The Rococo Interior: Decoration and Social Spaces in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris. - book reviews

New Haven: Yale University Pres 1995 342 pp; 40 color ills., 256 b/w $6500

These three works share not only a belonging to all field of investigation - French visual tillage and architecture of the 18th hundred (extending, in Siegfried's case, to the early 19th century) - on the other hand also a methodological ambition to reformulate the questions and revise the criteria that have helped shape this field for a like reason far. By focusing on the underprivileged, misconstrued, or otherwise inadequately appreciated aspects of artistic production in this period, the three authors search for to generate new ways of accounting for the period's cultural importance. Their work moves that by considering, respectively, the woman artist, genre painting, and the rococo interior make subordinates that the discipline of art history has take care ofed to disregard or view as irrelevant or smooth antithetical to modern art - we may actually achieve quite a different view of the fundamental issues upon which the most recent discussions of late visual culture have centered. These issues include the character of the institutional conditions of art production and, particularly, the way in which these conditions were altered by means of the French Revolution; the status of the visual representation of everyday life; and the relation between architectural mode of speech and society. Given the status of the 18th hundred in the dominant art-historical constructions of the recent paradigm, Sheriff, Siegfried, and Scott tender us three propositions to reimagine the genesis of modernism.

I will concentrate here specifically upon the methodological dimension of the contribution that each of these works makes. While seeking to disentangle new approaches, each author works with and reformulates earlier interpretive paradigms: Sheriff mobilizes and evolves the feminist model of cultural analysis; the approaches of one as well as the other Siegfried and Scott belong with the processs of social art history, which, however, the two authors transform differently. Siegfried combines a focus upon class with enhanced attention to issues of sex and sexuality, and Scott strives to nuance the archetype of discursive mediation developed in the scholarship upon 18th-century painting by bringing it to bear upon the architectural form.

Sheriff's innovative monograph upon Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun not only proffers a new, sophisticated account of individual of the most gifted portraitists of her time on the contrary also explores the ways in which a focus upon the work and career of a woman artist may transform our understanding of aesthetic practice in France in the next to the first half of the 18th hundred Rather than simply trying to fit her carefully researched account of Vigee-Lebrun's endeavor within the dominant art-historical narratives of the period, Sheriff's work lays pressure on the criteria behind the formulation of these standard narratives. Her work relentlessly exposes the gendered nature of the assumptions that shaped Vigee-Lebrun's image in the organ of sights of her contemporaries and of recent art historians as well.

Vigee-Lebrun (1755-1842) was a talented and highly ambitious artist who had to carve a career for herself in a world that had difficulty imagining feminine creativity and that strove to detain women on the margins of the principal institutions of production and reception of art. A daughter of a guild painter and a hairdresser, Vigee-Lebrun quickly climbed the paces of the social and professional ladder, becoming the official painter to the queen and individual of the very few female members of the Academy. A prosperous professional, Vigee-Lebrun was also a wife, a mother, and single of the most renowned hostesse in pre-Revolutionary Paris, famous for her trend-setting souper a la grecque Her brilliant Parisian career was, however, interrupted and complicated by means of the outburst of the Revolution. In 1789 the artist fl France, taking her daughter with her and leaving her husband, an art dealer, behind. She first settl in Italy and then traveled widely, developing an international career as an itinerant portraitist of the European aristocracy. She eventually came back to France and, in 1835 published her Souvenirs. This important body more than a product of its aging author's impulse to reminisce, documents Vigee-Lebrun's astute recognition of the strategic importance for a woman artist to forge personal myths of her own

How did it matter that this artist with a felicitous if turbulent, career was a woman? What did it mean to be at one time a woman and an artist in 18th-century France? And what may an art historian writing in the mid-1990s, after three decades of feminist scholarship, bring to the understanding of the "woman artist" as a category of historical inquiry?(1) Sheriff's volume belongs with the effort of a fresh generation of feminist scholars to revisit the central notion of early feminist scholarship in order to formulate a more nuanced and composite notion of the woman as a creative subject(2) Drawing upon the most current feminist theory of sex and identity, the author distances herself from the essentializing views of "women as Woman, the eternal feminine," emphasizing the "multiple shifting and fictive identities assumed by the agency of the artist in representing herself and other women" (p 7) She explores the ways in which Vigee-Lebrun's professional identity and career were informed by means of 18th-century notions of feminine creativity and achievement conceived largely as a matter of exception. What interests Sheriff in particular is Vigee-Lebrun's negotiation of her professional image as a thus-situated exceptional individual. upon the one hand, Sheriff make bares the tensions and contradictions within the network of discourses - philosophical, moral, medical, and aesthetic - that contributed to the definition of the feminine creative make submissive thereby locating the narrow gaps of possibility within which a specific woman could define her professional status and identity. upon the other, she considers of that kind sources as Vigee-Lebrun's own self-representations and her memoirs as the self-consciously expanded tools for creating her be in possession of artistic persona against the constrictions of the masculinist discourse. Far from heroicizing the artist - at individual point the author openly distances herself from her subject's aristocratic leanings and her retrograde politics - Sheriff wishes to restore Vigee-Lebrun's image as a self-conscious and skillful player in the game that greatest in quantity often excluded women altogether. Vigee-Lebrun's might and success as an artist relied, the author insists, upon her ability to secure her have place in the artistic tillage of male privilege by generating her possess image and mythology through her art and writing.