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Gary
Tinterow and Geneviève Lacambre with Deborah L. Roldán
and Juliet Wilson-Bareau |
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| As tremendous a feat as the exhibition "Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting" was at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York during 2002-2003, the accompanying catalogue may be a greater achievement.1 Few museums have the ambition, resources, and staff to produce such a publication. In fact, the Metropolitan produced a considerably longer English-language version, which is the one this review will consider. Over 600 pages long and lavishly illustrated, this catalogue will likely serve as the standard English-language publication on the nineteenth-century French interest in Spanish painting. The abundant good quality reproductions, frequently juxtaposed as comparisons, convey many of the authors' points and make this book a useful visual resource. The authors include established American, French, English, and Spanish scholars who published some of the first serious studies on the nineteenth-century French interest in Spanish painting, along with newer contributors to the topic. Nevertheless, the catalogue shares the same conceptual problems as the exhibition, and raises a number of broad and specific issues that I will address in relation to individual essays and the publication as a whole. | ||||
| In the Foreword, museum directors Philippe de Montebello of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Serge Lemoine of the Musée d'Orsay announced that "Manet/Velázquez" was conceived as an extension of the museums' 1994-1995 collaboration on "The Origins of Impressionism, 1859-1869," an exhibition that aimed to explain the development of French modernist painting (ix).2 Although the Manet/Velázquez catalogue focuses on modernist French painting, not old master Spanish painting, it is the only catalogue (and exhibition) to include the Spanish paintings that are believed to have inspired French and American nineteenth-century pictures.3 The Metropolitan's chief curator of American Art, H. Barbara Weinberg explains midway through the catalogue why American paintings were added to the New York venue, where the catalogue included two additional essays and nearly thirty entries on American art (258-260). She reasons that, as many American artists between the Civil War and World War I studied in France and absorbed French styles, their art necessarily reflected the French taste for Spanish painting. If one accepts this logic, why didn't the project include paintings by other foreign artists who studied in France? If it were an attempt at relevance for an American public, it has the opposite effect of rendering the American paintings as a shadow contribution, divorced from an American context. | ||||
| In the first essay, "Raphael Replaced: The Triumph of Spanish Painting in France," Gary Tinterow, the organizing curator from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, frames the exhibition and catalogue as a response to a series of questions, such as, "How is it that Velázquez, an "unknown" according to André Félibien's 1688 treatise on painting, came to be recognized as one of the supreme artists of all time . . . according to Théophile Thoré in 1857? . . . How is it that. . . in 1852 the Louvre would spend more money to obtain Murillo's Immaculate Conception than it had on any other previous acquisition? (3)" In fact, these queries are not new, but were asked twenty and thirty years ago by Jeannine Baticle and Ilse Hempel Lipschutz, who were invited to contribute essays here.4 Tinterow attempts to answer those questions with a notion of French "taste" for Spanish painting that he explains by tracing public and private collecting of Spanish painting (or ones then attributed to the Spanish school) in France from the eighteenth through nineteenth centuries. The author sees a direct relationship between increasing acquisitions of Spanish painting with its influence on nineteenth-century French art making, but how that taste was transformed into visual influence remains to be explored. One avenue might be to investigate possible relationships between art collectors, critics, and artists. In this useful essay, Tinterow details, augments, and corrects earlier studies of the collecting of Spanish painting in France, and fills a gap in the accessible, English-language scholarship. | ||||
