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L’Artiste dans la cité: 1871–1918. Par Bertrand Tillier

2020; Oxford University Press; Volume: 74; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fs/knaa136

1468-2931

Emma Bielecki,

Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis

Bertrand Tillier describes his rich and absorbing new monograph as a ‘un portrait collectif d’une génération de peintres et sculpteurs’. A collective portrait is indeed an apt description for the text, which, across sixteen chapters, focusing in almost every case on a single individual, explores the myriad ways in which artists of the period engaged with politics, in the broadest sense. We find here committed anarchists such as Maximilien Luce and Camille Pissarro, who sought to expose in their art the violence on which the Republican regime was founded, and its hypocrisies and corruption, as well as painters such as Paul Signac and Victor Prouvé whose work tended in a more utopian direction. (The cover shows a detail from Signac’s Au temps d’harmonie: l’âge d’or n’est pas dans le passé, il est dans l’avenir. It is the only illustration in the entire text, but Tillier’s evocative ekphrases bring their own pleasures.) We encounter art critics such as Adolphe Tabarant and Gustave Geoffroy, who both promoted initiatives — the Club d’art social and the Musée du soir respectively — which sought to make art accessible to all. We find men (women have only occasional cameos in the book) for whom art was mere frippery if it was not part of a broader emancipatory project, and others, such as Auguste Rodin, for whom creative freedom was paramount. We find academic painters such as Jean-Léon Gérôme, in equal parts baffled and disgusted by the radicalism of modern art, but influenced by it nonetheless. We find ardent Dreyfusards (Émile Gallé, Édouard Debat-Ponsan) and a pervasive anti-Semitism, whose spectre haunts even the work of Georges Clemenceau, whose troubling collaboration with Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Au pied du Sinaï (1898), is the subject of one thought-provoking chapter. Tillier’s book, as a footnote acknowledges, comprises various studies already published as articles or delivered as conference papers, expanded and reworked. They are organized into four different sections (‘Bâtisseurs d’art’, ‘L’Art pour tous?’, ‘Voix’, and ‘Défenses et combats’) but in truth almost any of the chapters could appear in almost any of the sections, so blurry are their contours. This is not a criticism. Certainly, those who come to Tillier’s book wanting to find a strong central argument, rigorously unfolded, about the relationship between art and politics during this period of French history are likely to be disappointed. Rather, the text acts as a polyphonic space in which we hear multiple voices grappling in different ways with the question of the artist’s role in and responsibilities to society and history. Gradually, Tillier builds up a dense image of the art world in the first decades of the Third Republic, familiarizing the reader not only with the various different aesthetic and ideological currents flowing against and into each other at the time, but also with the complex web of personal and professional connections which brought artists (and writers) into contact with each other. To be immersed in this milieu of hope and revolt is sometimes bracing, sometimes soothing, always interesting.