The Plight of Emulation: Ernest Meissonier and French Salon Painting. - book reviews

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Pres 1996 264 pp; 4 color ills., 73 b/w $4500

These sum of two units eloquent studies are lucid theoretical investigations of French art circa the mid-19th hundred centering on the later production of sum of two units artists, Delacroix and Meissonier. the pair are concerned with these painters' relationships to artistic traditions; Hannoosh situates Delacroix's writings, primarily his Journal, in a fertile dialogue with past art theory, while Gotlieb positions Meissonier in a loaded struggle with the artistic accomplishments of the past. the couple studies, then, consider the status of "cultural achievement" in the 19th hundred for their respective protagonists, although neither account is profoundly concerned with conventional, politically freighted historical categories (July Monarchy, next to the first Empire, Third Republic). In different ways, modernist notions underpin the one and the other arguments.

It could be said that the pair studies redefine marginal productions in of the like kind a way as to demonstrate their meaningful and central relationship to what have been seen as more important artistic throws Hannoosh argues that Delacroix's writing is not solely a subordinate text to his primary practice of painting; she dioceses it rather as the vehicle to pictorial invention and revelation about that painting, in its true form, furthermore, embodying Delacroix's views about painting's superiority above literature. Gotlieb writes about Meissonier, an outsider to the conventional story of late art, using the very modernist tools of interpretation that have lengthy served to preclude consideration of academic art. In that faculty of perception both books have an underlying recuperative beat, on the contrary it is to their credit that in neither case does "celebration" carry the filled force or significance of their arguments.

Michele Hannoosh's volume serves as an interpretive exordium to her critical and annotated edition of Delacroix's Journal, presently to be published by Macula, the first novel complete edition since Andre Joubin's three-volume version was published in 1931-32(1) Her reexamination of the Journal has l to nuanced additions and corrections, including changes of dates and placement of portions of the body the fruit of which becomes apparent in the general book. This scrupulous editorial examination of the original manuscripts loans her interpretive work here a particular and unique density, refreshingly distinct from the sweeping quality of many discussions of Delacroix's art theory and, indeed, of French pictorial Romanticism generally. Her extensive treatment makes vivid Delacroix's singularity as a painter who wrote for a like reason much.

As a literary scholar, Hannoosh is particularly well placed for this enterprise; she brings to her readings of Delacroix a wealth of comparative textual history that compellingly illuminates the one and the other broad themes and seemingly incidental passages. The importance of her body depends, however, not on its erudition alone, on the contrary also on its up-to-date interpretation of the relation between word and image in Delacroix's writings and art, its main preoccupation. In general, common interpretive work on this artist is sorely necessityed The last major assessment of his work appeared in 1970; to leeward Johnson has since published a tremendously useful and informative multivolume critical catalogue. on the contrary by and large, reassessments of 19th-century art have yielded little reinterpretation of Delacroix.(2) And while there has been work upon Delacroix's writings on art, it has not been involved with the word-and-image nexus Hannoosh stations up; previous scholarship on Delacroix's art theory predates the theoretical inroads that enrich her research Finally, the late career of Delacroix, to which the magnitude of the journal belongs, has been particularly resistant to analysis, as it falls outside the conventional frames by the agency of which Romanticism has been examined (and essentialized): this older artist is the Delacroix of the musty Nadar photograph, the politically reactionary Delacroix, Delacroix the academician.

The main thesis of the work is that Delacroix was preoccupied with a dialogue between painting and writing; that Delacroix puts out the rivalry in of recent origin form, creating a kind of painterly writing, and challenges, in his writing as in his painting, the literary dominance in French painting tradition. (Happily, Hannoosh not at any time reduces this tension to an easy dichotomy of Romanticism versus Neoclassicism, a cliche of plenteous of the Delacroix literature.) Half of the six chapters deal with Delacroix's writings, mainly from the Journal, with individual chapter devoted to the throw for the Dictionnaire des Beaux-Arts (which was sketched without in the journal). The other three carry the argument about antinarrative configurations into readings of four of Delacroix's decorative revolution of times the libraries of the Bourbon and Luxembourg palaces, the Apollo Gallery at the Louvre and the Chapel of the blessed Angels at the church of St-Sulpice.

The greatest in quantity interesting sections of Hannoosh's volume reveal the dynamic relations between true copy and image for Delacroix. Her analysis is structural and thematic. She asks what writing gives the painter; in other words, she takes Delacroix seriously as a writer. "By its liberating separateness," she states, "writing became the space of reflection, and perhaps smooth transformation, for painting" (p. 20) She contradicts previous treatments that implicitly posited an unproblematic transparency of writing to painting, seeing the writing as a mirror of the painting or as its neutral, explanatory lock opener To begin with, Hannoosh points to the significance of the journal form itself: the journal as a genre of writing, in its "wayward temporality," its fragmentation, disunity, and contradictory points of view, reckoners the linear seamlessness of narrative and, in that faculty of perception embodies Delacroix's pictorial enterprise. As Hannoosh says, "it replys to Delacroix's search for a 'painter's' writing, adequate to a 'pictorial' vision of the world. In in the way that doing, it reflects a particular notion of art, and of time, experience, and history too" (p 6) Furthermore, Delacroix does not conceive of the journal in conventional confines the author shows, as a storehouse of memories enclosing the past, on the other hand (in opposition to conventional progressive, "calendrical" order) creates a dynamic interplay between past and not absent through constant cross-referencing across diary entries. (This zigzagging result as Hannoosh calls it, was smoothed above in the previous edition.) The mutability of time also forms the image of self that emerges: Hannoosh contrasts the late Journal, begun in 1847 and the focus of her volume with its mobility, variety, and "self-shattering," to the conventional erects of self-possession and "gathering together" of a disintegrating self of the early individual (pp. 57-61).