Academics, Pompiers, Official Artists
and the Arrière-garde
Academics, Pompiers, Official Artists
and the Arrière-garde:
Defining Modern and Traditional in France,
1900-1960
Edited by
Natalie Adamson and Toby Norris
Academics, Pompiers, Official Artists and the Arrière-garde:
Defining Modern and Traditional in France, 1900-1960,
Edited by Natalie Adamson and Toby Norris
This book first published 2009
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2009 by Natalie Adamson and Toby Norris and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-1361-3, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-1361-7
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations .................................................................................... vii
Notes on Contributors................................................................................. xi
Acknowledgements ................................................................................... xv
Introduction
Natalie Adamson and Toby Norris .............................................................. 1
Chapter One
Émile Bernard’s Reactionary Idealism
Neil McWilliam......................................................................................... 25
Chapter Two
One Friday at the French Artists’ Salon: Pompiers and Official Artists
at the Coup de Cubisme
Fae Brauer ................................................................................................. 51
Chapter Three
Foreign Artists and the École de Paris: Critical and Institutional
Ambivalence between the Wars
Kate Kangaslahti ....................................................................................... 85
Chapter Four
After Locarno: German Painters in the Parisian “Picture Factory”
Keith Holz ............................................................................................... 113
Chapter Five
Between the Lines: The Juste Milieu in Interwar France
Toby Norris ............................................................................................. 139
Chapter Six
Classicism, Neither Right nor Left: The Combat Group
and the Cultural Politics of French Fascism during the 1930s
Mark Antliff ............................................................................................ 169
vi
Table of Contents
Chapter Seven
Sculpture’s Alternative Modernities: The Public Maillol,
the Private Rodin
Penelope Curtis........................................................................................ 191
Chapter Eight
“The Serpent Eats its Tail”: Avant-garde and Arrière-garde in Paris,
1943-1953
Natalie Adamson ..................................................................................... 211
Index........................................................................................................ 239
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Chapter One
Émile Bernard’s Reactionary Idealism
1.1 Émile Bernard, Triumph of the Virgin Mary, 1893.
1.2 Émile Bernard, Après le bain, 1908.
1.3 Émile Bernard, Le Jugement de Paris, 1908.
1.4 Émile Bernard, Le Repos à Tonnerre, 1904.
Chapter Two
One Friday at the French Artists’ Salon
2.1 Jules Grün, Un vendredi au Salon des Artistes Français, 1911.
2.2 “Un vendredi au Salon des Artistes Français, Tableau de Grün,
commandé par l’État,” L’Illustration, no. 3558 (6 May 1911), 360-1.
2.3 Jules Grün, Un vendredi au Salon des Artistes Français, 1911, detail.
2.4 Jules Grün, Un vendredi au Salon des Artistes Français, 1911, detail
2.5 Daniel Arnaudet, Salon des Artistes Français, 1910.
2.6 Jules Grün, Un vendredi au Salon des Artistes Français, 1911, detail.
2.7 Jules Grün, Un vendredi au Salon des Artistes Français, 1911, detail.
2.8 Édouard Dujardin, Le vernissage du Salon d’Automne - Toasts, 1905
Chapter Three
Foreign Artists and the École de Paris
3.1 Photograph of the “United States” installation at the Salon des
Indépendants, Grand Palais, Paris, 1924. Boston Evening Transcript,
March 15, 1924.
3.2 Jules Pascin, Temple of Beauty, 1925.
3.3 Photograph of Moïse Kisling working on Portrait of Ingrid, c.1932.
3.4 Catalogue entries for Jean Lurçat, Louis Marcoussis, Georges Bouche
and Moïse Kisling, pages 82 and 83 of the exhibition catalogue,
Maîtres de l'art indépendant 1895-1937, 1937.
Chapter Four
After Locarno: German Painters in the Parisian “Picture Factory”
4.1 Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, Bar and café for high-rise
apartment building, from the “Section allemande,” Société des artistes
décorateurs français, Paris, 1930.
viii
List of Illustrations
4.2 Max Beckmann, Paris Society (Gesellschaft Paris), 1931.
4.3 Paul Strecker, Embracing Lovers (Sich umarmendes Liebespaar),
1927.
4.4 Paul Strecker, Sunday on the Marne (Sonntag an der Marne), 1937.
4.5 Dietz Edzard, Street Singer: Young Woman in Profile to the Right
(Chanteuse des rues: Jeune femme de profil à droite), [date unknown,
1927?].
Chapter Five
Between the Lines: The Juste Milieu in Interwar France
5.1 Paul Chabas, September Morn, c. 1912.
5.2 Henri Martin, Le Travail de la Terre, completed 1920.
5.3 Henri Martin, Le Travail de la Terre, detail.
5.4 Georges d’Espagnat, Baigneuses (also known as Les Sirènes), 1927.
5.5 Jules-Émile Zingg, Le Bouvier et son Attelage, 1921.
5.6 Jules-Émile Zingg, Pâturage en Auvergne, 1921.
Chapter Six
Classicism, Neither Right nor Left
6.1 “Le passage des équipes aux régates internationales de l’Exposition,”
reproduced in L’Illustration (19 June 1937), 259.
6.2 “Unfinished Buildings at the Paris World’s Fair,” reproduced in
L’Illustration (10 January 1937), 110.
6.3 Charles Despiau, Apollo, 1937-46.
6.4 Harry Kessler, “Maillol au musée d’Olympie devant le fronton est du
temple de Zeus,” 1908.
6.5 Aristide Maillol, The Three Nymphs, 1930-38.
6.6 Auguste Perret, “Plans for the Palais de Chaillot,” 1933-34, reproduced
in Insurgé (13 January, 1937).
