Nineteenth-century
French art, and French artists, were fortunate to have the backing of some of
the best writers of the day. Stendhal, Baudelaire, Gautier, Goncourt, Zola,
Maupassant, Huysmans and Mallarmé all doubled up as art critics. (The bullish
Courbet took on both tasks: doing the work and the self-promotion.) It helped
that there were extraordinary new artists to support, as well as a hulking and
immobile target to attack: the annual Salon. The Académie des Beaux-Arts
organised it, controlled who and what was shown, awarded prizes and public
commissions. The thousands of artworks were all for sale: this was, as Huysmans
put it, an ‘official bazaar of art’, the ‘Stock Exchange for oils on the
Champs-Elysées’, the ‘temple of Offcuts’ from ‘the state-run farms of the
Academy’. It also controlled, both implicitly and explicitly, what and how a
painter was expected to paint. There was an established hierarchy of subject
matter: high solemnity and low sentimentality were applauded; imagination
should be orderly; finish was preferred to vivacity. You could say that all
Salon pictures were still lifes, even a picture of a heroic battle or a
portrait of Victor Hugo – perhaps especially a portrait of Victor Hugo, whose
marmoreal fame had turned him into a still life already.
This is
not, of course, as simple or monumental a story as the professional insiders v.
the excluded rebels. Artists, even the most rule-breaking, often enjoy acclaim
just as much as diligent hacks: they want to offend but they also want to be
accepted. Delacroix kept trying to get elected to the Institut de France (to
Baudelaire’s bafflement), succeeding at the seventh attempt, while a number of
the Impressionists showed – or tried to show – at the Salon. The second half of
the 19th century saw active and well-publicised breakaways: the famous Salon
des Refusés, established in 1863; and, from 1874 onwards, the Independent
exhibitions, of which there were eight. But even so, there was a surprising
amount of overlap. Renoir and Monet turned up on the Salon’s walls; and Manet,
despite being one of the Refused in 1863, played a double game, continuing to
submit and show pictures long after the new painters had their own outlet. That
Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère, which nowadays seems one of the
quintessential Impressionist paintings, was first shown (along with a Manet
portrait) at the Salon of 1882 comes as a genuine shock. But then Olympia had
enraged the Salon-goers back in 1865.
Nor did
the modernist writers who supported the modernist painters prove unfailing,
either in support or in judgment. Baudelaire believed that the painter of
modern life was Constantin Guys; Zola seemed to regard painters as the
provisional wing of prose naturalism, preferring them not to stray into trivial
or unhelpful subject matter: he dismissed Degas as ‘nothing more than a
constipated artist with a talent for the pretty’. The wildest, funniest and
most violent of the writer-critics was Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907), who
began his moral career as a degenerate and Satanist and ended up a pious
Catholic. He had a day job for thirty years with the Paris Sûreté, while also
holding down night jobs as an art critic and as a novelist of Zola’s naturalist
school. French journalism at the time was a largely unpoliced zone, with libel
laws very weak, which allowed Huysmans to express the full scale of his rage
and contempt. As Anita Brookner put it, ‘his judgments on his contemporaries
were not unlike the humours of an invalid, his view of the world as subjective
as that of a patient in a hospital bed.’ His misanthropy gave him much less
pleasure then than it does us now.
Huysmans
reviewed the Salons of 1879-82 and the Independent Exhibitions of 1880-82 at
considerable length. His articles, collected as L’Art moderne (1883), have
never before been translated into English, probably because he is the least
known of the writer-critics, and his French is often not straightforward.
Robert Baldick, biographer of Huysmans (1955) and translator of his most famous
novel, À Rebours, described his style as ‘one of the strangest literary idioms
in existence’. Léon Bloy, a fellow writer and fellow Catholic, described it as
‘continually dragging Mother Image by the hair or the feet down the wormeaten
staircase of terrified Syntax’. Brendan King, who has already translated most
of Huysmans’s fiction, has produced an excellent version. Rarely can it have
been such fun to read translated denunciations of so many forgotten French
pictures. The edition also includes scores of small black and white
illustrations, which can easily be Googled into colour. Try, for example, Peder
Kroyer’s Female Sardine Worker of Concarneau, from the 1880 Salon. A young
woman sits in profile: sabots on her feet, muslin cap on her head, red scarf
over her shoulders, yellowing apron. She is in a large shed, surrounded by
other women, and working her way through an endless pile of sardines. Her
resigned expression suggests that she already sees her life stretching ahead of
her in terms of gutted fish. It is a truthful and tender picture, and as a rare
image of a female industrial production line it would undoubtedly have had
Zola’s approval. Huysmans gives it half a line and the adjective ‘pleasing’.
In old
age, Huysmans largely turned his back on what he called ‘all that literary
jiggery-pokery’. He became the first president of the Académie Goncourt in
1900, but was simultaneously an oblate at the Benedictine abbey of Ligugé near
Poitiers. This spiritual seclusion fulfilled half of a famous prophecy made by
the (Catholic) novelist Barbey d’Aurevilly after Huysmans published À Rebours
in 1884. Barbey said that the future for Huysmans lay in a choice between ‘the
muzzle of a revolver’ and ‘the foot of the Cross’. Now, as an oblate, he had to
have the prior’s permission to come up to Paris on literary business. One of
his fellow academicians, the novelist Joseph Rosny, remembered that ‘Huysmans
behaved towards the members of the Academy like an old gentleman brimming over
with consideration and respect. He seemed to have grown more compassionate, and
he took a brotherly interest in our work.’
