paul marc joseph chenavardby joseph c. sloane

Paul Marc Joseph Chenavard by Joseph C. SloaneReview by: Linda NochlinThe Art Bulletin, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Mar., 1964), pp. 113-116Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3048151 .

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BOOK REVIEWS 113

on "embellished Gothic" in the Nicolaikirche in Leip- zig (pl. 40), and Goethe, of course, is also included; Piranesi and Milizia are the Italians chosen for discussion. The chapter ends with Quatrembre de Quincy, that is to say, with France at the start of the Republic. By far the greatest attention is focused on England (eleven pages), with Germany coming next (six pages) and Italy third (five pages), a proportion that seems to this reviewer fairly indicative of the currents of French influence at large. I would only remark that the author's interpretation of Ware's pro-Laugier position in The Complete Body of Architecture, for which he provides complete citations from both Lau- gier's and Ware's books, is weakened by the fact that while mentioning Claude Perrault's influence on Ware (p. 173) he greatly underestimates it due to his failure to make a thorough comparison of the texts of the Ordonnance and The Complete Body. According to my count, there are as many passages of Perrault's taken over bodily into Ware's book as of Laugier's-- a fact Herrmann does not mention. His account of Chambers' opposition to Laugier's ideas also seems drastically oversimplified.

Herrmann is the first scholar to attempt to isolate Laugier's Essai and come to a thorough comprehension of it. His knowledge of the literature is, quite simply, impressive, as can readily be appreciated in his fine chapter on "The Theoretical Foundation" of the Essai. Whether or not scholars find themselves in agreement with the author's approach, they will find the book indispensable. The many problems unavoid- ably bound up with Herrmann's study stem, it would seem, from his failure to recognize that the isolation of a problem is undertaken only for the sake of its re-insertion into history, that for a full comprehension of Laugier's thought, including its very meaning, a genetic approach has a decisive part to play even in this type of study. The author and publisher are nevertheless to be warmly commended for this well- documented contribution to a special problem within the field of architectural theory and for providing it, as well, with thirteen appendixes in which vital textual sources are organized under headings. A concordance of the 1753 and 1755 French editions of the Essai has helpfully been included.

DOROTHEA NYBERG Columbia University

JOSEPH C. SLOANE, Paul Marc Joseph Chenavard, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1962. Pp. 214; 34 figs. $6.oo.

Joseph C. Sloane's monograph devoted to the Lyon- nais painter whose grandiose plans for the decoration of the Pantheon constituted one of the notable failures

in the history of nineteenth century French art is interesting not merely as a study of Chenavard and his times, but because of the questions it raises about art historical method and approach. Essentially an ex- pansion and amalgamation of Professor Sloane's three previous investigations of his subject,' the present vol- ume begins with a general introduction setting the artist's project for the decoration of the Pantheon within the historical context of the mid-nineteenth century as well as the personal one of the artist's background and convictions, continues with a discussion of the vicissitudes in the destiny of the Pantheon itself, and then settles down to an exhaustive examination of the complex and recondite iconographic scheme, com- bining painted panels, mosaics, and sculpture and dealing with the entirety of human history and aspiration, which Chenavard was commissioned to carry out by Ledru-Rollin, head of the Provisional Government of the 1848 Revolution; particular attention is devoted to the central mosaic, Social Palingenesis, which actually contained the crux of the artist's message. The author then proceeds to consider the possible sources of the complex, circular scheme of history that Chena- vard embodied in the Palingenesis, tracking the artist's inspiration down in contemporary esoteric lore, historical theory and "cosmic speculation," tempered by the painter's own peculiar tendencies toward hero- worship and pessimism. Professor Sloane then surveys Chenavard's activities after the rejection of his cherished project following the coup d'6tat of I851 and the retransformation of the Pantheon into a Christian house of worship, touches on his relationships with various prominent artists and writers of the time, notably with Baudelaire and with Delacroix, and finally attempts an evaluation of the artist's contribution to the art and thought of the nineteenth century. The book includes an appendix listing all the known de- signs for the Pantheon project and a series of plates which, unfortunately, do little to add to Chenavard's reputation, since the present condition of the cartoons obliged the author to resort to contemporary litho- graphs after the Pantheon projects rather than photo- graphs of the originals.

