Essays should be between 8 and 10 pages in length (2,000 to 2,500 .docx

Essays should be between 8 and 10 pages in length (2,000 to
2,500 words)
This question invites you to respond to a piece you don’t know,
by an artist whose work you do know. In your response, be
guided by the three principles, invoked more than once in these
pages:
(i) Situate the unfamiliar image within its historical moment and
its specific social milieu.
(ii) Attend closely to the way the image is constructed. Relying
on your own immediate observations, take note of its principal
features, begin to look for significant details; and
(iii) Where possible, draw on relevant course Readings and
Lecture notes.
You already know the general situation surrounding this work,
but what is singular about this new work you are examining?
Does it present aspects that surprise you? Does this work make
you want to revise your understanding so far, of the artist who
created it.?
From the following group of six, choose three works and write a
short essay around each one.
Note: the thumbnail images on the next page are intended to
assist you with your selection. Once you know which images
you want to write about, look for high res pictures online, and
work from those. Otherwise, do not use resources beyond those
supplied through Canvas.
Degas, Singer with Glove, 1878
Toulouse-Lautrec, Circus Ferrando: The Equestrienne, 1888
Manet, The Railway, 1873
Caillebotte, The House Painters, 1877

Gauguin, Nevermore,1897
Van Gogh, Sunflowers,1888
Formatting Guidelines
1. Heading: The heading goes in the upper right corner of the
first page of your exam and should look like this:
Your Name
VIS 22– Final Exam
Professor Norman Bryson
Date
2. Formatting:
12-point font for the main text, footnotes are 10-point,
illustration captions are 9-point
Times New Roman
1” page margins
Insert page number at the top right corner of each page
Heading is single-spaced, the entire body is DOUBLE SPACED
Need help? Consult your TA. The conventions are definitively
stated in the
Chicago Manual of Style: http://www.docstyles.com/ctslite.htm
3. When you cite a book or article in your essay
You must always specify your exact source by means of a
footnote placed at the bottom of the page. The footnote should
be formatted like the example below & at the bottom of this
page.

Example: Part of the difficulty in representing Mameluke
figures in painting was that Mameluke society was ethnically so
diverse. As Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby has pointed out,
“Mamelukes came from throughout Eurasia and Africa and
spoke many languages, among them, Arabic, Armenian, Greek,
Turkish, Flemish, Italian, German, and French.”2
Footnote (at the bottom of the page, 10-pt font):
Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-
Revolutionary France (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2002), 108.
4. When you cite a work of art in your essay.
You must always specify exactly which work you are referring
to by means of a footnote placed at the bottom of the page. In
art history, referencing particular works of art normally
includes the artist’s full name, the title of the work, the date,
medium, dimensions and location – but we are only requiring
the information that appears in the Slides: the artist’s surname
[only], the title of the work, and the date.
Example: David, The Oath of the Horatii, 17853
___________________________________________
2 Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Extremities: Painting Empire in
Post-Revolutionary France (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2002), 108.
3 David, The Oath of the Horatii
5. Bibliography: You are not required to supplement your essay
with a Bibliography.
Robert Herbert

Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988
Robert Herbert
Impressionism:Art, Leisure,andParisianSociety
N ewHaven: Yale University Press, 1988
fier Three
' and Café~Concert
' einvaded the boulevards, concerts have invaded the
crowds have invadedeverywhere to the greatjoy ofthe
who are getting rich.
arc Constantin, 1872
.read! they used to demand. Spectacles and hussies, that’s
, cry today. ‘ .
.‘Anon” Paris désert. Lamentation d’unjeremle haussmamse,
4, 8
-able 3harlequin is some compensation for failing to bea
: citizen.
5 enry Tuckerman, 1867
’ . detail of Aux Ambassadeurs (P1. 83).

Even a casual glance at successive editions of guide books to
Paris, from their beginnings in the 18405 to the end of the
“Belle Epoque,” reveals the striking truth: leisure and enter ‑
tainment took an ever‐increasing place in the life of Paris. In
the guide books-their very growth is anindex of leisure‑
notices devoted to idle hours and entertainment greatly ex ‑
panded, while those that referred to historic sites and famous
buildings simply held their o w n (and visiting such places is, of
course, an aspect of leisure). At the end of the century the life
of Paris, if one were tojudge by guide books, was dominated
by the following: theaters in infinite variety, opera, comic
opera, vaudeville, music halls, cafes-concerts, cafes, restau ‑
rants, popular balls, circuses, racetracks, promenades (along
streets aswell asin parks and gardens), shopping, and excur‑
sions along the Seine and o u t to the suburbs, excursions that
may have includedbathing, boating, riverside dining, dancing,
picnicking, or simply promenading. The numbers involved
are n o t easy to establish, but they were already noteworthy by
the 18605. The American james McCabe estimated that in
1867 theaters in Paris seated atotal of 30,000 on a good night,
and in cafes‐concerts, circuses, and other enclosed places, an
additional 24,000.1
Tourists came to Paris to enjoy What the natives already
prized, an elegant urban culture. The extra revenues they
brought contributed fundamentally to Paris’s prosperity, as
did the plaudits they lavished on Parisian products catering
both to body and to mind. Paradoxically, tourists‐transients
bydefinition‐fitted readily into the Parisian culture of enter ‑
tainment and leisure, for the city’s life was sustained by a
volatile population. By 1886 the city’s inhabitants numbered
2,345,000, three times the figure for 1831. Furthermore, most
of the newcomers had been born outside Paris. From 1875
to 1891, for example, only 70/0 of the net increase in Paris’s
population was due to n e w births, 93% to immigration from
elsewhere (and these figures do n o t include temporary visitors

from abroad and from the provinces). Already by 1872, 7.4°/o
of Paris’s residents were foreign‐born, a huge percentage
compared to prior generations and to other European cities.
By 1891, only 32.2% ofthe capital’s populationhad been born
in the city, whereas in London, center of a vast colonial em‑
pire, and in Boston, major city in a nation of immigrants,
respectively 62.9% and 38.5% of the inhabitants were native
born.
Paris’s population was also marked by a very high per‑
centage of single men and women. Paris and its immediate
suburbs had the highest divorce rate in France: in 1885, 47
divorces for every 100,000 people, compared to 3.5 for the rest
of the country. Adding legal separations to divorces brought
the Paris figure up to 60 per 100,000, compared to 12 for all of
France. Moreove r, many Parisians never married a t all, for
Paris had the lowest marriage rate among Caucasians in all
of Western Europe and the United States. To these revealing
facts we might add another: among married couples, 323 per
1 0 0 0 had no children, an unusually high figure for that era.2
These various statistics show usthat the traditional family
and the domestic hearth, sovital to middle‐class mores and to
traditions of painting earlier in the century, were no longer as
central to Parisian life. The foreigners, the provincial immi‑
grants, the temporary visitors, the professional couples with‑
59
o u t children, the construction workers and laundresses who
left their families in the provinces, these were the ones who
populated the Second Empire and the Third Republic. It was
among these uprooted peoples, living in a city undergoing
constant and drastic alterations, that the flcineur and the

impressionist artists took their places. Paris was indeed a city
of strangers.
The burgeoning population of Paris formed an ideal
clientele for entrepreneurs of distraction, both the owners of
the rapidly expanding network of entertainment, and also the
municipaland national institutions which treated entertainment
asinstruments of policy. Henry Tuckerman, when he visited
Paris in 1867, contrasted the “dignity and permanence” of
American and British life with that ofParis, whose citizens, he
wrote, dwelled in
akind of metropolitan encampment, requiring no domicile
except a bedroom for seven hours in the twenty‐four, and
passing the remainder of each day and night as nomadic
cosmopolites: going to a café to breakfast, a restaurant to
dine, an estaminet to smoke, a national library to study, a
cabinet de lecture to read the gazettes, a public bath for ablu‑
tion, an open church to pray, a free lecture r o o m to be
instructed, a thronged garden to promenade, a theatre to
be amused, a museum for science, a royal gallery for art, a
municipal ball, literary soirée, or suburban rendezvous, for
society.
Unlike james McCabe and other American visitors in 1867,
who reveled in all the glitter, Tuckerman understood that
leisure and display formed a vital element of French politics,
one that was used to great advantage by Louis Napoleon’s
government , and one that truly characterized the n e w society
of the French capital:
To cultivate illusions is apparently the science of Parisian
life; vanity m u s t have its pabulum and fancy her triumph,
though pride is sacrificed and sense violated thereby; hence
acoincidence of thrift and wit, shrewdness and sentimental‑
i ty, love of excitement and patient endurance, superficial

enjoyment and essential deprivation. . . .3
Offenbach and Manet
In 1867, when Tuckerman made those observations, one of
the great masters of illusion and display reached the heights of
a giddy climb to fame. Jacques Offenbach had t w o smash hits
that year, both calculated to coincide with the 1867 exposition.
La Vie Parisienne, commissioned expressly for the fair, was
ready ahead of time (it premiered on 31October 1866), leaving
Offenbach and his habitual collaborators, Henri Meilhac and
Ludovic Halévy, several months to prepare La Grande‑
Duchesse deGerolstein. The latter opened on 12April 1867 and
was, like its predecessor, a huge success. Offenbach was n o t
an impressionist in any sense of the term, but the study of his
operettas is sorewarding for the history of Impressionism that
it m u s t have its place. Moreover, SiegfriedKracauer’s
Offenbach
and the Paris of His Time4 is one of the great pieces of cultural
history, and in many ways the ideal model for a book on I m ‑
pressionism, even though the author never mentions Manet,
Morisot, or Degas. Thanks to his perceptive analysis of Offen‑
60
bach, we can find illuminating parallels with .
greatly extend o u r understanding of the works of t
himself a master of illusion and display. :_
Offenbach’s first major success, Orphée aux enfl'
owed some of its vogue to its witty satire of c o n
society. jupiter, forever chasing women, was see ;
Napoleon, and his jealous wife juno, as Eugenie,
Emperor,jupiterneededpublic support, soOffenbac,
the classical chorus with voices labeled “public 5;
making clear the manipulation of the populace.Jupi ..
courtiers used shabby subterfuges to maintain th ‘

and they succeeded, despite the threat of the 01 u
stage arevolution, because indulgence in pleasures W
to all. “ I n short,” w r o t e Kracauer, “the operetta mad.
of all the glamour that surrounded the apparatus 0 f,
The fact that there was considerable sting in Offenbaal
of the Empire was revealed by Jules janin’s attaca.
operetta for profaning “glorious antiquity” throug.
sions to contemporary society.5 In La Belle Héle‘ne:
Offenbach poked more fun at the vainglory whic
terized Louis Napoleon’s reign (Kracauer reminds u‘
masked ball in 1857, Eugénie appeared asNight, wi
Way of diamonds, and t w o others came as the B
at sunset, and the Sea of Marmora on a misty day)
adultery is frankly justified for reasons of state, 4-1
members of Louis Napoleon’s cour t , Orestes parad'
on the “boulevards” of Sparta, boasting that the state ‘3;
wil l pay for his excesses. "
In 1866 and 1867, with La Vie Parisienhe and La
Duchesse de Gerolstein, Offenbach dropped mytholo'.
tings in favor of contemporary life. La Vie Parisienne,
the Gare Saint‐Lazare, asa party returns from the fas
resor t of Trouville; its final act takes place in acafe-r.
In between, the visitors Baron and Baroness de Gonn
are victims of the boulevardiers Gardefeu and Bob' 5
take advantage of the foreigners’ desires to attend 51
plays, musicals, and cafes‐concerts, and to embark on
escapades. Appropriate to the Paris exposition, for "
was initially commissioned, La Vie Parisierme givk»
prominent roles to foreigners, and its chorus, suitably if:
is composed of foreign tourists: '
We are going to invade
The sovereign city,
The resor t of pleasure.