Such
mellowness and charity – perhaps attributable to the Church – would have come
as a surprise to those who had known him in earlier times. Léon Daudet, also
one of the first ten academicians, left a rather different description of
Huysmans in his memoir Fantômes et Vivantes:
“
He was as silent and grave as a bird of the night. Slender and slightly
stooped, he had a beaky nose, deep-set eyes, sparse hair, a long and sinuous
mouth hidden beneath a floppy moustache; his skin was grey and he had the
delicate hands of a jewellery engraver. His conversation, normally of a
crepuscular nature, consisted entirely of outbursts of disgust, sickened as he
was by the things and people of his time, which he cursed and execrated:
everything from the decline of cooking and the rise of readymade sauces to the
shape of hats. On cue he would vomit out his century, through which he ran
shivering: skinless, squirming at every contact and every atmosphere he
encountered, at the stupidity he was surrounded by, at both banality and
feigned originality, at anticlericalism and bigotry, at architecture put up by
engineers and at bien-pensant sculpture, at the Eiffel Tower and the religious
imagery of the Saint-Sulpice quarter ... Most critics writing about him have
based their approach on his Flemish origins, and treated him as a painter of
interiors, in the style of the greater and lesser painters of the North; but
within him there was also a ferociously cocky Parisian, quick and colourful in
his judgments, and first-rate in irritability.”
Huysmans
was a great hater of falsity: of models clothed from the costumier’s
dressing-up box and pretending to be Joan of Arc while looking entirely
contemporary; of nudes (such as those by Bouguereau) which didn’t look at all
like naked women – ‘a kind of gaseous painting ... not even porcelain ... soft
octopus flesh ... like a badly inflated balloon’. (For Huysmans, only Rembrandt
had ever painted truthful nudes.) He hated landscape artists ‘whose brushes
move of their own accord’ and vast military pictures offering up ‘a frozen
purée of combatants’. For one so sensitive and so irritable, reviewing the
Salon must have been a secular martyrdom. The 1879 Salon was ‘a heap of
crackbrained nonsense’: of its 3040 pictures ‘not a hundred are worth looking
at’ and the other 2940 were ‘certainly inferior to the advertising posters on
the walls of our streets and on the pissoirs of our boulevards’. His account of
the 1882 Salon begins: ‘Once you’ve seen one Salon, you’ve seen them all.’ If
the Impressionists, in their shifting composition and nomenclature, were also
known as the Independents and the Intransigents, Huysmans is the most
intransigeant critic of the age. At times it almost makes you feel sorry for
that modestly talented, modestly ambitious young or middle-aged painter hoping
that their picture wouldn’t be hung too high, that their version of landscape
or history will catch the acquisitive eye of a passing visitor, that they
themselves may find favour with the high chiefs of official art and – one day –
win a medal and thus be exempt from the selection process for the rest of their
painting life. Almost.
Huysmans
loathes Salon stalwarts like Léon Bonnat (‘never has a more belaboured, more
pitiful painting come off the dull trowel of that mixer of mortar who goes by
the name of Bonnat’), whose influence as juror at the Salon and teacher at the
Académie had deformed generations of young painters; or Gérôme, with his
glossy, influential, ‘oft-repeated nonsense’; or Henri Gervex, who started
promisingly but flopped back into conventionality. As Daudet pointed out, he
was enraged by ‘feigned originality’ such as the ‘fake modernity’ of Jules
Bastien-Lepage, a ‘prudent rebel’ who was no more than ‘a sly fellow-traveller
of modernism’. Huysmans salutes a heroic military picture – a sapper pointing
heaven out to a dying rifleman – as ‘the most powerful disinfectant I know for
spleen, and I recommend it to anyone who has difficulty laughing’. He invents
categories of badness for painters: there are the ‘couturiers’, who paint
clothes rather than character, the ‘vaudevillistes’ with pretensions to wit,
and the self-explanatory ‘weepies’. The fundamental failure of Salon painters
was their refusal to paint what was in front of them, their sheer inability to
see, for instance, that ‘the trees growing in Paris are not the same as those
growing in the countryside.’ In 1879, Bastien-Lepage exhibited October: Gathering
Potatoes, which features a female potato-picker, pretty, genteel and
‘lethargic’, straight out of the studio models’ listings, a suspicion of
make-up on her cheeks. With grouchy pedantry, Huysmans points out that ‘the
hands of his peasant aren’t the hands of a woman who delves in mud, they’re the
hands of my maid, who dusts as little as possible and who barely even does the
washing up.’ Contrast this with the way Degas portrays his ballet dancers.
‘Here,’ Huysmans writes, ‘there’s no smooth creamy flesh, no silky gossamer
skin, but real powdered flesh, the painted flesh of the theatre and the
bedchamber, just as it is, like flannelette, with its veiny granularity when
seen up close, and its unhealthy sheen when seen from a distance.’