Chapter Seven
Sculpture’s Alternative Modernities
7.1 Auguste Rodin, Le Grand Penseur, 1880/1904, Palace of the Legion of
Honor, San Francisco.
7.2 Rodin Museum, Philadelphia.
7.3 Rodin’s tomb at Meudon, with the reconstructed facade of the Chateau
d'Issy-les-Moulineaux behind, 1917.
7.4 Aristide Maillol, La Rivière, 1938/43, at the Museum of Modern Art,
New York.
7.5 The Tuileries Gardens, Paris with Maillol’s L’Air, 1938/43.
Academics, Pompiers, Official Artists and the Arriėre-garde
Chapter Eight
Avant-garde and Arrière-garde in Paris, 1943-1953
8.1 Édouard Pignon, Nature morte au buste, 1941.
8.2 Maurice Estève, Hommage à Cézanne, 1942.
8.3 Jean Bazaine, La Clairière, 1951.
8.4 Nicolas de Staël, Bouteilles, harmonie en rose et bleu, 1952.
ix
CONTRIBUTORS
Natalie Adamson is Lecturer in the School of Art History, University of
St Andrews. A scholar of art, photography and cultural politics in late
nineteenth- and twentieth-century France, her recent book is Painting,
Politics, and the Struggle for the École de Paris, 1944-1964 (Ashgate,
2009).
Mark Antliff is Professor in Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke
University. He is the author of Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and
the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton University Press, 1993) and AvantGarde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France,
1909-1939 (Duke University Press, 2007), co-author with Patricia
Leighton of Cubism and Culture (Thames & Hudson, 2001) and A Cubism
Reader: Documents and Criticism, 1909-1914 (University of Chicago
Press, 2008), and co-editor with Matthew Affron of Fascist Visions: Art
and Ideology in France and Italy (Princeton, 1997). He is currently
organizing an exhibition of British Vorticism which will open at Duke
University’s Nasher Museum of Art in autumn 2010 and then travel to the
Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and to Tate Britain in 2011.
Fae Brauer is Research Professor for Visual Art Theory, School of
Architecture and Visual Arts at the University of East London and Senior
Lecturer in Art History and Theory at the University of New South Wales.
Recent publications include Art, Sex and Eugenics: Corpus Delecti, coedited with Anthea Callen (Ashgate, 2008); The Art of Evolution: Darwin,
Darwinisms and Visual Culture, co-edited with Barbara Larson
(University Press of New England, 2009); and “The Transparent Body:
Biocultures of Evolution, Eugenics and Scientific Racism” and “The
Stigmata of Abjection: Degenerate Limbs, Hysterical Skin and The
Tattooed Body” for A History of Visual Culture, edited by Jane Kromm
and Susan Bakewell (Berg, 2009). She is Principal Investigator of the
Australian Research Council project, Regenerating the Body: Modern Art,
Neo-Darwinism and the Fitness Imperative.
xii
Contributors
Penelope Curtis is Curator of the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. Among
recent exhibitions, Figuring Space: Furniture/Sculpture from Mies to
Moore relates most closely to this essay, and it was also reflected in the
book Patio and Pavilion: the place of sculpture in modern architecture
(Ridinghouse/Getty, 2007/8). She has recently contributed to La Memoire
à l’Œuvre (Paris, 2009) on the archives of Antoine Bourdelle.
Keith Holz is Associate Professor of Art History at Western Illinois
University, Macomb. He is committed to a revisionist account of German
art based in an institutional and political history. He has published on
Oskar Kokoschka, Paul Klee, and the many exiled artists from Nazi
Germany who founded anti-Nazi artist groups in Prague, Paris and
London. His current research projects include a study of the role of visual
art in German foreign relations 1914-1950, and a consideration of Breslau
Germany’s Jewish art collectors’ engagement in the social and cultural life
of that city.
Kate Kangaslahti is Assistant Professor in Modern Art History in the
School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University,
Singapore. She specialises in French art of the interwar period, cultural
constructions of national identity, and the history and philosophy of
museums and exhibitions. Her recent work on the École de Paris also
appears in Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence: The
Proceedings of the 32nd International Congress of the History of Art
(Melbourne, 2009) and The Making of National Art (Hamburg and Berlin,
forthcoming).
Neil McWilliam is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Art and Art History
at Duke University. His publications include Dreams of Happiness. Social
Art and the French Left (Princeton, 1993) and Monumental Intolerance.
Jean Baffier, A Nationalist Sculptor in Fin-de-siècle France (Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2000). He is currently editing an edition of Émile
Bernard’s correspondence (forthcoming 2011), and completing The
Aesthetics of Reaction: Tradition, Identity and the Visual Arts in France,
c.1900-1914.
Academics, Pompiers, Official Artists and the Arriėre-garde
xiii
Toby Norris is Assistant Professor of Art History at Assumption College,
Worcester, MA. He works on the relationship between state patronage and
the art market in France, focusing on the interwar period. Recent papers
include “The Querelle du Réalisme and the Politicization of French Artists
during the Great Depression,” PART: Journal of Art History at the CUNY
Graduate Center, March 2007, and “Underwriting Independence: The Art
Market in France in the 1920s,” Association of Art Historians Conference,
2009.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book originated in a panel of papers presented at the College Art
Association Annual Conference in Boston, 2006. We would like to thank
the original participants in that panel (Fae Brauer, Keith Holz, Vivian
Rehberg and Nancy Jachec) and the audience for their contributions to the
subject under discussion. Neil McWilliam and Tom Jones kindly gave the
introduction a critical reading. A number of museums and artists
generously permitted the reproduction of artworks throughout the essays,
making it possible to illustrate the volume. Cambridge Scholars Press has
been an encouraging and patient publisher.
