely conservative politically; he was, in fact, part of the neo-Christian revival that infiltrated many symbolist circles (Mariais, 185-219). On the other hand, Octave Mirbeau, the critic instrumental in formulating a symbolist interpretation of Monet's series paintings and a champion of Puvis, had anarchist leanings.

9. Puvis came to this position of prominence slowly. It was not until 1879 that the artist, who had already been exhibiting his work for more than twenty years, first began to draw widespread attention at the Salon with easel paintings such as The Poor Fisherman (1879) and Young Girls by the Seashore (1881) or murals like Ludus Pro Patria (1882). At that time, the critical reaction to his work was characterized by a combination of fascination and dumbfoundedness. His paintings were often deemed incomprehensible. They claimed status as high art in size and subject matter, and yet they flouted the norms of academic convention. Puvis's drawing seemed to distort, rather than idealize, his figures. His canvases were dominated by large expanses of color that had a rough and plastery look. Correct drawing, careful modeling, distinctions between figure and ground, respect for perspective - all of these were left by the wayside in his works, be they mural or easel paintings. For some, this added up to a naive incompetence, for others, a valuable poeticism. By the 1890s only the most conservative critics dismissed the artist's work as incompetent. Indeed, almost everyone was willing to agree that Puvis's work was both strange and powerful, that his pictorial mode brought something to the province of high art that promised an alternative to outworn academic conventions. Even the most advanced members of the avant-garde admired his work. (See Shaw; Richard J. Wattenmaker, ed., Puvis de Chavannes and the Modern Tradition, exh. cat., Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 1975; Robert L. Herbert, "Seurat and Puvis de Chavannes," Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin, xxv, Oct. 1959, 23.) All of Puvis's murals were painted on canvas in the studio, exhibited in the Salon, and then transported to their destinations, where they were glued to the walls.

10. For a discussion of the ideological underpinnings of Ludus Pro Patria (1882, Musee de Picardie, Amiens), see Claudine Mitchell, "Time and the Idea of Patriarchy in the Pastorals of Puvis de Chavannes," Art History, June 1987, 188-202. Margaret Werth offers an analysis of the critical discourse on Puvis in the context of idyllic, pastoral, and utopian imagery and its role in French cultural politics as well as a formal analysis of the "pictorial and imaginary structure" of Summer See Werth.

11. Aimee Brown Price, ed., Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, exh. cat., Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, 1994, and my review of that catalogue in Art Bulletin, LXXVII, no. 4, 1995, 688-89.

12. For example, an essay on Puvis's drawing practice maintains that the artist's aesthetic should be aligned with the traditions of the academy rather than with the avant-garde artists whom he influenced. See John Whiteley's essay, "The Role of Drawing in the Work of Puvis de Chavannes," in Price (as in n. 11).

13. Robert Goldwater, "Puvis de Chavannes: Some Reasons for a Reputation,"Art Bulletin, XXXVII, no. 1, 1946, 33.

14. Andre Michel, "Puvis de Chavannes," Journal des Debats, Jan. 14, 1895, 1.

15. There were no strict distinctions to be made in the 1880s and 1890s between public art and painting for the private market. As Nicholas Green (as in n. 7) has shown, the Third Republic's ideology of civic participation infiltrated its sponsorship of the arts in general. Its goal was to promote an ideology of individualism appropriate to the development of a capitalist marketplace while also encouraging individuals to feel that they collectively participated in the betterment of France. Green has shown that one of its strategies was to cultivate a wide variety of artistic practices through state purchases. In addition to this cult of the individual artist, the Third Republic sponsored a range of researches and activities meant to explore and take advantage of the individual subjectivities of its citizens. These include the sponsorship of psychological research, the reform of education, and an emphasis in the education of males on the cult of the moi and the promotion of decorative art that mimicked the range of individual styles sponsored by state purchases.

16. Aquilino convincingly argues that this shift is related to the more general transformations of the public sphere theorized byJiirgen Habermas. For an excellent discussion of the way this was manifested in the overall decorative scheme for the HOtel de Ville, see Aquilino, 706-8.