In La Grande-Duchesse deGerolstein, set in the fiction,‘
ofGerolstein, one ofthe principal characters is General
always anxious to enjoy war; periodically heshoots is
into the air and sniffs the fumes, in preference to
Analogies with contemporaries were n o t hard to ”
Offenbach had to cope repeatedly with the gove 5'”
censors.6 His original title, simply La Grande-Duch ]‘
rejected on the grounds that Russia might take offe‑
were thought that Catherine II were being satirized ( A 1
II was in Paris for the exposition). Further, the censor o‘
to a young general’s declaration, “Madam, I havej *
the war in eighteen days,” fearing that it would be til‑
a reference to Moltke’s defeat of the Austrians at 3.111
a campaign that had lasted eighteen days (Offenbach ti
lClS With Mal “ ” . Th b'e t' 5 Qtsofar‐fetched.works Ofthis
four days ) C0 J 6 i o n wa nfigs widespread discussion in 1867
of the possibility
fl. ouis Napoleon might again venture on war asa way
fidifying his control, and the operetta was treading on
~te ground by havmg the Grand Duchess s ministers plan
,‘ as3solution to their own difficulties. More absurdly,
,, sor 3150 forbade Hortense Schneider to wear animagin‑
{4o 31decoration, lest it offend one or another of the Visit‑
“oyaltY (she subsequently had her portrait painted as the
nd Duchess, w e a r i n g the forbiddengrand cordonparodtque).
t, reviewing the social role of Offenbach’s operettas from
, to 1867, the year of La Grande-Durhesse, Kracauer
.onstrated that Offenbach’s operettas used illuSion and
My as devices to undermine the pompous ex t e r i o r of
pire, and to reveal the political truths that lay beneath. The
bachiade, he w ro t e ,
llée aux enfers .

[ t i r e o f Conte n
n, was seen f.
as Eugénie. ‘,soOffenbach
3d “public 0p
aulace. Jupiteri,
iaintain their 5.
Ofthe Olwnp
pleasures was 0
>peretta made J
lpparatus of p
InOffenbach’
inin’s attacks t.
W” through if“.‑
Belle Héléne 0:
glory which i
.'reminds usth
Night, with a=
16 as the BOSP
misty day) l ‑
S of state, an
:stes parades '
hat the state’s c
, 'd originated in anepoch in which social reality had been
4aniSth by the Emperor’s orders, and for many years it
tadflourished in the gap that was left. Thoroughly ambigu‑
.us asit was, it had fulfilled a revolutionary function under
5 edictatorship, that of scourging corruption and authori‑
wrianism, and holding up the principle of freedom. To be
ure, its satire hadbeen clothed in agarment of frivolity and
concealed in an atmosphere of intoxication, in accordance
ith the requirements of the Second Empire. But the fri‑
fvolity went deeper than the world of fashionable Bohemia
could see.
. At atime when the bourgeoisie were politically stagnant

and the Left was impotent, Offenbach’s operettas had been
-'the most definite form of revolutionary protest. It released
‘gusts of laughter, which shattered the compulsory silence
‘and lured the public towards opposition, while seeming
‘ only to amuse them.
AWhat about the parallels with Manet in all of this? They
"r ly leap to the eye, asthe French would say.8 Manet once
presented Offenbach, who can be seen in Music in the Tull‑
a'es (Pl. 42), apicture devoted to one of the most fashionable
if the Second Empire’s social pageants. Offenbach is shown
n o n g a group of immaculately dressed contemporaries, in ‑
, uding Manet himself, his brother Eugene, Baudelaire, and
_autier. The composer’s image would n o t be enough to
" arrant comparison with Manet, of course, and it is to his
“1eat operettas of the 18605 that we should tu rn . If we look
urst at Offenbach’s t w o early successes, Orphée aux En ers
1858) and La Belle Héléne (1864), and then at t w o of Manet’s
otorious canvases, his Déjeunersur l’herbe (Pl. 171) andOlym‑
11:0 (P1. 62), we sha eethat the painter, like the musician and
1- librettists, of edup spoofs of the gods, saucily converted
0 contempora y purposes. The Déjeuner shows t w o men
glothed in the apparently casual, but in fact elegant clothing of
Ontemporary artists, and t w o women, one nude and the
4'her, in the middle distance, in a diaphanous garment. The
ppses of the three foreground figures were taken from the
' V6} gods in Raimondi’s engraving after Raphael’sjudgment of
am; the fourth figure is asmucha nymphasa contemporary.
Olympia is a modern version of Titian’s Venus of Urbino.
. anet replaces the goddess of love with a contemporary
Ourtesan, that kind of woman‐Cora Pearl, Blanche d’Anti‑
znne and La Cf,
3dmythologicq
if Parisienne op-,
Irom the fashion
In acafé‐restau

ies s deGondre
and Bobinet,
to attend the I
embark onamo
>sition, for w h i
risz'enne gives Q
us, suitably eno
l the fictional du
TSis General B0 l
he shoots his p'
reference to sn
hard to find, ._
the governme ,
‘ande-Durhesse, 7
it take offense i
atirized (Alexanai
the censor Objcn;
1, l have just w
would be taken .
strians at Sado '
foenbach chang
62. Manet, Olympia, 1863. Musée d’Orsay.
gny, Hortense Schneider‐whosepublic prominencesymboli‑
zed the luxury and the hypocrisy of the Second Empire (Cora
Pearl was for a time the favorite of Prince Napoleon, the
Emperor’s cousin; in 1867 she made a few appearances as
Cupid in arevival of Offenbach’s Orphée).
In these, and in other pictures, Manet was, like Offenbach,
making fun of tradition by clothing mythological figures in
contemporary costume. His citations from past ar t were n o t
generally recognized at first, but no one doubted his assault
upon the conventions of ar t and, therefore, upon the academic

tradition which was deeply embedded in government institu‑
tions. The Déjeuner was refused by the official Salon jury in
1863, but raised a furor when it was shown in the exhibition
of rejected artists, the Salon des refuses. Olympia, although
accepted by the jury in 1865, was subjected to virulent
criticism from the defenders of tradition. jules Janin’s dis‑
comfiture before Offenbach’s bawdy gods was felt again by
Manet’s critics, unwilling to see mythological figures, so
closely attached to royalty and to the authority of established
art, transformed into mischievous commentaries on current
society and its mores. Manet’s devotion to the pleasures of eye
and brush, we might think, should have disarmed his critics,
but his assault upon convention was so outrageous that only
years later would the brilliance of his technique become evi‑
dent and the elegance of his life be recognized asof one piece
with his art .
When Offenbach was completing La Vie Parisienne and La
Grande-Duchesse for the 1867 fair, Manet, hoping to benefit
from the same crowds, was preparing his one-artist show in
the pavilion hehad erected on the place de l’Alma. His fate
was the opposite of Offenbach’s. Few visitors came to his
exhibition, and it received scant notice in the press. The rea‑
sons for this are many. He was n o t at all aswell known as
Offenbach, and in any event an ar t exhibition would n o t
benefit asmuch asan Operetta from the fairgoers’ thirst for
entertainment. Equally to the point, Manet’s forum was n o t
that of acomic opera, where witty satire was anticipated, and
the shocking quality of his style was n o t sufficiently
cushioned
by clever adaptationsof tradition; thesewouldhavebeenunder‑
stood only by a few insiders.
61

Manet’s opposition to authority found another outlet in the
summer of 1867, in this case an overtly political work of a r t
that hadnoclose parallel in Offenbach’s satirical repertoire. He
embarked on a series of studies and large oils devoted to the
execution in june by juarez’s Mexican troops of France’s
puppet, Emperor Maximilian. Since Maximilian’s fall mean t
the end of Louis Napoleon’s ambitions for Mexico, it was a
defeat and, to many, adisgrace, all the more crushing because
ofthe boastful nature ofthe Paris fair. Manet projected amajor
composition (P1. 63) on the theme and worked on it and its
related studies through 1867 and 1868. Imperial censors
would have thwarted any effort to show it in public, and
Manet exhibited it only a decade later. He entertained more
hopes for a lithograph of the composition, but in 1869 the
gove r nmen t censor forbade its printing, an action publicly
noted by Zola which confirmed the artist’s opposition to the
Empire.9
Although Manet’s failures were in striking contrast to
Offenbach’s successes, there were nonetheless parallel changes
in the direction their ar t took in 1867. For both artists, that
year marked a definitive tu rn towards contemporary life.
They no longer needed mythological or historical figures in
order to commen t upon their society. Goddesses and gods
had been useful earlier when imperial censorship successfully
stifled opposition, which therefore had to find cove r t ways of
manifesting itself. Censorship continued in 1867, but in order
to placate growing opposition, Louis Napoleon had made a
tu r n towards the Left, and anumber ofliberal measures were
introduced which led to a re tu rn of more ove r t criticism.
Daumier’s cartoons, for example, became political again after
1867, following along period of relatively subdued views, and
Henri Rochefort, ajournalist who had displayed little political
consciousness before then, made such a success of his attacks

on the Emperor that hehad to flee to Belgium (adecade later
62
Manet painted a portrait of him, and a painting of r,
from the prison of New Caledonia). 5
Neither Manet n o r Offenbach were overtly u
artists, but the more liberal mood of 1867 and after“,
manifested in their work by a complete devotion to
drawn from cu r ren t society. Their a r t seemed to liv‘
immediate present, to arise from aworld of artifice ~
by courtesans, actresses and actors, musicians, Write, ,"
mians, andfaslzionablcs. Their settings were freunntl,
places, those theaters, dances, cafés, restaurants, cafés-c
gardens, and parks, where their exquisite figures parad
leisure as a way of rebuking bourgeois conventions
greatness resides in par t in the genius with which th
sistently undermined the hallowed conventions o f t 5.
by pointing mocking fingers at the cloak of hypocrisy .
over imperial society.
Bohemians, Marginals, and Performers
Because Paris was itself a theater‐tourists and r e ;
agreed, each treating the other ascharacters worthy o "
stared a t ‐ i t is no wonder that artists devoted to contem.
life treated Parisians asactors on their painted stages, ;_
Degas, and Renoir, the chief figure painters among t i ;
pressionists, portrayed awide cross section ofthe city’s?
lation, from street people to aristocrats. Of all these
their sympathies were extended mo s t often to writers, pa '
journalists, courtesans, dandies, musicians, and perfo .
that informal grouping of marginals for whom there
blanket te rm unless we accept the vague one then curren
Boheme.” Through their common interests and inters
lives, these people formed alooselyjointed community So