There is certainly nothing misguided in the attempt to give a full-scale treatment to a forgotten minor artist, even one whose work is, as Professor Sloane is the first to admit, "cold, eclectic and unlikely to appeal to modern taste"; on the contrary, such an undertaking can be both useful and provocative. The author quite appropriately states in his preface that this is to be an essay in the history of ideas rather than the biography of an artist of major gifts. What one questions is the degree to which Professor Sloane has adhered to his own laudable intentions, and whether, having already amply fulfilled them within the more restricted scope of his previous, briefer accounts of

I. "Baudelaire, Chenavard and 'Philosophic Art,' " Jour- nal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, xIII, 1955, pp. 285-299; French Painting Between the Past and the Present, Princeton,

i951; "Paul Chenavard," ART BULLETIN, XXXIII, 1951, pp. 240-258.



114 THE ART BULLETIN

Chenavard, he has not merely resorted to a kind of misplaced scrupulousness in expanding his subject, leveling the big guns of scholarship more appropriate to a major study of Michelangelo or Raphael at a decidedly small-scale target; although the book includes pages of explication and description of gods, demigods, heroes, and symbols, a chart of identification of persons in Social Palingenesis with one hundred and fifty-eight numbered outline drawings and a re- production of the circular time-scheme upon which Chenavard based his iconography, it nevertheless fails to deal satisfactorily with certain crucial aspects of mid-nineteenth century art and thought that the subject would seem to demand.

Generally speaking, the study of the artistic failure-- the failure, that is to say, unredeemed by the judg- ment of future generations-may be valuable to the historian of art or culture for two reasons: first of all, the second-rate artist may serve to cast light upon a hitherto neglected movement or direction in the art of his period; in the second place, the work of a bad or mediocre artist immediately raises certain basic, perennial questions of aesthetic evaluation. Yet the present study approaches Chenavard from neither of these standpoints. One wonders, for example, why no more than passing mention is made of the influence of the German Nazarenes, Cornelius and Overbeck particularly, on Chenavard's style, despite the fact that the painter himself knew both of the German artists, was admittedly attracted to their work, and actually copied the Nazarene murals at the Villa Massimi during the course of his visit to Italy in 1827. A painting like Overbeck's Triumph of Religion in the Arts, created in I840, certainly deserves more than a brief footnote as a possible source of inspiration for Social Palingenesis: its style, format, and composition--a combination School of Athens and Disputa, divided into a heavenly and an earthly realm which is in turn sub- divided into smaller knots and clusters of conversing figures-are remarkably similar; the theme of the German work, while less complex than the French artist's, is nevertheless connected to that of Social

Palingenesis in its hypostatization of great figures of the past within a nontemporal religious or quasi- religious setting.

Even more striking is the omission of an attempt to situate Chenavard's efforts within the context of contemporary French art and more specifically, that of the religious and mystical revival which centered in Chenavard's own native city of Lyon. While it may be true that Paris was more influential in Chenavard's formation than Lyon, and writers more important than painters in his development, as Professor Sloane maintains, a consideration of what has been termed "le pr6rapha6lisme frangais" would seem to be of the

utmost relevance to a discussion of Chenavard's art and essential to a serious examination of his style. If Chenavard was attracted by the works of the German Nazarenes, it is certainly permissible to assume that he must at least have been familiar with the works of their Lyonnais counterparts, such as Hippolyte Flan- drin, an almost exact contemporary of Chenavard's, whose works, according to an admirer, bore witness to familiarity with Raphael and Giotto mixed with the

splendors of antiquity, and who was in fact known as the Fra Angelico of the nineteenth century.2 Flan- drin's work was certainly in evidence in Paris during the decade of the forties when Chenavard was brood-

ing over the Pantheon cartoons; the former artist was engaged in the decorations for the sanctuary and

Chapel of the Apostles of the Church of Saint-Ger- main-des-Pres over a period extending from 1842 to