At root,
truth to life in painting is truth to light. Huysmans – of Dutch origin – is
extremely sensitive to its representation, and misrepresentation. And in his
view French painters had long stopped looking at light as it is. Instead, they
automatically imported the illumination of the old masters, with Dutch, Italian
or Spanish light unthinkingly transplanted into Parisian scenes. But Dutch
light, governed as it is by the proximity of the sea, of canals and rising
mists, then filtered through narrow sash windows with small square panes, was
‘absolutely ridiculous in Paris, in the year of grace 1880’, where the only
canals are street gutters, and the drawing rooms have ‘large casement windows
and clean panes with neither bubbles nor imperfections’. In another lying
stratagem, painters applied ‘standard’ daylight as taught by the Académie:
manoeuvring curtains on poles until you get the same bland effect ‘whether it’s
supposed to be on the ground floor, in a courtyard, or on the fifth floor of a
boulevard, whether in rooms that are bare or upholstered in fabrics, lit by a
candle or by stained glass’. Similarly, landscapists may go out into the
countryside and sketch accurately, but then return to the studio and give their
pictures the same light ‘regardless of season, whether it’s midday or five
o’clock in the evening, whether the sky is clear or overcast’. Jean Béraud
paints a night-time scene of an open-air ball lit by circular gaslight bowls:
the problem is that ‘Béraud has never, and I mean never, even noticed the pale
green of leaves when lit from below, or the harsh brilliance of skies above the
fierce gleam of gaslight.’ As for Bonnat’s portrait of Victor Hugo, ‘the
lighting is, as usual, mad.’
Highly
entertaining though all this is, we don’t read Modern Art for its caustic
denunciations – especially as few of those taunted by Huysmans have ever made
much of a comeback. We read it for the speed and accuracy with which he
identified and championed the new painters who in his view – and posterity’s –
would supplant them. Given his central concern with light, it’s clear that
Huysmans was the ideal critic to welcome the Impressionists. ‘The new school
proclaimed this scientific truth: that broad daylight fades colours, that
shadows and colours, of a house or a tree, for example, painted in an enclosed
room, differ absolutely from the shadows and colours of a house or a tree
painted under the selfsame sky in the open air.’ Of Caillebotte’s Interior,
Woman at the Window he writes: ‘That supreme quality of art, life, exudes from
this canvas with an intensity that is really incredible; added to which ...
it’s here that one should see it, the light of Paris, in an apartment located
on a street, the light deadened by window hangings, filtered by thin muslin
curtains.’ Of the still-lifers, Huysmans asks: ‘Where is the artist who,
instead of making his objects or his flowers stand out as bright spots against
a sombre background, has painted them simply, in the open air and in full
daylight? ... The only previous attempts to have been dared were those of M.
Manet, who pulled off some paintings of flowers in real daylight.’
And as
they took back control of their native French light, the new painters also took
back control of subject matter. The longstanding hierarchy laid down by the
Académie was now completely discarded. None of those old gods and nymphs, those
ancient and Christian myths, those ‘noble’ history paintings, and so on.
Flaubert had written that ‘everything in art depends on the execution: the
story of a louse can be as fine as the history of Alexander the Great.’ Now, in
1880, the year of Flaubert’s death, as if in homage, Huysmans writes: ‘It’s ...
quite useless to choose subjects that are said to be more “elevated” than
others, because subjects are nothing in themselves. Everything depends on the
way they are treated.’ Even so, theory and practice don’t always accord. A
couple of pages later, Huysmans is denouncing a ‘democratic and liberal still
life’ of a politician’s desk as unacceptable subject matter, as a
‘monstrosity’: ‘When will we see Robespierre’s chamber pot or Marat’s bidet in
the Salon? When, supposing a change of government comes about, will we see
Louis-Philippe’s umbrella, Napoleon’s catheter, or Chambord’s hernia pads?’ As
for Flaubert: in 1877, writing to Turgenev, he dismissed the Impressionists as
‘a bunch of jokesters, trying to delude themselves and us into believing that
they have discovered the Mediterranean’.
And yet
– and happily – the story is more complicated than we might have expected. It
isn’t the case that everything suddenly changed for Huysmans and the
avant-garde trainspotters the day Monet painted Impression, Sunrise. He didn’t
write about the first four Independent shows, but it’s clear that at first the
Impressionists didn’t make much of an impression on him. He saw their opening
group show at Nadar’s photography studio in 1874 and then their second one at
Durand-Ruel’s gallery in 1875. And what he found on display were ‘touching
follies’ that should be examined not aesthetically but as ‘a matter of
physiology and medicine’. The painters were suffering from ‘monomania’: one
would see intense blue in everything, another purple, tingeing everything with
lilac and aubergine. Green disappeared from their palettes, as it did for
patients suffering from atrophy of the nerve fibres in the eye. ‘Ultimately,
most of them would have confirmed Dr Charcot’s experiments on the deterioration
of colour perception, which he’d observed in many hysterics in the Salpêtrière
hospital.’ Colour theory (or at least colour thought) is reduced to a retinal
disorder – as it would be by others who attacked the Impressionists in
subsequent decades. Le Figaro agreed with the diagnosis of monomania. Of the
1874 show, it wrote that the new painters merely flung a few colours together
and imagined the result a masterpiece ‘in the same way that lost souls in the
Ville-Évrard insane asylum pick up a pebble in the road and imagine that it’s a
diamond. A frightful spectacle of human vanity straying into dementia.’
What
happened over the next few years, in Huysmans’s analysis, was that painters
like Monet and Pissarro jumped ‘from bad to good’. Pissarro started off
painting ‘vague motley-coloured canvases’, then developed into ‘a landscape
artist of talent at times, but often unhinged, a man who either gets it
completely wrong or else calmly paints a very beautiful work’. Monet seemed at
first to be a ‘stammering’, ‘unmethodical’ and ‘hasty’ painter, his Impressionism
‘the poorly hatched egg of realism’, ‘painting left in a rudimentary and
confused state’, and Huysmans lost interest in him. But then Monet’s eye was
‘cured’, whereupon he grasped ‘all the phenomena of light’, emerging, in the
critic’s final judgment, as ‘a seascape artist par excellence’. Even
Caillebotte, whom Huysmans came to rate straightforwardly as ‘a great painter’,
started off suffering from ‘indigomania’. But ‘after being cruelly afflicted,
this artist has cured himself and, apart from one or two relapses, he seems to
have finally managed to clarify his eye.’ However, it’s not at all apparent how
such ‘clarification’ took place: was it the result of hard work, or of a knock
on the head? Which leaves us with an alternative explanation: that after
several years of looking at Impressionist pictures, Huysmans managed to clarify
his eye, and came to understand the revolution that had been taking place.