what apart from the res t of the population. They lacke
relative stability of the bourgeoisie, from whom they
their distance. .
Renoir was legitimately amember of this bohemia, oz
the son o fa tailor, a slum dweller, a porcelain worker
still aboy, and then aresident of Montmartre where hel‑
among that area’s assortment of shop assistants, r e s t a
employees, laundresses, models, concierges, workers, and‘
formers. He frequently took his models from among th
including several figures in his Moulin de[a Galette (Pl. 7’
and the young performers in Little Circus Girls of 1879
were daughters of the circus owner Fernando Wartenber
Degas is a quite different case. He was from a banV»
family, but his misanthropy and the failed fortunes of
family business in 1874 gave him asharp‐eyed and embitte
distance from his o w n kind. His ballet dancers, ballet mast‑
laundresses, jockeys, journalists, musicians, cabaret per .
mers, and milliners were all people who served or entertai 1
the well‐to‐do, so Degas did n o t have to desert his class'
construct an a r t devoted to them. In them he found levels»
professional skill that he admired and associated with his 0 ' .
craft. We shall encounter them in future portions ofthis b00
As for Manet, hecame to public attention well beforeDC.
and Renoir, and it is his treatment of street bohemians a
social marginals that we should first examine. Manet delib
ately retained his place in high society, and from the C0
fidence this gave him, hemoved with aflrincur’s ( l l i f among ‘
1painting Ofhi 7 of pariSian SOciety. Throughout the 18605 and
18705Tm both studio and apartment in the Batignolles, the
l'i 'u5t north of the Gare Saint-Lazare which was being

,.‘ Sively refashioned by Haussmann, aswe saw in Chapter
‘l NCW streets were being cut through old ones, and thet .of
thC Batignolles, avillage annexed to the city in 1861,
(“6 being leveled to permit the extensmn of the railroad and
tracts and boulevards c o m i n g from the center. It embraced
.' turC of costly new apartment buildings, empty lots, rail‑
I. tracks, warehouses, and remnants of the old Batignolles..
aSthere that Manet frequently crossed the paths of the
nerants, ragpiCkers, and gyp51es who became his models.-;
have already m e t one of them o r , rather, amodeltreated
.,such, in The Street Singer (P1. _38). In other paintings,
w_ings, and etchings of the period, he pictured Paris’s
],- emians: The Absinthe Drinker of 1859; Gypsy with Cigarette
fi'about 1862; The Old Musician (P1. 65); several kinds ofstreet
fitertainers, dancers, guitarists, c o u r t e s a n s , actresses and
f, org, gypsies, and three paintings of beggar‐philosophers of
mich Plate 64 is an example. Among his models were
'.lardet, a ragpicker, janvier, a locksmith (who posed for
1:riSt, injesiis Marked by the Soldiers of 1865), and Lagrene, a
W)” _ .
The marginals that Manet represented were much admired
y the generation of painters and writers he led in the 18605, a
l i s t school with prominent leanings toward romanticism, a
ndness for Spanish art , and touches of nascent Impression‑
m. Ragpickers were especially favored by the artists. They
15ere not the lowest of the working class, but self-employed
fuen and women who formed aguild that regulatedthe gather‑
. . g of urban detritus. They had their o w n clubs in Paris and
”1e near suburbs; one of the best known, near the Pantheon,
j. asdevoted to communal drinking of absinthe. Manet, like
Baudelaire, associated them with the tradition of the beggar‑

ahilosopher, a well‐established Parisian type whose gradual
disappearance, owing to Haussmann’s transformations and
police repression, was cause for grievance. The ragpicker was
faliberated spirit who moved about atnight, flouting the habits
of the bourgeoisie in their comfortable beds; he was despised
by society (a piece of irony, since he was an entrepreneur),
therefore an outcast, but this freed him from society’s restric‑
‘tive conventions; he gathered up discarded scraps from the
. City. just aswriters and painters chose bits and pieces of urban
. life‐commonplace realities, n o t the ideal elements sanctioned
, by academics‐with which to create their works“) Further,
rilgpickers had self‐esteem (Manet’s old man, Pl. 64, has an
almost defiant bearing) and were proud of their opposition to
a government whose agents constantly harried them. These
' yvere all comforting parallels for avantgarde artists who were
1m Psychological if n o t social opposition to the mainstream.
‘ Manet’s principal homage to street bohemians is his huge
f Pfilnting of 1862, The Old Musician (Pl. 65). The model for
the
aViolinist was the gypsy jean Lagrene, an elder of the Parisian
i, gYPSY colony who lived n o t far from Manet’s studio in a
tcInporary encampment, harrassed by the police.” He had
-earlier hurt his arm while a construction worker on Hauss‑
' mann's projects and thereafter made his living principally as
anOrgan grinder and artists’ model. Behind him in Manet’s
PICture, seated on the embankment, the ragpicker Colardet
are overtly “p.‑
367 and afterwa«i
te devotion to A
: seemed to l i vrldofartifice, ..
iSiCians, writers

were frequently;
aurants, cafes‐co
te figures parade
) l S conventions. I
with which the
nventions of th
k of hypocrisy t,
"formers
:ourists and re "1
cters worthy o f ‑
roted to contemr
Jainted stages. 1.
inters among th
i o n of the city’s oi
;. Of all these p
ento writers, pa'1.
ians, and perforr
or whom there a»
: one then curren
arests and inters.
ted community Se
t i o n . They lacke‑
om whom they:
fthis bohemia, v
)rcelain worker '.
na r t re where he .
assistants, resta’t
ges, workers, and,
s from among t
le la Galette (Pl. _
us Girls of 1879
iando Wartenber
was from 3 ba 8

ailed fortunes of .
t‐eyed and enibitt
iiicers, ballet mast
i a n s , cabaret per
served or enterta'
to desert his clas
-m he found level
ociated with his 0
iortions ofthis boo
on well before De
Ltreet bohemians A
mine. Manet delib
. and from the C"
ineur’s chic among 53
64. Manet , The Ragpicleer, 1869. Norton Simon Foundation.
reappears. Manet has reproduced him from his Absinthe
Drinker, that scandalous composition redolent of Baudelaire’s
world, rejected by the Salonjury in 1859. On the right edge is
a key personage of mid-century realism, the wandering Jew.
Opposite him is ayoung girl holding ababy; from other evi‑
dence the model is known to have been a slum child from
Petite Pologne, the section of the Batignolles where Manet
had located his studio in 1861. Next to her are t w o children
in unconventional costume. The one nearest the old man looks
asthough he might have stepped o u t of aSpanish painting of
a beggar boy. The other, dressed in white asGilles or Pierrot,
invokes the itinerant troupes of performers who often stayed
in Petite Pologne. The constant excavations there left vacant
lots and upturned yellowish earth, so the setting of this
painting, indefinite though it is, seems appropriate to this
gathering:
So one fine day the hamlet became a village, the village
a borough, and the borough a city; but a dirty city, with

n a r r o w, airless streets, without t rees , without squares,
63
65. Manet, The Old Musician, 1862. Washington, National
Gallery.
formed by deposits of plaster and limestone that have been
left to accumulate without care. . . .12
Unlike The Street Singer (P1. 38), which also sprang from
this arena of demolition, The OldMusician does n o t encourage
a clear explanation of what is going on. It is true, five figures
form a symmetrical half‐circle around the musician, while
his gaze outwards and his pizzicato invite us to complete the
circle. Yet the fiction ofa group in attendance upon a roadside
fiddler is n o t easily sustained in terms …
T A I C
R H T -L ' "A M R "
A ( ): R H H T -L
S : A I C M S , . 12, N . 2, T H B B
M C (1986), . 114-135
P : T A I C
S RL: :// . . / /4115937
A : 10-01-2017 00:50 TC
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The A r t Ins t i tu te o f Chicago
Rediscovering Hen r i de Toulouse‐Lautrec's "At t he Mou l in
Rouge"
Author(s): Reinhold Hel ler and Hen r i de Toulouse‐Lautrec
Source: A r t I ns t i t u t e o f Chicago Museum Studies, Vol.
12, No. 2 , The Helen B i r ch Ba r t l e t t
Memoria l Col lect ion (1986), pp. 114‐135
Published by: The A r t Ins t i t u te of Chicago
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4115937
Accessed: 10‐01‐2017 00:50 UTC
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range of content in a trusted

digital archive.We use information technology and tools to
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Formore information about
JSTOR, please contact [email protected] stor.org.
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I n s t i t u t e o f Chicago Museum Studies
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H -L '
A M
EINHOLD HELLE ,
P A G L L ,
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Rediscovering
At the Moulin Rouge
R E I N H O L D H E L L E R ,
The University of Chicago
HOSE works of a r t with which we are the m o s t
familiar often are the ones weactually know least.
As we confront these objects, o u r expectations‑
molded by prior knowledge and beliefs‐obscure the

reality before us. We confuse, in tu rn , many a r t works
with the biographies of their makers. The lives of artists,
especially of those who were working during the Post‑
Impressionist era‐extending roughly from Seurat and
Gauguin in the 1880s to Picasso in his initial years in
Paris around 1900‐are encased in anenvelope of myth
and legend that associates the ar t with an imagined bohe‑
mianism accented by sexual license, alcoholic excess, ge‑
nius merged with insanity, and deaths that are roman‑
tically youthful due to suicide or mysteriously decadent
diseases. The a r t becomes a means of vicarious escape
from our o w n lives into a novel and suggestive world
whose diabolic excess wecontrol through o u r ability to
leave our aesthetic daydreams at will and thus avoid the
final fates of those artists wehave admired. In this proc‑
ess, the artworks lose their physical reality and become
specters of themselves, ghostly apparitions of a cult
whose shrines are the hushed halls of museums or gal‑
leries and whose sacred texts are the biographies, novels,
and films filled with illustrations serving as rememo‑
rative substitutes for the ar t itself. Yearning for the famil‑
iar, we blind ourselves with comfortable precognition:
Welook through, n o t at, the works of a r t weknow best
andpermit their aura to overshadow their materialreality.
Henri de Toulouse‐Lautrec’s At the Moulin Rouge
(fig. 1), one of a series of Post‐Impressionist master ‑
pieces in the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection
of The Art Institute of Chicago, surely has earned its
place among such icons of comfortable familiarity. Illus‑
trated and discussed in the many volumes of writings on
the legendary crippled, pathetic, but laughing dwarf of
Montmartre; included in the numerous exhibitions of
Lautrec’s work that draw visitors by tens of thousands;
among the m o s t sought‐out paintings at the Art In‑
stitute, At the Moulin Rouge is awork wemay even find