INTRODUCTION
NATALIE ADAMSON AND TOBY NORRIS
In his Panorama des Arts Plastiques contemporains (1960) Jean
Cassou, curator of the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, cautioned
that “A history of modern art, which is to say the art which has unfolded
from the middle of the nineteenth century until the present, does not
account for the entirety of artistic production during that period.” Cassou
highlights the existence of an alternative artistic field of production against
which modern art defined itself, holds that this art deserves to be studied,
and asserts that without such study “it seems impossible to produce an
overview of modern art since 1900.”1 Although the paradigm of modernist
art as a teleologically progressive and radical force, politically and
aesthetically, has been contested on numerous occasions in recent
scholarship, and significant attention has been directed to what may be
labelled “reactionary modernism” in France during the first half of the
twentieth century, art historians have still largely failed to respond to the
challenge proposed by Cassou. The comprehensive study of traditional
modes of artistic production after 1900 remains a blind spot in art history,
perhaps especially so in relation to art in France, the privileged
“homeland” of modernism and the avant-gardes from the mid-nineteenth
century until 1940.
This book addresses the lacuna highlighted almost half a century ago
by Cassou. It was spurred by questions raised by our own research and by
the desire to invite other scholars to reflect upon the construction of the
broad conceptual categories of progressive and reactionary, modernist and
anti-modernist, in twentieth-century French art. Our intention is not to
resuscitate a deterministic opposition between avant-garde and non-avantgarde art, but to override simplistic divisions through the examination of
1
“Une histoire de l’art moderne, c’est-à-dire de l’art qui se poursuit depuis le
milieu du XIXe siècle jusqu’à nos jours, n’épuise pas toute la production artistique
de cette époque.” “En attendant de pareils travaux, il nous paraît impossible
d’établir un panorama de l’art moderne depuis 1900.” Jean Cassou, Panorama des
Arts Plastiques contemporains (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 11. All translations are by
the authors unless otherwise noted.
2
Introduction
the history and significance of operating terms for traditional art like
“academic,” “official,” “pompier,” and “arrière-garde.”2 In this introduction
to the eight essays that follow, we discuss in brief some of the important
features of any historical analysis of tradition and modernity with
reference to the essays and to current scholarship. We then outline a
history for the four terms that we have chosen to bracket under the rubric
of “traditional” art, indicating when they became current, how they were
originally used, and the changes in their usage that ensued over time.
As we have worked with these categories we have become aware how
slippery the terms are, and to what extent the concept of “tradition” under
which we have grouped them was a source of contention. For example, in
chapter two of this volume Fae Brauer offers insight into the mechanisms
through which academic power was exercised (and challenged) at the
beginning of the century. What has become clear, however, is how
vigorously the Academy’s efforts to monopolize the idea of tradition were
contested by artists of widely varying persuasions who worked outside its
institutional boundaries. We open with Neil McWilliam’s examination of
one such artist, Emile Bernard. McWilliam traces a path from Bernard’s
active engagement with the avant-garde at the end of the nineteenth
century to the deliberate re-engagement with specific aspects of the
European painting tradition, allied to a broadly conservative political
posture, which shaped the remainder of his career. Bernard, however,
maintained a resolute separation from academic practice even as he sought
a return to tradition in his work. Similar artistic trajectories—although not
always accompanied by a conservative political turn at the individual
level—are more frequent in the years following the First World War.
Indeed this phenomenon of “reactionary modernism” during the so-called
rappel à l’ordre (call to order) in the early 1920s is currently the bestunderstood and most thoroughly researched manifestation of “traditional”
attitudes in the visual arts in the period under review.3
2
Jean Laude, “La crise de l’humanisme et la fin des utopies,” in Louis Roux, ed.,
L’art face à la crise: L’art en Occident, 1929-1939 (Saint-Etienne: CIEREC,
1979), 318-9, long ago noted the need for an opened-out history of the 1929-1939
period, where simple divisions between reactionary, traditional, modernist and
avant-garde are insufficient.
3
The term “reactionary modernism” is drawn from Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary
Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), although Herf’s concerns are
distinct from our own. For the “call to order” in France after World War I, see
Christopher Green, Cubism and Its Enemies: Modern Movements and Reaction in
French Art, 1916-1928 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987)
and Art in France, 1900-1940 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
Academics, Pompiers, Official Artists and the Arriėre-garde
3
Recent research has also brought out the extent to which similar
negotiations of tradition and modernity characterise literary, musical,
philosophical and religious activity in both like and contrasting terms.
Major studies of the literary field, such as Antoine Compagnon’s Les
Antimodernes de Joseph de Maistre à Roland Barthes (2005), have
examined keywords like counter-revolutionary, conservative, reactionary,
arrière-garde and reformist, in the effort to demonstrate how those he calls
the “anti-moderns” are in fact fundamentally modern in their conception
and ideology. Moreover, contends Compagnon in a statement akin to our
argument, the antimoderns, and not the historical avant-gardes, constituted
the dominant current of literary thought in this period.4 Other recent work
on the relationship of intellectuals to the vexed politics of the Third
Republic—such as that of Jane Fulcher on the interpolation of music with
politics in the disputes over national identity, republican democracy, and
the roles of church, army and state—further demonstrates the importance
and power of the ways in which each domain of cultural production
participated in the fashioning of “antimodern” and “traditional” values.5
What such studies demonstrate is that, rather than being marginal in
comparison to more overtly progressive and radical innovations,
“traditional” developments across the intellectual spectrum were in fact
integral to the very conceptualisation of modernity.
2000); Kenneth Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and
the First World War, 1914-1925 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989);
Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy, eds., On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger,
and the New Classicism, 1910-1930 (London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1990);
Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the
Wars (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995).
