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Becoming Cosmopolitan: Viewing and Reviewing the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris

2010; Routledge; Volume: 32; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/08905491003704038

1477-2663

Margueritte S. Murphy,

Historical Art and Culture Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes [1] “Let us add that Paris is the abode of a large colony of foreigners called there by business, pleasure, study, etc., that through its collections, museums, libraries, it lends itself more than any other capital to synthetic studies of industry, the sciences and the arts; that through the urbanity of its manners, through its hospitality towards foreigners, our capital truly has a cosmopolitan character.” (my translation) [2] “We see, reversing the old maxim: If you want peace, prepare for war, an entirely modern spirit, in time of war peace prepared.” [3] “These games, since their origin, were intended to render the inhabitants of the various parts of Greece fit for combat to defend their country. But, to this purpose, already so noble, was joined one of highest moral import. The founders of these games wanted all the tribes that together made up Greece to take part in these solemnities; and in effect the idea of these festivals, strongly imprinted on the spirit of the Greeks through religious traditions and through custom, was thereby retained for many centuries. Now the moral aim of these periodic assemblies, whether at Olympia or at Corinth, was to soften the manners of the various Hellenic tribes, so inclined to wage all‐out war, by leading them little by little to visit one another, to participate in the same festivals, and finally to give up the fierce hatreds that divided them. Such was the first attempt to prepare men to accept the benefits of a more humane and peaceful civilization.” [4] This claim of the superiority of French taste and art and its evidence in manufactured goods, especially luxury items, is already widespread in the coverage of the earlier industrial expositions of the July Monarchy (Murphy). [5] “Let us take in visually the national genius of races, and, lamenting the dreariness of so much in decline, let us weigh the work of the peace of peoples.” [6] “the Portico where systems are debated, the studio where methods are worked out; she is the great nation of art.” [7] “in decorating the town hall [literally the common house], to paint the lofty deeds of this Parisian people who have already accomplished such great things, without counting those that it will yet accomplish. Paris, this heart and brain of France and of the entire world, deserves more than these useless things that fill its own palace.” [8] the “people” who are “the nation that has ceaselessly saved the fatherland that the leaders often persist in losing.” [9] “heroic events achieved by this glorious legion called France.” [10] “I hate this man because his pictures have nothing whatever to do with painting (I would prefer to call them a kind of brisk and frequent masturbation in paint, a kind of itching on the French skin)” (Mayne 94). All translations of Baudelaire’s The Salon of 1846 and The Exposition universelle of 1855 are by Jonathan Mayne unless otherwise noted. All other translations are my own. [11] “he is the chronicler of your National glory, and that is the great thing. But what, I ask you, can that matter to the enthusiastic traveler, to the cosmopolitan spirit who prefers beauty to glory?” (Mayne 94). [12] “There can be few occupations so interesting, so attractive, so full of surprises and revelations for a critic, a dreamer whose mind is given to generalization as well as to the study of details—or, to put it even better, to the idea of an universal order and hierarchy—as a comparison of the nations and their respective products” (Mayne 121). [13] Baudelaire published three essays on the Exposition universelle, later collected in Curiosités esthétiques. The first and third appeared in Le Pays of May 26 and June 3, 1855; the second, critical of the art of Ingres, was rejected by Le Pays and appeared instead in Le Portefeuille of August 12, 1855 (Claude Pichois, notes, 1366). [14] “When I say ‘hierarchy’, I have no wish to assert the supremacy of any one nation over another. Although Nature contains certain plants which are more or less holy, certain forms more or less spiritual, certain animals more or less sacred; and although, following the promptings of the immense universal analogy, it is legitimate for us to conclude that certain nations (vast animals, whose organisms are adequate to their surroundings) have been prepared and educated by Providence for a determined goal—a goal more or less lofty, more or less near to Heaven;—nevertheless all I wish to do here is to assert their equal utility in the eyes of Him who is indefinable, and the miraculous way in which they come to one another’s aid in the harmony of the universe” (Mayne 121). [15] “But always some spontaneous, unexpected product of universal vitality would come to give the lie to my childish and superannuated wisdom—that lamentable child of Utopia!” (Mayne 123). [16] This section contrasting Gautier’s review of the Chinese exhibit with Baudelaire’s has appeared previously in “The Critic as Cosmopolite: Baudelaire’s International Sensibility and the Transformation of Viewer Subjectivity,” in Art and Life in Aestheticism: De‐Humanizing and Re‐Humanizing Art, the Artist, and the Artistic Receptor, edited by Kelly Comfort (Basingstoke, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) 25–41; see 27–30. [17] “Let him [the reader] imagine a modern Winckelmann (we are full of them; the nation overflows