There is also the overlapping matter of personal taste: Huysmans never came
round to the fluffier, white-dabbing aspect of Impressionism.
This is
clear from his attitude to the movement’s two women painters, Berthe Morisot
and Mary Cassatt. Malely, he describes the first as Manet’s pupil and the
second as Degas’s – true in neither case. Morisot was one of the founder
Impressionists of 1874 and Huysmans barely has an unpatronising word to say
about her. The ‘unfinished’ sketches she shows at the 1880 Independent show are
‘a chic jumble of white and pink’; the following year she ‘limits herself to
improvisations too summary and too constantly repeated without the slightest
variation’, while being ‘one of the few painters who understand the adorable
delights of the fashionable woman’s toilette’. In 1882: ‘If it were a dinner,
her painting would always be the same insubstantial vanilla meringue dessert!’
Whereas Cassatt – whom he sees, oddly, as ‘a student of the English painters’ –
has emerged as ‘an artist ... who owes nothing to anyone, a wholly spontaneous,
wholly original artist’. She paints babies – which normally give Huysmans ‘the
shivers’ – with a ‘delicious tenderness’ and ‘manages to extract from Paris
what none of our painters know how to express: the joyous quietude, the calm
good-naturedness of an interior’.
In sum,
he finds Cassatt ‘more balanced, more tranquil, more intelligent’ than Morisot,
and this explains some of the basis of his taste. He is interested in light and
a democracy of subject matter and a truthful eye. He is less interested in the
‘irrational’ fragmentation of colour and the fleeting impression. It’s also the
case that he applauded many non-Impressionists just as loudly. He greatly
admired Moreau and Redon (not only in these essays – he devoted half a chapter
to them in À Rebours), as well as Fantin-Latour and Raffaëlli. Writing of
Christoffel Bisschop’s The Eternal Giveth, the Eternal Taketh Away, a Dutch
picture in the 1880 Salon of a grieving mother, an empty cradle and a
sympathetic onlooker, he praises its un-Frenchness, its sobriety, its refusal
to direct our emotions. ‘By force of good faith M. Bisschop isn’t ridiculous
for a second.’ To my eye it looks pious and mock-medieval. Huysmans compares it
to a Vermeer: ‘It’s a luminous painting ... highly finished and very spacious.’
That ‘highly finished’ is significant. The average Salon picture was, of
course, also highly finished, but highly wrongly finished.
Félix
Fénéon described Huysmans as ‘the inventor of Impressionism’. ‘Endorser’ might
be better (we shouldn’t allow critics too much power). But his one enduring
claim to fame is that he was the first person to see Degas as the greatest
painter of the age, ‘the one who has remained the boldest and the most
original’. Huysmans first came across him in 1876, when he’d shown two pictures
of ballet dancers:
“”The joy I experienced then, wholly boyish,
has since increased with each exhibition in which Degas has featured ... A
painter of modern life has been born, and a painter who doesn’t derive from
anyone, who doesn’t resemble anyone, who brings a whole new flavour to art,
wholly new techniques of execution. Washerwomen in their shops, dancers at their
rehearsals, café-concert singers, theatre scenes, racehorses, portraits,
American cotton merchants, the paraphernalia of bedrooms and theatre boxes, all
these divers subjects have been treated by this artist, who nevertheless has
acquired a reputation for only painting dancers! “
‘What
truth! What life!’ Huysmans exclaims. This is not – or not only – the response
of a sophisticated connoisseur: it is simple, ‘boyish’ awe. ‘What a study of
the effect of light!’ What an ability to ‘forge neologisms of colour ... and
what a definitive abandonment of all the techniques of light and shade, of all
the old impostures of tones’. Look at the artist’s portrait of Edmond Duranty:
‘Up close, it’s a slashing crosshatch of colours that clash against each other,
that seem to overlap each other; at the distance of a few steps, all this
harmonises itself and melts into the precise tone of flesh, of flesh that
breathes, that lives, and that nobody in France has known how to do until now.’
Again: ‘No painter since Delacroix – whom he’s studied for a long time and who
is his true master – has understood the marriage and the adultery of colours
like M. Degas; no one today has a drawing style so precise and so broad, a
touch for colouring so delicate ... When will it be understood that this artist
is the greatest we have today in France?’ ‘The marriage and the adultery of
colours’ – this wonderful phrase takes us back to a scene in Maxime Du Camp’s
memoirs, of Delacroix spending an evening bent over a basket filled with skeins
of wool, picking them up, grouping them, placing them against one another,
separating them shade by shade, and ‘producing extraordinary effects of
colour’.