1848 and in 1848-1849 created for the Church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul the chilly, hieratic processions of male and female saints against a gold background, obviously inspired by Ravenna, that Th6ophile Gau- tier, one of Chenavard's warmest admirers, dubbed "the Christian Panathenaic Procession." While the rather anemic and derivative linear style of the Lyon- nais prdrapha4lites was allied with profound Catholic sentiment and Chenavard, though attracted to the

mystical side of Catholicism, was a skeptical pantheist, nevertheless a common ground might be found in the positive attitude they shared toward the 1848 Revo- lution; Flandrin was sympathetic enough with the ideals of 1848 to enter the contest for a representation of the Republic sponsored by the same Provisional Government that commissioned Chenavard's decora- tive cycle.

Of even more direct relevance to Chenavard's whole conception of the Pantheon scheme must have been the work of Louis Janmot, born in Lyon only seven years after the artist, who studied at the Icole des Beaux-Arts in that city from 1831 to 1833 and then went on to Paris to study with Ingres and with Andr6 Orsel, himself a friend of Overbeck and the Nazarene group in Rome and a precursor of the whole pre'raphaelite movement in Lyon. If Chenavard was a believer in metempsychosis and actually pro- posed a plan for his Lyonnais friend Laprade's epic poem Psyche', dealing with the various historical meta- morphoses of the soul, then surely the painter must have been familiar with Janmot's extraordinary and ambitious chef-d'oeuvre, which the latter started shortly after I840: Le Pokme de l'Pme. This cycle consisted of eighteen large compositions, accompanied by a poem in eighteen cantos, taking the soul from its origins and following it through all its manifestations.3 This remarkable project, which seems to bear striking affinities to that of Chenavard, was first exhibited in

2. See Andre Chastel, "Le Gout des 'Prkraphablites' en France," introd. to De Giotto ' Bellini, Orangerie des Tuileries, Paris, May-July, 1956, p. xviii.

3. Loc.cit. See Jean Leymarie, French Painting: The Nine-

teenth Century, trans. James Emmons, Geneva, 1962, p. 92, for additional information about Janmot and a good, brief account of the whole Lyonnais school.



BOOK REVIEWS 115

Lyon and then later in Paris. Certainly the two painters must have known of each other, if only through Baudelaire, who discusses Janmot's work several times, in his Salons of 1845 and 1846, as well as in his fragmentary article, "L'Art philosophique," where he quite naturally places Janmot in the same context as the German School of Overbeck, Cornelius, and Kaulbach and that of Chenavard and the group from Lyon. Yet while Professor Sloane emphasizes the undoubted interaction between Chenavard and his poet friend, Laprade, he fails to mention any possible pictorial sources or parallels for the artist's con- ceptions. One wonders whether Chenavard's paint- ings, both his themes and his handling of them, would seem such a startling anomaly within the natural context of the Lyonnais school; I rather suspect that they would not.

The neglect of analogous phenomena in the art of Chenavard's contemporaries is accompanied by a lack of interest in the style of Chenavard himself, which in turn may be related to a basic misconception about the very nature of style. When, for example, Profes- sor Sloane attempts to explain Chenavard's obvious defects as an artist, he does so primarily by an oversimplified opposition between form and content: "Where the great Italian [Michelangelo] could match the power of his thoughts with forms capable of ex- pressing their transcendant [sic] significance, the Frenchman [Chenavard] could not. . . . The lack of formal power sterilized the ideas, for only the greatly gifted could invent what had to be invented if the project were to succeed" (p. I31). The im- plication is clearly that if Chenavard had only been Michelangelo, his allegorical hodgepodge of Confucius and the Chaldean Sphinx, Washington and the Elders of the Apocalypse, Watt and Lavoisier discussing the steam engine rubbing shoulders with Napoleon and Vasco da Gama would have sprung to life on the walls of the Pantheon. "The few masters who have really achieved what Chenavard was after, such as Michelangelo and Poussin, have been able to combine their high vision with a style of comparable quality" (p. 155). Yet surely the style of an artist is insep- arably linked to his vision, just as that vision itself is inevitably connected with the beliefs and aspirations of his time; style is not some sort of incidental en- dowment of the hand and lower forearm, but rather the expression of an artist's total commitment to certain values, a visible embodiment of his "high vision."