17. Michel (as in n. 14).

18. Denis (as in n. 8).

19. Greenberg's theorizations of modernist formalism and self-reflexivity are extremely complex. I do not wish here to simplify Greenberg's writings, only to signal the way certain aspects of them seem have been taken up as tenets of formalism or even prescriptions for writing about art. For a classic debate about modernism between Clement Greenberg and T. J. Clark, see Francis Frascina, ed., Pollock and After, New York, 1985. Greenberg's writings have recently been collected in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, 4 vols., ed. John O'Brian, Chicago, 1986-93.

20. The decorative scheme for the building also included works by Paul Baudofiin, Hippolyte Berteaux, Albert Besnard, Leon Bonnat, Urbain Bourgeois, Georges Callot, Eugene Carriere, Jules Cheret, Gustave Colin, Raphael Coilin, Fernand Cormon, Dagnan-Bouveret, Francois Flameng, Henri Gervex, Leon Glaize, Ferdinand Humbert, Jean-Paul Laurens, Jules Lefebvre, Henry Lerolle, Leon Lhermitte, Albert Maignan, Luc-Olivier Merson, Paul Millet, Tony Robert-Fleury, and Alfred Roll, among others. Many critics attributed its failure to the clash of painterly styles that resulted from the large number of artists participating. For a general discussion of the decorative scheme, see Daniel Imbert, "L'Hotel de Ville de Paris: Genese republicaine d'un grand decor," in Le triomphe des mairies, exh. cat., Musee du Petit Palais, Paris, 1986, 62-80. For a discussion of the Hotel de Ville as a "Tower of Babylon," see Aqualino, 706-8.

21. The mural hung opposite its pendant, Winter. For a discussion of Puvis's decorative scheme as a whole, see Shaw, 235-300.

22. See Puvis de Chavannes, 1824-1898, exh. cat., Grand Palais, Paris, 1977, 214-16.

23. Louis de Fourcaud, "Le Salon de Champ de Mars," Le Gaulois, May 11, 1891, 1.

24. A difference between near and far views is, of course, a common property of most decorative painting. However, I would claim that Puvis de Chavannes pushes this disjunctiveness to the extreme, pitting the pleasure of the overall view against the abbreviations and distortions of the figures.

25. Rene Doumic, "Le Salon du Champ-de-Mars," Moniteur Universelle, May 24, 1891, 558-59.

26. critics who identified the figure as female include Alphonse de Calonne, "Le Salon du Champ de Mars," Le Soleil, May 19, 1891, 2; and Gustave Geffroy, 1.

27. This theme and variation is literally given body in Puvis's mural Le bois sacri cher aux arts et aux muses, 1886; the artist and model Suzanne Valadon posed for all of the figures included in that composition.

28. Henri Fouquier, "Le Salon," Gil Blas, May 1, 1884, 2.

29. Gustave Geffroy, "Salon de 1884," La Justice, May 7, 1884, 2.

30. Alfred Ernst, "Le Salon de 1891 Champ-de-Mars," Le Siecle, May 14, 1891, 1.

31. Paul Bluysen, "A travers le Salon du Champs de Mars," La Republique Francaise, May 14, 1891, 2.

32. Claudius Lavergne, "Beaux-Arts, Salon du Champ-de-Mars," L'Univers, May 21, 1891, 1.

33. I am not claiming that all academic artists were royalists, only that royalist and ardently Catholic newspapers inevitably employed critics whose criteria for painting followed academic hierarchies and paradigms in the strictest manner.

34. This was the fiction that underpinned the nude as a genre. See T.J. Clark's now classic essay "Olympia's Choice," in Clark (as in n. 7), 79-146.

35. See Charles Blanc, Grammaire des arts du dessin, Paris, 1867. See Jennifer L. Shaw, "The Figure of Venus: Rhetoric of the Ideal and the Salon of 1863," Art History, XIV, no. 4, 1991, 540-70.

36. Claudius Lavergne, "Le Salon de 1887," L'Univers, June 3, 1887, 1-2.

37. The most important reform was the establishment of compulsory, free, secular primary education, which (in theory at least) included a course in civic morality. In Feb. 1880 clergy were excluded from the Conseil Superieur de l'Instruction Publique; also in 1880, the state took over university exams, and only state institutions were allowed to take the name "university," which meant the exclusion of Catholic schools of higher learning from this category. See Phyllis Stock-Morton, Moral Education for a Secular Society, Albany, N.Y., 1988. Ferry's plan was to unify the nation by providing to all free, compulsory education that had at its center training in civic morality. As Theodore Zeldin (as in n. 5), 259-62, and others have convincingly argued, these reforms did less to establish unity through ideological training than to exacerbate the already profound divisions between Church and Republic. The educational reforms were part of a broader secularizing strategy on the part of the Third Republic that took place in the last decades of the century, including in 1880, the annulment of the law of 1814 forbidding work on Sunday; in 1881, the abolition of the denominational nature of cemeteries; in 1884, the legalization of divorce; in 1887, a law on the freedom of funerals that favored civic funerals; the laicization of hospitals. See Mayeur and Reberioux (as in n. 5).