4
Antoine Compagnon, Les Antimodernes de Joseph de Maistre à Roland Barthes
(Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2005), 7-11, 25. See also Michel Décaudin, La Crise
des valeurs symbolistes (Toulouse: Éditions Privat, 1960) and Roger Griffiths, The
Reactionary Revolution: The Catholic Revival in French Literature, 1870-1914
(New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1965).
5
Jane Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music from the Dreyfus Affair to the
First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); The Composer as
Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France, 1914-1940 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005). Further studies of note include Mark Antliff, Inventing
Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1993) and Marjorie Beale, The Modernist Enterprise: French
Elites and the Threat of Modernity, 1900-1940 (Palo Alto: Stanford University
Press, 1999). On the role of the intellectual, see Pascal Ory and Jean-François
Sirinelli, Les Intellectuels en France de l’Affaire Dreyfus à nos jours (Paris:
Armand Colin, 1986) and Christophe Charles, Naissance des “intellectuels” 18801900 (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1990).
4
Introduction
Considerable attention has also been paid in recent scholarship to the
relationship between “returns” to tradition, forms of “reactionary
modernism” (especially in literature) and the rise of the far right in France,
notably during the interwar years. In this volume, Mark Antliff’s essay on
the Combat journal and its art criticism adds art historical nuance to the
lively debate on fascist politics and culture in France.6 Antliff shows that
the Combat group involved an initially surprising alliance of far-left and
far-right political elements, but that the group expressed clear, and rather
uncontroversial, preferences in the realm of art and architecture. Such
detailed analysis points to the dangers of trying to map political radicalism
or conservatism directly onto artistic practice, or vice versa. Aristide
Maillol was one of three figures vigorously promoted by the Combat
group, and to contemporary eyes Maillol’s profoundly classical-looking
sculptures might appear congruent with the group’s calls for a new
political approach drawing on classical principles. In the seventh chapter,
however, Penelope Curtis sets out to understand what was modern about
Maillol, whose status as the favoured sculptor of modernist architects from
Mies van der Rohe to Philip Johnson makes him arguably the key modern
sculptor of the middle of the twentieth century. Curtis also examines the
process by which Auguste Rodin has supplanted Maillol as the central
figure in histories of modern sculpture written since the early 1960s.
Like Antliff, Keith Holz (chapter four) is interested in the complex
relationship between political and artistic activity. His investigation of
German artists who participated in the Paris branch of the pan-European
organization known as the Kulturbund between the two world wars
examines how a politically conservative organisation was able to
accommodate and even promote the work of artists of varying degrees of
6
There is a vast literature tracing the intellectual and cultural history of far-right
and fascist politics in France. To start, see the work of the historians Robert Soucy,
Zeev Sternhell, Robert Paxton, and Paul Mazgaj, in addition to the three volume
Histoire des droites en France, edited by Jean-François Sirinelli (Paris: Gallimard,
1992). Important specific studies include Alice Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality:
Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1986); David Carroll, French Literary Fascism: Nationalism,
Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture (New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 1995); Matthew Affron and Mark Antliff, eds., Fascist Visions: Art and
Ideology in France and Italy (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997);
Mary Anne Frese Witt, The Search for Modern Tragedy: Aesthetic Fascism in
Italy and France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); Jessica Wardhaugh, ed.,
Paris and the Right in the Twentieth Century (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars
Press, 2007); and Mark Antliff, Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth,
Art, and Culture in France, 1909-1939 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
Academics, Pompiers, Official Artists and the Arriėre-garde
5
stylistic progressiveness. In chapter three Kate Kangaslahti also focuses on
foreign-born artists who made their careers in Paris. Her analysis of the
origins and usage of the term “École de Paris” challenges the current
understanding that the term was coined as a way of excluding or
marginalising non-French artists; instead, Kangaslahti argues that it served
to integrate the work of leading artists from abroad into a modern French
tradition that was itself in the process of being constructed.
Indeed, any analysis of the role that tradition played in French cultural
and political life in the first half of the twentieth century must contend
with the disputes that proliferated over the identity of the “French
tradition.”7 Examining the five hundred years of French painting on show
at the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la vie
moderne in Paris, Louis Gillet may have been moved to observe that “the
continuity strikes the eye: not a hole, not a gap,”8 but in practice the
preceding decades had been a fertile period for competing claims about the
cultural origins of French identity. During the war and into the 1920s, the
“call to order” argument proposed that France had only ever been, and
would continue to be, a classical culture, irrefutably Latin in origin.9
Another strand of tradition-making, which endured through the war years
and into the late 1940s, can be found in the surge of a “nationalist
primitivism” which glorified the French medieval age and ancient Celtic
culture.10 Both “traditions” were also called upon to sustain a plethora of
competing formulations of a modern French tradition of art making. If we
accept Eric Hobsbawm’s assertion that tradition “automatically implies
continuity with the past,” then we must note that French artists and
intellectuals in our period were unable to agree whose past was at stake,
and what sort of continuity was desirable.11 The existence of a substantial
middle ground of artists who worked with one eye toward some form of
tradition—academic or otherwise—and the other toward recent
innovations in artistic practice further complicated the situation. In chapter
five, Toby Norris investigates this middle ground, arguing that it constituted
a “juste milieu,” treading a careful path between overt modernism and
7
To start, see June Hargrove and Neil McWilliam, eds., Nationalism and French
Visual Culture, 1870-1914 (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2005).
8
“la continuité saute aux yeux: pas un trou, pas une lacune.” Louis Gillet, Essais
sur l’art français (Paris: Flammarion, 1938), 41.
9
See above, n. 3.
10
See Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 19001945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).
11
Eric Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983), 1-14.