And
then, only a year later, Degas strikes again. Huysmans had long been of the
opinion that French sculpture was even more moribund than French painting,
locked into old forms, old techniques and old materials. A tradition which
Degas demolished with a single work in the 1881 Independent show, The Little
14-Year-Old Dancer, before which ‘a confused public has fled, as if in
embarrassment’. Huysmans declared that Degas had ‘immediately made sculpture
completely individual, completely modern’. A painted head, a corsage of kneaded
wax, skirts of muslin, a leek-green ribbon at the neck and real hair: ‘At once refined
and barbarous in her machine-made costume and her coloured flesh which
palpitates, furrowed by the working of the muscles, this statuette is the only
real attempt at sculpture I know of.’ And because of such profound originality,
he concludes, ‘I have strong doubts that it will obtain even the slightest
success.’
Huysmans
isn’t the sort of critic who latches onto a new movement and applauds slavishly
as a way of applauding himself. His doubts and vacillations make him the more
interesting, and he is inclined to be schoolmasterly. At the Seventh
Independent exhibition, Gauguin, whom he had been the first to notice
favourably, is ticked off (‘No progress, alas’); Morisot likewise (‘Always the
same’). He can misread paintings. At the same show, Renoir – ‘a gallant and
adventurous charmer’ – offers the public the still charming and ever popular
Lunch in Bougival. ‘A few of his boatmen are good, some, among his women, are
charming, but the painting doesn’t smell strong enough,’ Huysmans decides. ‘His
whores are chic and merry, but they don’t give off the odour of a Parisian
whore; these are springtime whores freshly disembarked from London.’
Throughout
Modern Art, Huysmans is unwavering in his insistence that women should look
like women – that’s to say, the women they are meant to represent. Don’t just
dress up a model; don’t show potato-pickers with the unblemished hands of a
lazy housemaid; and above all – Huysmans is rather obsessed with this subject –
show whores as they are. This is an echo of Huysmans the prose naturalist, and
the unforgiving view at least displays commitment. The only problem with his
disparagement of Lunch in Bougival is that the participants aren’t in fact
boatmen with native – or even imported – whores: they are a group of Renoir’s
friends, including Caillebotte and the poet Laforgue, entertaining some
well-known actresses, including Renoir’s future wife.
By the
time Huysmans saw the Salon and Independent shows of 1882 he had become
bomb-happy and trench-weary. Gervex received his annual instruction to put on
the dunce’s cap for painting ‘tall coalmen scrubbed clean with herbal soap’.
But Huysmans was also getting grumpy with those he had previously praised.
Despite having admired Sargent’s ‘soft and dreamy’ portrait of Carolus-Duran,
he loathed the crowd-pleasing swagger and ‘turbulent pastiche’ of his El Jaleo,
which still pleases crowds at the Frick. His staunch admiration for
Fantin-Latour is now tempered: the ‘portraits are superb but will never
change’. But his most surprising response is to Manet’s masterpiece Bar at the
Folies-Bergère. Huysmans had already expressed the view that Manet ‘remains
incomplete’ as a painter and that some of his work is ‘going downhill’; here he
praises the modernity of the subject, the ‘ingenious’ placing of the bar-girl
and the liveliness of the crowd. The problem is that old and essential one, the
quality of the light:
“ What’s the meaning of that lighting? Is
that supposed to be gaslight or electric light? Come off it! It’s as if it was
set in the open air, it’s bathed in pale daylight! As a result, everything
collapses – the Folies-Bergère only exists, and can only exist in the evening,
so however knowing and sophisticated the painting is it’s absurd. It’s really
deplorable to see a man of M. Manet’s quality sacrificing himself to such
subterfuges and, to be blunt, making a painting as conventional as those of
everyone else.”
Time to
retire? Time to admit, at least, that the implacable aesthetic which impelled
the critic to such cheering rage against the Salon needs to be adjusted to take
in all the stretchings and loosenings and formal developments of the new art.
(So he doesn’t confront Manet’s unrealism in all the ‘impossible’ mirrorings
behind the bar girl.) Art moves on; portrayal of light moves on; ‘finish’ moves
on. But the irony here is that within two years Huysmans would himself be
publishing his own great act of disobedience to Zola’s school of realism: his
unruly masterpiece, his ‘wild and gloomy fantasy’, as he called it, À Rebours.
Robespierre’s
Chamber Pot. By Julian Barnes. London Review of Books , March 22, 2020
Few late
nineteenth-century art critics were more clearly on the right side of history
than the early J.-K. Huysmans. For to read his essay on the “Exhibition of the
Independents in 1880” is to discover in retrospect an anticipation of the
twentieth century’s aesthetic preferences:
When
will the high place that [Degas] should occupy in contemporary art be
recognised? I am not a prophet, but if I judge by the ineptitude of the
enlightened classes – who after having reviled Delacroix for so long still
don’t even suspect that Baudelaire is the poet of genius of the 19th century,
that he is head and shoulders above everyone else, including Hugo, and that the
masterpiece of the modern novel is Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education,
even though literature is supposedly the art most accessible to the masses – I
can well believe that this truth about M. Degas, which I am the only person to
write today, will probably not be recognised as such for many, many years.
In
privileging Degas over Manet, Huysmans was already distancing himself from his
Naturalist maître, Zola. That journey was to be completed the following year
with the publication of his most famous work, the novel À rebours (Against
Nature), which also marks an art-historical shift in the Symbolist direction of
Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon, and away from the quest for modern life
embodied in his accounts of exhibitions of Impressionist refusés in 1880, 1881
and 1882. These essays stand in contradistinction to the vitriol he pours on
the official Salons of 1879, 1880, 1881 and 1882. Huysmans cites Baudelaire’s
“righteous anger” in order to describe his own taste for iconoclastic polemic
which embarrassed his publisher so much that when L’Art moderne finally
appeared in May 1873 with Zola’s publisher, Charpentier (also the friend of
some of Huysmans’s targets such as Gervex and Bastien-Lepage), the publisher
“deliberately dragg[ed] his heels as regards marketing and distributing,” as
noted by the able editor, translator and Huysmansophile, Brendan King.
