map of paris france

Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life under Siege

HOLLIS CLAYSON

Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life under Siege (1870-1871)

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 472 pp.; 36 color ills., 181 b/w. $55.00

ARDEN REED

Manet, Flaubert, and the Emergence of Modernism: Blurring Genre Boundaries

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 371 pp.; 9 color ills., 85 b/w. $90.00

JENNIFER L. SHAW

Dream States: Puvis de Chavannes, Modernism, and the Fantasy of France

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. 255 pp.; 24 color ills., 31 b/w. $50.00

On Friday, December 2, 1870, Edouard Manet wrote to his wife, Suzanne, "Yesterday I was at the battle that took place between Bry and Champigny. What a bacchanal! The shells went off over our heads from all sides!" (quoted in Clayson, p. 214). Betraying little of Manet's trademark nonchalance--note the repeated exclamation points--the letter signals instead something less expected: the artist's active involvement, in the closing months of 1870, in the Franco-Prussian War. Against the myth of Manet as detached ironist, this is Manet as engaged citizen, a man who attended political rallies in the capital and who signed up for the National Guard to defend Paris following the collapse of the Second Empire. The note also reveals--and this is both expected and at the same time quite odd--a man reading the war through the filter of his own art historical imagination, a painter experiencing battle as bacchanal. Perhaps he recalled, as he watched the fighting unfold before him, the scattered and intertwined bodies of Titian's Andrians, seen some five years earlier in Madrid, or the stormy sky of Nicolas Poussin's Bacchanale, housed in the Musee du Louvre, Paris. If so, the mismatch between the pictorial language of these bacchanals and the reality of the siege of Paris is striking. If Manet the painter of the museum meets Manet the painter of modern life, if an artistic intelligence saturated by the history of painting here faces up to the events of its time, the encounter produces a strangely dissonant analogy between art and reality, an analogy whose insufficiency speaks to the difficulty of picturing the war, of imagining how artistic traditions might be retooled to answer to this modern scene.

Manet's incongruous turn of phrase raises a series of questions: How did artists seek to represent, and with what success, the forms of modernity--its particular conditions of warfare, say? How was tradition altered and deformed in the process? And how did modernism emerge from this field? It is to such questions that Clayson attends, taking as her subject the ways in which the Prussian siege of Paris in 1870 and 1871 was figured in the arts. It is striking, as she notes, that a catastrophic event, and one, moreover, that took place in the city that stood at the heart of the European art world, is generally assumed to have left little trace in the artistic record. The same cannot be said of other struggles that marked the capital. The revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848 were each accompanied by significant artistic developments, and art histories of those earlier moments invariably place artists and historical events in close contact. Yet histories of the art of the early 1870s--most notably, early Impressionism--give a decidedly secondary role (if any) to the events that shook Paris at the start of the decade. The war, as Clayson observes, remains "an obscure conflict without celebrity in the annals of modern art" (p. 4). Her goal is to remove some of that obscurity (equally noteworthy, though not addressed here, is the absence of the Commune from so many standard art histories).

To this end, Clayson brings to light a wide and at times apparently inexhaustible range of visual material, much of which has rarely been studied. (1) We are introduced, for example, to a series of thirty-six paintings by lesser-known artists that represent, in conventional Salon naturalist style, a number of episodes from the war and siege. Commissioned by the little-known entrepreneur A. Binant and displayed at the Durand-Ruel gallery toward the end of 1871 (a useful reminder that such works circulated in the familiar sites of avantgarde exhibition, though Durand-Ruel himself, not yet back in Paris after the fighting, probably had no hand in the show), the series allows Clayson to set the historical scene and also to advance what will be her central thesis: that if the war had an impact on the arts, it was less in the shape of battle paintings than in the ways in which images reflected the changed rhythms of everyday life in a city under siege. For Parisians, the fighting was almost always at a distance, often heard but rarely seen. Privation was the primary experience, punctuated only rarely--and only late in the siege--by sporadic shelling of the city; the siege was suffered not as combat but as an endless stasis and as an ongoing disruption of the habits of daily life. Urban spaces came to be occupied in different ways as "[t]he conventional (the expected) symbiotic link between the spaces and practices of metropolitan modernity, leisure, and consumption was ruptured" (p. 12). It is this rupture that Clayson sets out to map, sifting through the visual material for evidence of the remaking of life in the city. In the Binant series, for example, she spies amid its endless crowd scenes a number of recurrent figures: first, the middle-class citizen laying claim to the space of the boulevard in an effort to hold at bay the wider public who, during the siege, increasingly impinged on what had become the privileged realm of bourgeois self-display under the Second Empire (exhibited after the fall of the Commune, the series probably also betrays a desire to take the boulevards back from the workers who had briefly held control); second, soldiers and women, whose appearance reflects what Clayson calls "new and thoroughly contingent forms of Parisian city-scape" (p. 42). The appearance of these new social actors on the stage of the Parisian boulevard, would--this is one of her larger claims--leave its mark in the ways in which the city came to be represented in French painting in the years following the siege.