38. Calonne (as in n. 26).

39. Ibid.

40. For a discussion of the intersections between debates about Puvis's work and debates about symbolist poetry in the 1890s see Jennifer L. Shaw, "The Wandering Gaze: Modernism, Subjectivity and the Art of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes," in Moving Forward, Holding Fast: The Dynamics of Nineteenth Century French Culture, ed. Mary Donaldson-Evans and Barbara Cooper, Amsterdam, 1997.

41. I am of course not questioning the value of this kind of art historical revisionism, only proposing the means by which our revision of modernist formalism might be taken a step further. T.J. Clark gives a brilliant account of the social meanings that could accrue to "flatness" in the 1860s in "Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art," in Frascina (as in n. 19), 57-58, and in Clark (as in n. 7).

42. See Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious, New York, 1970.

43. Gustave Le Bon and Gabrielle Tarde developed theories of group psychology in which an unconscious component was integral. The psychological research of Charles Bernheim's school of Nancy posited the influence of unconscious processes in the everyday lives of normal human subjects. Bernheim's primary rival Jean Martin Charcot and the school of Salpetriere conducted experiments on hysteria in which the visual image played a large part. This kind of psychological research was actively fostered by the state. The philosophical theory of Arthur Schopenhauer that centered itself on the relationship between desire and representation enjoyed a vogue in France at the end of the century, and there was a similar fascination with the philosophy of Henri Bergson, which focused attention on the issue of memory and posited an analogy between art and hypnosis. This was also the moment when advertising in France began to be explicitly theorized using Bergson's philosophy. For an excellent account of the relationship between Freudian theories of the unconscious and the work of his French precursors see Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, Stanford, 1988. On Le Bon, see Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France, New Haven, 1981. On the role of the visual image in hysteria, see Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention de l'hysterie, Charcot et l'iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere, Paris, 1982; Janet Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France, Ithaca, 1993; Sander L. Gilman, "The Image of the Hysteric," in Hysteria beyond Freud, Berkeley, 1993, 345-452. See also Henri Bergson, Essai sur les donnees immediates de la conscience, Paris, 1991; and Marjorie Anne Beale, "Advertising and the Politics of Public Persuasion in France, 1900-1939," Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1991.

44. Alfred Fouillee, "Les grandes conclusions de la psychoiogie contemporaine - La conscience et ses transformations," Revue des Deux Mondes, CVII, 1891, 811.

45. For an excellent account of the relationship between the new psychology and the visual arts, see Silverman (as in n. 7).

46. Guyau hailed from a solidly republican background. In 1877, his mother wrote Le tour de France par deux enfants under the pseudonym G. Bruno. This educational tract aimed at teaching republican values to schoolchildren helped to mold generations of French children into good French citizens. See Mayeur and Rebtrioux (as in n. 5), 87.

47. See, for example, Victor Cousin, Du vrai, du beau et du bien, Paris, 1853; and the seminal academic text by Charles Blanc (as in n. 35).

48. For a discussion of the role of desire in late-nineteenth-century aesthetic theory, see Shaw, 17-44.

49. Guyau, 25.

50. Guyau died at a young age and his theories were taken up and expanded by Alfred Fouillee, who had close ties to the state arts administrations. Fouillee was the second husband of Guyau's mother and thus technically Guyau's stepfather. He was also Guyau's student.

