Paul Delaroche: History Painted - Review

Princeton: Princeton University Pres 1997 304 pp; 35 color ills., 132 b/w $4950

The 1995-96 blockbuster exhibition at the Musee de Beaux-Arts de Nantes and the Grand Palais in Paris and its accompanying catalogue, Le annees romantiques: La peinture francaise de 1815 a 1850 (Paris: Reunion de Musees Nationaux, 1995) testify to the growing popularity of early 19th-century art and underscore more [i]or[/i] less of the difficulties in studying this period. Despite several admirable essays, a wealth of primary materials, and exceptional illustrations, the catalogue nears the period as an eclectic assemblage of individual painters and phraseologys created during the nebulous "romantic era." In contrast, Michel, Bann, and Wright have produc significant interpretative works in the rapidly expanding historiography upon history painting and Romanticism.

A self-styl "post-historian of art," Regis Michel prefaces his edited contortions of papers from the Theodore Gericault colloquium held in 1991 with a highly polemical tract against art history. Thinking of shoot forwards similar to Les annees romantiques, he criticizes art history as a positivist discipline that focuses upon artist, intention, and style and that reaffirms its ideology from one side constant reproduction. Of course, it is with great irony that Michel uses a publication issuing from the Gericault retrospective to attack conventions of art history - a kind of official discourse of the state, in his view. Invoking poststructuralist critic Jean-Francois Lyotard, Michel mobilizes a metaphor of breach with Gericault's Severed Heads (1818) and Anatomical Fragments (1818) to call for a break in the metadiscourse of art history; he engages these fragments to double as a type of a new interpretative strategy, individual that allows for "an infinity of possible readings for Gericault" (xxviii). Despite a disclaimer against relativism, postmodernist Michel strike one as beings to ignore the reality that more [i]or[/i] less readings are more convincing than others.

If Michel's iconoclastic ambitions appear overstated, his whirls present thirty-three articles that challenge conventional assumptions, proffer novel readings, and expand knowledge upon Gericault and Romanticism. For instance, Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer cast offs the longstanding tradition that Gericault's separateed heads and limbs were studies for the Raft of the Medusa (1819) and asserts they were autonomous works complexly related to abolitionist tracts against the guillotine and the homage of horror during the Restoration. Albert Boime addresses a transformation in Gericault's liberalism in his research of the African Slave Trade (ca. 1820-24) which he reads as a paternalist expression of "the white man's burden" The omited popular origins of Gericault's art and his subjects' relationship with sensationalist crime and catastrophe are the focus of Robert Simon's sum of two units excellent essays. Another important aspect of the collection is the posthumous reception of Gericault; Bruno Chenique, who continues to strip important unpublished materials on Gericault, chronicles the efforts to raise a memorial to the painter frustrated in part by the agency of a legal battle over his family's wealth. Michel's sum of two units edited volumes will prove indispensable for further scholarly investigation of Gericault and Romanticism.

In his work Paul Delaroche: History Painted, Stephen Bann argues for the importance of Delaroche to a research of early 19th-century art, not to depose the primacy of J.-A.-D. Ingres and Eugene Delacroix, on the contrary as a relatively "more faithful index of the ambiguities and tensions of that elusive date than [provided by] his great contemporaries" (p 30) Bann wishes to shift the paradigm applied to Delaroche from characterizations as either a facile artist who pandered to public taste or a conservative and academic painter to a consideration of the artist in the visual agriculture of early 19th-century Europe. Delaroche's painting, for Bann, exhibits a rupture with tradition growing from the artist's distinctive background and reply to an early modern visual tillage of prints, paintings, panoramic displays, and photography. Bann argues that the artist also contributed uniquely to visual tillage He develops this symbiotic relationship quite through his text, exploring the inscription of the self structural aspects of painting, the generation of political meaning and history, and the creation of visual types

In chapter 1 Bann interprets Delaroche's apprenticeship and early work as a "struggle to inscribe the self that is, to achieve authority as an artist in relation to, and in replication to, the social, cultural, and familial determinants of his career" (p 35 emphasis in the original). Paul Delaroche was initially sent to train with Louis-Etienne Watelet in the inferior genre of landscape, as his father, an art dealer, wished to avert any possible sibling rivalry between Paul and his older brother Jule who apprenticed as a history painter in the competitive environment of Antoine Gros's studio. With parental concurrence Paul eventually followed Jules to Gros's studio, where he continued to face the difficult task of separating himself from his brother. For Bann similar a personal stake "seems to reside particularly in the oblique gaze of the male child" (p 55) in several early works stressing the theme of hierarchy and legitimacy. The history of Delaroche's signature actually supports of the like kind a speculative reading. Until 1824 Paul signed his surname followed by means of the diminutive jeune (the younger) to recognize the priority of his brother, on the other hand by 1826 he had settl definitively upon DelaRoche - with an uppercase R These issues - the gaze of male children and his signature as surrogates for the self - coalesce around a series of eight watercolors that interpret in personal metes an incident from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's youth described in the Confessions (1782) At the extremity of the series, signed DelaRoche and dated 1825 the artist transformed the text's image of a writer actively searching to find a patron into a picture of a seated artist absorbed in his have thoughts - "the inward experience of the trials of selfhood and their outward manifestation" (p 69)