With this argument in place, Clayson devotes the first half of the book to examining in detail how the war altered the terms of everyday life for the Parisians. She reproduces a vast array of prints and occasional paintings depicting the blockading of the city, the interaction between civilians and soldiers, the notorious food crisis (with its well-known images of elephants and rats in butchers' shop-windows), and so forth. Many of the images are straightforward illustrations of life in the sequestered city and require little interpretation; others are given a closer reading. Clayson is interested in how artistic conventions themselves flexed under the pressure of the siege. Shifting assumptions about gender and the role of women in public life, for example, are shown to have influenced the diverse allegories of Paris that represented the city as either a decadent or a robust woman (and very occasionally as a man) acquiescing to or resisting the advances of the Prussians. Such images, Clayson argues, were a way of controlling women, of keeping them in their place at a time when they were beginning to play a more prominent role in public life. In satirical prints of political leaders, too, traditional forms were put to new uses and given new gender inflections. At times Clayson's readings are a little belabored: the meanings of such prints are for the most part clear and demand little amplification (we hardly need four or so pages explaining that images that feminized Adolphe Thiers, the despised head of the republican government, were intended to insult him). Nevertheless, Clayson has uncovered a rich trove of material and furnished a thoroughly charted contextual framework within which to read it.

If the first half of the book manifests an interest in decidedly noncanonical works and shows little interest in those who produced them, the second half signals a shift in approach, directing our attention toward specific artists who are for the most part better known (though not always: the sculptor Jean-Alexandre-Joseph Falguiere, hardly a regular fixture in art historical accounts, here has a chapter to himself). Clayson justifies this approach in the opening chapter to the book, announcing that she will "rely less upon some of the procedures and assumptions usually employed in a social history of art, especially the view that artists are exemplars of a collectivity, usually of a social class" (assumptions to which she has herself, as she says, long been sympathetic) and that she will instead concentrate on "the agency of artists as individuals" (pp. 6-7). The call for a renewed attention to the individual is one that is heard increasingly in recent art historical writing, and it has its merits--in particular when it allows us to get closer to the material conditions under which works of art are produced. One might question to what degree that happens here. Although we are given copious biographical information, the book tends at times toward what the Russian formalists dismissed as the "did-Pushkin-smoke" school of literary analysis: every fact about an artist's life during the period of the siege is detailed, but it is not always clear what purchase the exhaustive biographies have on Clayson's readings of the images. This is so in part because the "individuals" who emerge from her account are rather uniform. Each manifests similar symptoms, notably, anxiety, discomfort, and a disruption of work habits. Though Clayson declares her "frustration with the neglect of artistic individuality in the work of some social and political art historians" (p. 7), that neglect reappears here in altered form: one collective identity--that of class--is simply replaced by another: the soldier-artist whose work is interrupted, but perhaps also enriched, by his experience of the siege.

This is not to say that each of the artists she examines is held to have responded in the same way, nor that Clayson does not contribute suggestive new readings of the work of a number of key figures. The picture that she paints of an art world in temporary suspension constitutes an important corrective to the unspoken assumption that the war had little effect on painters. The letters and other documents that she cites show that Manet. Edgar Degas, and others were deeply affected by the siege--both in their lives and, she argues, in their work. Degas, for example, is said to have discovered new artistic subjects--namely, female invalids and working women--during "urban wanderings and social mixing that were only possible in the war-torn city" (p. 304), and, because these women were fellow assieges, to have found in himself a new empathy with the downtrodden. Although Clayson acknowledges the speculative nature of her readings--Degas "may have completed or at least worked on three paintings of women during the war, whom he may have encountered while circulating through the besieged city in new ways" (p. 309, my emphasis)--she pursues this line of interpretation to the end, presenting new readings that are seductive and tenuous in equal measure. At the Oculist, for instance, which has long been discussed in relation to Degas's fears about eyesight (only one of his eyes was any good, which prevented him from serving as a rifleman during the war; instead, he stood guard on the ramparts), is interpreted as a representation of a working-class victim of the siege in "a distinctly wartime hospital context" (p. 310). The reading has a certain appeal: it gives us a more humane Degas than we might expect. It is not clear, however, that the figure is a working woman, nor that we are in a hospital, nor even that the painting was produced during the siege (Clayson's evidence for redating the painting to 1870 is rather thin).

