Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. - book reviews

After sum of two units decades of silence, a volume has finally been published which treats the work of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. The artist was individual of the most important painters in France in the next to the first half of the 19th hundred Hailed in the 1880s and 1890 as the sole viable representative of the French tradition of classicism, Puvis de Chavannes was arguably France's last national painter. He kept a tradition of public painting alive, offering images of France in a pictorial fashion that was at once convincingly recent and appropriately public. Puvis's admirers hailed from a wide political and aesthetic representation - from the avant-garde, the academy and the state, from the literati of small Symbolist journals to the aged men of the Institute. notwithstanding he has barely entered into art-historical accounts of the period.(1)

The catalogue of the Puvis de Chavannes exhibition held in Amsterdam in spring 1994 goe a certain number of way toward remedying this. It is the first work to be published in English upon the artist in a generation, and the first at any time to include a significant number of color reproductions of the artist's easel paintings and murals. It will therefore be an important resource for anyone interested in 19th-century French painting. Drawing extensively upon private collections, the catalogue makes public many works which have heretofore been inaccessible. In particular, the inclusion of preliminary drawings for more [i]or[/i] less of Puvis's major commissions makes the catalogue a rich resource for scholars interested in Puvis's greatest in quantity important works - public murals now situated in Amiens, Lyon Rouen Marseilles, Paris, and Boston.

If Puvis's oeuvre has not always impressed art historians to the same step that it impressed his contemporaries, this is partly because his greatest in quantity accomplished works, the murals, cannot be exhibited beyond their original sites. Aside from a hardly any major paintings (Summer, Young Girls by means of the Seashore, The Poor Fisherman, etc) which the artist conceived as major statements upon a par with his murals, Puvis's small-scale production consisted of preliminary studies and paintings for the market - quick reproductions of the murals or anecdotal spectacles excerpted from them. This next to the first kind of production was oftentimes second-rate. Unfortunately (but inevitably), it dominated the exhibition in Amsterdam. Thus, although the catalogue aims to be a representative monographic application of mind the catalogued works cannot not away an adequate picture of Puvis's oeuvre The organizer of the exhibition and editor of the catalogue, Aimee Brown Price, has attempted to restorative this impossible situation. At the exhibition, the murals were showed in an exquisite slide exhibit In the catalogue, Price has included photographs of many murals in situ as well as reproductions of the major easel paintings.

The essays in the catalogue provide a profitable introduction to the artist's work and reputation. Genevieve Lecambre contributes "Puvis de Chavannes and the Artistic Establishment of his Day," a useful discussion of Puvis's participation in the Salon, his attitude toward official bodies similar as the Institut de France, and his standing among his immediate compeers Jon Whiteley's essay, "The part of Drawing in the Work of Puvis de Chavannes," also provides an informative treatment of an important aspect of Puvis's work. Whiteley's account of Puvis's drawing practice tenders us valuable insights into the artist's working materials and [i]modus operandi[/i]s - in particular, his reliance upon careful and repeated preliminary studies for his major works. In addition to her extensive and thorough entries upon particular works, Price contributes sum of two units essays, "The Poor Fisherman: A Painting in Context" and "Pierre Puvis de Chavannes: The exhibition of a Pictorial Idiom." Price traces the artist's major works and stylistic disentanglement while also touching on wider cultural issues of the like kind as modernism, classicism, and nationalism. These essays will form the groundwork for further examination of the important cultural meanings of Puvis's oeuvre (A more extensive framework for the close attention of Puvis will soon be available in Price's forthcoming monograph upon the artist.)

While the essays in the catalogue are prime in many respects, their monographic perspective means that they ultimately give us a narrow focus upon Puvis's work. There is a aim throughout to limit inquiry to Puvis de Chavannes and his immediate circle and to fix the ultimate meaning of one as well as the other formal means and subject matter through deferring to the artist's point of view. This is, individual could argue, an appropriate approach for a catalogue, especially when there is like a dearth of information available about its make subordinate However, the approach also has its drawbacks. It impedes us from seeing the wider social and political implications of the true issues raised in many of the essays. The catalogue thus proffers a telling example of the limitations of art-historical work that hold [i]or[/i] keep one's courses from a monographic perspective. Lecambre's otherwise eminent discussion limits itself to Puvis's personal negotiation of narrowly artistic institutions of that kind as the Salon and thus not at any time considers the political implications of important state commissions of the like kind as the Sorbonne and the Hotel-de-Ville de Paris.(2) Similarly, Price's essay answers the central questions of classicism, nationalism, and modernism from the artist's point of view, thus obscuring the central place of Puvis's oeuvre in important debates of the day. Price attributes the artist's interest in classicism to his lycee education in the classics and describes him as perpetuating "a nostalgia for a Hellenizing of gold Age" akin to the Parnassian bards Nationalism is acknowledged as central to the artist's work, on the other hand is only explicitly discussed in instances where France is specifically allegorized in replication to the Franco-Prussian War (Hope The Pigeon, The Balloon). All of this is accurate. however it only begins to touch on what is most interesting about Puvis de Chavannes's art.