Imagining the motherland: Puvis de Chavannes, modernism, and the fantasy of France - Puvis de Chavannes' mural 'Summer'

If there is individual word that, today, seems to expres a noble and fair idea, it is the word patrie; managements know how to manipulate this word with singular clevernes and men who sincerely abhor tyrannies allow themselves, nevertheless, to be tyrannized without testify in the name of la patrie. Who would dare confes themselves nonpatriot?

- A-Ferdinand Herold, 1893(1)

What Rembrandt is to Holland, Puvis de Chavannes will be to France, he is ours; thanks to his "thusness," our art will become national again. - Alphonse Germain, 1891(2)

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes occupied a remarkable place in the agriculture of late-nineteenth-century France.(3) The quotations I have chosen as epigraphs give us a certain number of sense of both the admiration he elicited in the last sum of two units decades of the century and the manifold political and aesthetic background into which Puvis's art must be station if we are to understand abundantly the significance of his work. There is no better place to begin than with the painting that was widely seen as Puvis's crowning achievement: Summer 1891 This mural marked the culmination of an artistic career. Indeed, the critical replications it generated provide a window onto a certain quantity of of the most important aesthetic and political controversies of fin de siecle France. Summer was part of a decorative scheme for the public-house de Ville in Paris, to which the artist contributed several works.(4) More than any of Puvis's murals, Summer was imagined through its viewers to embody a vision of France and to give a faculty of perception of Frenchness.

However, such a task was particularly difficult to achieve at a flash when French culture was marked through political division. The end of the nineteenth hundred was characterized by the emerging see the verb of both syndicalism on the Left and most distant forms of exclusionary nationalism upon the Right. France saw the consolidation of trade unionism in the form of the Confederation Generale du Travail, on the other hand also the codification of the racist and anti-Semitic nationalism that would become Action Francaise. This was the time of anarchist bomb exploding in Paris and the beginning of the Dreyfus Affair. While the mid-1880s saw a turn back of both the extreme Right and Left in France to parliamentary political power, it was not simply that the different political factions disagreed upon matters of policy.(5) The division went a great deal of deeper. Along with opposing political positions went real different conceptions of what Frenchnes was. There was disagreement about which regions best showed France and which historical point of times were authentically French. For example, those upon the Right believed the French Revolution of 1789 was an aberration that had deposit the country on the inequitable course. Republicanism seemed to them to be a form of conduct at war with the authentic nature of France. Others saw the Republic as the founding flash of the nation, the beginning of a tradition of democracy that defined Frenchnes itself. During this period, the republican management did its best to instill its have a title to version of Frenchness in the citizens of France. The centennial celebration of the French Revolution (which coincided with the Paris International Exposition in 1889) and the reconstruction and decoration of the house of entertainment de Ville in Paris were among the grand action s employed as part of this ideological strategy. The state commissioned work by means of Puvis on both occasions.(6)

If the definition of France was an ideological battleground in the 1880 and 1890 the visual and literary arts were polarized in ways that had compounded and often contradictory relationships to the politics of the time. Naturalism was without of fashion in avant-garde circles, on the other hand so, too, were the of advanced age academic paradigms of idealization and transcendence. These academic paradigms were still promot however, through a legion of conservative critics with legitimist leanings. The unfolding of a dealer-critic system, combined with a relaxation of publishing laws, l to the proliferation of avant-garde practices and the promotion of individual artists and manner of writings by critics.(7) In this climate there was little agreement, smooth within self-consciously advanced artistic circles, about the direction painting should take. Artists and critics had lusty opinions about the proper direction for art and the peculiar relationships between culture and politics, on the contrary even within particular avant-garde circles there were small in number simple correspondences between aesthetic and political positions. For example, critics who championed symbolist form paradoxically might hail from the utmost Left or from the neo-Christian Right.(8) What is particularly striking about this jiffy for our purposes, however, is that virtually all the artists and critics of the day admired Puvis de Chavannes. His admirers hailed from the political right, left and center from the avant-garde, the academy, and the state. Almost everyone agreed that Puvis de Chavannes was France's greatest national painter.(9)

Art historians have drawn out been puzzled by Puvis's wide appeal. Until not long ago he was dismissed as a watered-down symbolist or academic hack (despite the fact that he had almost no academic training) - an artist who pleased everyone through inoffensive compromise. With the exceptions of Margaret Werth and Claudine Mitchell, art historians who have lately endeavored to write extensively about his work have, for the greatest in quantity part, not fully elaborated the intersections between aesthetics and politics that define it.(10) The catalogue of the Puvis de Chavannes exhibition held in Amsterdam in 1994 alludes to more [i]or[/i] less of the issues that are central to Puvis's oeuvre: classicism, nationalism, and modernism.(11) However, because the catalogue maintains a monographic perspective it fails to change our perspective upon the political and artistic importance of the artist's work.(12) smooth after one has read the greatest in quantity recent published materials about Puvis de Chavannes, individual is still left with the faculty of perception that Puvis de Chavannes's wide appeal in his have a title to day derived not from aesthetic innovations on the other hand from aesthetic conservatism - from what Robert Goldwater described fifty years ago as "the neutral character of [Puvis's] style"(13)