Clayson's reassigning of certain works by Degas to 1870 so that they can be read as siege paintings points to a larger problem: that despite her wish (one that is easy to share) that artists might have been inclined to put their wartime experiences into paint, they rarely did. She is thus forced to marshal any and every image painted around 1870 and to argue that it reflects the impact of the war. Two watercolors by Henri Regnault, for example, are said to show that his work "was visibly detraque, thrown into disorder," by his return to Paris from Tangier to enlist in the army (p. 244). The moribund male found in one of the watercolors is read as an alter ego for Regnault, the military volunteer bored by the lack of action, while the pale-skinned woman found in each image is said to register as a professional model in a cold Parisian studio and thus to disrupt conventional Orientalist fantasies of exotic otherness. That an artist's work might be thrown off course by the pressures of confinement in the besieged capital and by the rigors (or ennui) of military service is a reasonable expectation, but with Regnault it is not clear that it was. The watercolors are utterly run-of-the-mill Orientalism (even if they are rather different, as Clayson notes, from Regnault's most famous image. Execution without Trial under the Moorish Kings of Granada). Countless examples could be cited--including earlier works by Regnault himself--that predict the dissolute male figure and white-skinned women. For Regnault, it seems that the siege left its mark not in particular images--on the odd occasion that he had time, he painted as though nothing had changed--but simply in his reduced output (an output that was definitively brought to a close when he was killed in action in January 1871). (2)

These are minor quibbles that detract little from the important contribution made by Clayson's book, both in the vast quantity of contextual material that it brings into focus and in its readings of individual images. Particularly productive is Clayson's willingness to look for indirect responses to the siege. Although somewhat forced in the chapter on Regnault, this does seem to be the right way of proceeding. If the war left little trace, as indeed it seems to have, it is because its very form--its distance, its numbing monotony, its rendering uncertain of the everyday--resisted representation (the same is true--perhaps more so--of the Commune). Certainly painters found the siege difficult, if not impossible, to translate into conventional visual form. Degas's rage at James Tissot for drawing their dead comrade Louis-Alfred-Joseph Cuvelier ("You would have done better"--this is one version of Degas's reaction--"if you had brought back his body," quoted on p. 306) might signal, as Clayson suggests, that Degas was immune to the allure of beautiful corpses invoked by Aristotle. But the real question was: How was the artist to figure this type of death? And with what pictorial tools? The artist Georges Clairin, a friend of Regnault, was attuned to the difficulty of answering such questions, given the disjunction between the reality of the war and the artistic models with which one might represent it: "We dreamt, Regnault and I, of those battle paintings of the trenches in Sebastopol, and we said to ourselves that the reality of war resembled not at all what one saw in the museums" (p. 247). And recall Manet's note to his wife: modern warfare as bacchanal. No wonder he hesitated to paint it.

Such remarks suggest that if we are to get hold of the ways in which the war impacted the arts--and this does seem to be an important task--we will have to look obliquely. (3) As, for example, Clayson does in her rich reading of the breakdown of traditional genres in Pierre Puvis de Chavannes's "modern allegories" Le ballon and Le pigeon voyageur, both painted during the winter of 1870-71. Suspended between conventional allegory and modern life--the figure of the woman looks both abstract and contemporary--the paintings reflect the dificulty of finding a vocabulary adequate to the representation of Paris under siege. Although Puvis strives to turn old conventions to new purposes, the fact that the images garnered "diverse readings within only a few months of their completion" points to the doomed nature of such efforts (p. 148). Puvis's allegorical procedures were fractured to the point of failure by the war, which left its most telling traces not in explicit representations but in precisely such moments of inadequacy.

Looking for similarly oblique evidence would, I suspect, prove equally fruitful for Manet. His wartime images reflect, as Clayson notes, the fact that his "modus operandi and reputation at the end of the 1860s--the artist as boulevardier, social charmer, modern studio adept, and intransigent painters' painter--could not survive intact in a Paris consumed by war" (p. 208). Images of social life disappear from his wartime oeuvre, as do the posed studio paintings. Clayson, though, tends to read the works that he did paint as straightforward documents of his mental state and of the state of the capital. The gloomy Effet de neige, Montrouge, perhaps a view from the ramparts of a southern quarter of the capital, is described as "a Parisian soldier's landscape" (p. 218). Its somber palette, Clayson argues, evokes not only the exceptionally cold winter of 1870-71 and the lifelessness of the besieged city but also "the commingled trauma of inactivity, anxiety, and seclusion" experienced by Manet (p. 223). (4) This admittedly homological reading--the dark tone of the painting interpreted as a sign of the difficult conditions of life as a soldier-artist--provides one way into the work. Yet it also seems important to consider how the painting fails to hold together, how it never quite manages to be a picture of wartime ramparts (if this is indeed what we are looking at here: there is much that remains uncertain, despite Clayson's best efforts to pin the image down).

