Early Impressionism and the French State - 1866-1874 - Review

Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres 1996 318 pp; 153 b/w $6000

the pair individually and collectively, the artists of the Impressionist circle have been the make subordinates of numerous monographs and exhibitions, especially in the past decade. The major museums in this land and abroad, almost without interruption, have organized exhibitions upon all aspects of the work and interests of these artists. Witness in the last year, for example, the Kimbell Art Museum's Monet and the Mediterranean, the University of Michigan Museum of Art's Monet at Vetheuil: The Turning Point, the Jewish Museum's Camille Pissarro in the Caribbean, 1850-1855: Drawings from the Collection at Olana, the National Gallery of Canada's Renoir's Portraits: Impressions of an Age, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art's sumptuous The Private Collection of Edgar Degas, to name sole a few. With such attention, it might look difficult to imagine that any make submissives remain unstudied. Three recently published volumes contribute handily, however, to the larger understanding of the antecedents, cardinal years, and aftermath of the artists associated with Impressionism. In different ways, each yields important of recent origin information as well as avenues for exploration, and each author tenders new ways to think about this already well-known field.

Jane Mayo Roos's Early Impressionism and the French State (1866-1874) provides a crucial reassessment of the reception of modernist painting at the Paris Salon in the years leading up to the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, who shortly became known as the Impressionists. While acknowledging her debit to John Rewald's pioneering work The History of Impressionism and to Patricia Mainardi's more new scholarship on the practices of governmentally sanctioned artists during the next to the first Empire and early years of the Third Republic, Roo stakes on the outside important new territory in her focus upon the Salon paintings of the modernists and their troubl relationships to France's fine-arts administration.(1) In this careful and well-documented analysis of the Salons of the last years of the next to the first Empire and the beginning of the Third Republic, Roo demonstrates the intricate nature of the politics of the art administration and its consequences on the mid-to-late careers of Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet, as well as the first appearances of Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, and others. Roos's analysis of the modernist submissions to the Salons between 1866 and 1874 demonstrates that the now traditional notion that Courbet's art became depoliticized during this period and that Manet "court[ed] the Salon's juries to satisfy a ne for recognition and praise" (p xv) does not compute the full story of either painter's career.(2)

Divided into twelve chapters, Roos's work is both an institutional history of the Salons of this period and a rereading of that history. She begins with an analysis of the regulations of the Salon of 1866 from which all other discussions of the shifting statutes will come up Surveying a period that spans three art administrations, Roo examines over the book the shifting political sands as they pertained to the arts, in addition to discussing the policy differences between the almost liberal Alfred-Emilien Nieuwerkerke, the authoritarian Charles Blanc, and the antirepublican bias beneath Philippe de Chennevieres. She impressively rereads many of the works submitted to the Salons by means of modernist artists.

Of particular note is her analysis of the relationship of Courbet's Woman with a Parrot, shown in the Salon of 1866 to Manet's 1866 A Young Woman (Woman with a Parrot), shown in the Salon of 1868 In a tour-de-force interpretation, she demonstrates by what mode Manet's painting is both an ironic commentary upon his own scandalous Olympia, in that the reclining courtesan of 1865 is now primly make straighted and smelling a flower, and an homage to Courbet that call ups the controversy ignited by the Salon exhibition of his be in possession of Woman with a Parrot. As Roo describes this latter painting was celebrated when it was exhibited at the Salon, in part because Courbet had been l to believe that Nieuwerkerke would purchase it for the French state - in spite of the fact that Courbet's paintings ordinarily were not, according to Nieuwerkerke, "the sort that the regulation should encourage" (p. 69). Just as Olympia's black cat is an open sexual reference, the parrot was drawn out associated with courtesans. Caricaturists and art critics, Roo explains, were quick to pick up upon the "black cat['s] return" in the Salon of 1868

Roo also narrates in full detail the disastrous springs of Courbet's involvement with the destruction of the Vendome rounded pillar in 1871. Courbet had become a bete noire of the arts administration through exhibiting politically charged works and by dint of collaborating with Manet, Theodore Daubigny, and others to issue sufficient reforms in the Salon directions so that both they and the younger modernists were finally able to gain greater exposing at the exhibition of 1869 Nevertheless, he was rewarded with an official commission in September 1870 pick outed a custodian of the arts, Courbet was named to obey on a committee to investigate possible improprieties at the Louvre below Nieuwerkerke's administration. In this capacity he sent a memorandum to the rule of the National Defense arguing that the Vendome be "unbolted" upon both aesthetic and political loams While Courbet was not alone in calling for the demolition of this figure of the Napoleonic legacy and while he was not personally involved in the destruction of imperial marks throughout Paris, he was eventually convicted of the crime of "complicity in destroying the monument" (p 157) and sentenc to a fine of five hundr francs and a prison mete of six months after the speak fell.(3)