6
Introduction
excessive conservatism, and often garnering significant state support in the
process.
For all the competing versions of tradition on offer, the slow and
piecemeal consolidation of a modernist French tradition, shifting away
from naturalistic realism, is nonetheless one of the most notable features of
the artistic landscape in France in the first decades of the twentieth
century. This modern tradition, however, was largely suppressed in 1940
with the defeat of France, the Occupation, and what Charles Maurras—the
royalist, anti-democratic editor of Action française—called the “divine
surprise” of Maréchal Pétain’s Vichy regime.12 As historians such as
Christian Faure and Laurence Bertrand Dorléac have described, Pétain’s
“National Revolution” sparked a resurgent, popularist conservatism in the
arts and the resuscitation of a “grand discourse” of tradition. This new
tradition was founded on a claim to universal validity in the representation
of the real (in the genres of landscape, portrait, nude and still-life), on the
continuity of the fine arts administration and its training for artists, and on
the putative fealty of artists to a pure, indigenous French identity.13 ProVichy and pro-Nazi art critics, however, did not necessarily support the
version of tradition embodied by the Academy and the École de BeauxArts. At the same time, the Vichy notion of tradition was contested by
modernist artists such as Jean Bazaine (a protagonist in chapter eight),
who saw themselves as fighting for the survival and renovation of a
modern tradition, completely distinct both from academic practice and
from the state-sponsored naturalistic style.
The study of art and artists in France during the war years confirms
that tradition in this period, as before, must be conceived of as a contested
field, riven by political and artistic pressures and by the struggle over the
right to represent alternative visions of human experience in pictorial
form. Rather than emphasise what is to be passed on by the tradition that
putatively defines French art, tradition might best be understood as the
12
Charles Maurras’s words are cited by Robert O. Paxton, “France: The Church,
the Republic,” in Richard J. Wolff and Jörg K. Hoensch, eds., Catholics, the State,
and the European Radical Right 1919-1945 (Boulder, CO.: Social Science
Monographs, 1987), 82.
13
See Daniel Lindenberg, Les Années souterraines 1937-1947 (Paris: La
Découverte, 1990); Christian Faure, Le Projet culturel de Vichy: Folklore et
révolution nationale 1940-1944 (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1989);
Jean-Pierre Roux, ed., La Vie culturelle sous Vichy (Brussels: Éditions Complexe,
1990); Michèle Cone, Artists Under Vichy: A Case of Prejudice and Persecution
(New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992); and Laurence Bertrand Dorléac,
Art of the Defeat, France 1940-1944 (1993), trans. Jane Marie Todd (Los Angeles:
Getty Institute, 2009).
Academics, Pompiers, Official Artists and the Arriėre-garde
7
very struggle over the right to transmit or donate, from one generation to
another, a set of privileged values, principles and practices of artmaking.14 In this sense too, we may better begin to comprehend the
momentous consequences of the wartime struggles over tradition for the
postwar period. As discussed in Natalie Adamson’s concluding essay on
the collapse of operating boundaries between academic art and avantgarde art, and the emergence of telling terms such as arrière-garde and
neo-avant-garde, modernism might be said to have triumphed by the end
of the 1950s. But the shattering of the prewar utopian faith of the avantgardes by fascism, the war, and the Holocaust, recused any secure sense of
progress.15
Terms and Categories
In the process of working with four of the terms typically deployed to
categorize traditional art, each essay in this volume contributes to the
ongoing task of clarifying what it meant to be modern in the French art
world between 1900 and 1960. For it is clear that all of the terms cited
operated in a dialogical and synchronic relationship to emerging definitions
of modern art and modernism, often dubbed art indépendant or art vivant
at the time, and to the conceptualisation of avant-garde as a dominant
paradigm for artistic practice. Rather than assume that academic, official,
pompier or arrière-garde automatically situated the art these terms
described in the realm of the second-rate (as those who used the terms
typically intended), the essays outline and analyse the polemical and
rhetorical strategies that gave meaning to all of these categories, which had
a real ability to elevate or to marginalise an artist’s work.
In this light it is important to note that artists who had received their
training principally at the École des Beaux-Arts rather than at one of the
14
On tradition as an active, non-linear and entangled process of donation and
appropriation, see Howard Caygill, “The Present of Tradition,” Journal of the
British Society for Phenomenology 26/3 (October 1995), 293-9.
15
On the collapse of notions of progress, see Hannah Arendt, Between Past and
Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (1961) (London: Penguin, 1977).
Amongst the growing number of sources on culture and politics in postwar France,
see the key study by Henri Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in
France since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1991) and on painting, Bernard Ceysson, “Histoire et la
mémoire: tradition et modernité,” in L’Art en Europe: Les Années décisives, 19451953 (Geneva and Saint-Étienne: Skira, 1987), 36-47; Natalie Adamson, Painting,
Politics, and the Struggle for the École de Paris, 1944-1964 (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2009).
8
Introduction
independent, private academies or ateliers, and whose work depended
upon a more or less naturalistic approach in which the legibility of the
representation largely avoided the types of deliberate distortion or
abstraction introduced by Fauve and Cubist artists—artists, in other words
who might broadly be considered traditional—were in the majority in
France until at least the 1920s.16 Although it is beyond the scope of this
book to trace in detail the means by which “modern” artists won out over
their traditional counterparts in the middle of the twentieth century, this
gradual process provides the necessary backdrop for understanding the
aesthetic and institutional choices made by artists, curators and art critics
during the period 1900-1960. As several studies have detailed, modern art
(or l’art vivant) triumphed initially at the commercial level and only later
within the institutional sphere. The first significant breakthrough came in
the second half of the 1920s, when prices for recent works by modern
artists decisively outstripped those of their traditional counterparts for the
first time.17 The stylistic innovations of modern art thus began to exert a
financial attraction for younger artists as they mapped out their careers.