Similar observations might be made of a highly schematic drawing of (perhaps) four men in uniform, into which Clayson projects a precision and particularity that seem more imagined than actual (she sees an officer and two guardsmen, one sullen, the other more alert; the fourth figure, she concedes, is illegible). What is most striking, though, is Manet's inability to picture the military, and this despite his professed admiration for his own appearance in uniform. There appears to be no vocabulary on which he can draw--or, rather, those that were available, the endless prints and paintings of soldiers that saturated Parisian visual culture in 1870, are refused. The indecipherability of the image, its apparent incapacity to capture what for Manet was clearly an uncertain subject, serves as the most graphic sign of the unintelligibility of the war. (Similar observations might be made of Adolf Menzel's representations of French prisoners of war captured by the Prussians, in which shadowy and inconclusively delineated figures hover in indeterminate space.) If, as Clayson suggests, "soldiering was an unstable field of identification for Manet" (pp. 225-26), the radically undecided nature of his wartime images is surely the index of this instability. Queue devant la boucherie (siege de Paris), to take one more example, is an image of the Parisian street that hovers between legibility and an utter collapse of representational precision. Its conspicuous incompletion, which Clayson interprets simply as a means of encouraging "what Pierre Bourdieu has called 'a properly aesthetic mode of perception'" (p. 231), points again to the impossibility of representing wartime Paris. Evincing an obscurity and ambiguity that exceed even that of his own, earlier work, Manet's depictions of Paris in 1870 serve as perhaps the most eloquent testament to the arbitrary and endlessly shifting character of everyday life under siege.

Where Clayson focuses on the siege of Paris, offering a close and frequently insightful reading of the relation between historical events and artistic production. Reed tackles a more narrowly prescribed art historical moment: Manet's Jeune dame en 1866 and its reception at the Salon of 1868. What he calls a series of "naggingly close readings" of the painting are intertwined with extended observations on a limited number of Gustave Flaubert's texts--primarily the Three Tales--in order to advance what Reed believes are new answers to the question of what, exactly, modernism is. His answers--both of which seem rather familiar--are, first, that modernism emerges when the boundary between art and literature is transgressed: "modernism happens, in part at least, when painting and literature interfere with each other" (p. 5), and second, that in modernist painting the boundaries between genres become blurred and that meanings are thus rendered unstable.

In making the first argument, Reed adds to a long history of attempts to link Manet to particular practitioners of 19th-century literature. The Baudelairean Manet is the most familiar, but Stephane Mallarme and Emile Zola are also routinely aligned with the artist (not least because they themselves wrote about his work). Manet has also been coupled with Flaubert, most compellingly by Michel Foucault. (5) Reed is summarily dismissive of much of this earlier literature, accusing it either of an unsophisticated search for thematic parallels between Manet's images and the subject matter of, say, Charles Baudelaire or--in the case of Foucault--of being "neo-Greenbergian" (p. 6). The latter accusation is telling, for it is against the straw man of formalism that Reed sets up his argument. Yet it is not true to say that Clement Greenberg's "remains the most influential account we possess about the beginnings of modernism" (p. 1). Most of the significant writing on Manet in the last twenty or more years has corrected the formalist reading (and much of it, as we shall see, predicts Reed's own account). More seriously, while Reed's stated goal is to correct Greenberg's separation of painting and literature into distinct spheres (again, who believes any longer in that separation?), he gives a number of rather unsatisfactory answers to the crucial question, "What does it mean for me to call a painter 'literary'?" (p. 8). Manet, we are told, "was intimately connected with several important writers of his day"; he "illustrated a number of texts"; and he said that "without punctuation there can be neither spelling nor grammar" (pp. 8-9). None of these takes us very far. Manet's use of language metaphors, for example, does not make his work literary, or not necessarily, and certainly no more than does, say, Eugene Delacroix's description of nature as the artist's dictionary. Also not taking us very far is the suggestion that "Manet's 'literariness' follows from--or else helps to explain--his relationship to the history of painting" (p. 9). Art historians, Reed notes, frequently talk of Manet "quoting" earlier paintings (Michael Fried is the example he cites). But even if it is true that art historians are thus "borrowing the language of literary criticism," this again does not make Manet literary (though it might tell us something about the movement of vocabularies between academic disciplines), for citation can, of course, be visual, and a painting looking like another does not make it textual.