too familiar and one weavoid with some sense of embar‑
rassment because of its, and Lautrec’s, popularity. Our
faith in ou r familiarity is misplaced, however: the paint‑
ing is n o t what we have wanted it to be. Much of what
wehave thought to bet r u e about it for over eighty years
is false. Recent examinations of the painting by the Art
Institute’s Department of Conservation, particularly by
conservator David Kolch, reveal a painting we have
never seen.
Before we t u r n to those findings, we should review
what we have believed and what we do actually know.
Prior to entering the collections of the Art Institute in
1928, At the Moulin Rouge was displayed at the museum
from December 1924 to January 1925 in a Lautrec ex‑
hibition organized by the Arts Club of Chicago. From
the works in that exhibition, Frederic Clay Bartlett and
other Chicago collectors selected those that today form
115
HE A IN I E F CHICAG
L ME 12, N . 2
A
HE HELEN BI CH BA LE MEM IAL C LLEC I NThis content
downloaded from 132.239.90.237 on Tue, 10 Jan 2017 00:50:53
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G 0
VOLUME 12, N O . 2 ‑
Mmeum

fludzéf
T H E H E L E N B I R C H B A R I L E E I M E M O R i A L C
O L L E C T I O N
FIGURE 1 H T -La (F , 1864-1901).
A M R , 1894/95. O a a ; 123
141 . T A I C a , H B Ba
M a C (1928.610).
2017 00:50:53 UTC
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2017 00:50:53 UTC
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the core of the Art Institute’s enviable Lautrec collec‑
tion.1 Before being purchased for the Chicago museum,
the painting had been owned by Parisian collectors and
a r t galleries since 1902, the year following Lautrec’s
death. It was ceded, alongwith other works in Lautrec’s
estate, to Maurice Joyant, codirector of the Galerie
Manzi‐Joyant in Paris and ex e c u t o r of the estate, by
Lautrec’s father, Count Alphonse deToulouse-Lautrec,
“with all my heart andwithout regret . . . [because] you
believe in his work more than I do and because you have
been proven right.”2 Joyant then apparently sold the
painting to his partner, Manzi.3 Also in 1902, At the
Moulin Rouge seems to have been included among the
group of some fifty works by Lautrec exhibited at the
April Salon des Inde’pendants.4 However, after that ex‑
hibition, the painting was n o t displayed in public again
until 1914, when the Galerie Manzi-Joyant held a r e t r o ‑
spective exhibition.5 Although it may have been available
in the intervening years at the Galerie Manzi‐Joyant, for
twelve years the painting essentially disappeared from
public View. The 1914 exhibition was followed by an ‑
other decade during which At the Moulin Rouge was
again largely unseen" No t until after the 1924 Chicago
exhibition did the painting become a consistent part of
Lautrec’s oeuvre in shows devoted to his work. Then,
and particularly after it entered the Art Institute’s collec‑
tions, the paintingwas on cons tan t public display, either
on loan to numerous exhibitions in the UnitedStates and
Europe, or in the Ar t Institute itself.
The early exhibition history of the painting, there‑
fore, is one filled with lengthy gaps during which it was
n o t available to the public. Moreover, to this history of

invisibility m u s t be added even mo r e significant years,
because At the Moulin Rouge was apparently never ex ‑
hibited prior to 1902, when Manzi purchased it.7 Today
universally identified asone of Toulouse-Lautrec’s m o s t
important works, and one of the few large paintings
created by him, it seems never to have been shown by
him either in anexhibition devoted to his o w n a r t or in
group exhibitions such asthose of the Salons des Indé‑
pendants to which he consistently contributed. During
Lautrec’s lifetime, the painting remained in his studio.
Lautrec’s seeming reluctance to exhibit it deprives us of
documentation that could establish the year in which he
created it. Nonetheless,At the MoulinRougehas consis‑
tently been assigned to 1892 since Maurice Joyant first
listed it among a group of eight paintings with this title
created in that year.8 These eight paintings are clustered
around agrouping of four that explore various aspects of
the nocturnal life of the famed Montmartre music hall
and that were exhibited in 1893 at the Galerie Goupil,
which Joyant managed at the time.9 The painting now in
the Art Institute was n o t among them, however. None‑
116
FIGURE 2 Henri deToulouse‐Lautrec. Le Divan
japonais, 1892/93. Lithograph in four colors; 80 x
61.5 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago. Mr. and Mrs.
Carter H. Harrison Collection (1949.1002).
theless, in Joyant’s biography and monograph on
Toulouse‐Lautrec, which in 1926 established authorita‑
tively the compass and the chronology of Lautrec’s
works, he discussed the Art Institute paintingasif it had
been anessential component of the 1892paintingsuite he
had exhibited in 1893:
The renewal of the Moulin Rouge [under the new manage‑

m e n t of Joseph Oller in 1892] asnew performers preferred
by Lautrec were hired inspired him [to paint] . . . La
Goulue and her Sister, The Dance or The Beginning of the
Quadrille, La Goulue and her Sister Entering the Moulin
Rouge, The Dancers, and finally: Au Moulin Rouge with
several of his friends seen with La Macarona at a table.‘°
Joyant categorically stated: “This painting is one of the
mo s t impor tan t o f all works by Lautrec. . . . I t serves as
L
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117
2017 00:50:53 UTC
the summation of all his studies of the Moulin Rouge.”
Hewen t onto identify the persons seen inAt theMoulin
Rouge:
Seated around the table, from left to right, are M. Edouard
Dujardin [a Symbolist poet, critic, and dramatist associated
with the Revue Wagnerienne and the Revue Indépendante],
La Macarona [a dancer], Paul Sescau [a professional photog‑
rapher], Maurice Guibert [a proprietor of the vineyard of
Moét et Chandon champagne]; in the foreground to the
right, seen full-face: Mlle. Nelly C. [a name otherwise
unknown]; in the central part: [the dancer] La Goulue
adjusting her hair and silhouettes of [Lautrec’s cousin] Dr.
G. Tapié de Céleyran, and of Toulouse-Lautrec himself
wearing his bowler hat.‘1
Joyant’s ability to identify with certainty various fig‑
ures in the painting lends his information the quality of
authority, ashe intended, but this authority15under‑
mined by his failure to even mention other figures.

Joyant’s writings about Lautrec are filled with personal
reminiscences about the artist and the people he be‑
friended.12 Joyant should therefore have been able to
identify with little difficulty the woman seen from the
Rediscovering Lautrec
back, seated between Dujardin and Guibert. Her com ‑
plex knot of fiery redhair, her tall hat of tulle and ostrich
feathers, the gesture of her hand with little finger dain‑
tily extended‐all these are identifiably the attributes of
the dancer Jane Avril, described by Joyant himself as
“Lautrec’s m o s t intelligent and complaisant model . . .
with her very fine but pale facial features, angular, al‑
mo s t simian i n figure and m o v em e n t” 1 3 Jane Avril ap‑
pears in the company of Dujardin, for example,m the
1893 poster for the music hall, Le Divanjaponais (fig. 2),
in a pose quite similar to hers1nAt the Moulin Rouge,
a n dm t w o painted sketches (figs. 3, 4), also closely
related to her figurein the paintingand certainly used by
Lautrec asheworked o u t the composition. Another fa‑
miliar dancer whom Joyant knew and failed to identify
in the Art Institute painting is the woman seen in profile
near La Goulue in the background, and easily recog‑
nized asLa Mome Fromage, so closely associated with
La Goulue as to be called her sister by Joyant in the
painting of La Goulue entering the Moulin Rouge (see
fig. 5), aswell aselsewhere.
Joyant simply ignored the figures of Jane Avril and La
Mome Fromage when he named the personnages of At
FIGURE 3 Henri de
Toulouse‐Lautrec. Femme
deDos (lane Avril),
1892/95. Oi l or gouache

on cardboard; 59.7 x
39.4 cm . Upperville, Va.,
collection of Mr. and Mrs.
Paul Mellon.
FIGURE 4 Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec. [cine
Avril, 1892/95. Oi l or
gouache on cardboard.
Albi, France, Musée
Toulouse‐Lautrec.
117
. , ,
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. G. D , - (
, 1971), . 2. . 243.
118
2017 00:50:53 UTC
the Moulin Rouge. More problematic, however, is his
identification of the large right‐hand foreground figure
as“Mlle. Nelly C . , ” someone whose name is connected
with Lautrec at no other time. The name is, in fact, a
fiction that permitted Joyant to hide the actual identity
of the person depicted: the English (or perhaps Amer‑
ican) dancer May Milton1“Lautrec created a poster for
h e rIn 1895 (fig. 6), apparently for a t o u r of the United
States, and used its composition for a black‐and-white
lithograph illustrating her dance1nthe August 3,1895,
issue of Le Rire (fig. 7). Moreover, in addition to printed

sketches for the poster, he painted her portrait (fig. 8)
and exhibited it at the London branch of Goupil’s in
1898.15Her strange hat, perched on her head like a giant
Art Nouveau insect with fibrous antennae and winglike
bows, also appearedin Lautrec’5cover of the sheet music
for Yvette Guilbert’s song “Eros Vanné” in 1894 (fig. 9).
The features of the dancer seem to linger1nthose of the
wearer of the hat as well.
Despite Joyant’s failure to properly identify May
Milton asthe major figure in At the Moulin Rouge, heis
the source of the mos t information about her, but his
description is tinged with distaste and notes of disdain:
At the same time [as Lautrec discovered May Belfort, the
Irish singer, in 1895] he also hunted down May Milton, but
this May was no more than adancer. Her pale face was
clown-like and reminded one of nothing somuch asabull
dog. Nothing in her face was attractive, but her movements’
suppleness, her purely English choreographic training . . .
[were] a so r t of revelation to us then. . . .“’
Others inform us that May Milton became the close
friend of Jane Avril and that the t w o were in each other’s
company constantly, so that the lime‐green face of May
Milton, complementing the red‐orange hair of Jane Avril
in the painting, may serve as a commentary on their
relationship. After 1895, however, Milton disappeared
from the retinue of Lautrec, possibly after leaving for
her American tou r. With May Milton seemingly moving
off the canvas and away from the central group, the
painting could well symbolize her departure from the
milieu of the Moulin Rouge.
Neither Miss Milton’s brief appearance on the stages
of Montmartre n o r her departure suffice to explain

Joyant’s negative references to her, or certainly the vi‑
tuperative description of her portrait (fig. 8) written in
1913 by Gustave Cocquiot:
I remember having seen‐with what a shudder [frisson]‑
this [portrait of] May Milton . . . with her yellowish‐white
complexion that left the impression of a bladder skin thinly
stretched over some magma alternating between yellow and
whitish green. This painting is of a hideous te r r o r. This
mouth, rubbed red, drops open like a vulva, lacking reserve,
without solidity. It opens and lets en te r whatever will! And
the painter of this dreadful image was a lover of women!
What entangled sadism! . . . or perhaps a so r t of sermon
addressed to other men? It is a singular problem.”
Cocquiot’s bizarre, deprecating c omm e n t s suggest that
hewas thinking of the apparition of May Milton at the
right of At the Moulin Rouge more than of her other
portrait, and that he was attempting to impart an ap‑
otropaic value to i t , again as if something about the
FIGURE 5 Henri deToulouse‐Lautrec. Lu Goulue En‑
tering the Moulin Rouge, 1891/92. Oil on cardboard;
79.4 X 59cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photo:
M. G. Dortu, Toulouse-Lautrec et son oeuvre (New
York, 1971), vol. 2. p. 243.
FIG RE 8 H -L . M M , 1895.
O ; 65.9 49.2 . A
I C , K L. B
(1949.263).