King
displays both considerable knowledge and easy humour in the tone of his
introduction (“To many critics”, we learn, Impressionist paintings were “the
products of artists who were untalented, if not even a bit sick in the head”.)
His detailed notes (not without errors in the French) and glossary of artists
(which also serves as an index) are useful, but particularly appealing to the
reader will be the inclusion, in the main body of the text, of small
black-and-white illustrations for a number of the paintings referred to, some
taken from the original Salon catalogues.
Sick in the head. By Nicholas White. Times Literary Supplement , September 6, 2019.
About Modern
Art / by J.K. Huysmans, translated by
Brendan King. Dedalus,
313 pp. February 2019, 978 1 910213 99 5
Flowing
through three contiguous galleries along the right-hand mezzanine of the Musée
d’Orsay is the stream of consciousness of the novelist and art critic
Joris-Karl Huysmans, in the form of the exhibition and installation Joris-Karl
Huysmans Art Critic. Acting as a valve on this torrent of images and ideas is
another enigmatic aesthetic impresario, the artist Francesco Vezzoli. This is
an academic exhibition curated by André Guyaux and Stéphane Guégan, contained
within an artwork by Vezzoli. Complicating things further, Vezzoli’s artwork
folds in on itself and is based on the writings of Huysmans, primarily his
masterpiece À Rebours (Against Nature, 1884). The coordination between artistic
fantasy and historical reality, i.e. between Vezzoli and the curatorial team,
was deftly juggled by Donatien Grau (who has edited for and contributed to the Brooklyn
Rail in the past). Luckily the transition from history to fiction begins with a
traditional white box gallery space, so we can get our bearings, and migrates
into a final total conceptual piece, via a spell in a sumptuous scarlet house
of pleasure designed by Futurist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio (an acolyte of
Huysmans). In the final conceptual gesture, Vezzoli fills a single room with
multiple paintings based on Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece (1512–16),
indicating on the one hand Huysmans’s seemingly inescapable destiny in the arms
of some form of spirituality, and on the other the uncomfortably close
relationship between dandyish decadence and intense Catholic religious fervor.
Like Vezzoli, Huysmans had no problem mixing fact with fiction and peppered his
novels with references to real-world writers and artists. The color-coded
white, red, and black galleries are filled with the artists Huysmans championed
as well as the art works which inspired his fictional character in Against
Nature, the Baron des Esseintes. In this, there is a wonderful ambiguity in
what the exhibition is attempting to accomplish: illustrate the life of the
critic or bring his novel to life? If the viewer understandably balks at this
mille-feuille of subtexts and metaphors, the range of works exhibited is truly
extraordinary, featuring seminal pieces by Edgar Degas, Eva Gonzalès, Gustave
Caillebotte, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Gustave Moreau, and Odilon Redon,
as well as historical documentation, photographs and a jewel-encrusted turtle
fabricated by Bulgari.
The tale
begins in a series of white galleries introducing the viewer to Huysmans’s
initial fascination with naturalism and his overall likes and dislikes.
William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s Naissance de Venus (Birth of Venus, 1879) and
Fernand Pelez’s La Mort de l’Empereur Commode (The Death of Emperor Commodus,
1879) are presented as examples of the insipid sentimentality that the critic
regularly dismissed, while he was lukewarm on Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’s pallid
Jeune Filles au bord de la Mer (Girls at the Seaside, 1879) and its ilk. It is
hard to discern why the illustrative Jean-François Raffaëlli’s Chiffonnier
Allumant sa Pipe (Ragpicker Lights His Pipe, 1884) or Henri Gervex’s soft-core
erotic Rolla (1878) was more appealing to the critic, but Huysmans was very
nuanced in his definition of naturalism in terms of what he deemed authentic.
The Second Impressionist Exhibition of 1876 introduced Huysmans to Degas, and
the last two-thirds of the white galleries are devoted primarily to examples of
Impressionism, including Degas’s L’Absinthe (1875-76) and Édouard Manet’s
Portrait of Irma Brunner (1880). The piercing and dramatic canvas Une Loge au
Théâtre des Italiens (A Box at the Italian Theatre, 1874) by Eva Gonzalès,
Caillebotte’s Au Café (In a Café, 1880), and several works on paper by Jean-Louis
Forain exemplify the critic’s fascination with direct contact between the
figures in the image and the viewer, a commingling of the illusory volume of
the picture plane and the personal space of the viewer that would emerge in his
intensely descriptive novels. Vezzoli’s gentle contribution to the white zone
is a modest, embroidered Self-portrait (2019), but it acknowledges the themes
of fictional autobiography and role reversal between critic and artist with
which Huysmans would engage: Vezzoli’s Self-portrait is a portrait of the
artist as a young girl, and while the allure of the piece is one of Vezzoli’s
trademark tears in sparkling sequins, the pun lies in an embroidery of an
embroiderer (embroidering).
The
second, red, gallery joyously begins the process of purposefully confusing the
writer with his characters, and the viewer is transported to Huysmans’s alter
ego des Esseintes’s obsessively crafted home in the novel Against Nature.