Such arguments are clearly untenable, and Reed's attempts to show that Flaubert was "painterly" are equally unconvincing. We are told that the writer's repeated use of a language of "seeing," together with his descriptions of interiors containing paintings, make him painterly (pp. 12-13), and we are asked to believe that Flaubert composed "a painterly, abstract play of color" when writing in "A Simple Heart" that "Three candlesticks on the chest of drawers added taches of red, and the fog was turning the windows white" (quoted on p. 66). However, while it may be true that Flaubert was keen to let his readers know that he was interested in paintings, and while he was rather good at capturing in words how things look, this is not at all to be (or not necessarily to be) a painterly writer. A more promising suggestion, to return to the painter's side of the question, is that "Manet is 'literary' because his paintings display a complex relation to narrative" (p. 11). This formulation probably needs to be tweaked. While it is true that Manet's work evokes narrative in complex ways, this is not the same as being "literary"--or not in the medium-disruptive way that Reed wants it to be. But we are on the right track in focusing on the question of narrative. Manet is modern not in the (alleged) literariness of his work but in the fact that his work renders narrative, along with other kinds of reading, ambiguous and hard to disentangle. Reed understands this last point well. Thus, while there are problems with his larger claims about the relation between painting and literature, his account becomes more compelling when he moves on to a close reading of the Young Woman and of the various critical and contextual frames within which it might have been viewed--frames that serve always to multiply the meanings that the painting produces. This approach is most successful in a chapter entitled "The Stain of Modernism," in which Reed discusses Flaubert's use of the word tache and Manet's use of pictorial taches. The tache--spot or stain--is for Reed the key to modernism: "we shall," he asserts, "discover modernism in [this] little mark" (p. 57). He provides a useful summary of the appearance of the term in period criticism, with particular emphasis on how Zola's description of Manet's taches was picked up by other writers (either in praise or condemnation), and he tracks the word through a number of Flaubert's texts, arguing that the increased frequency with which it came to be employed had to do with the author's awareness of the new pictorial resonances that the term was gaining in contemporary criticism (p. 68). Reed establishes clearly the overlap between the appearance of the term in literature and its appearance in textual responses to Manet, though his argument is hamstrung once more by his determination to use the tache to link painting and literariness. He writes, for example, that because the etymology of tache is the popular Latin tacca, "sign," it is therefore literary: "In the tache image crosses into text" (p. 57). Not so. Even if a sign can be "read," this does not mean that it is text; readability is not the same as literariness; if we were to accept this definition, then all painting would be literary: even Kasimir Malevich's Black Square can be read in one way or another.

Manet's taches undid the conventions of painting and thus generated--this is Reed's second argument about the emergence of modernism--its familiar illegibility. The tache, he writes, disrupts representation, stymying our ability to empathize with the young woman (Reed reads her reduction in Manet's painting to something like a still life in relation both to Flaubert's detached prose and to the operation of capital, which likewise reduces people to objects, p. 50): the tache resists conventional notions of finish and aligns Manet's work with Epinal prints (and thus with the low); the tache can be both figure and ground, both self-referential and referential (pp. 73-81); the tache can operate as a sign of the speed of Baron Haussmann's Paris and might have something to do with Paris as spectacle. Equally multiple resonances are found in the monocle that hangs around the young woman's neck: the monocle is (probably) a man's; monocles were used by critics to examine paintings; monocles could be associated with detectives; and, on a formal level, "the monocle blurs the difference between transparency and opacity" because it looks like the buttons on the woman's peignoir, a visual echo that is complicated by the fact that the buttons, like the peignoir, are flesh-colored (p. 163). Much of what Reed writes here seems accurate, though again he is distracted by the desire to find in this detail a disruptively textual aspect. The monocle, he suggests, is "the most textual passage in the picture because it is inscribed, is painted as an inscription on the surface of the canvas" (p. 148). Because it looks like a letter O, it is "both part of the diction of painting and an intrusion from the realm of writing. It does a bit of cognitive violence by introducing into the picture (the trace of) that other system of representation" (p. 149). A more serious problem than the questionable nature of such (playful?) claims, however, is that much of what Reed has to say seems old hat. That Manet's works resisted audience expectations in terms of their format and finish, that their subjects were found obscure and their mobilization of genre unstable is by now part of a familiar story. So, too, is the reading of these aspects in terms of urban modernity. Reed's linking of Manet to Paris and the emergence of spectacular society, for example, is a retread of T. J. Clark, while his observations on the opacity of identity in the Young Woman echo the altogether richer account offered by Carol Armstrong (who is here dismissed, along with Foucault, as a neo-Greenbergian, p. 275, n. 125). (6)

