Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror. - book review

EWA LAJER-BURCHARTH

Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror

of recent origin Haven: Yale University Press, 1999 400 pp 11 color ills., 165 b/w $60

Since the works of Robert Rosenblum (Transformations in Late Eighteenth hundred Art, 1967) and Hugh Honour (Neo-classicism, 1968) we have witnessed a spectacular renewal in British and American studies of the Western art of the late 18th hundred Books by historians as diverse as Michael Fried, Thomas boast Norman Bryson, Timothy J. Clark, and Alex Pott exhibit how research in Neoclassical art has profited from the theoretical interests marking the last three or four decades in structural, combinatory theories of the sign and representation, psychoanalysis, and sex studies.

Ewa Lajer-Burcharth's work Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror participates in this renewal, which had its jiffy of glory in 1989 with the international colloquium organized at the Musee du Louvre Paris, by means of Regis Michel on the occasion of the exhibition Jacqnss-Louis David 1748-1825 at the Louvre and the Musee National du Chateau de Versailles, and the official celebrations of the French Revolution. (1) It was during the course of this colloquium, where the greatest in quantity antithetical art historical points of view had the opportunity to rise that Lajer-Burcharth presented an analysis of David's painting The Sabine Women that caused a sensation and that individual might consider the core of her book

Necklines studies David's dark years, between the fall of Robespierre, which was also his be in possession of in 1794, and the advent of the Consulate. These six years followed a five-year period during which the career of the painter was increasingly associated with the Revolution. At the time, David became a political man, engaged in leftist forces (the party of the Montagnards), and attempted to realize the dream of many ambitious artists in the late world of transforming society [i]or[/i] part of to the other his art. It was during these years that the image of David as renewer of historical painting was replaced by dint of that of "the Raphael of the sans-culottes" (as he was called in 1799 when he exhibited the heroic uncovereds of The Sabine Women). As David became caught up in exceptional incidents Belisarius, the Horatii, and Brutus in his work made way for the heroes and martyrs of the at hand Revolution, the deputies of the Jeu de Paume, Le Peletier, Marat expiring, and the young Bara. Etienne-Jean Delecluze individual of David's students who published t he first comprehensive work on the artist and who strove to depoliticize him, compared these works to that of a somnambulist. (2)

With the fall of his friend Robespierre, David narrowly escaped the guillotine and was imprisoned twice. The resulting political and personal trauma lasted several years, and during this period David produc none of the historical paintings that, until the Revolution, he had habitually place out, slowly but steadily. Necklines is pertain toed with these years from 1794 to 1800 the lengthy unproductive months and the artist's painstaking efforts to regain his clinch These efforts are primarily manifest in unfinished portraits and projects: the unfinished self-portrait of 1794 the shoot forward of Homer reciting his line of poetry the unfinished painting of Psyche abandoned, the portraits upon wood (3) of his brother-in-law and sister-in-law (the single paintings he would show at the Salon during this period), those of the Montagnards imprisoned after Thermidor, and finally, after a drawn out gestation period, the large canvas of The Sabine Women the first historical painting to be complet in ten years.

The contextual manner of Necklines is particularly well suited to the David of these agitated years. still while relying on a considerable mass of facts, more [i]or[/i] less totally new, the author suffers her factual and theoretical biases display There is hardly any mention, for example, of the portraits of sum of two units Dutch plenipotentiaries (1795), Gaspar Meyer and, especially,Jacobus Blauw, a patriot of the left with Babouvist sympathies. The real figure of Gracchus Baheuf, the communist revolutionary guillotined in 1797 after the Conspiracy of the Equals, is absent from the volume (his name appears only upon p. 114 in the caption to the frontispiece of his pamphlet against the Montagnard Carrier). It is rather amusing that Antoine Schnapper, a scientifically and politically reactionary art historian, should be the single who mentions the fact that in 1796 while he worked upon The Sabine Women, David subscribed to Babeufs newspaper the Tribun du Peuple (4) In Necklines, the enormous issue of the painter's political position and meditation afte r Thermidor remains scarcely addressed.

Instead, Lajer-Burcharth highlights the interaction of David's art and certain psychocultural aspects of Thermidorian society shaken through the Terror. A new bourgeoisie sought to forge an image of itself by the agency of staging its language, dress, social life, entertainments, and debaucheries. It is the self-representation of this society that is stand over againsted in David's art.