FIG RE 6 H -L . M M , 1895.
L ; 83 62 . A I
C , C H. H C (1948.451).
L
FIG RE 7 H -L . M M , 1895.
L . P L R , A . 3, 1895.
N , H L. . P :
N R , N .
119
2017 00:50:53 UTC
Top left
FIGURE 6 Henri de Toulouse‐Lautrec. May Milton, 1895.
Lithograph in five colors; 83 X 62cm. The Art Institute
of Chicago, Carter H. Harrison Collection (1948.451).
, , . / ' Left
®/ / /. / / ' FIGURE 7 Henri deToulouse-Lautrec. May Milton,
1895.
/ / '/ Lithograph in black. Published in Le Rire, Aug. 3, 1895.
‘ New York, collection of Herbert L. Schimmel. Photo:
"MWWM Nathan Rabin, New York.
119
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2017 00:50:53 UTC

M M
.
: M
M ' J A
? A ,
, L
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120

2017 00:50:53 UTC
memory of May Milton was sounpleasant or scandalous
asto require rejection and condemnation. What this
might have been15open only to conjecture: might Miss
Milton’s relationship with Jane Avril have been a lesbian
one? At the time of the painting, in his depictions of
prostitutes, Lautrec demonstrated definite interest in
what the French identified asl’umour unglais, but polite
society would surely have condemned such relationships
outside the “perverse” atmosphere of the brothel.
Joyant’s and Cocquiot’s references to vulgarity, ugliness,
troupes of dancing‘‘girls,” overly receptive female geni‑
tals, and sermons to m e n can all serve asdisguised refer‑
ences to what they did n o t wish to mention overtly:
female homosexuality. Similarly, if the figure on the
Paroles de
MAURICE
Vt;J)0NNAY
, ~ .- i - .,- - ( L A swam: M u s l c u j
. fr‐-~y‐.us‐Ahn‐J::==
J
120
,,,cover of “Eros Vanne (fig. 9) can be associated with the
English dancer, the song’s rhythmic ennui, its celebra‑
tion of the tired sensibilities of névroses, of “secret ma‑
neuvers to resuscitate senses n o w defunct,” and of “the
quest for novel frissons [thrills],” all cause aneros:

Very old, worn o u t and satiated
Despite my twenty years, because 1 was born
on a bed of tarnished roses
and 1 am an exhausted Eros!18
Thus, the song may signal forbidden erotic pleasures
shared by t w o w o m e n such asthose Lautrec depicted in
At the Moulin Rouge. With one of the w o m e n in
pseudo-masculine dress, the potential for identifying
them as lovers and, by implication, asJane Avril and
May Milton, c a n n o t be readily dismissed.
The conclusion wetentatively reach m u s t remain con ‑
jecture, but it is one invited by the t o n e and c o n t e n t of
Lautrec’s ardent defenders as they discussed May
Milton. Their need to denigrate‐even annihilate‐her
memory appears to bethe predominant motive, amotive
that may explain the history of “vandalism” At the
Moulin Rouge has suffered. The painting clearly shows,
even in reproductions, that it is composed of t w o canvas
segments: arectangle measuring approximately one hun‑
dred and twenty‐four by ninety‐four centimeters and
containing the group seated around the table; and a re ‑
verse‐L‐shaped segment, somewhat irregularly edged,
measuring in its lower a r m some twenty‐seven cen‑
timeters high while its vertical portion is approximately
sixteen centimeters wide and contains m o s t of the figure
of May Milton. Despite the easy Visibility of this seg‑
mentation, it was n o t mentioned by Joyant or by M. G.
Dortu in her six‐volume catalogue of Lautrec’s paintings
and drawings compiledin 1971to supplantJoyant’ssixty‑
year‐old listings.‘9 Virtually all the literature on the
painting, in fact, has been remarkably silent concerning
the mounting of the t w o canvas segments on a n e w sup‑
porting lining canvas, the filling in with plaster of tack‑
ing holes surrounding the rectangle, and the efforts to

touch up the junctures to make them less obtrusive. The
first, and little noted, published mention (there are u n ‑
FIGURE 9 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Eros
Vanne, 1894. Lithograph in black on t a n wove
paper; 49.6 x 33.9 cm. The Ar t Institute of
Chicago, Carter H. Harrison Collection
(1949.991).
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121
2017 00:50:53 UTC
published ones in the Art Institute’s conservation and
curatorial files dating back to the 1930s) is contained in a
1956 book by Douglas Cooper:
In its original form this picture was astraightforward con‑
versation piece in which the spectator was imagined close to
the table and looking down on the scene from just behind
the back of the woman with orange hair. But Lautrec mu s t
have felt that this conception was t o o illustrative and banal,
for at a later stage he enlarged his canvas. . . . Then he
brought all the pictorial science at his command into play in
order to transform the impressionistic or photographic im‑
age izigto ano less realistic but pictorially more effective

one.
The joining of the t w o segments to transform a genre
scene of people in a café, such ashad become common
since EdouardManet and the Impressionists began their
systematic exploration of this theme during the 18605,
into a more radical composition, with a partial figure
pushed to the edge of the canvas‐that is, linked to the
a r t of Edgar Degas and Japanese woodcuts‐was n o t
discussed further until twen …
VISION AND
DIFFERENCE
Femininity, feminism and
histories of art
GRISELDA POLLOCK
ROUTLEDGE
London and New York
3
Modernity and the spaces of
femininity
Investment in the look is n o t as privileged in w o m e n as in
men.
More than other senses, the eye objectifies and masters. It sets
at
a distance, and maintains a distance. In o u r culture the
predomin‑

ance of the look over smell, taste, touch and hearing has
brought
about an impoverishment of bodily relations. The m o m e n t
the look
dominates, the body loses its materiality.
(Luce Irigaray (1978). Interview in M . - F. Hans and G.
Iapouge
(eds) [ a s Pemmes, la pornographic ct i‘émtisme, Paris, p. 50)
INTRODUCTION
The schema which decorated the cover of Alfred H. Barr’s
catalogue for
the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art at the Museum of
Modern Art, New
York, in 1936 is paradigmatic of the way modern art has been
mapped
by modernist art history (Figure3.1). Artistic practices from the
late nine‑
teenth century are placed on achronological flow chart where
movement
follows m0vement connected by one-way arrows which indicate
influence
and reaction. Over each movement a named artist presides. All
those
canonized as the initiators of modern art are men. Is this
because there
were no w o m e n involved in early modern mavements? N o.‘
Is it
because those who were, w e r e without significance in
determining the
shape and character of modern art? N o . Or is it rather because
what
modernist art history celebrates is a selective tradition which
normalizes,
asthe only modernism, a particular and gendered set of

practices? I would
argue for this explanation. As a result any attempt to deal with
artists
in the early history of modernism who are women necessitates a
deconstruction of the masculinist myths of modernism.2
c h i - u m s
s v u l h m s u m u l l s ] l l !
u- Muir-Illa ' gO-IMFIEESWNIf: .
l o o t - n u
l l fl l ‘
CUBISM
m m
i W ‘ W l r u v u m u
( t r u s s - 0 m mm m W , ' u n s u n l s u
us “can
h u m : ' c o n s t r u c n w m
M m m.
( m m n i ‘
D A D A I S M
f : 02“, r u n s u
h t ‑
NEQHASTICISMm M ""
[31.- Fun
7 a n u H a u su n l m l 1 - b u t
SURREALISM '“ mM O D E I N
W M

R C H I T ( ( Y U I E
m u m - 1 m . ABSI‘ACI’ A l l
3.1 The Development of Abstract Art. 1936. Chart prepared for
the Museum of
Modern A r t , New York, by Alfred H. Barr, j r . Photograph
courtesy, The
Museum of Modern A r t , New York.
These are, however, widespread and structure the discourse of
many
counter-modernism, for instance in the social history of art. The
recent
publication The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the A r t of
Manet and his
Followers, by T. J. Clark,3 offers a searching account of the
social
relations between the emergence of n e w protocols and criteria
for paint‑
ing ‐ modernism - and the myths of modernity shaped in and by
the
n e w city of Paris remade by capitalism during the Second
Empire.
Going beyond the c0mmonplaces about a desire to be
contemporary in
art, ' i ] faut etre de son temps',‘ Clark puzzles at what
structured the
51
3.2 Gustave Caillebotte, Paris, a rainy day (1877)

notions of modernity which became the territory for Manet and
his
followers. He thus indexes the impressionist painting practices
to a
complex set of negotiations of the ambiguous and baffling class
forma‑
tions and class identities which emerged in Parisiansociety.
Modernity
is presented asfar more then a sense of being ’up to date' -
modernity
is a matter of representations and major myths ‐ of a new Paris
for
recreation, leisureandpleasure,of nature to be enjoyed at
weekends in
suburbia, of the prostitute taking over and of fluidity of class in
the
popular spaces of entertainment. The key markers in this mythic
territory are leisure, consumption, the spectacle and money.
And we
can reconstruct from Clark a map of impressionist territory
which
stretches from the new boulevards via Care St Lazare out on the
suburbantrain to LaGrenouillere, Bougivalor Argenteuil. In
these sites,
the artists lived, worked and pictured themselvesS (Figure 3.2).
But in
two of the four chapters of Clark's book, he deals with the
problematic
of sexuality in bourgeois Paris and the canonical paintings are
Olympia
(1863, Paris, Musée du Louvre) and A bar at the Folies‐Bergére
(1881‐2,
London, Courtauld Institute of Art) (Figure 3.3).
it is a mighty but flawed argument on many levelsbut here I
wish to