with them; they are the idols of the lazy). What would he say, if faced with a product of China—something weird, strange, distorted in form, intense in color and sometimes delicate to the point of evanescence? And yet such a thing is a specimen of universal beauty; but in order for it to be understood, it is necessary for the critic, for the spectator, to work a transformation in himself which partakes of the nature of a mystery—it is necessary for him, by means of a phenomenon of the will acting upon the imagination, to learn of himself to participate in the surroundings which have given birth to this singular flowering. Few men have the divine grace of cosmopolitanism in its entirety; but all can acquire it in different degrees. The best endowed in this respect are those solitary wanderers who have lived for years in the heart of forests, in the midst of illimitable prairies, with no other companion but their gun—contemplating, dissecting, writing. No scholastic veil, no university paradox, no academic utopia has intervened between them and the complex truth. They know the admirable, eternal and inevitable relationship between form and function. Such people do not criticize; they contemplate, they study” (Mayne 121–22). [18] The Chinese museum in the Palais des Beaux‐Arts consisted of a collection brought back by Montigni, former consul at Shanghai and Ning‐Po, according to Pichois who cites an article by Yoshio Abé in Le Monde, 28 November 1968 (notes, 2, 1368). [19] “They have invented everything and perfected nothing; they understood the compass, gunpowder, printing, gas, long before the rest of the world had any idea of these precious discoveries.” [20] “They have a bizarre, eccentric and patient genius, unlike that of any other people, and which instead of opening like a flower, writhes like a mandrake root. Lacking interest in serious beauty, they excel in curiosities; if they have nothing to send to museums, they can, on the other hand, fill all the bric‐a‐brac shops with baroque and deformed creations, of the most whimsical sort. You have no doubt seen this dwarf of the River of Pearls enclosed in a porcelain vase so that his growth is curiously stunted; this is the most apt image of the Chinese genius.” [21] “Other nations, beginning with the Greeks, who attained it, seek ideal beauty; the Chinese seek ideal ugliness; they think that art should be as distant as possible from nature, that it is useless to represent, since the original and the copy do the same thing.” [22] “to put in the same frame objects that perspective separates”— and use of color—“A sky‐blue tiger, an apple‐green lion, are much more singular than if they were simply painted in their natural hues.” He concludes: “the ugly is infinite and its monstrous combinations offer to the fancy unlimited possibilities.” [23] “the truly serious part of the collection composed of the most rare and precious objects in enamel, bronze, porcelain, lacquer, of cabinets, and furniture of all sorts.” [24] “for pure arabesque, for whimsical ornamentation in bronze, porcelain, wood, lacquer and hard stones, the Chinese are inimitable masters, and one can only admire the thousand products of their inexhaustibly fertile imagination.” [25] “as closed to Europeans as the harems of the pashas of Asia.” [26] “two bronzes by Jules Cordier, a mandarin and his wife, perfect types of the Middle Empire that grimace with a jovial gravity on their pedestals.” [27] “wonderful collection … takes you across the Great Wall of China for a few moments.” [28] “The beautiful is always bizarre” (my translation). [29] “depend[ent] upon the environment, the climate, the manners, the race, the religion and the temperament of the artist” (Mayne 124). [30] “[H]is wit is a cosmopolitan mirror of beauty” (my translation). The point that Baudelaire goes on to make is that Gautier’s witty mirror reflects the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as well as ancient Greece, and so his sensibility is at once classical and romantic. [31] In the Awards Ceremony of the Exposition, Ingres was named “Grand Officier of the Légion d’honneur,” an honor which effectively recognized him as the greatest living artist (Mainardi 112–3). [32] “This modern lantern throws a stream of darkness upon all the objects of knowledge; liberty melts away, discipline vanishes” (Mayne 126). [33] This idea of the chameleon nature of the cosmopolitan reappears in Le Peintre de la vie moderne; Baudelaire describes Constantin Guys as “par nature, très voyageur et très cosmopolite” (689) (“naturally, very much a traveller and very cosmopolitan”), and a “kaléidoscope doué de conscience, qui, à chacun de ses mouvements, représente la vie multiple et la grâce mouvante de tous les éléments de la vie” … “un moi insatiable de non‐moi, qui, à chaque instant, le rend et l’exprime en images plus vivantes que la vie elle‐même, toujours instable et fugitive” (692) (“kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness, who, in each of his movements, represents the multiple life and the moving grace of all the elements of life… a self insatiable of the non‐self, who, at every instant renders it and expresses it in images more alive than life itself, always unstable and fugitive.”) [34] “several thousands of ideas and sensations will enrich his earthly dictionary, and it is even possible that, going a step too far and transforming justice into revolt, he will do like the converted Sicambrian and burn what he had formerly adored—and adore what he had formerly burnt” (Mayne 123). [35] Mignolo speaks of “border thinking, critical and dialogic, from the perspective of those local histories that had to deal all along with global designs” (744).