D’Annunzio modeled his own home after Huysmans’s detailed description of the
protagonist’s house, and Vezzoli has laminated the walls of the gallery in
floor-to-ceiling photographs of the decadent paneling and interior decoration
of D’Annunzio’s recreation of the fictional domicile. At the entrance to the
red gallery are a selection of portraits of poets and dandies (sometimes both
simultaneously) who inspired or are referenced in Against Nature: Félix Nadar’s
photographic portrait of a pensive Baudelaire (1855), Émile Lévy’s painting of
a haughty Jules Barbey D’Aurevilly (1881) and a Giovanni Boldini portrait of a
rakish Count Robert de Montesquiou (1897). The Baron des Esseintes spends
almost an entire chapter agonizing over two of Moreau’s Salome paintings in
Huysmans’s novel, but in this exhibition, we are treated to the painter’s
Galatea (c. 1880), its subtext of thwarted love just as applicable. This second
phase of the exhibition charts Huysmans’s trajectory from a critic espousing
Naturalism to a proponent of Symbolism, while simultaneously following a
personal path from agnosticism towards devoted and monastic Catholicism. That
personal transformation is mirrored in the selection of works by Redon, which
features a dozen of the artist’s surreal black and white lithographs but
concludes the red passage of the exhibition with his color pastels Christ au
Sacre Coeur (Christ of the Sacred Heart, 1895) and Parsifal (1912). Images not
only steeped in Christian mysticism, but iconography as well, objects that,
like des Esseintes’s endless catalog of luxurious objects, can be radiant
forms, almost as decadent in their depiction as the life-sized, gilt and
jewel-encrusted turtle, created by Vezzoli with the jewelers at Bulgari, that
sits at the center of the room.
In
Against Nature, the protagonist purchases a turtle to pair with the Persian
carpet in his study. Not satisfied with the natural appearance of the reptile,
he hires a lapidary to encrust his pet with gold and jewels, decoration which
in the end crushes the poor creature to death. The figure of Vezzoli’s golden turtle
placed center-stage in the red gallery transitions to the gaudy and morbid
intensity of the putrid, decomposing, and lacerated flesh of Christ in the
three full-sized painted reproductions of Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece
placed in the exhibition’s final pitch-black chamber. Huysmans called Grünewald
“the boldest painter who has ever lived.” In his two pieces about the German
master—the first chapter of his novel, Là-Bas (The Damned, 1891), and his
description of the painter’s works in Colmar, France from Trois Églises et
Trois Primitifs (Three Churches and Three Primitives, 1908)—the author revels,
possibly to the point of arousal, in descriptions of blistering tortured skin
and the ravages enacted on the Savior. This parallels his earlier obsessions
with sensory exactitude in discussions of color, smell, and taste in Against
Nature. Vezzoli, who in the red gallery had presented us with a stately
pleasure palace of shimmering gold and gemstones, as well as the hallucinatory
Moreaus and Redons, has let this voluptuous atmosphere sour into a murky zone
of sadomasochistic Catholic pain fetish. It is a rich and satisfying verdict on
Huysmans’s life. The writer was able to retire from the French civil service by
1898, at the age of 50, based on the sales of his writings. He had envisioned
creating a cloistered monastic community of Catholic artists, which on the
surface seems a life of humility and introspection. Vezzoli digs deeper,
instead unearthing an erotic trend in the arc of the critic’s life. Huysmans’s
early championing of naturalism, seemingly innocent enough, transmogrified into
his affair with sensuality, dandyism, and symbolism, and finally ascended to
what might be considered a plane of clarity and revelation. In Vezzoli’s eyes,
though, Huysmans’s aesthetic biography is a lateral move into a zone of darker,
and perhaps more delicious, perversion.
Joris-Karl
Huysmans Art Critic. By William Corwin. The Brooklyn Rail, February 2020.
À
Rebours (Against Nature) (1884), by the French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans
(1848-1907), is the quintessential statement of literary decadence. It depicts
the hyper-aesthete Jean des Esseintes’ attempts to reject society and nature in
favour of pure aesthetic indulgence. With little in the way of continuous
narrative, the novel follows Huysmans’ protagonist as he decorates his house
and arranges his library. In one vignette, he creates a garden from poisonous
tropical flowers, chosen because they appear more artificial than natural. In
another scene, probably the novel’s most famous, he embeds gemstones in the
shell of a tortoise, which is crushed by the increased weight.
A
simulacrum of this unfortunate creature has been contrived as the centrepiece
of Huysmans, Art Critic: From Degas to Grünewald, in the Eye of Francesco
Vezzoli, an exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, that will travel this
spring to the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Strasbourg. It was
created by Vezzoli, an Italian contemporary artist best known for his
open-armed embrace of fashion and celebrity. Vezzoli has directed Gore Vidal
and Helen Mirren in a fake trailer for a remake of Vidal’s infamous 1979 erotic
epic Caligula and choreographed a performance by Lady Gaga. Away from these
circuses, his work often involves translating past masters from one medium to
another, or melding them with images from popular culture.
There is
a whiff in this of “art for art’s sake”, the mantra of the decadent movement,
where the Ruskinian notion that art has a moral value is cast aside. It might
be a stretch, though, to compare Vezzoli to Huysmans’ more intellectually
fixated protagonist; in 2011, the New York magazine critic Jerry Saltz aptly
described a solo show of Vezzoli’s work as “empty-headedly decadent”. Here,
Vezzoli has turned decorator, furnishing three of the Musée d’Orsay’s galleries
to represent different stages in Huysmans’ thought. Each intersperses a
smattering of Vezzoli’s own works with that of Huysmans’ contemporaries, many
from the museum’s own collection. It also contains texts, largely letters, from
the writer’s archive, the most exciting of which is the draft manuscript of À
Rebours itself.