| The culminating point of Tinterow's argument, as it was for the exhibition, is the Galerie Espagnole, more than 400 paintings acquired in Spain by agents of the King Louis-Philippe that were exhibited together in the Louvre from 1838-1848. The Spanish Gallery was the largest, most accessible collection of Spanish paintings known in nineteenth-century France. Tinterow calls it "a monumental compensatory act,"—for the sale of his family's art collection, for the restitution of Napoleon's art "booty" to the European countries from which they were pillaged, and for Louis-Philippe's ascent to power via revolution—which is as close as any of the authors comes to acknowledging non-aesthetic factors in the collecting of Spanish art (37). Tinterow ends his investigation of collecting and exhibiting Spanish art in France with the closing of the Spanish Gallery in 1848; after that time, he asserts that artists were more likely to go to Spain to see Spanish painting (49). The author then abruptly veers off to discuss the impact of Spanish painting on a few French modernist artists, namely, Courbet, Manet, and Degas. | ||||
| Despite the opening sentence of the second essay, "The Discovery of the Spanish School in France," "It is hardly surprising that political events played a decisive role in spreading the influence of Spanish painting or that, in due course, the results of this dissemination surfaced in the works of nineteenth-century French artists." Geneviève Lacambre tracks specific Spanish paintings that could be seen in French public collections during the nineteenth century, thus covering much of the same historical material that Tinterow does (67). Although her opinion that "museums have proven to be the best places for artists to study the great works of the past", might seem self evident to readers today, art museums were relatively new institutions then, following centuries of artists having cited or modified earlier works of art. Lacambre, however, does not explore or support this claim by historical and visual evidence (67). In the course of detailing these paintings, Lacambre acknowledges that many were wrongly attributed to Spanish artists, while other works now known to be by Spanish painters were also misidentified to non-Spanish painters. Readers may be amazed to learn that the French art world then believed the anonymous Portrait of a Monk, 1633 in the Louvre to be a painting by Velázquez. Yet, Lacambre does not address how these facts and historical opinions affect her argument. | ||||
| One of Lacambre's intriguing points is that public art museums destroyed the original contexts of the art works they possessed, and thereby forced connoisseurs and visitors to focus more on aesthetic and technical qualities than on subject matter (68). Yet, her own investigation into the increasing number of paintings in the Paris Salons representing scenes from Spanish artists' lives seems to contradict this statement (77-78). In the Franco-Spanish reception of Velázquez's oeuvre, this shift in visual appreciation emerges in a significant way only after 1880 "that is, too late to support the argument of "Manet-Velázquez," that artists such as Courbet and Manet created revolutionary painting techniques from museum study of the Spanish Old Masters.5 Also compelling is her research on some early titles given to Spanish pictures in the Muséum Français in Paris in 1793, which ignored the religious or vulgar content of these works. For example, Murillo's Virgin of the Rosary ca. 1650 (Castres) was then called Woman with Child Holding a Rosary (69). This information provides a useful warning to all who might believe certain forms of naturalism to be universally or timelessly legible.6 Equally stimulating is her consideration of French pictures (to which one could add numerous commercial images) in which a Spanish artist is depicted painting one of his masterpieces (78-79). Such scenarios allowed French artists to reproduce a masterpiece without simply copying it, while they also drew attention to their profession and creative process in an accessible, biographical manner. Unlike Tinterow, Lacambre credits books with informing and inspiring French artists in their emulation of Spanish painting after 1848, when the Galerie Espagnole ceased to exist (87). | ||||
| The third essay, "Seville's Artistic Heritage during the French Occupation," by Ignacio Cano Rivero, presents a clear, organized recounting of the Spanish (or believed to be Spanish) paintings that were taken from Seville to France during the French occupation of that city between January 1810 and August 1812. Cano Rivero offers much new information, such as biographical details on the slippery figure of Frédéric Quilliet, a French agent and administrator under Joseph I. The author seems to agree with traditional scholarship that sees the French extraction of Spanish paintings as a principal factor in the increased esteem for Seville's artistic treasures; yet, he also recognizes that these French notions of the best, most authentic Spanish painting came in large part from reading Spanish publications