52
3.3 Edouard Manet, A bar at the Polies‐Bergére (1881-2)
attend to its peCuliar closmes on the issue of sexuality. For
Clark the
foundingfact isclass. Olympia's nakedness inscribesherclass
andthus
debunks the mythic classlessness of sex epitomized in the image
of the
courtesan." The fashionably blase’ barmaid at the Folies evades
afixed
identity aseither bourgeois or proletarianbut none the less
participates
in the play around class that constituted the myth and appeal of
the
popular.7
Although Clark nods in the direction of feminism by
acknowledging
that these paintingsimply amasculineviewerfconsumer, the
manner in
which this is done ensures the normalcyof that positionleavingit
below
the threshold of historical investigation and theoretical
analysis.a To
recognize the gender specific conditions of these paintings'
existence
one need only imagine a female spectator and a female producer
of the
works. How can a woman relate to the viewing positions
proposedby
either of these paintings? Can a woman be offered, in order to
be
denied, imaginary possession of Olympia or the barmaid?
Would a

woman of Manet’s class have a familiarity with either of these
spaces
anditsexchangeswhich couldbeevokedsothat the
painting'smodern‑
ist job of negation and disruption could be effective? Could
Berthe
53
Vision and Difference
Morisot have gone to such a location to canvass the subject?
Would it
enter her head asasite of modernity asshe experienced it? Could
she
as awoman experience modernity as Clark defines it at all?”
For it is astrikingfact that many of the canonicalworks heldup
asthe
founding monuments of modern art treat precisely with this
area,
sexuality, and this form of it, commercial exchange. I am
thinking of
innumerablebrothelscenes through
toPicasso’sDemoisellesd’Avignonor
that other form, the artist’s couch. The encounters pictured and
imagined are those between men who have the freedom to take
their
pleasuresin many urbanspacesandwomen fromaclass subjectto
them
who have to work in those spaces often selling their bodies to
clients,
or toartists. Undoubtedly these exchanges are structuredby
relationsof

class but these are thoroughly captured within gender and its
power
relations. Neither can be separated or ordered in a hierarchy.
They are
historical simultaneities and mutually inflecting.
Sowe mustenquirewhy the territory of modernismsooften is
away
of dealing with masculine sexuality and its sign, the bodies of
women
- why the nude, the brothel, the bar? What relation is there
between
sexuality, modernity and modernism. If it is normal to see
paintings of
women’s bodies as the territory across which men artists claim
their
modernityandcompetefor leadershipof the avant-garde, canwe
expect
to rediscover paintings by women in which they battled with
their
sexuality in the representationof the malenude?Ofcourse not;
the very
’ While accepting that paintings such as Olympia and A bar at
the Folks-Berger's
come from a tradition which invokes the spectator as masculine,
it is necessary to
acknowledge the way in which a feminine spectator is actually
implied by these
paintings. Surely one partof the shock,of the
transgressioneffectedby the painting
Olympia for itsfirst viewers at the Paris Salon was the presence
of that ’brazen' but
cool look from the white woman on abed attended by a black
maid in a space in
which women, or tobehistorically precisebourgeois ladies,

would bepresumed to
be present. That look, soovertly passingbetween a seller of
woman‘s body and a
clientiviewer signifiedthe commercialand sexual
exchangesspecificto apartof the
publicrealmwhichshouldbeinvisible to
ladies.Furthermoreitsabsencefrom their
consciousnessstructured their identitiesasladies.In some of
hiswritingsT. ]. Clark
correctly discusses the meanings of the sign woman in the
nineteenth century as
oscillating between two poles of the fillt publique (woman of
the streets) and the
ftmme horméte (therespectable married woman). But it would
seem that the exhibi‑
tion of Olympia precisely confounds that social and ideological
distance between
two imaginary poles and forces the one to confront the other in
that part of the
public realm where ladies do go ‐ still within the frontiers of
femininity. The
presence of this painting in the Salon - not because it is a nude
but because it
displaces the mythological costume or anecdote through which
prostitution was
represented mythically through the courtesan ‐ transgresses the
line on my grid
derivedfromBaudelaire’atext, introducingnot just
modernityasamannerof int‑
‘mga pressingcontemporary theme, but the spaces of modernity
into a soci terri‑
tory of the bourgeoisie, the Salon, where ViEWing “ C h 3“
image is quite shocking
becauseof the presenceof wives, sisters and daughters. The
understandingof the
shock depends upon our restoration of the female spectator to

her historical and
social place.
54
Modernity and the spaces of femininity
suggestion seems ludicrous. But why? Because there is a
historical
asymmetry ‐ a difference socially, economically, subjectively
between
beingawoman andbeingaman in Paris in the
latenineteenthcentury.
This difference ‐ the product of the social structuration of
sexual
difference and not any imaginary biological distinction -
determined
both what and how men and women painted.
I have long been interested in the work of Berthe Morisot
(1841-96)
andMary Cassatt (1844‐1926), two of thefour womenwho were
actively
involved with the impressionist exhibiting society in Paris in
the 18705
and 1880s who were regarded by their contemporaries as
important
members of the artistic group we n o w label the
lmpressionists.° But
how arewe to study the work of artists who are women so that
we can
discover and account for the specificity of what they produced
as
individuals while also recognizing that, aswomen, they worked
from
different positions and experiences from those of their

colleagues who
were men?
Analysing the activities of women who were artists cannot
merely
involve mapping women on to existing schemata even those
which
claimtoconsiderthe productionof artsocially andaddress the
centrality
of sexuality. Wecannot ignore the fact that the terrains of
artistic prac‑
tice andof art history are structured in and structuringof gender
power
relations.
As Roszika Parker and I argued in Old Mistresses: Women, Art
and
ideology (1981), feminist art history has a double project. The
historical
recoveryof data about women producersof art coexists with
andisonly
critically possible through a concomitant deconstruction of the
discourses and practices of art history itself.
Historical recovery of women who were artists is a prime
necessity
because of the consistent obliterationof their activity in what
passes for
art history. Wehaveto refutethe lies that there were nowomen
artists,
or that the women artists who areadmittedare second-rate
andthat the
reason for their indifference lies in the all‐pervasive submission
to an
indeliblefemininity ‐ alwaysproposedasunquestionably
adisability in

making art. But alone historical recovery is insufficient.What
sense are
we to make of information without a theorized framework
through
complicated issue. To avoid the embrace of the feminine
stereotype
which homogenizes women’s work asdetermined by natural
gender,
we must stress the heterogeneity of women's art work, the
specificity
of individual producers and products. Yet we have to recognize
what
women share - as a result of nurture not nature, i.e. the
historically
variable social systems which produce sexual differentiation. .
This leads to a major aspect of the feminist project, the
theorization
and historical analysis of sexual difference. Difference is not
essential
but understood asa social structure which positions male and
female
people asymmetrically in relation to language, to social and
economic
power and to meaning. Feminist analysis undermines one bias of
patriarchal power by refuting the myths of universal or general
mean‑
ing. Sexuality, modernism or modernity cannot function as
given
categories to which we add women. That only identifies a
partial and

masculine viewpoint with the norm and confirms women asother
and
subsidiary. Sexuality, modernism or modernity are organized by
and
organizations of sexual difference. To perceivewomen's
specificity is to
analyse historically a particular configuration of difference.
This is my projecthere.Howdo thesocially contrivedorders of
sexual
difference structure the lives of Mary Cassatt and Berthe
Morisot? How
did that structure what they produced?The matrix I shall
consider here
is that of space.
Spacecanbegraspedin severaldimensions.The first refersusto
spaces
aslocations.What spaces are representedin the
paintingsmadebyBerthe
Morisot and Mary Cassatt? And what are not? A quick list
includes: 3.4 Bertha Morisot 3.5 Berthe Morisot
dining-rooms in the dining room (1886) Two wmen reading
(1869‐70)
drawing-rooms
bedrooms
balconiesfverandas
private gardens (See Figures 3.4‐3.11.)
The majority of these have to be recognized as examples of
private
areas or domestic space. But there are paintings located in the
public
domain, scenes for instance of promenading, driving in the
park,being
at the theatre, boating. They are the spaces of bourgeois

recreation,
display and those social rituals which constituted polite society,
or
Society, LeMamie. In the case of Mary Cassatt's work, spaces of
labour
are included, especially those involving child care (Figure
3.10]. In
several examples, they make visible aspects of working-class
women's
labour within the bourgeois home.
.- I have previously argued that engagement with the
impressionist
groupwas attractive to some women precisely becausesubjects
dealing
with domestic social life hitherto relegated asmere genre
paintingwere
‘. legitimized as central topics of the painting practices.” On
closer
1 examination it is much more significant how little of typical
impres‑
sionist iconographyactuallyreappearsin the works madeby artists
who
l are women. They do not represent the territory which their
colleagues
| . who were men so freely occupied and made use of in their
works, for
'.t‘ /- instance bars, cafes, backstage and even those places
which Clark has
seen asparticipatingin the mythof the popular- such asthe bar at
the
56
____ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ A _ _

3.5" Mary Cassatt
Susan on a balcony (1883)
and historical analysis of sexual difference. Difference is not
essential
but understood asa social structure which positions male and
female
people asymmetrically in relation to language, to social and
economic
power and to meaning. Feminist analysis undermines one bias of
patriarchal power by refuting the myths of universal or general
mean‑
ing. Sexuality, modernism or modernity cannot function as
given
categories to which we add women, That only identifies a
partial and
masculine viewpoint with the norm and confirms women asother
and
subsidiary. Sexuality, modernism or modernity are organized by
and
organizations of sexual difference. To perceivewomen's
specificity is to
analyse historically a particular configuration of difference.
This is my projecthere.Howdo thesocially contrivedorders of
sexual
difference structure the lives of Mary Cassatt and Berthe
Morisot? How
did that structure what they produced?The matrix I shall
consider here
is that of space.