51. Alfred Fouillee, introduction to L'art au point de vue sociologique, by J.-M. Guyau, Paris, 1889, viii-x.

52. Ibid.

53. Fouillee (as in n. 44).

54. Renan, 42-43.

55. Anderson, 15. Translation of Renan quotation is mine.

56. Anderson describes a proliferation of printed material as an aid to the imagining of community in the modern era. For example, reading the newspaper is an "extraordinary mass ceremony: the almost precisely simultaneous consumption ('imagining') of the newspaper-as-fiction. We know that particular morning and evening editions will overwhelmingly be consumed between this hour and that, only on this day, not that. . . . The significance of this mass ceremony - Hegel observed that newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning prayers - is paradoxical. It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion. . . . At the same time the newspaper reader, observing exact replicas of his own paper being consumed by his subway, barbershop, or residential neighbors, is continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life. . . . fiction seeps quietly and continuously into reality, creating that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations" (39-40). There was, of course, a proliferation of the periodic press in France in the second half of the century. I would suggest that the widespread campaign to decorate public buildings from postoffices to town halls that took place in France in the 1880s and 1890s was meant to have a similar effect.

57. For an excellent discussion of the phantasmic elements of nation formation, see Stathis Gourgouris, "Notes on the Nation's Dreamwork," Qui Parle, vii, 1993, 91-101. A classic formulation of the relationship between ideology and individual subjectivity comes from Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and Philosophy, London, 1971.

58. Jean Mayeur, in Mayeur and Reberioux (as in n. 5), 147, argues that prior to the 1890s "only legitimist reactionaries, the artistocrats, and the priests interested in the Catholic Workers' Circles saw in the popular insurrection a sign of the failure of liberal society that had emerged from the Revolution. The bourgeoisie, Orleanist or republican, did not see in the drama of May 1871 any reasons for doubting its certainties. The Commune seemed a tragic but aberrant parenthesis and it did not shake people's faith in the liberal social order and in individualism. . . . In the 1890s on the contrary, the bourgeois classes were affected by 'social remorse.' The indifference of twenty years earlier was replaced by curiosity, interest, pity, and even the desire for reforms to prevent another revolution."

59. The French government had given political amnesty to exiled Communards in 1879.

60. See Imbert (as in n. 20). For an excellent discussion of the relationship between Third Republic decorative campaigns and the transformation of the public sphere during this period, see Aquilino.

61. Quoted in Aquilino, 706.

62. Gustave Geffroy commented on the building's role as town hall: ". . . the Hotel de Ville . . . It is everyone's home . . . a book open to everyone whose pages must recount yesterday and today the history of our time and the times that have preceded us"; Geffroy, "L'Hotel-de-Ville de Paris," La vie artistique, Paris, 1893, 168-69.

63. Puvis's easel paintings Le ballon, 1870, and Le pigeon, 1871, which allegorized France during the siege, were circulated in lithographic form.

64. Puvis's letters from the early 1870s indicate that he had no sympathy whatsoever with the Commune. See Conrad de Mandach, "Lettres de Puvis de Chavannes, 1871-6," Revue de Paris, Dec. 15, 1910, 684-85. In 1891 Puvis was one of several artists who refused to exhibit their work in Berlin. See Boyer d'Agen and Melchior, "Les Peintres a Berlin," LeFigaro, Feb. 24, 1891, 1-2.

65. Edmond Jacques, "Le Salon II, au Champ de Mars," L'Intransigeant, May 15, 1891, 2.

66. Ibid.

67. Ernst (as in n. 30), 1.

68. Jacques (as in n. 65), 2.

69. Ibid.

70. Theorists in the twentieth century have described the fantasy of the maternal body as a site of preoedipal fullness - of a time before the infiltration of language, culture, and the father's law. Julia Kristeva has linked this notion of the maternal with the semiotic strategies associated with modernist form and, in particular, with an emphasis on large areas of saturated color in painting. Kristeva suggests that color exerts "an instinctual pressure linked to external visual objects; the same pressure causing an eroticization of the body proper [i.e., the viewer's body] via visual perception and gesture" Desire in Language, New York, 1980 (219). The experience of color taps into those instinctual drives that return the viewer to a fantasy of the maternal. Thus the erotic pull of color threatens to break down the boundaries and hierarchies normally established by dominant semiotic systems. Kristeva imagines color as a kind of "freedom" provided by the preoedipal. Her description of color's ties to fantasies of origins is similar in many ways to responses to Puvis's paintings in the 1880s and 1890s. Interestingly, she uses statements by Matisse to support her theorization of color's role as a spur to fantasies of the maternal. Matisse was, of course, drawing directly on a version of the pastoral initiated by Puvis for his own painterly practice. For an excellent discussion of the aesthetic, political, and psychological ramifications of fantasies of origins in Puvis de Chavannes's and Matisse's work see Werth; and idem, "Engendering Imaginary Modernism," Genders, no. 9, 1990, 49-74.