The
presence of this novel threatens here, as it so often has, to overshadow the
rest of Huysmans’ satisfying, many-sided career, which encompasses both sober,
Émile Zola-indebted naturalism and extravagant emphasis on gothic architecture.
In a time of raging debates between advocates of different artistic approaches,
Huysmans’ art criticism for weekly periodicals was non-prescriptive, embracing
naturalism and symbolism. An early advocate for the Dutch Golden Age, his
tastes have shaped what is now regarded as the canon of the old masters. His
views on his own generation were also prescient: while Zola dismissed Edgar
Degas as a “minor artist” and the Goncourt brothers smeared him as a
“constipated artist”, Huysmans identified his genius for depicting modern life.
A
full-time civil servant for the majority of his adult life, Huysmans was
slightly removed from the grandest artistic circles of Paris. While Zola was
immortalised by Édouard Manet, Huysmans had to settle with the era’s B-list. An
1878 painting by Jean-Louis Forain shows the young Huysmans as a figure of
keen, intelligent eyes and sober manner; the printmaker Eugène Delâtre’s
sketch-like depiction of 1894 has the now infamous writer as a debonair gentleman,
with a hint of mischievousness.
Both
feature in the exhibition’s first section, left white by Vezzoli to evoke a
present-day gallery space. It provides a capsule tour of the tendencies at play
during the 1870s and 80s. Major and minor impressionist works share space with
the final gaps of academicism. Huysmans was often scathing about the latter.
William-Adolphe Bouguereau, represented here by the meringue-accented Birth of
Venus (1879), was singled out for a devastating dressing-down. The then-celebrated
painter, wrote Huysmans, “has invented a gaseous style of painting, an inflated
art. It is not even porcelain any more, it is flabby and overworked; I can’t
even describe it, it is a bit like soft octopus flesh.” The Spanish-descended
artist Fernand Pelez, meanwhile, was shamelessly mocked for his 1879 attempt to
depict the assassination of the emperor Commodus. “At first,” said Huysmans, “I
thought the man in the green bathing trunks leaning over the other man in the
white bathing trunks was a masseur, and that the woman raising the curtain was
simply saying: “The bath is ready.’”
When it
came to the art Huysmans enjoyed, he could be rhapsodic in his praise. He
admired the perpetual impressionist also-ran Gustave Caillebotte, represented
here by his masterpieces The Floor Scrapers (1875) and In a Cafe (1880).
Huysmans chose the latter for inclusion in his ideal museum, along with several
works by James Abbott McNeill Whistler. The American émigré’s wispy,
ukiyo-e-indebted Variations in Violet and Green (1871) provides one of the
exhibition’s finest pairings of work and text, as Huysmans singles out the
American’s landscapes as “whisper-soft and tender, like a confession, like a
caress”. In comparing Whistler’s work with the visionary reveries of Thomas de
Quincey, the influential author of Confessions of an English Opium Eater,
Huysmans positions him as a bridge to the dreamlike works of symbolist artists
such as Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon.
These
two have a starring role in the exhibition’s second section, which Vezzoli has
coloured red. The walls are adorned with photographic wallpaper evoking the
house of the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, who designed his own home after
that described in À Rebours. This room contains superb examples of Moreau and
Redon, including the former’s unspeakably sumptuous Galatea (1880) and a broad
selection of the latter’s phantasmagorical illustrations. It is also here that
the exhibition’s previously tight focus around Huysmans’ writings begins to
dissolve into something looser. There are fewer texts, so that pieces such as
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’ Virgin Adoring the Host hang without
explanation. Four works by Vezzoli that see photographs of famous dancers,
including Ida Rubinstein and Isadora Duncan, adorned with embroidered tears
allude to something of the fin de siècle’s commingling of pleasure and tragedy,
but feel misplaced next to that era’s actual expressions.
In his
final decade and a half, Huysmans rediscovered Catholicism. A sequence of four
novels fictionalised Huysmans’ own conversion, along the way interpreting
rapturous passages on gothic and northern Renaissance art. The late essay Trois
Primitifs (1905) describes his reaction to Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim
Altarpiece (1512-16), one of the very greatest works of the Renaissance. “It is
as if a typhoon of art had been let loose and was sweeping you away, and you
need a few minutes to recover from the impact, to surmount the impression of
awful horror made by the huge crucified Christ.”
It would
be a nigh-impossible task to recreate the conditions of Huysmans’ experience,
or even those which greet present-day visitors to the altarpiece’s current home
in the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar. But Vezzoli tries in the exhibition’s final
chamber, devoted entirely to the glibly titled Jesus Christ Superstar (2019).
Painted pitch-black and lit with theatrical flair, it displays three
reproductions of the altarpiece’s central crucifixion scene. It manages to
retain a glimmer of the original’s splendour while undercutting the cult of
authenticity, tying together Huysmans’ faith with Des Esseintes’ preference for
the replica over the real. But you may wish that the writer’s ardent belief in
the unmediated power of art had been left alone.
Huysmans,
Art Critic: From Degas to Grünewald, in the Eye of Francesco Vezzoli. By Joe
Lloyd. Studio International , January 2, 2020.
Joris-Karl
Huysmans Art Critic. From Degas to Grünewald, in the Eye of Francesco Vezzoli.
Musée d'Orsay.
November 26 , 2019 - March 1, 2020.
