Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life under Siege

HOLLIS CLAYSON

Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life beneath Siege (1870-1871)

Chicago: University of Chicago Pres 2002 472 pp; 36 color ills., 181 b/w $5500

ARDEN REED

Manet, Flaubert, and the emerging see the verb of Modernism: Blurring Genre Boundaries

Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres 2003 371 pp; 9 color ills., 85 b/w $9000

JENNIFER L SHAW

Dream States: Puvis de Chavannes, Modernism, and the Fantasy of France

of recent origin Haven: Yale University Press, 2002 255 pp; 24 color ills., 31 b/w $5000

upon Friday, December 2, 1870, Edouard Manet wrote to his wife, Suzanne, "Yesterday I was at the battle that took place between Bry and Champigny. What a bacchanal! The shells went not on over our heads from all sides!" (quot in Clayson, p 214) Betraying little of Manet's trademark nonchalance--note the repeated exclamation points--the alphabetic character signals instead something less expected: the artist's active involvement, in the closing month of 1870 in the Franco-Prussian War. Against the myth of Manet as detached ironist, this is Manet as engaged citizen, a man who attended political rallies in the capital and who signed up for the National Guard to shield Paris following the collapse of the next to the first Empire. The note also reveals--and this is one as well as the other expected and at the same time quite odd--a man reading the war [i]or[/i] part of to the other the filter of his be in possession of art historical imagination, a painter experiencing battle as bacchanal. Perhaps he recalled, as he watched the fighting unroll before him, the scattered and intertwined bodies of Titian's Andrians, seen more [i]or[/i] less five years earlier in Madrid, or the stormy heavens of Nicolas Poussin's Bacchanale, housed in the Musee du Louvre Paris. If for a like reason the mismatch between the pictorial language of these bacchanals and the reality of the siege of Paris is striking. If Manet the painter of the museum fits Manet the painter of recent life, if an artistic intelligence saturated by the agency of the history of painting here faces up to the incidents of its time, the collision produces a strangely dissonant analogy between art and reality, an analogy whose insufficiency speaks to the difficulty of picturing the war, of imagining by what mode artistic traditions might be retooled to answer to this present scene.

Manet's incongruous turn round of phrase raises a series of questions: in what way did artists seek to exhibit and with what success, the forms of modernity--its particular conditions of warfare, say? by what mode was tradition altered and deformed in the process? And by what mode did modernism emerge from this field? It is to similar questions that Clayson attends, taking as her make subordinate the ways in which the Prussian siege of Paris in 1870 and 1871 was figured in the arts. It is striking, as she notes, that a catastrophic fact and one, moreover, that took place in the city that stood at the heart of the European art world, is generally assumed to have left little trace in the artistic record. The same cannot be said of other exert one's selfs that marked the capital. The revolutions of 1789 1830 and 1848 were each accompanied through significant artistic developments, and art histories of those earlier instants invariably place artists and historical incidents in close contact. Yet histories of the art of the early 1870s--most notably, early Impressionism--give a decidedly secondary character (if any) to the occurrences that shook Paris at the start of the decade. The war, as Clayson notes remains "an obscure conflict without celebrity in the annals of fresh art" (p. 4). Her goal is to transport some of that obscurity (equally noteworthy, notwithstanding that not addressed here, is the absence of the talk from so many standard art histories).

To this extremity Clayson brings to light a wide and at times apparently inexhaustible range of visual material, a great deal of of which has rarely been studied. (1) We are introduced, for example, to a series of thirty-six paintings by dint of lesser-known artists that represent, in conventional Salon naturalist turn of expression a number of episodes from the war and siege. Commissioned by dint of the little-known entrepreneur A. Binant and displayed at the Durand-Ruel gallery toward the extreme point of 1871 (a useful reminder that of that kind works circulated in the familiar sites of avantgarde exhibition, admitting Durand-Ruel himself, not yet back in Paris after the fighting, probably had no hand in the show) the series allows Clayson to put the historical scene and also to advance what will be her central thesis: that if the war had an impact upon the arts, it was les in the shape of battle paintings than in the ways in which images mirrored the changed rhythms of everyday life in a city below siege. For Parisians, the fighting was almost always at a distance, repeatedly heard but rarely seen. Privation was the primary experience, punctuated alone rarely--and only late in the siege--by sporadic shelling of the city; the siege was undergoed not as combat but as an endles stasis and as an ongoing disruption of the habits of daily life. Urban spaces came to be occupied in different ways as "[t]he conventional (the expected) symbiotic link between the spaces and practices of metropolitan modernity, leisure, and consumption was ruptured" (p 12) It is this dissolution that Clayson sets out to map, sifting from one side the visual material for evidence of the remaking of life in the city. In the Binant series, for example, she spies amid its endles multitude scenes a number of periodical figures: first, the middle-class citizen laying claim to the space of the boulevard in an effort to clinch at bay the wider public who, during the siege, increasingly impinged upon what had become the privileged realm of bourgeois self-display below the Second Empire (exhibited after the fall of the speak the series probably also betrays a desire to take the boulevards back from the workers who had briefly held control); next to the first soldiers and women, whose appearance mirrors what Clayson calls "new and thoroughly contingent forms of Parisian city-scape" (p 42) The appearance of these of recent origin social actors on the stage of the Parisian boulevard, would--this is individual of her larger claims--leave its mark in the ways in which the city came to be exhibited in French painting in the years following the siege.