Where Reed moves beyond these writers is in pushing toward an expanded and at times deliriously free-floating set of iconographic readings. In a chapter on the Young Woman as an "allegory of beholding," for example, he pays particular attention to the diverse meanings that the parrot might have. Such birds, we are told, were likely to be encountered in brothels, and Zola had described Nana as "this fille with the tastes of a female parrot" (quoted on p. 130); the parrot could also stand for Napoleon III (p. 131). Such details complicate the potential meaning of the painting, showing that knowing your literature, as Reed clearly does, can be useful. It is not clear, in the end, how relevant such meanings are; Napoleon III might occasionally have been shown as a parrot, but does this bear--and in what way--on the Young Woman? Such questions become harder to answer as Reed's iconography continues to proliferate. The parrot, he suggests, is a critic (because--the logic here is a little shaky--critics repeat each others' words). Manet thus includes earlier criticism within his painting in the shape of the parrot-critic and at the same time answers it, sticking doggedly to his taches. "In this way, Manet replays what he has been doing for years, only now he frames it, renders it self-conscious, or raises his practice to the level of allegory" (p. 159). At the same time, the parrot is a spectator, one glassy eye fixed on the viewer, the other, hidden, eyeing the woman. This doubled gaze within the painting provides Reed with the occasion for a Lacanian riff on the painting and castration anxiety, again in part at least on the basis of an iconographic interpretation: the monocle dangles, an eye "rendered sightless, mechanical ... dead weight, detumesced" (p. 165) (it is significant, Reed suggests, "that the strongest sign of the male in this picture should be a detached eye," p. 166); the parrot (a phallic symbol) looks at us and at the same time at the monocle; and so forth.

It seems fair to say that Reed's characterization of what Manet's work might have to tell us about beholding is both less grounded and less compelling than that recently offered by Jonathan Crary. (7) To say this, though, is to miss what are, for Reed, the ethical issues involved in his speculative iconography. If he presents his work as a counter to formalism, he is also concerned to counter what he sees as the presumption of certain art historians--Clark and Griselda Pollock are the two he mentions--to know what Manet's painting is about:

   they both write from the position of someone who knows the truth
   about Paris in the 1860s and can tell when a painting represents it.
   Even though they would be highly skeptical about the claims of
   realism, they treat painting as the representation, or more often the
   misrepresentation, of certain truths. However, the Jeune dame engages
   us in a dialectical struggle, such that the painting relativizes our
   truths even as we situate its poses. (p. 173)

Reed's desire is to remain true to what he sees as the painting's openness. Hence the feeling in his book of interpretation running wild; hence the endless multiplication of interpretative gambits. Indeed, the genre blurring of the title is intended, one gathers, to apply not only to Manet and Flaubert but also to Reed's own text. The book as a whole, in this sense, is a demonstration, an acting out, of what Reed calls "the ethical structure of the work's resistance to turning itself into anybody's ideology" (pp. 173-74). Thus diverse approaches--social art history, reception analysis, psychoanalytical theory, and iconography--are allowed to crisscross in an undifferentiated manner throughout his text, in order that any apparent conclusion regarding Manet's painting will always be displaced by new perspectives. It is easy to sympathize with what is an ambitious attempt to build into the art historical text something of the open-endedness of the art object (though I am less convinced than Reed that this is an ethical imperative). It is disappointing, then, that much of what Reed has to say takes us back down well-worn paths in the Manet literature.

Shaw's discussion of Puvis echoes to some extent Reed's discussion of Manet. We are told that Puvis flouted academic rules even as he invoked high art traditions; that his technique--in particular, his use of flat areas of color--disrupted the representational coherence of his images; and that he rendered uncertain the boundary between genres such as allegory and history painting (pp. 2-3). However, where such claims are familiar enough with regard to Manet, here they feel fresher. Shaw introduces a new, more troublesome, Puvis, arguing at length for the visual and semantic indeterminacy of a number of his most famous images and investigating the consequently divergent responses that his work generated. Her basic argument is straightforward: "Puvis's murals were imagined to embody a vision of France and to impart a sense of Frenchness--through images of characteristic regions, allegories of the French heritage, or evocations of the nation as an embracing motherland" (p. 1). As she proceeds to demonstrate, though, these questions were far from simple. Competing visions of France were in play, as different groups fought to define the nation according to their own ideals. Artistic battles were also being waged, as various modernisms began to lay claim to official status and as the avant-garde began to move from the margins to the center. Shaw places Puvis's work at the intersection of these debates, recovering the very real complexity of paintings that are too often held up as foils to modernism. She argues convincingly that the uncertainties of Puvis's work reflect the increasingly difficult task of picturing the nation toward the end of the century (in this her approach echoes in productive ways Clayson's reading of Puvis's work of 1870-71).