The important question at stake here is incorrectly-- or at least unfruitfully-formulated. By the same token, one might be led to ask what Chenavard could have achieved if he had only had a style to match that of Cezanne or even Picasso, and the answer seems clear: the latter artists would never have conceived of painting Social Palingenesis or anything related to it at that particular moment in history, any more than would Michelangelo or Poussin. The fact that the major stylistic innovation in the years immediately succeeding Chenavard's Pantheon project was that of

Courbet, and that Courbet chose to represent a coun- try funeral and two stonebreakers at the side of a road in his major Salon offerings of I850-1851, would seem worthy of consideration in this context. Another fruitful approach to the aesthetic problem in- volved here-and one is surprised that Professor Sloane does not even raise this question-would be to ask how Delacroix or Chasseriau would have fared as decorators of the Pantheon, since, after all, both of these artists were engaged in carrying out monumental, secular architectural commissions at almost exactly the same time that Chenavard was working on the Pantheon scheme. The whole important question of the fate of the large-scale, allegorical complex in the middle of the nineteenth century, which would seem necessarily to be implied by a study of Chenavard, is hardly touched on. Yet the obvious comparison with the Pantheon scheme is not the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel but that of the Palais Bourbon Library, where Delacroix, like Chenavard, attempted to summarize a vast panorama of human history and aspiration in an allegorical framework that drew heavily upon traditional literary and artistic sources. Here, in the Bib- liotheque de la Chambre, despite occasional brilliant passages, one has that same disquieting sense of con- fronting well-constructed illustrations of high-minded ideals or of Biblical and classical texts rather than direct pictorial expressions of a vital and meaningful content. While the achievement of the Palais Bourbon Library rises far above the level of artistic nullity established by the Pantheon cartoons, the difference between the impact of Delacroix's or Chenavard's representations of Adam and Eve, on the one hand, and those of Michelangelo or Masaccio on the other, has much more to do with the relative viability of the theme of the Fall itself in the nineteenth as opposed to the fif- teenth or sixteenth centuries, and with the profound effects that such differences in attitude must have on the pictorial formulations of this subject, than with the technical virtuosity, skill, or "gift for invention" of individual artists. At certain moments an apple may serve better as an embodiment of "high vision" than the Fall of Man; the superiority of the style of the artist, who, at the end of the nineteenth century, chose to convey his anguish through a simple landscape of olive trees rather than Christ in the Garden of Olives has everything to do with the nature of his choice of subject. In short, to use the words of Sartre, "une technique . . . renvoie toujours i la m~taphysique." From this point of view, Chenavard must be considered not as a mere personal failure, but as an exag- gerated symptom of a more prevalent malady in the art of the mid-nineteenth century.

Professor Sloane is more successful in his attempt to situate Chenavard's program in the context of a certain brand of nineteenth century speculative historical thought-Germanic, occult, mystical, and all- embracing-which, while attempting to substitute a half-rational, half-poetic justification of human exist- ence for traditional religion, provided a new constel-



116 THE ART BULLETIN

lation of deities and demigods-a new mythology, in short-for writers or painters with epic aspirations. The obvious dependence of Chenavard upon the historical theories of Vico, Hegel, and Herder, trans- mitted to France by Michelet, Quinet, and Ballanche, is convincingly demonstrated by the author. Somewhat less convincing is the analysis of Baudelaire's aesthetic position in relation to Chenavard, and the attempt to find parallels for the artist's reiterated pessimism in the poet's writing. The imposition of rational con- sistency on Baudelaire's art criticism would seem misplaced in the light of the poet's ability to accept the most exotic costume-pieces and far-fetched historical or literary fantasies of his idol, Delacroix, while at the same time demanding that painters turn to ordinary scenes of modern life and represent men in their top hats and frock coats. Baudelaire's approach to art is remarkable for intuitive brilliance rather than logical coherence; his varied and often self-contradictory as- sertions assume unity only when they are seen as emanations of a single underlying authenticity of vision. The poet's suggestion that the "artiste philos- ophe" should carry his intentions to their logical con- clusions and return to the "innumerable and barbaric conventions of hieratic art" seems more like an astonish- ing anticipation of Gauguin before the fact than a critique of Chenavard's didacticism, as Professor Sloane implies. In any case, it would hardly seem that the crux of Baudelaire's criticism of Chenavard's work is the poet's contention that its symbolism was too dif- ficult for modern observers to interpret; rather, to the admirer of Delacroix's painterly brio and surpassingly evocative form, the fault with the Pantheon cartoons might simply be seen to lie in the fact that, as Baude- laire himself says: "Chenavard is not a painter; he despises what we mean by painting.'"*