Although the Great Depression narrowed the price gap as the art market,
both domestically and internationally, experienced a dramatic contraction,
traditional art never again had the same commercial allure as in the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
But institutionally, the enhanced critical and market status of modern
art was reflected in only a modest and piecemeal way before 1960. In 1925
numerous artists, arts bureaucrats and critics responded to the inquiry
launched by the journal L’Art Vivant, “Pour un musée français d’art
moderne,” to return a list of the top ten living artists: Matisse, Maillol,
Derain, Dunoyer de Segonzac, Picasso, Utrillo, Rouault, Bonnard, Braque
and Vlaminck. Not one of these artists, remarked the enquête editor,
Georges Charensol, came from the Academy or the Salon des Artistes
Français; they were all independent in their training. He might have added
that as a group they were extremely poorly represented at the Musée du
16
On the reception of the Fauves, and especially Matisse, in terms of tradition and
its distortion by modern artists, see Alastair Wright, Matisse and the Subject of
Modernism (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004).
17
Malcolm Gee, Dealers, Critics and Collectors of Modern Painting: Aspects of
the Parisian Art Market between 1910 and 1930 (New York: Garland, 1981)
remains the key study on the dramatic growth of the market for modern art; see
also Michael Fitzgerald, Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the
Market for Twentieth-Century Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
For the post-1945 period, the pioneering study by Raymonde Moulin, Le Marché
de la peinture en France (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967) remains indispensable
(translated in 1987).
Academics, Pompiers, Official Artists and the Arriėre-garde
9
Luxembourg, the state museum responsible for showing the work of
contemporary artists.18 Although Christopher Green has identified isolated
incidents during the 1920s that suggest a degree of openness to modern art
by the State, it was not until the election of the Popular Front government
in 1936 that a concerted attempt was made to acknowledge modernism at
the official level.19 The 1937 Paris Exposition Internationale, which
opened a year into the Popular Front’s tenure, represented the high point
of the interwar acknowledgement of modern art’s new status (the essays
by Mark Antliff, Penelope Curtis and Kate Kangaslahti in this volume all
touch on aspects of the Exposition). A much more cautious approach had
returned by 1942, when the Musée d’Art Moderne constructed by the State
as part of the preparation for the Exposition opened its doors for the first
time under the repressive auspices of the Vichy regime and German
occupation. Noting the paucity of innovative modernist works on show
(not one work by Picasso, for example), the young painter Jean Bazaine
dismissed its contents as a “fine collection of daubs.”20
Upon the Liberation of Paris in August 1944, the public profile of
modern art was heightened by its “return” from exile and suppression
during the “black years” of the war. This was announced by the presence
of a generation of modernist painters that had absorbed the lessons of the
Fauves and the Cubists, baptised the Nouvelle École de Paris by won-over
critics, and by Picasso’s dominating presence at the Salon d’Automne
(dubbed the “Salon de la Libération”). However, in spite of the interest in
new art on the part of state art officials such as Jean Cassou (director) and
Bernard Dorival (curator), the Musée d’Art Moderne collection was
limited by its dependence upon gifts and bequests, and by a deep
conservatism at the core of its organisation and of the state mechanisms of
acquisition and commission.21
18
Georges Charensol, ed., “Enquête: Pour un musée francais d’art moderne,” L’Art
Vivant (15 July, 1 and 15 August, 1 and 15 September, 1 October 1925).
19
See Green, Cubism and Its Enemies, chapter 7, and Art in France, 40-43.
Further, see Marie-Claude Genet-Delacroix, Art et État sous la Troisième
République: Le Système des Beaux-Arts 1870-1940 (Paris: Publications de la
Sorbonne, 1992); Pascal Ory, La Belle Illusion: Culture et Politique sous le signe
du Front Populaire, 1935-1938 (Paris: Plon, 1994); and Toby Norris, Modern
Artists and the State in France between the Two World Wars (PhD dissertation:
Northwestern University, 2005).
20
“une belle récolte de navets.” Jean Bazaine, “Le Musée d’Art Moderne,” La
Nouvelle Revue française (December 1942), 740.
21
For a brief overview of the period prior to 1968, see Rebecca DeRoo, The
Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art: The Politics of Artistic Display in
France after 1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), chapter 2.
10
Introduction
Thus the polemical exchanges between modernists and traditionalists
which characterise the period under study in this volume, sprinkled as they
were with barbed insults, are the key symptom of a much more meaningful
struggle for dominance than recent art history—written in the aftermath of
the eventual triumph of modern forms—has tended to acknowledge. In the
early decades of the twentieth century, traditional artists occupied a
commanding position both commercially and institutionally, and they
continued to fight a vigorous rearguard action at the institutional level
even after the burgeoning Parisian art market of the 1920s overturned their
market primacy.22 In this context, the eventual “victory” of the moderns
has allowed the pejorative terms for the opposition to pass from the jargon
of art criticism into the language of art history without serious evaluation.
One important task here, therefore, is to conduct an initial inventory of
terms and categories to begin to understand how each has been used.
Of “academic,” “official,” “pompier,” and “arrière-garde,” academic
has the most thorough historical grounding, given that it derives from the
Académie des Beaux-Arts, the most prestigious institution in the French
art world from its foundation in 1648 until the late nineteenth century. But
as a descriptive label, academic only began to be regularly used to
categorize artists or their work after the Academy had been dissolved
during the French Revolution and re-established under the Consulate in
1795 within the framework of the Institut de France.23 The Academy’s
network of institutional influence and the artistic doctrines it promulgated
were certainly not static during the nineteenth century, but they were
sufficiently consistent to allow the designation of “academic” to acquire a
Even later, Yve-Alain Bois calls 1965-1968 under Dorival the “darkest years of the
museum and its acquisition policy” in “Better Late than Never,” in Rendez-vous:
Masterpieces from the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Guggenheim Museums
(New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1998), 45.