Spacecanbegraspedin severaldimensions.The first refersusto
spaces
aslocations.What spaces are representedin the paintingsmadeby
Berthe
Morisot and Mary Cassatt? And what are not? A quick list
includes:
dining-rooms
drawing-rooms
bedrooms
balconiesiverandas
private gardens (See Figures 3.4‐3.ll.)
The majority of these have to be recognized asexamples of
private
areas or domestic space. But there are paintings located in the
public
domain, scenes for instance of promenading, driving in the
park,being
at the theatre, boating. They are the spaces of bourgeois
recreation,
display and those social rituals which constituted polite society,
or
Society, LeMonde. In the case of Mary Cassatt’s work, spaces
of labour
are included, especially those involving child care (Figure
3.10]. In
several examples, they make visible aspects of working-class
women’s
labour within the bourgeois home.
. I have previously argued that engagement with the
impressionist
groupwas attractive to some women precisely becausesubjects
dealing
with domestic social life hitherto relegatedasmeregenre
paintingwere

legitimized as central topics of the painting practices.lo On
closer
examination it is much more significant how little of typical
impresr
sionist iconographyactuallyreappearsin the works madeby artists
who
are women. They do not represent the territory which their
colleagues
who were men so freely occupied and made use of in their
works, for
‐ instance bars, cafes, backstage and even those places which
Clark has
seen asparticipatingin the mythof the popular- such asthe bar at
the
56
3.4 Berthe Morisot 3.5 Berthe Morisot
in the dining room (1886) Two women reading (1869‐70)
- ~ ’ .
3.6 Mary Cassatt
Five o'clock tea (1880)
1? Mary Cassatt
Susan on a balcony (1883)
On asummer's day (1830)
The build (1892)
3.11 Berthe Morisot

3.8 Mary Cassatt Lydia at a tapestry frame (6. 1881)
3.9 Mary Cassatt Lydia crocheting in the garden (1880)
3.14 Berthe Morisot
On the balcony (1872)
3.12 Berthe Morisot The harbour at Lorie-m (1869)
Claude Monet
The garden of the princess (1867)
Folies-Bergere or even the Moulin de la Galette. A range of
places and
subjects was closed to them while open to their male colleagues
who
could move freely with men and women in the socially fluid
public
world of the streets, popular entertainment and commercial or
casual
sexual exchange.
The second dimension in which the issue of space can
beaddressed
is that of the spatial order within paintings. Playingwith spatial
struc‑
tures was one of the defining features of early modernist
painting in
Paris, be it Manet’s witty and calculated play uponflatness or

Degas’s
use of acute angles of vision, varying viewpoints and cryptic
framing
devices. Withtheir close personalcontactswithbothartists,
Morisotand
Cassatt were no doubt party to the conversations out of which
these
strategiesemergedandequally subject to the lessconscious social
forces
which may well have conditioned the predisposition to explore
spatial
ambiguities and metaphors.11Yet although there are examples
of their
using similar tactics, i would like to suggest that spatial devices
in the
work of Morisot and Cassatt work to a wholly different effect.
A remarkable feature in the spatial arrangements in paintings by
Morisot is the juxtaposition on asingle canvas of two spatial
systems ‑
or at least of two compartments of space oftenobviously
boundariedby
some device such as a balustrade, balcony, veranda or
embankment
whose presence is underscoredby facture. In The harbourat
Lorienf,1869
(Figure 3.12), Morisot offers us at the left a landscape view
down the
estuary represented in traditional perspective while in one
corner,
shapedby the boundary of the embankment, the main figure is
seated
at an oblique angle to the view and to the viewer. A comparable
composition occurs in On the terrace, 1874(Figure3.13), where
againthe
foregroundfigure

isliterallysqueezedoff‐centreandcompressedwithin
abox of space markedby aheavilybrushed‐inbandof dark paint
form‑
ing the wall of the balcony on the other side of which lies the
outside
world of the beach. In On the balcony, 1872 (Figure 3.14), the
viewer's
gaze over Paris is obstructed by the figures who are none the
less
separated from that Paris as they look over the balustrade from
the
Trocadéro, very near to her home.12 The point can be
underlined by
contrastingthe painting by Monet,Thegardenoftheprincess,
186?(Figure
3.15), where theviewer cannot readily imaginethe point
fromwhich the
paintinghasbeenmade,namelyawindow highin oneof the new
apart‑
ment buildings, and instead enjoys afantasy of floating over the
scene.
What Morisot's balustrades demarcate is not the boundary
between
public and private but between the spaces of masculinity and of
femininity inscribed at the level of both what spaces are open to
men
and women and what relation a man or woman has to that space
and
its occupants.
62
In Morisot’s paintings, moreover, it is asif the place from which
the

painter worked is made part of the scene creating a compression
or
immediacy in the foregroundspaces.This locatesthe viewer in
that same
place,establishinganotionalrelationbetweentheviewer andthe
woman
defining the foreground, therefore forcing the viewer to
experience a
dislocation between her space and that of aworld beyond its
frontiers.
Proximity and compression are also characteristic of the works
of
Cassatt. Less often is there a split space but it occurs, as in
Susan on a
balcony, 1883 (Figure 3.7). More common is a shallow pictorial
space
which the paintedfigure dominates Youngwoman in black:
portraitofMrs
Gardner Cassatt, 1883(Figure3.16)/.Zhe viewer
isforcedintoaconfronta‑
tion or conversation with the painted figure while dominance
and
familiarity are deniedby the deviceof the avertedheadof
concentration
on an activity by the depicted personage. "at are the conditions
for
this awkward but pointed relation of the figure to the world?
Why this
lack of conventional distance andthe radicaldisruption of what
we take
asthe normal spectator‐text relations? What has disturbed the
‘logic of
the gaze?
In a previous monograph on Mary Cassatt I tried to establish a

correspondence between the social space of the represented and
the
pictorial space of the representation.” Considering the painting
Lydia,
at a tapestry frame, 1881 (Figure 3.8), I noted the shallow space
of the
painting which seemed inadequate to contain the embroidery
frame at
which the artist’s sister works. I tried to explain its threatened
protru‑
sionbeyondthe picture's space into that of the viewer
asacomment on
the containment of women and read the painting as a statement
of
resistance to it. In Lydia crochzting in the garden, 1880 (Figure
3.9), the
woman is not placed in an interior but in a garden. Yet this
outdoor
space seemsto collapsetowards the
pictureplane,againcreatingasense
of compression. The comfortable vista beyond the figure,
opening out
to include aview and the sky beyond asin Caillebotte’s Garden
at Petit
Gennevillt’ers with dahlt’as, 1893, is decisively refused.
I argued that despite the exterior setting the painting creates the
intimacy of an interior and registers the garden, a favoured
topic with
impressionist artists, not asa piece of private property but asthe
place
of seclusion and enclosure. I was searching for some kind of
homology
between the compression of pictorial space and the social
confinement
of women within the prescribedlimitsof bourgeoiscodes of

femininity.
Claustrophobia and restraint were read into the pressurized
placement
of figures in shallow depth. But such an argument is only a
modified
form of reflection theory which does not explain anything
(though it
does have the savinggraceof acknowledgingthe roleof signifiers
in the
active production of meaning).
3.16 Mary Cassatt Young woman in black: portrait ofMrs
Gardner Cassatt (1883)
In the case of Mary Cassatt I would now want to draw
attentionto the
disarticulation of the conventions of geometric perspective
which had
normally governed the representation of space in European
painting
since the fifteenth century. Since its development in the
fifteenth
century, this mathematically calculated system of projection had
aided
painters in the representation of a three-dimensional world on a
two‑
dimensional surface by organizing objects in relation to each
other to
produce a notional and singular position from which the scene
is
intelligible. It establishes the viewer as both absent from and
indeed
independent of the scene while being its mastering eyeH.

64
3.17 Mary Cassatt Young girl in a blue annchair (1878)
It ispossibleto representspaceby otherconventions.
Phenomenology
hasbeenusefully applied to the apparentspatial deviations of the
work
of Van Gogh and Cézanne.“ Insteadof pictorial space
functiomng as a
notional box into which objects are placed in a rational and
abstract
relationship, space isrepresentedaccordingto the way it
isexperienced
by a combination of touch, texture, as well as sight. Thus
objects are
patterned according to subjective hierarchies of value for the
producer.
Phenomenologicalspaceisnotorchestratedfor sightalonebutby
means
of visual cues refers to other sensations and relations of bodies
and
objectsin alivedworld. Asexperientialspace this kindof
representation
becomes susceptible to different ideological,historicalaswell
aspurely
contingent, subjective inflections. _ _ .
These are not necessarily unconscious. For instance in
Younggirl in a
blue armchair, 1878 (Figure 3.17) by Cassatt, the viewpomt
from which
the room has been painted is low so that the chairs loom large
as if
imagined from the perspective of a small person placed amongst
massive upholstered obstacles. The background zooms sharply

away
indicating a different sense of distance from that a taller adult
would
enjoy over the objects to an easily accessible back wall. The
painhrtg
therefore not only picturesasmallchild in aroombutevokesthat
child 9
sense of the space of the room. It is from this conception of the
65
possibilitiesof spatialstructure that I cannow discernaway
throughmy
earlier problem in attempting to relate space and social
processes. For
athird approach lies in considering not only the spaces
represented, or
the spaces of the representation, but the social spaces from
which the
representationismadeand its reciprocalpositionalities.The
producer is
herself shaped within a spatially orchestrated social structure
which is
livedatbothpsychic and social levels.The spaceof the look at the
point
of productionwill to some extent determine the viewing
positionof the
spectator at the point of consumption. This point of view is
neither
abstract nor exclusively personal, but ideologically and
historically
construed. It is the art historian's job to re-create it ‐ since it

cannot
ensure its recognition outside its historical moment.
The spaces of femininity operated not only at the level of what
is
represented, the drawing-room or sewing-room. The spaces of
femininity are those from which femininity is lived
asapositionality in
discourse and social practice. They are the product of a lived
sense of
social locatedness,mobilityandvisibility, in the socialrelationsof
seeing
and being seen. Shaped within the sexual politics of looking
they
demarcate a particular social organization of the gaze which
itself works
back to secure a particular social ordering of sexual difference.
Femininity is both the condition and the effect.
How does thisrelateto
modernityandmodernism?AslanetWolffhas
convincingly pointed out, the literature of modernity describes
the
experience of men.“ It is essentially a literature about
transformations
in the public world and its associated consciousness. it is
generally
agreed that modernity as a nineteenth-century phenomenon is a
productof the city. It is aresponsein amythicor
ideologicalformto the
new complexities of a social existence passed amongst strangers
in an
atmosphere of intensified nervous and psychic stimulation, in a
world
ruledby money andcommodity exchange, stressedby competition
and

formative of anintensified individuality, publicly defended by a
blasé
mask of indifference but intensely ‘expressed‘ in a private,
familial
context.“ Modernity stands for a myriad of responses to the vast
increase in population leading to the literature of the crowds
and
masses, a speeding up of the pace of life with its attendant
changes in
the sense and regulation of time and fostering that very modern
phenomenon,fashion, the shift in the character of towns
andcities from
being centresof quite visible activities - manufacture, trade,
exchange
- to being zoned and stratified, with production becoming less
visible
while the centres of cities such as Paris and London become key
sites
of consumption and display producing what Sennett has labelled
the
spectacular city.”
All these phenomena affected women aswell asmen, but in
different
66
ways. What I have described above takes place within and
comes to
define the modernforms of the publicspace changingasSennett
argues
in hisbook significantly titled The FallofPublic Manfrom the …

FRAMING
FRANCE
The representation of landscape
in France, 1870‐1914
EDITED B Y R I C H A R D THOMSON
Manchester University Press
MANCHESTER A N D NEW Y O R K
Contents
"may be
tl d . ,m an List of figures page Vi
List of contributors x
Acknowledgements xii
Introduction RICHARD THOMSON 1
I Authority versus independence: the position of French
landscape in the 18705 JOHN HOUSE 15
2 Frenchliterary landscapes JOY NEWTON 35
3 Cézanne’s blur, approximating Cézanne RICHARD SHIFF 59
4 On n o t seeing Provence: Van Gogh and the landscape of
consolation, 1888‐9 GRISELDA POLLOCK 81
5 Maurice Denis: four stages in the history of French
landscape, 1889‐1914 JEAN-PAUL B O U I L L O N 119
6 Henri Martin atToulouse: terre natale andjuste milieu
RICHARD THOMSON 147

