Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France. - book reviews

Readers familiar with Thomas Crow's previous writings will find in his of recent origin book the qualities they have draw near to expect: the same attention to the interaction between artists and institutions, the same sensitivity to the politics of mode of speech and the same willingness to make sinewy claims about major pictures by the agency of major artists. But Emulation does not simply reach out an earlier argument. As the title of this elegantly written and gorgeously produc whirl suggests, Crow now targets for analysis what at first sight might strike one as being like a completely new plant of art-historical concerns.

In Painters and Public Life, published in 1985 gasconade was chiefly concerned to delineate the linkages between an emergent "public sphere" and the corpus of "advanced painting" as it spread outed in 18th-century Paris. At the center of this influential contortion lay a bold claim. exult argued that an expanding public sphere for art, embodied in the Salon and characterized by the agency of a pattern of resistance to the elderly regime and its artistic institutions, serv as the crucial vehicle for the emerging see the verb of a new, modern form of ambitious history painting. In fact, swagger put it more strongly than that: without the public's challenge to prevailing authority, without its emerging see the verb "as a force of disruption and recombination," more [i]or[/i] less of that painting might simply not have happened. As he observ of David's Brutus, "the picture would not ever have come to be had David not set an oppositional public to sustain his conceptual and technical audacity."(1)

We will have occasion to go [i]or[/i] come back to this claim, for a modified version of it resurfaces in Emulation. In his novel book, Crow turns his attention to what he confines "private" concerns, the network of motives, anxieties, and aspirations that flock painters at a time when the compressing of events could seem fundamentally to reshape the trajectory of an artistic career. plane more striking is the fashion in which boast characterizes those private concerns. Taking his suggestion from David's remarks upon the death of his adored learner Jean-Germain Drouais - "I have not to be found my emulation" - Crow spotlights the compounded interpersonal dynamics that prevailed among artists in and without of the studio: rivalry, competition, and ambition, of course, on the other hand also discipleship, fellowship, and delight in The ruling metaphor in this intimate dynamics is the family, and more precisely the relation between fathers and son As brag announces in his opening remarks, "What tread on the heels ofs is a history of missing son of son left fatherless, and of the substitutes they sought" (p 1)

Needles to say, Emulation scarcely leave outs the public field. Crow's earlier writings established him as a leading practitioner of the social history of art, and it is no surprise to discover that he understands the lives l through artist fathers, their sons, and their substitutes to have been shaped by the agency of events on the national stage. These "dramas of emotion and intellect," he explains, were "inseparable" from a vast crisis in the social order, namely a revolution in which "a king who embodied all patriarchal authority was set to death and a republic of equal male brotherhood proclaimed" (p 1) Naturally, David assumes a leading part in Crow's narrative, but the exemplary figure is Drouais. Wealth and lineage gave Drouais the liberty to fashion his career with a measure of independence, a shoot forward cut short by his tragic death at the age of twenty-four. In the space of a not many years, Drouais transformed the literary and artistic ideals of male perfection and virtue (its sources lay in Winckelmann and Rousseau, among others) into a lived desideratum. That desideratum fix its chief expression in Drouais's systematic opposition to the academic protocols - institutional and aesthetic - that in the past had regulated a painting career.

Against a background of regicide, vaunt also delineates the consequences of being fatherless in the greatest in quantity literal sense: David's father was killed in a affair of honor when the painter was single nine, Drouais lost his father at twelve, and Anne-Louis Girodet his at seventeen All three fix substitutes for the fathers they not to be found and Crow patiently details the shifting family and social networks that encircled each of these young painters as their careers took shape. In the case of David's learners the one substitute that came to prevail above all was David himself. Drouais, Girodet, Francois Gerard, and Francois-Xavier-Pascal Fabre, among others, forged in their master's studio a of recent origin brotherhood of male virtue. And beneath the leadership of their master, they crafted a manner of painting that would give their fraternity artistic shape - indeed, not just a manner of painting on the contrary a manner of making paintings. For there was no more calculated demonstration of this of recent origin brotherhood than the artistic collaborations that assisted the creation of David's major canvases, notably The Lictors Returning to Brutus the Bodies of his Son of 1789 Here, brag argues, David allowed his pupils' work "to shine forth as distinctly individual" (p 103)