22
For example, Yves Brayer (1907-1990) studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in
Paris and won the Prix de Rome in 1930. He dedicated his work to the landscape
and light of the south of France, showing frequently at the official Salons and at
the Galerie de l’Elysée along with other painters from the Poetic Realist strand.
The Dossier Brayer, Archives Nationales F21/6816, corroborates Raymonde
Moulin’s finding that Brayer was the artist most bought by the State during the
1950s, when his works received extremely high prices.
23
Louis Dimier, Histoire de la peinture française au XIXe siècle (1793-1903), 2nd
edition (Paris: Librarire Delagrave, 1926), 249. Although French writers often use
“Académie” and “Institut” interchangeably to describe the institution, perhaps
because the Académie des Beaux-Arts was not formally re-established as an
independent “class” within the Institut until 1816, “académique” is almost
invariably used to characterize the artists and doctrines associated with it.
Academics, Pompiers, Official Artists and the Arriėre-garde
11
relatively stable meaning. Applied to an artist at the beginning of the
twentieth century, this typically meant that they had studied at the École
des Beaux-Arts in Paris—where the majority of professors were or aspired
to become members of the Academy—and competed for its highest
honour, the Prix de Rome. In their subsequent careers, such artists could
measure success in terms of tangible achievements such as purchases or
commissions of their work by the State, service on state committees, a
professorship at the École des Beaux-Arts and their own eventual election
to the Academy. Artists who followed this career trajectory would exhibit
at the Salon of the Société des Artistes Français (the continuation of the
state-run Salon that had existed until 1880), or at the Salon of the Société
Nationale des Beaux-Arts, established in 1890 as an alternative to the
Salon of the Société des Artistes Français but quickly reputed for its
conservatism. The Société des Artistes Français offered a complex
hierarchy of attainments by which members could gauge the progress of
their careers: “honourable mentions”; third, second and first class medals
that entitled their holder to exemption from submitting works to the jury;
and ultimately, for the most successful, a Medal of Honour awarded at
each year’s Salon.
This typical academic professional career path remained intact through
to the mid-twentieth century, even if the commercial success and critical
recognition it was likely to garner declined rapidly after 1920. During the
nineteenth century, it also became associated with a specific artistic
doctrine with implications for both the style and the subject matter of the
works produced by artists who followed this course. The most thorough
historical examination of academic doctrine remains Albert Boime’s The
Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century (1971). By
focusing on the central role that pedagogy played in transmitting the
standards of the Academy, Boime shed light on the way in which certain
features of academic art remained constant throughout the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries while others witnessed notable changes. Thus the
almost exclusive emphasis on the nude male figure that characterizes
French art of the early nineteenth century, when Jacques-Louis David’s
influence was at its strongest, gave way in the second half of the century to
a preference for the female nude in academic painting. But the technique
used to represent the nude body, based upon a rigorous sequence of
drawing exercises and emphasizing clarity of outline, careful modelling,
and a smooth, clean finish, was remarkably consistent.24 Following the
24
See Philippe Grunchec, The Grand Prix de Rome: Paintings from the École des
Beaux-Arts, 1797-1863 (Washington, D.C.: International Exhibitions Foundation,
1984) and Grunchec, Les concours d’esquisses peintes, 1816-1863 (Paris: École
12
Introduction
invention of photography in 1839 and its rapid expansion as a medium for
documenting the real, academic painting technique moved still further
towards a quasi-photographic precision of detail delivered by very tight
brushwork and a high degree of almost lacquered surface polish.25 The
painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, famed for his Orientalist scenes, was perhaps
the most proficient exponent of this technique, which is sometimes dubbed
Academic Realism.26 During the same period the expectation that
academic painting would focus on biblical themes or scenes from classical
history or mythology broke down completely. Artists began to draw fairly
indiscriminately from European history, from literary sources of all
periods, and from the history and contemporary mores of non-Western
cultures. By the beginning of the twentieth century, there was also a
thriving industry in society portraits executed using academic technique;
beyond this the most common subject was the female nude, whose
presence could be justified by a wide range of subjects: classical
goddesses, allegorical figures, odalisques, slave markets, bathing scenes,
and even witches’ covens (assumed to assemble in a state of undress).27
At the turn of the twentieth century it was still meaningful to describe
an artist as academic given his institutional affiliations and professional
goals, or to describe artworks as such on the basis of style, often in
combination with subject matter.28 It was just as likely, however, that an
Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1986). Monique Segré, L’Art comme
Institution: l’École des Beaux-Arts, 19ème-20ème siècle (Cachan: Éditions de l’ENSCachan, 1993), 130-6, notes how far into the twentieth century the same
pedagogical approach persisted.
25
Louis-Marie Lécharny, L’Art Pompier (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1998), 76ff. has a detailed technical description, from the perspective of a
practising painter, of how this effect is achieved.
26
Gerald M. Ackerman, The Life and Work of Jean-Léon Gérôme, with a
Catalogue Raisonné (London and New York: Sotheby’s Publications, 1986),
revised and updated edition Jean-Léon Gérôme: His Life, His Work, 1824-1904
(Courbevoie: ACR Édition, 1997), coined the term Academic Realism. For a
discussion of how this term has migrated into current debates about art pedagogy,
see M. S. Doherty, “Spreading the word about Academic Realism,” American
Artist 70 (July-August 2006), 36-43.