In her opening chapter, Shaw makes the case that works such as Young Girls by the Seashore (1879) and The Sacred Grove Dear to the Arts and Muses (1884) displaced the conventions of the academic nude both in their treatment of surface and in their refusal to make the female body available to the gaze; in each, the figure is fragmented, rendered strange, incomplete. The paintings also confounded allegorical readings even as their array of classically garbed figures in a dreamily nonspecific landscape suggested that this was how they should be read. These aspects, Shaw suggests, are evidence of Puvis's modernism, an argument that feels a little forced at times--as, for example, when she proposes that the rough texture of his paintings calls attention to their materiality (surely not what strikes one most in front of his ethereal images), or when Greenberg is again summoned as a straw man against whom Shaw can assert that Puvis's painting "had meaning far beyond the meanings often attributed to formalist abstraction" (p. 8). This is true, but who now would be inclined to disagree? Once this unnecessary preamble is dispensed with, however, Shaw maps out with great skill how the salient features of Puvis's works--their fragmentation and indeterminacy--served to foster particular kinds of viewing. What the critics complained of--or at times praised--as the incompletion of his images was the means by which the artist pulled the spectators in, made them submit to the emotional charge of his work; the reception was dominated, as Shaw ably documents, by a language of the enigmatic, the deeply felt, the poetic. So, too, the paintings' emphasis on the corporeality of the body pushed the viewer away from allegorical readings and toward "other mental processes more closely aligned with the unconscious" (p. 45). Shaw's argument is occasionally marred by a looseness in the use of terms: "dreams" (a term used frequently by the critics) slides a little too easily into "the unconscious." This takes little away, though, from a suggestive reading of how Puvis's apparently cool images opened out into fantasy, of how his apparently "controlled and concentrated sublimation of desire into the ideal might slip over into the unleashing of unconscious will and sexual desire" (p. 54).

There is, as Shaw notes, much at stake here. Puvis's work, by encouraging an identification with images of the female body that always verge on dissolution, aligned itself with what she calls the modernist challenge to classical paradigms of representation and thus also with "broader challenges to the notion of the autonomous subject--a male subject for whom thought and representation had the potential to be transparent to one another" (p. 9). Fantasy displaced the rational self as Puvis's paintings encouraged introspective and highly personal musings on the part of the audience. Shaw then poses the crucial question: "How ... could the allusiveness of Puvis's style--a style that throws each viewer into a dream state of his or her own--communicate a common message to all viewers?" (p. 42). How, in other words, could Puvis's work communicate ideas of national identity, as it was clearly meant to do in many of his public commissions? The answer, Shaw believes, lies in the way that Puvis's painting spoke to the unconscious, an address that she describes at times as a deliberate strategy on the part not only of the artist but also of those who commissioned his work: "the state attempted to forge a new aesthetic for public decoration that would instill, through individual fantasy, a sense of collective identity in the viewing public" (p. 11). This, the fantasy of France, is one of the "dream states" generated by Puvis's work. Shaw aligns his work with the writings of the republican social philosophers Jean-Marie Guyau and Alfred Fouillee, who argued that unconscious fraternity was the strongest bond in group identity and who "proposed that art was a tool that could be used to transform desire from a source of anxiety into a source of political power" (p. 62). Social unity, in this view, was forged by Puvis's work not consciously but unconsciously--by leading the diverse members of the audience to share the same desires (p. 63).

Elsewhere Shaw provides an alternate--and ultimately more convincing--answer to the question of how Puvis's work could stand for France: namely, that it could not. Or rather: that whatever image of France it might conjure, this image was itself already contradictory, riven by ideological divisions. Try as he might--and one suspects that he did--Puvis could not contain the conflicts. Critics from different political positions reacted to his work differently according to their own political and cultural inclinations. Shaw examines these varying responses in detail in her description of Puvis's projects at the Sorbonne and in the rebuilt Hotel de Ville (a particularly loaded site, given that the original structure had been destroyed during the Commune: no attempt to envision the nation within these walls could fully paper over the bitter divisions left by the memory of 1871). Most telling, though, and beautifully charted by Shaw, was the fractured reception of Puvis's murals for the Musee des Beaux-Arts in Lyons. The Sacred Grove is the most famous of the images, but it is the paintings on the staircase walls to either side of this canonical image, Ancient Vision and Christian Inspiration, that offer the richest glimpse of the complexities involved in Puvis's work and its relation to the national imaginary.