The attempt to find a point-by-point parallel with the iconography of the Social Palingenesis mosaic in a passage from one of Baudelaire's Fusees is overdone. This sort of secular eschatology was a common phe- nomenon during the period of disillusionment immediately following the 1848 Revolution and was in- dulged in by writers as unlike in other respects as Proudhon and the Goncourts, whose Rdvolution dans les ma'urs, published in 1854, with its diatribe against a whole spectrum of modern evils, from the suppres- sion of primogeniture to the advent of conspicuous consumption, is a fine example of the genre. That both Baudelaire and Chenavard were pessimistic about the same things should be considered less as an evidence of influence than as the manifestation of a widespread and even fashionable attitude of the time, an attitude that might be expressed in a variety of forms and on many aesthetic levels.

One might also ask, in the context of a discussion of the relation between Chenavard and Baudelaire, why Professor Sloane, who went to considerable pains in a previous article to establish the identity of the subject of Chenavard's portrait drawing in the Mus6e des Beaux-Arts of Lyon as Baudelaire," should now see fit to refer to the work simply as a Portrait of Baudelaire, without any mention of the problematic nature of the drawing. If further evidence for such an unqualified identification of the Lyon drawing has come to light since 1955, it should be made available to the reader; if not, the still uncertain status of the work in question should be more clearly indicated. Even more surprising, in view of the far-from-positive identity of the subject and the noncommittal nature of the little sketch itself, is the author's assertion that this is a "most revealing likeness, not of the poet, but of the philosopher-critic" (p. I87). Such a refined discrimination between one aspect of the presumed subject's personality and another hardly seems war- ranted by the visual evidence; one searches the Lyon drawing in vain for any evidence that might have led Professor Sloane to conclude that the sitter looks more philosophical than poetic, or vice versa.

LINDA NOCHLIN

Vassar College

4. "L'Art philosophique," Oeuvres complktes, ed. Y.-G. Le Dantec and Claude Pichois, Paris, 1961, p. I o02.

5. "Baudelaire, Chenavard and 'Philosophic Art,'" pp. 289-293 and figs. I and 2.

GERMAIN SELIGMAN, Merchants of Art-Eighty Years of Professional Collecting, New York, Appleton- Century-Crofts, Inc., I96I. Pp. 294; I28 plates. $I0.OO.

Biographies of distinguished dealers are often of importance to art historians and curators, as they may provide invaluable information concerning the dis- covery and acquisition of major monuments. Mr. Seligman's book has several revealing sections, espe- cially in the earlier part, which presents a delightful tableau of art collecting in the late belle dpoque.' Most interesting are his portrayals of the elusive figures on the fringes of the art market-the marchand amateur and the aristocratic contact man such as the Marquis de Biron and the Marquis de Castellane. He also provides tantalizing glimpses of the Rothschilds' pur- chases during these years-a subject of great importance for Americans as more and more of these acqui- sitions keep coming on the international art market today. Unfortunately the French archives of the Seligman gallery were destroyed during the Second World War, so that the events during the early history of the firm cannot be as extensively documented as the author and his readers would have liked.

i. Some minor typographical inaccuracies mar the text- "Chalenden," "Bad Neuheim," "Klosterneuberg"; it is Knole, not Knole House, Baron and Baroness Stoclet, not Mr. Stoclet.



paul marc joseph chenavardby joseph c. sloane

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