71. Roger-Miles, "Salon du Champ-de-Mars," Le Soir, May 14, 1891, suppl., 1.

72. Germain (as in n. 2), 141.

73. In the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, inv. no. 1916. 1056, oil on canvas, 59 x 91 1/2 in. (150 x 232.4 cm).

74. William H. Robinson discusses both paintings in "Puvis de Chavannes's Summer and the Symbolist Avant-Garde," Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, LXXVII, no. 1, 1991, 2-25.

75. Karen Often, "Depopulation, Nationalism and Feminism in Fin-deSiecle France," American Historical Review, LXXXIX, 1984, 648-76.

76. The indirect alignment of nation and mother that required the viewer's participation is what sets Summer apart from more direct allegories of the Republic that also draw on maternal metaphors. Perhaps the most famous of these is Honore Daumier's image of 1848. For a discussion of this work, see T.J. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851, Princeton, 1982.

77. Andre Michel, "Les Salons de 1891," Journal des Debats, May 14, 1891, 2.

78. Geffroy, 1.

79. Ibid.

80. Ibid.

81. Ibid.

82. Gustave Geffroy, La Vie Artistique, Feb. 6, 1892, 195-96.

83. Ibid.

84. In an article for La Justice, Geffroy described Vogue as "the Franco-Russian leader of the neo-Christian school of literature." Vogue is often characterized as a Christian socialist, but I think we should follow Geffroy in being skeptical of both such a characterization of him and of the possibilities for the existence of real socialism with a Christian agenda in France at this moment. Geffroy noted that the new generation that Vogue predicted would take up a Christian socialist mantle was characterized by Vogue himself as uninterested in politics, but disturbed with social problems; skeptical of traditional forms of spiritualism; and possessing "a collective and fraternal soul" and "impervious to Roman [Catholic] domination." Geffroy's ironic tone in his characterization of Vogue's writings implies that he did not see these characteristics as necessarily leading to socialism - Christian or otherwise (in fact, he implies that the two are incompatible). See Geffroy, "Le mouvement neo-chretien," La Justice, Mar. 30, 1892, 1-2. While Vogue proclaimed himself to be promoting a form of social solidarity, it is clear from many of his writings that he preferred a pre-Revolutionary form of solidarity but acknowledged the impossibility of realizing it. Furthermore, he was certainly not interested in international socialism, but rather in promoting "Gallic strength [or vigor]." This stance would lead him to become a participant in the nationalist racism of Action Francaise.

85. Other examples of this phenomenon include the critic Camille Mauclair and the writer Paul Desjardins.

86. Vogue, 346.

87. In 1889 during the centenary of the Revolution Vogue published a series of articles elaborating this position. See Vogue, Remarques sur l'Exposition du Centenaire, Parris, 1889. For a discussion of these texts, see Shaw, 207-11.

88. Vogue, 347.

89. Vogue's description of primordial memory is much like the one proposed nearly a century later by Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de memoire," Representations, no. 26, 1989, 7-25. Acknowledging the deep and conservative roots of this definition of memory should make us wary of taking up Nora's formulations with an uncritical eye.

90. Vogue, 345.

91. Ibid., 346.

92. Ibid., 349-50.

93. Ibid., 350.

94. Ibid., 350-51.

95. Ibid., 351.

96. Ibid., 352.

97. Ibid., 353-54.

98. The position of the queen has strong parallels to the position assigned to Woman in Lacanian psychoanalysis. It would be possible to trace a genealogy of Lacan's gendered description of subjectivity that stretches back to the moment of the 1890s and French symbolism. Steven Levine discusses this phenomenon with relation to the reception of Monet's work by symbolist critics in Monet, Narcissus and Self-Reflection: The Modernist Myth of the Self, Chicago, 1994. In her doctoral dissertation, Margaret Werth draws on Vogue's passage to give an explicitly Lacanian reading of Summer. Werth maps psychoanalytic terms onto the very bodies of the female figures (126-27): "In a reading that responds to Vogue's, I would argue that the Bather-Nymphs represent the Maternal Body as a vessel for the Law of the Father - the idealization of both la nature maternelle and les morts - but that this conflation of Mother and Father has turned out to be an image of ambivalence and oscillation. The disruption of bodily unity contradicts the pastoral myth of presence, the myth of Culture grounded in Nature. The fantasied Father-Beholder who completes the fictions of family, maternity, and femininity in the image is not securely positioned vis-a-vis the image of idyll."