7 Reconsiderations of Matisse and Derain in the classical
landscape JAMES D. HERBERT 173
8 ‘Ce beau pays del’avenir’: Cubism, nationalism and the
landscape of modernity in France DAVID COTTINGTON I 94
GRISELDA P O L L O C K
l
4 On n o t seeing Provence: Van Gogh and E
the landscape of consolation, 1888‐9
N 1975, three of us, including one budding art historian, went
on
holiday to the South of France.Weeach had our own agenda for
the
success of the trip. We politely indulged each other’s whims.
Sowe
swam and sunbathed on the C6te d’Azur. We froze and cursed
aswe
climbed the still chilly slopes of the Alpes Maritimes. The art
historian
dragged her companions around several Provencal towns, Arles
and St.
Rémy, to fulfil an unsuppressable art‐historical obligation, even
while
onholiday, to visit the ‘Van Gogh’ sites.
We did n o t see Provence.We had brought anidea of what we
wanted
to find with us. Sowe searched for, and sometimes caught
glimpses of,

motifs of paintings and drawings by Van Gogh, then the
Ph.D.research
topic for the art historian. She even found herselfusingacamera
to help
her to see ‘Van Goghs’ in the landscape, following in the
footsteps of
John Rewaldwho had made famous photographs of the motifs
painted ‘
by another painter of the Provencal landscape, Paul Cézanne
[27].1But I
27] La Crau from Montmajour, 1975 1
I
that was amistake. Van Gogh was n o t Cézanne. Van Gogh was
n o t at
homein this landscape andhedid n o t paint its sites simply
asthemselves. Reg.
Provence was aprop for aversion of modernism soradically
different In t
from Cézanne’s intense battle with sensation,place and form
that it may ‘regi
in t u r n lead usto question Van Gogh’s place in modernism
itself. Eur(
plex
Artistic tourism and the late nineteenth-century avant-garde 12;
This anecdote exemplifies the placewhere art history meets
tourism. We . est v
are all tourists now. Tourism is, according to MacCannell, the
paradig‐ C638!
matic moderncondition.2 Astypically urbantravellers in periodic
search soug

of the exotic, of difference, of utopia, of somewhere from the
past or ‘unt<
even o u t of time, what we see is what we expect to experience.
Vision and
is pre-packaged. Images of far‐off places in glossy travel
features in vied
Sunday supplements vie with alluring photographs of ecstatic
holiday‐ zeal
makers in travel companies’ brochures,andwith the
picturesqueviews of - mos
major landmarks andfolklorique customs in the promotional
literature ' geni:
of the tourist board. These fantasies fill our heads so that we
bring our notir
o w n dreams with us when we travel. They promise the
pleasures we of d1
paid for; and wejudge our holiday asuccess according to the
degree of T1
match between what we encounter and what we imagined. pher
Perhaps Vincent van Gogh was atourist in this modernist sense,
too. Thr<
Obviously hewas n o t on atwo‐week break from the routines of
urban all a
work. On Monday 20February I888 Van Gogharrived in the
Provencal acro
t o w n of Arles, where hestayed until 8May 1889 when
hemoved to a and
hospital on the outskirts of the smaller t o w n of St. Rémy
where he villa;
remained until 16May 1890. He left Paris at a moment when
being a in G
tourist became asignificant factor in the making and shaping of
modern for 1
art. In the mid‐18805, the possibility of maintaining the
metropolis as rura'

the paradigmatic site for advanced culture’s encounter with
modernity Fr
‐ its founding project since the 1860s ‐ fell into a crisis. A
number of was
artists, identifyingwith the independent movement, the legacy of
Manet artis
andworkingwith the example of the group’s current
pre‐eminentfigure, artis‑
Georges Seurat, left the city to explore another site for modern
art: the ‐ an
regions. Modern art went on the tourist trail.3 (pla(
Van Gogh’s relation to this avant‐garde experiment is somewhat
spe‐ 142)
cial if n o t deviant. Weneed to ask: what is the difference
between being he a
aDutchman abroad, being an expatriate like the American artist
Mary t w o
Cassatt who lived andworked in Paris,and being atourist? How
are we city
t o read bothwhat Van Gogh made and what h e w r o t e i n the
light o f his tried
peculiar conjunctionof all three: anartist, leavingthe city,who
hadchosen took
to live abroad and tried to found an artistic colony in Provence,
which fam(
was n o t at all an‘unspoilt region’ but ahighly modernising,
politically eartl
volatile, aggressively left‐wingandindustrialisingarea
ofmodernFrance?4 that
We
ch

or
on
in
of
i r e
ur
ave
of
ity
of
let
re,
he
fllS
en
ch
lly
n>4
V A N GOGH, 1888‐9
Regionality and the artists’ colony: Van Gogh and Drenthe,
1883
In the late nineteenth century a certain kind of consciousness of
‘regionality’ had emerged within the economic and political
forces for
Europeanconvergence and nationalcentralisation.Regionality is
acom‑
plex ideologicaleffect of the latter: ascapitalismpenetratedand
imposed
anexpanding uniformity upon hitherto disparate and segregated

com‑
munities,economies and traditions, soabelated, almost nostalgic,
inter‑
est was generated in that which, in the new economic logic,
must soon
cease to,bedifferent. Artists asmuchastourists
paradoxically,therefore,
sought out regions,villages, landscapes that appeared to
be‘unspoiled’,
‘untouched’,‘undeveloped’.A drive for integrationof disparate
linguistic
and cultural communities into anational economy and
apoliticalunity
vied with acultural romanticism that travelled with
ananthropologist’s
zeal for diversity anddifference into those regions and areas that
seemed
most to resist the pressures of economic progress and national
homo‑
genisation. This desired difference could no longer besignified
by the
notionof the country asopposed to the city and increasingly the
object
of desire was called ‘Nature’.5
The extent to which artists were part of this contradictory trend
is a
phenomenon that is only just being properly researched and
analysed.
Throughout the nineteenth century, but massively at its end,
artists of
all aesthetic persuasions moved out of the cities and set up
‘colonies’
across the face of Europe,with certain areas
muchprivileged:PontAven
and the northern coasts of Brittany were popular; sowere the

fishing
villages of Holland,Cornwall and Scandinavia. Worpswede and
Dachau
in Germany were also well settled. Various explanations can be
offered
for this artistic colonisation of the picturesque remnants of
traditional
rural economies and cultures which cannot be entered in here.6
From the very inception of his belated career asanartist, Van
Gogh
was apart of this tendency. His letters show hewas already
aware of the
artistic colonies. In 1881hewrote of his plans to paint in well-
known
artistic sites in
Holland:Katwijk,Heyst,Calmphout,Etten,Scheveningen
‐ any ‘plaats waar kans is in aanraking te komen met andere
schilders’
(placewhere there is achance of cominginto contact
withpainters) (LT
142).7After working in Etten (where his parents were
living),however,
he actually settled in the city of The Hague in December 1881.
After
t w o years of struggling to come to terms with representing the
modern
city and its rapidly changing environs,he abandoned that project
and
tried another possible artistic strategy: being a painter of
Nature.8 This
took him'onthe railway into the relatively remote province of
Drenthe,
famous for its peat-rich soil and spectacular landscapes of deep
brown
earth stretching for miles, flat, regular, punctuated only by the

canals
that transported its almost slave‐produced peat, and interrupted
by the
fascinating shapes of very large farmhouses and barns whose
enormous
thatched roofs almost touched the ground.
Significantly, Van Gogh got this wrong. The growing colony of
urban artist‐tourists from Holland and Germany (Max
Liebermann for
instance) settled in the attractive little village of Zweeloo, a
short carriage
ride from the railway terminus at Hoogeveen. Van Gogh did n o
t go
there, but found a room in an inn, one of the very few buildings
for
miles, at the intersection of one of the main canal networks.
Wherever
y o u look from this point is limitless, featureless flatness.
However char‑
acteristic of the region, and its economy, this does n o t furnish
much by
way of interest for a landscape painter, and the limited company
pro‑
vided by an inn at an otherwise virtually uninhabited crossroads
could
n o t provide the very sociality that Nina Lubbren has identified
as a
defining aspect of the ‘artists’ colony’.9 Van Gogh struggled
with the
problem, taking canal trips and trying to draw and paint some of
the
sights that make this region spectacular in its v a s t vistas of

chocolate‑
brown earth. But from the few drawings and oils that survive,
we can see
that the relations between what he was trying to draw and paint
and the
still unconquered vocabulary of landscape painting remained
unresolved
however much, in his letters, he tried to convince his brother
that hewas
living in ‘nature’, in the restorative healthiness of the
countryside and
in someplace comparable to what the village of Barbizon in
France had
been forty years before, or even akin to the rural world painted
by
Ruysdael and De Koninck in the seventeenth century.
I have introduced the brief Drenthe episode ‐ it lasted a m e r e
three
months ‐ of Van Gogh aslandscape painter because it differs
from what
happened in Provence in 1888 and y e t corresponds in crucial
ways. Per‑
haps I could say that in Drenthe, Van Gogh, still taking the
artistic trope
of ‘being t r u e to Nature’ t o o literally, actually tried to see
Drenthe and
thus missed the artistic boat. He had studied a lot m o r e a r t
by the time
he once again set a canvas before an outdoor rural scene in
France. He
had learnt that art, n o t Nature ‐ in the r a w ‐ makes a r t .
Nature is arhet‑
orical figure for an aesthetic renovation. Van Gogh learnt
through c o n t a c t
with this painting revolution that the ‘Nature’ heneeded to

master was the
rhetoric already coded into the history of a r t by those painting
schools
claimed asm o r e t r u e to n a t u r e by contemporary critics:
namely landscape
painting practised at Barbizon and to befound in the museums’
holdings
of seventeenth‐century Dutch a r t which,"in direct c o n t r a s t
to allegorical
interpretations in the later twentieth century, was read
as‘naturalist’.
Dreams, memories and the problem of place
What Van Gogh produced in the South of France has to some e
x t e n t
become the defining, popular image of ‘Van Gogh’: brilliant,
intensely
color
and :
thick
and e
durin
PI‘OVt
gest 1
a ‘stu
His r
novd
fram(
whicf
shifte
Mati:
whic:
I975
types

art b
n o t t
as in
I ) r e n
trial
m o s t
scam
site w
devel
fusin
Va n (
impo
Th
ture 5
ing 0
but (2
o f w ]
yet a
a mo
t o p :
Arge
prob
n o t a l
fram‑
e c o n l
a
I |
84 j 85 VAN GOGH, 1888‐9
[01.18 j coloured imagesof aperpetualsummer, anagriculturally

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