Each image represented an aspect of the French heritage (the classical and the medieval, respectively), but in doing so opened up a key fault line within competing period definitions of France: "whereas Catholics and royalists often emphasized the predominance of the medieval Christian heritage, republicans tended to locate the origins of France in the classical tradition of ancient democracies" (p. 69). Hence, Christian Inspiration was generally preferred by the former group, while Antique Vision was favored by republicans and socialists. Gustave Geffroy, for example, took the horsemen who appear on the latter image's distant horizon as a symbol both of the fraternal conditions of antiquity and--in their distance--of his own remove, as a modern, from that fraternal existence. The nostalgia evinced in such iconographic readings is also, Shaw argues, built into the very form of the image. Like much of Puvis's work, Antique Vision is dominated by female bodies that tend always toward incompletion. Some of what Shaw writes about this aspect smacks somewhat of ready-made theory--as, for example, when she suggests that the viewer, forced to complete the bodies, is pushed toward an infantile fantasy of the plenitude of the maternal body. More compelling, for this reader, is her argument that the indeterminacy and inaccessibility of the bodies generated the desire and nostalgia for lost community that Geffroy articulated explicitly in relation to the image's content. The women of Antique Vision, that is to say, operated paradoxically as signs of the loss of antiquity's serene fraternalism, and the lack built into the form of the painting itself turns out to be its most powerful tool, prompting its audience to desire, to dream of a plenitude both sexual and cultural.

Again, the most striking aspect of Puvis's works in Lyons is the way in which the multiple meanings that they generated failed to hold together. Though the two murals presumably constituted an effort to unite two competing conceptions of France--the classical and the medieval--and thus to propagate the fantasy of a unified republican state, the effort was always in important ways a failure. Not that some among the audience did not try to make the trick work. Edouard Aynard, the director of the museum, stitched the opposing positions together in a generic eulogy to the dreams of France--though as a good republican, he elided the Christianity of Christian Inspiration with "the modern religion of la patrie" (quoted on p. 92). Such disavowals of the political divisions of the day could only ever form partial solutions. While Shaw argues at times that Puvis's works successfully produced a consensus, she is at her strongest when she acknowledges the impossibility of the operation: "The disagreements between critics about the murals and the struggles of individual critics to make sense of Ancient Vision show that no such consensus existed" (p. 95).

As Shaw recounts the reception of Puvis's work, we hear a series of wild shifts in the meaning of the classical, which within the space of a few years could stand both for republican fraternity and--particularly as the 19th century ceded to the 20th--for the reactionarily exclusionary vision of pure Frenchness promulgated by the likes of Charles Maurras. As Shaw notes, Maurras would soon lay claim to Puvis's classicism, initiating what became the standard line on the artist: that he was on the side of the establishment, the conservative counterpart to modernist heroes--or villains--such as Matisse (whose own relation to the contradictory classicisms of the early 20th century continues to be debated). (8) Shaw's book serves both to correct this one-sided perception of Puvis and to underline the complexity of questions of identity at the turn of the last century. As in Clayson's study of art and the Paris siege, what surfaces most strongly is a sense of the inadequacy of established artistic modes--of allegory, say--when faced with the task of representing new political and social formations. Painting might seek to conjure up a fantasy of the nation or to picture a city at war, but modernism--or at least one form of modernism--emerged in the slippage between such desires and what could be achieved with the tools at hand (and not, pace Reed, in the uncertain space between painting and literature). Both Clayson and Shaw remind us that the ambiguities and ambivalences of modernism, its contradictory privileging of surface and form even as it continued to engage with the task of representing the world around it, can only be fully understood by taking into account the contradictions of modernity itself.

Notes

1. The most significant study to date--and one that covers some of the ground that Clayson traverses--is John Milner, Art, War and Revolution in France, 1870-1871: Myth, Reportage and Reality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). On the impact of the Commune on the arts, see Albert Boime, Art and the French Commune: Imagining Paris after War and Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

2. Clayson resorts to some rather questionable logic in her effort to tie Regnault's watercolors to the siege, as when she suggests that the male figure may be a Turco (an indigenous Algerian recruited by the French army) even though his attire bears no relation to the uniform of the Turcos, and then reads meaning into Regnault's "decision" not to represent his uniform: "his willful recostuming and dehistoricization by Regnault are what count" (p. 255). A less convoluted explanation would be that he simply is not a Turco. The richest, albeit the most speculative, of Clayson's suggestions is that Hassan and Namouna evinces an erotic investment that might indirectly express Regnault's attachment to his artistic companion Georges Clairin (p. 272).

3. A productive model for such looking is offered by Kristin Ross's reading of Arthur Rimbaud's texts in relation to the Commune and its remaking of the everyday: Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

4. For a similar interpretation, see Milner (as in n. 1), 109.

5. Michel Foucault, "Fantasia of the Library," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980), 87-109.

6. T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985); Carol Armstrong, "Manet/Manette: Encoloring the I/Eye," Stanford Humanities Review 2, nos. 2-3 (spring 1992): 1-46; and idem, Manet Manette (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).

7. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.; MIT Press, 1999); and Norman Bryson, Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

8. See Alastair Wright, Matisse and the Subject of Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

ALASTAIR WRIGHT is assistant professor of art history at Princeton University [Department of Art and Archaeology, 105 McCormick Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J. 08544].

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