99. Vogue, 357.

100. Geffroy (as in n. 82), 196.

101. Teodor de Wyzewa, "Une exposition d'oeuvres de Puvis de Chavannes" (1894), repr. in Peintres de jadis et d'aujourd'hui, Paris, 1903, 364-70.

102. Charles Maurras, "Le gout de Puvis de Chavannes," Gazette de France, Jan. 8, 1895, 2.

103. Gustave Kahn, "Et la cher Baudelaire au grand coeur douleureux!" in Silhouettes litteraires, Paris, 1925, 113.

104. Herold (as in n. 1), 156.

105. La Plume, Jan. 15, 1895, 27-61. The issue begins with a biographical essay on Puvis by Durand-Tahier, followed by short articles on particular works by a variety of young writers, and ends with excerpts from the Album des poites.

106. Andre Michel (as in n. 14).

107. The exhibition was held at the Durand-Ruel galleries at the end of 1894.

108. Mathias Morhardt, "Le banquet Puvis de Chavannes," Mercure de France, Aug. 1935, 517.

109. Maurras's definitions of subjectivity and creativity were developed in a symbolist context in particular, through his association with Jean Moreas and the Ecole Romane, a group within the literary avant-garde that battled for control of the symbolist movement. On Maurras, see Michael Curtis, Three against the Third Republic: Sorel, Barres, and Maurras, Princeton, 1959.

110. Alain Pages, Emile Zola, un intellectual dans l'affaire Dreyfus, Paris, 1991, 10.

111. See Eugen Joseph Weber, Action francaise: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France, Stanford, 1962.

112. In 1898, Le Cri de Paris ("Puvis et M. Charle," Le Cri de Paris, Nov. 6, 1898, 5) would retrospectively tell the story. After Luce's arrest his friends started a petition, demanding that his "professeur," M. Charle, sign his name at the top. Refusing to do so, Charle proposed, "Go see if he signs, I will sign.... "At Puvis's studio Luce's supporters had more luck: "Brought up to date, the illustrious painter took a pen and in a long paragraph, supported the petition, saying with a smile that had exquisite finesse: 'With pleasure, my friends, with pleasure, because it's for a good cause.' Then, after some time, 'Ah! Worthy L. is an anarchist? ... You don't say!' Then, as if speaking to himself, 'After all, aren't we all a little anarchist?'" While this story is perhaps somewhat apocryphal in its details, it suggests that Puvis's signature at the head of a petition supporting an artist suspected of anarchist ties might have been taken as an alignment with the younger generation of artists and poets falling prey to government censorship for anarchist sentiments. His comment, "Aren't we all a little anarchist?" could be a claim of solidarity with an anarchist worldview. Given the political slant of Le Cri de Paris, this story seems meant to claim Puvis for the causes on the Left. However, it also suggests the ridiculousness of calling Luce an anarchist. "If he was an anarchist," we might imagine Puvis to imply, "then so am I." Above all, it suggests the fluidity of the term anarchist at that moment, the recklessness with which it was bandied about, and its capacity to encompass figures as diverse as Remy de Gourmont, Felix Valloton, and Emile Henry.

Frequently Cited Sources

Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities, London, 1983.

Aquilino, Marie Jeannine, "Painted Promises: The Politics of Public Art in Late Nineteenth-Century France," Art Bulletin, LXXV, no. 4, 1993, 697-712.

Geffroy, Gustave, "Salon de 1891," La Justice, May 14, 1891, 1.

Guyau, Jean-Marie, Les problemes de l'esthetique contemporaine, Paris, 1884.

Renan, Ernest, Qu'est-ce qu'une nation? Paris, 1992.

Shaw, Jennifer L., "Nation and Desire in the Paintings of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes from 1879-1895," Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1994.

Vogue, E. M. de, "Devant l'ete," in Regards historiques et litteraires, Paris, 1892.

Werth, Margaret, "Le Bonheur de Vivre: The Idyllic Image in French Art, 1891-1906," Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1995.

Jennifer L. Shaw received her Ph. D. from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently completing a book entitled Dream States: Puvis de Chavannes and the Fantasy of France [748 The Alameda, Berkeley, Calif. 94707].

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