The Allure of Empire: Art in the Service of French Imperialism 1798-1836

TODD PORTERFIELD

The Allure of Empire: Art in the Service of French Imperialism 1798-1836

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Pres 1998 253 pp; 20 color ills., 85 b/w $5500

DARCY GRIMALDO GRIGSBY

Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France

novel Haven: Yale University Press, 2002 400 pp; 81 color ills., 139 b/w $7000

There is no doubt that questions of empire, rarely raised in traditional accounts of painting in the period, have now become matters of pressing interest in the study of early-19th-century French art. In his classic research David to Delacroix, Walter Friedlaender wearied relatively little time on Antoine-Jean Gros's Napoleon in the Plague House at Jaffa, remarking rather cursorily upon the artist's debts to, and divergences from, iconographic and formal traditions and adding that it was "a picture which, although based on an old tradition must, end its Orientalisms, its strange gothic setting, and its dreadfulness of make submissive have had a strange and exciting effect" (1)

The nature and complexity of these "Orientalisms" take center stage in the two Porterfield's and Grimaldo Grigsby's works, together with a novel and subtle scrutiny of the "strange and exciting effect" of this and other composite grandes machines that structure our understanding of French history painting in the first half of the 19th hundred Of course, much has happened since Friedlaender. Waves of revisionist accounts have been successively more acutely attuned to politics and to reception. However, work of a sociohistorical bent still attends to organize the history of French art in this period according to the categories and chronologies of domestic French politics. (2)

The sum of two units books under review here take a different tack, choosing a path made feasible by means of the profound influence of Edward Said's discussion of by what means the physical expansion of empires and colonization of tribes in the latter half of the 19th hundred was foreshadowed and prepared by the agency of a cultural creation of the Oriental "Other." The features of this discursive Orient were fixed in a place of binary oppositions that helped to fashion not single the identity of this phantasmic Orient on the contrary also that of the Occident as it understood itself in the 19th hundred (3) Said's chronology deemphasized the differences and distinctions between the separate "local" regimes that held power in France and the ease of his "West" and instead focused upon a more pervasive and unified imperial or colonizing identity shared by means of regimes that we might otherwise diocese as disparate, an identity established [i]or[/i] part of to the other representations (literary, visual, musical, and in the way that on) of "the Other." Said's work and that of his followers, similar as Homi Bhabha, while attracting many and vociferous critics, have undoubtedly shifted emphases and reinvigorated discussions of the period. (4) of the like kind work has displaced emphasis not sole from histories of "influence" on the other hand also from more explicitly Marxist-oriented prototypes of a revolutionary politics of art (and, indeed, from Jacques-Louis David as linchpin for all that came later) toward a discursive history that can contain more compound discussion of previously neglected or simply awkward issues, like race, desire, and violence, as they act upon and through the art of the early 19th century

These sum of two units books exemplify, in different ways, the possibilities render free of accessed up for art history by means of such reframings of the period. Porterfield makes clear from the commencement his debt to Said's account and its pertinence for art history. His broad assent to Said's central thesis is reiterated over his chapters as he consistently reads the French involvement in and fascination with Egypt manifest in painting, memorials and museology in the early 19th hundred as part of those technologies of knowledge and power that he dioceses as instrumental in preparing a colonial empire in North Africa. In his discussion of the Luxor obelisk (his first chapter), for example, he argues, "The obelisk was the yield of, and it in move round produced, an apparently disinterested cultural output that tendered historical, moral and technological rationales for French imperialism in the orient, in the same years that France was securing and expanding its imperial push in Algeria" (p 40)

Grimaldo Grigsby, too, makes clear from one side her methods, her references, and her phraseology what she owes to Said and to post-colonial theory, particularly to Homi Bhabha in The Location of tillage (pp. 4, 65-66), but her volume contests Said in many sly and incisive ways. Both these works are also deep indebted to the entire universal of "discourse" in a Foucauldian faculty of perception and while they may challenge sociohistorical paradigms of understanding French tillage they remain indebted to of recent origin historicist interpretative paradigms of cultural "work," which necessitates a critical engagement not just with the artwork or cultural entity on the other hand also with the complexities of its reception and with the body s habits, and orthodoxies it challenges or relies on