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Discomfort Food: The Culinary Imagination in Late Nineteenth-Century French Art . By Marni Reva Kessler

2022; Oxford University Press; Volume: 76; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fs/knac049

1468-2931

Ruth Cruickshank,

History of Science and Medicine

Profoundly and approachably interdisciplinary, this book opens with an eloquent expression of how food and representations of it can be so ambivalently revelatory, providing ‘discursive sites for the negotiation of a panoply of contemporary anxieties and uneases’ (p. xviii). Marni Reva Kessler draws on an extraordinary depth of historical, socio-political, literary, culinary — and, of course, art-historical — expertise, spanning and exceeding nineteenth-century France. She further deploys approaches from memory and food studies, as well as personal reflections (the latter being judicious affective and illustrative ingredients in a mix which appeals across the senses and sensibilities). Kessler’s palpable pleasure in language and her deftness with it at once evoke and exceed the artworks featured. Throughout, black-and-white reproductions of paintings, maps, diagrams, and photographs supplement colour plates of the chapters’ titular artworks bound in the centre pages with yet further canvases, deftly established as interlocutors. Exquisitely couched descriptions bring these paintings yet more vitally alive within and beyond their frames as the analysis unfolds in ‘Édouard Manet’s Fish (Still Life) and the Melancholy of Mullet’; ‘Clarifying and Compounding Antoine Vollon’s Mound of Butter’; ‘Gustave Caillebotte’s Fruit Displayed on a Stand and the Ghost of the Lost City’; and ‘Edgar Degas’s Beef and the Double Life of Édouard Manet’s Ham’. Kessler’s simultaneously impeccably researched and allusive approach to often well-known representations of food makes for a proliferation of contemporary images and literary intertexts; for the displacement of aesthetic and ontological conventions; and for discomforting new perspectives and insights which destabilize orthodoxies and open up interpretative possibilities. Kessler identifies Manet’s fish as decaying and falling short of a bouillabaisse yet also feeding back to Pieter Claesz and Jean-Siméon Chardin; forward to Helen Frankenthaler; and beyond other famed nineteenth-century natures mortes to Manet’s Le Torero mort (1864) and Le Christ mort et ses anges (1864) and also to the Paris Morgue via Edgar Allan Poe, and hence, enlisting the eel as it appears to slither off Nature morte avec du poisson (1864) to imaginary detective work and Manet’s reflexivity in portraying the ephemerality and anxiety of modern life. Vollon’s ostensibly luscious Motte de beurre (1875–85) is rendered uncanny, with its shadow of adulteration and with an acutely perceived palimpsest of Théodore Géricault’s Tête de guillotiné (1818–19) calling to mind the tumult of post-Revolutionary politics. Caillebotte’s orderly array of fruits, together with more of his and others’ contrasting canvases, are read in terms of the tension of the confident mapping of rationalized post-Haussmannian Paris with nostalgia for past urban and rural foodways and worlds. The final chapter is bookended with an early Degas, Portrait d’homme (c. 1866) — inhabitually and viscerally focused on animal body parts, inviting uneasy comparison with contemporary anatomical cross sections — and Degas’s later photograph, Edgar Degas et Albert Bartholomé dans l’appartement de Degas (1895) featuring Manet’s painting Le Jambon (c. 1875–78). Here, among the many questions Kessler so productively and uncomfortably raises, is the bigger picture of the politics of consuming others. Discomfort Food is an artfully meaty work indeed. Richly readable but ideally savoured in several sittings, it promises pleasure and nourishes discomfort for students and scholars alike, across the many disciplines it spans and deploys.