such as Ceán Bermúdez's well-known dictionary of Spanish artists, published in 1800 (93; 99, 110-111, fn. 87). Clearly, Spanish critics and historians had already evaluated and appreciated their native school of painting in Seville. Why Cano Rivero expresses surprise at Quilliet's and others' use of such Spanish books to acquire paintings is baffling: where else would Frenchmen get their information and ideas on Spanish art in the early 1800s? For his own book on Spanish painting, Quilliet translated whole passages from Ceán Bermúdez's volumes, and other French authors borrowed from Quilliet, often ignorant of his Spanish source. Yes, this is French taste, but formed in good part by Spanish scholarship. | ||||
| Cano Rivero gives full attention to Murillo's developing reputation, mostly outside Spain, as closely linked to that of Seville, and he convincingly proposes several causes underlying the evident gaps in French knowledge and reception of Spanish painting, especially Murillo, during this time. Some clarification is needed with regard to his claim that the decree of 1779 was the first Spanish attempt "prohibiting the removal of paintings from Spain" (93). In 1761, the young Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid tried to accomplish this, and the 1779 decree prohibited only the exportation of works by deceased, famous, Spanish artists.7 | ||||
| María de los Santos García Felguera and Javier Portús Pérez authored the fourth essay, "The Origins of the Museo del Prado," which is divided into two distinct parts reflecting their research interests. The contextual discussion of the early years of the royal art museum that came to be called the Museo del Prado was probably largely written by Portús, and the following overview of foreign visitors' remarks on the museum is indebted to García Felguera's publication.8 Both parts have interesting ideas and information that are useful to English-language readers. The scholarly literature has generally seen Joseph Bonaparte's 1809 decree to create an art museum in Madrid as the origin for the Prado, founded in 1819 by Ferdinand VII, but here one learns that as early as the 1760s, when Anton Raphael Mengs was called to Spain by Carlos III, the painter proposed that an art gallery be formed in the new royal palace with the best works from the king's various residences (124). And in 1814, after the French were chased from Spain, Ferdinand VII directed the Academy of San Fernando to form an art museum. Other intriguing facts could be amplified: for example, the authors state that the early display of paintings in the Madrid museum was arranged according to spatial and decorative needs, rather than by artist, school, date, or style, and lacked labels (117). Was this common practice in European museums? Further study of the Italian-born curator Luis Eusebi might shed additional light on the privileged installation given to the Italian, rather than Spanish school (117). In minor details, I would take issue with the claim that Bernardo López's 1829 portrait Isabel de Braganza "documents" her role in the formation of the art museum, and, an editorial error should be corrected to read "by Vicente Maçip" (117, 118). | ||||
| Juliet Wilson-Bareau tells the reader that her essay, "Goya and France," is the prelude to her later article on Manet and Spain, and so they will be reviewed together. This author has published extensively on Goya and Manet since the 1970s, and the information and ideas she presents here have appeared previously.9 Mastering the extensive research and interpretations of these artistic giants is not an easy task, and perhaps it is unrealistic to expect new ideas and facts.10 Both essays are structured around the artist's biography, compiling all the possible relationships between Goya and France/French art and Manet and Spain/Spanish art. Sometimes the continuity between all this information is broken; for example, Goya's art is described as having been inspired by Poussin, David, and Paret. Then, the author shifts to a long section on Goya's printmaking and its influence on Romantic French artists. Indeed, Goya's prints seem to have been the major vehicle through which earlier nineteenth-century French artists and critics knew his art, but this point clearly refutes the catalogue's title and argument, which specifies the influence of Spanish painting, particularly, its technique. Her exploration of Goya's reception stops around mid-century, except as it relates to Manet in her second essay. | ||||