27
See Jacques-Émile Blanche, Les Arts Plastiques (Paris: Les Éditions de France,
1931), ch.5; Francis Jourdain, L’Art Officiel de Jules Grévy à Albert Lebrun,
special issue of Le Point, Mulhouse, April 1949 reproduces several works by the
artist Luis Ricardo Falero, who specialized in representing titillating witches.
28
The gender bias of this sentence is deliberate: academic institutions in France
were only opened up to women starting at the end of the nineteenth century. See
Marina Sauer, L’Entrée des Femmes à l’École des Beaux-Arts, 1880-1923 (Paris:
École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1990).
Academics, Pompiers, Official Artists and the Arriėre-garde
13
artist or critic hostile to academicism would dub such artists or artworks
“pompier,” literally meaning “fireman” (the word serves as an adjective as
well as a noun in French). The origins of the term have been difficult to
identify. Jacques Thuillier suggests that it was a form of studio slang
picked up by critics around the middle of the nineteenth century. He
proposes three explanations for this curious designation: it may have come
from the visible resemblance between the helmets worn by classical heroes
in Davidian history painting and the helmets worn by French firefighters
of the period; it was possibly a corruption of pompéiste, a label sometimes
used to describe the group of “Neo-Greek” painters around Gérôme at
mid-century; or it may have actually been a tribute to the platoons of
uniformed men who were customarily present at the official openings of
the state-sponsored Salon.29 Louis-Marie Lécharny adds that “pompier”
must have been a widely-accepted alternative for “academic” by 1880,
when the critic Théodore de Banville entitled a comic fable on academic
painting for the front page of Gil Blas “Le Pompier.”30 Here de Banville
derided the replacement of original inspiration and study after nature by
formulaic recipes that guaranteed salon medals, stateroom commissions,
and a statue erected in the artist’s honour in some provincial home town,
guarded by a striking nude ghost wearing the gilded fireman’s helmet!31
Thuillier and Lécharny agree that “pompier” was used pejoratively from
the beginning, and that it lent itself well to the task of derogation because
of its alliterative similarity to pompeux (pompous). “Pompier” also
allowed livelier punning than “academic”: Thuillier cites Edgar Degas’s
dismissal of Albert Besnard, an academic artist who began to incorporate
elements of Impressionist technique into his work from the 1880s
onwards, as “un pompier qui a pris feu” (a fireman who has caught fire);
and Gérôme’s droll defence of academic practice, “Il est plus facile d’être
incendiare que pompier” (It is easier to be an arsonist than a fireman).32
These kinds of off-the-cuff but pointed comments—one a modern
artist’s dismissal of the conventional painter’s efforts to become a little
more à la mode, the other a supreme academician re-tooling the
derogatory epithet to his own favour—underline the rhetorical power, as
29
Jacques Thuillier, Peut-on parler d’une peinture «pompier»? (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1984), chapter 2. For a critique of Thuillier’s and
Ackerman’s (see n. 26) contributions to revisionist studies of nineteenth-century
art history, see Neil McWilliam, “Limited Revisions: Academic Art History
confronts Academic Art,” Oxford Art Journal 12/2 (1989), 71-86.
30
Lécharny, L’Art Pompier, 13ff (see n. 25).
31
Théodore de Banville, “Le Pompier,” Gil Blas (12 November 1880), 1.
32
Thuillier, Peut-on parler?, 20.
14
Introduction
well as the contingency, of the terminology. Many of the essays that
follow—whether they focus on artists, art critics or institutions—examine
links between the construction of hierarchies, distinctions and categories,
and the deployment of an inventive and targeted vocabulary designed to
mark out boundaries. Several essays in this book are specifically
concerned with art criticism as a source of labels designed both to
demarcate territory in a crowded art world and to establish the critic’s own
standing in a competitive field. Against this background, it is perhaps not
surprising that the labels coined in such profusion often reveal a mismatch
with the artworks themselves.33
The fluidity of critical discourse is indicated by the interchangeable
application of academic and pompier through the first half of the twentieth
century, with the latter having the polemical benefit of not being affiliated
to a specific set of institutions; this permitted it, on many occasions, to
become a general term of abuse for artists or movements not committed to
modernist formal innovation (including, later, both Surrealism and
Socialist Realism).34 Both these epithets, however, have a clearer and
more reliable meaning than “official,” the designation Cassou used to
identify a distinct realm of art requiring investigation. The term has been
in use almost continuously since the nineteenth century and during that
time its meaning has not remained constant. Its most dependable
connotation, although even this is not invariably present, is the assumed
link between “official art” and government objectives. As Lécharny
observes, official art is “attached to the State, even at the service of that
State.”35 Consequently, if an official art is to display its status by
recognisable visual characteristics, then it might be presumed that the
State is in control of a clear and relatively consistent idea of the style and
subject matter of the art it wants to promote.
For most of the Third Republic, supporters of modern art firmly
believed that the State was in the Academy’s pocket as far as artistic
policy went, with the implication that any official art would be academic
33
Adrian Rifkin describes the relationship between art criticism and its object as
“non-isomorphic” in “History, Time, and the Morphology of Critical Language, or
Publicola’s Choice,” in Michael R. Orwicz, ed., Art Criticism and its Institutions in
Nineteenth-Century France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 2942.
34
The term “pompier” experienced a revival in popularity after the Musée d’Orsay
opened in 1986, showing traditional artists alongside their modern counterparts.
See McWilliam, “Limited Revisions,” for a discussion of the debates prompted by
the opening of the museum and by wider scholarly efforts to rehabilitate
nineteenth-century academic painting at this time.
35
“attaché à l’État, au service même de cet État” Lécharny, L’Art Pompier, 65.