Watteau's Painted Conversations: Art, Literature, and Talk in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France. - book reviews

Watteau scholarship has exhibited in the last two decades a remarkable moment of its own. Moreover, with the exception of the polemic surrounding Jean Ferre's monumental on the other hand failed monograph (1972), the chief impulse stimulating research has not been connoisseurial on the other hand iconologic. The Watteau exhibitions of 1984-85 generated the usual amount of exhibition-related scholarship, diademed by a bulky catalogue and the sum of two units remarkable monographs by Marianne Roland Michel and Donald Posner Symptomatic of the enormous extension of the literature on Watteau, and of the direction taken by dint of this newly aroused interest, might be the fact that plane such a relatively minor question as that of the statue vivante near in some of his works was not long ago taken up by at least half a dozen shorter studies. The obvious limitations of iconographic procedures--Watteau's paintings look to defy all attempts at definitively deciphering their topics--or of the always reiterated, on the other hand never satisfyingly substantiated, literary comparison with Marivaux have, however, stimulated the appearance of a of recent origin type of study combining art-historical modes with both a semiotic and a sociocultural attention to connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts Jutta Held's little book upon the Cytherea motif (1984) and Norman Bryson's chapter upon the concept of reverie in his Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Regime (1981) showed the possibilities and the enigmas inherent in this approach. The volume under review here has combined a certain pre-iconographic premise with these fresh methodological impulses (although Mary Vidal consigns neither to Held's book nor upon the whole to recent German scholarship), and has builded a larger interpretative scheme based upon the conviction that the general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of conversation lies at the core of Watteau's figural imagery.

The central thesis of the work is thus that aspects of conversational practices and customs, as described in the writings of French conversationalists from Montaigne onward and practiced in the Parisian salons of the 17th hundred give meaning and cultural relevance to the comportment of Watteau's figures. In her first chapter, Vidal undertakes a thematic and visual reevaluation of a certain number of selected paintings in order to exhibit that Watteau depicted conversation in a form one as well as the other more extensive and penetrating than other painters of his time. Vidal then carries her argument [i]or[/i] part of to the other four main areas of investigation corresponding roughly to the arrangement of the book: the moot point of the status of conversation in 17th- and 18th-century French society; the formative consequences of conversation on the arts during this period; the attempts of Watteau to achieve an aristocratic status; and lastly, of course, the part of conversation in Watteau's visual universe of bring under rules and forms. The last vexed question is taken up both in the first chapter and in a closing, extensive analysis of the famous L'Enseigne de Gersaint.

According to Vidal, almost all s galantes should be interpreted from the viewpoint of the conversational theme. Watteau, she argues, accepted the high status of conversation within society, and he paid homage to it end his artful construction of discoursive situations and end the discreet but self-revealing guidance of his figures as they fulfill the overriding aim of aristocratic culture: a social definition and self-presentation based upon aesthetic norms of bienseance. Vidal's conception of conversation is somewhat broad and includes not solitary the encounters in the s galantes and the theater sights but also military and plane religious paintings like the Repo de la Sainte Famille.

After examining the conversation as a theme within Watteau's paintings, Vidal impels on to consider it as an aesthetic equivalent to Watteau's works themselves. Watteau's elevation of minor make submissive matter and the evidence of a demonstrative "impromptu" approach to painting lead her to close that the cultivation of an artistic "manner" [i]or[/i] part of to the other a specific type of aesthetic performance is in reality Watteau's principal objective. And this manner is analogous, she argues, to the elevated position ascribed to manner as like by conversational writers like the famous Mme de Scudery or the Chevalier de nothing else but The stress laid by Watteau upon an artistic spontaneity unencumbered by dint of scholarly references stands, in Vidal's opinion, for the artist's implicit acceptance of an aristocratic value a whole a system praising the advantages of courteous dilettantism. Vidal finds further evidence for of the like kind an attitude in the self-portraits and the not many posthumous portraits of the artist. Disdaining the standard atelier motif, they portray Watteau in a non-studio setting, make straighted in sumptous clothes, and each inch an artiste-dilettante.

There can be no doubt that the pinpointing of conversation as the individual concept that gives meaning and cultural specificity to Watteau's figural representations opens new interpretive vistas. It recognizes and formalizes a strand of intellectual and social history to [i]or[/i] at a great depth connected with but not identical to the arcadian, bucolic, or theatrical framing or encompassing themes in the way that often associated with Watteau. Vidal's analysis of the Dulwich Le Plaisirs du bal is stringent and incisive, providing an prime starting point for the ensuing line of argument. Chapter after chapter, however, and galante after fete galante, the conversation conception gradually loses its original distinctiveness, strained as it is through an overambitious methodological frame.