Degas: Beyond Impressionism - Review

London: National Gallery Publications and Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1996 324 pp; 171 color ills., 138 b/w $5000

the two individually and collectively, the artists of the Impressionist circle have been the subdues of numerous monographs and exhibitions, especially in the past decade. The major museums in this political division 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 solitary a few. With such attention, it might appear to be difficult to imagine that any make subordinates remain unstudied. Three recently published works 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 moves 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 in a short time became known as the Impressionists. While acknowledging her due 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 without 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 results on the mid-to-late careers of Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet, as well as the first attempts 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 mention one by one 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 completely through 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 below Philippe de Chennevieres. She impressively rereads many of the works submitted to the Salons by dint 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 means Manet's painting is both an ironic commentary upon his own scandalous Olympia, in that the reclining courtesan of 1865 is now primly aligned 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 enumerates 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 patent 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 give an account ofs in full detail the disastrous originates of Courbet's involvement with the destruction of the Vendome round pillar in 1871. Courbet had become a bete noire of the arts administration by means of exhibiting politically charged works and by means of collaborating with Manet, Theodore Daubigny, and others to consequence sufficient reforms in the Salon directions so that both they and the younger modernists were finally able to gain greater in all senses at the exhibition of 1869 Nevertheless, he was rewarded with an official commission in September 1870 prefered a custodian of the arts, Courbet was named to obey on a committee to investigate possible improprieties at the Louvre beneath Nieuwerkerke's administration. In this capacity he sent a memorandum to the management 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 token of the Napoleonic legacy and while he was not personally involved in the destruction of imperial allusive figures 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 limit of six months after the communicate fell.(3)