| Several points concerning Goya merit further investigation. First, it would be useful to plumb Goya's statement that he did not want the copper plates of Los Caprichos to go to foreigners, who he recognized were already eager to acquire them (145). Second, the exhibition of Goya's "Black Paintings"murals from his country house, at the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris, appeared a few years before the public manifestation of Symbolism in literature and painting. While Goya's disturbing paintings have been mentioned elsewhere as sources for Odilon Redon's dark, melancholic, and fantastical prints (one series' title cites Goya), perhaps other Parisian artists were struck by the parallels between their current situation and Goya's Spain, both of which had recently undergone political revolution, foreign invasion, and civil war. Cited by Wilson-Bareau, Michel Florisoone's attribution to Achille Devéria of the design for the lithographs Caricatures espagnoles, published by Charles Motte in 1825, could have wide-ranging implications (151).11 Devéria played a significant role as curator of the Cabinet des Estampes in the Bib liothèque Impériale and as a producer of popular lithography.12 Devéria himself copied a Spanish print of a bullfighter that was then copied by Manet.13 | ||||
| What is missing in both essays is sustained visual analysis and comparisons that support general claims and interpretations. A perfect opportunity is presented with the anonymous Portrait of a Monk (1633) in the Louvre—then considered to be by Velázquez—that Manet was interested in copying. Unlike Wilson-Bareau, I would not characterize the Baroque painting's palette as "clean unmixed colours," that she believes attracted Manet to this picture (205). However, I would compare the hands and prayer book, which she calls "inept" (thus implying they were unable to interest Manet) to Manet's own painting before 1870; for example, the harsh shadows, sooty highlights, pasty paint, and dirty fingernails of The Spanish Singer (1860) or Olympia (1863). A welcome reference to the important analysis of Manet's paintings by Anne McCauley, the photographic historian (not "writer", as she is described here), stops short of advancing the discourse on Manet and Spain, despite the evident interconnections between French Realism, Spanish art and culture, photography, and cultural entertainment and tourism (226).14 | ||||
| Manet's only trip to Spain in 1865, which lasted about ten days, is given its traditional interpretation here as an artistic pilgrimage; other more critical scholars have also suggested it served as an escape from the harsh criticism he had just received at the 1865 Salon, or a tourist's excursion made newly attractive by extended train service in France and Spain. Wilson-Bareau does offer a new interpretation of the brevity of Manet's trip, the result, she writes, of his prudence and cost-consciousness. But letters in which Manet expresses his disgust with Spanish food - none of which is quoted here - and his well-informed friend Zacharie Astruc provides him with detailed itineraries for seeing Spanish art, which Manet ignored, offer a more credible reason for Manet having cut short his trip: the Parisian painter's need for creature comforts. Manet's encounter with the progressive art critic Théodore Duret in Madrid is also passed over, creating an unbalanced account of Manet's trip to Spain as the solitary genius finding his own way to aesthetic inspiration. That view is reinforced by the exclusion of two faithful copies that Manet made after Spanish works.15 | ||||
| The fifth and sixth essays, "Goya and the French Romantics" and "The Galerie Espagnole of Louis-Philippe"reprise, in abbreviated versions, earlier publications by two major scholars.16 In 1972, Ilse Hempel Lipschutz broke new ground with her examination of the role that Spanish painting (but prints, too) played in the creative imagination of French Romantic writers. Lamentably, the abridged version of Lipschutz's material in this essay will only be followed easily by well-informed readers. For example, no discussion of the important Romantic writer Charles Nodier and his circle is given, or how artists like Delacroix were connected to them. The illustration of two paintings by Delacroix, Head of an Old Woman, Study for "The Massacres at Chios" (1824) and Orphan Girl in a Cemetery (1823-24) seems to imply that these are portraits of George Sand and that they are inspired from Goya's Caprichos, without any further explanation (171-172). | ||||
| Jeannine Baticle co-authored with Cristina Marinas the most important publication on the Galerie Espagnole in 1981, in which they attempted to catalogue and provide the provenance of the paintings that had belonged to it. Their essay is even more of an apology for the creation of the Spanish Gallery, exhibited between 1838-1848 in the Louvre museum, which occurred in contravention to Spanish law and with the full support of the French government and armed forces.17 Towards the end of her essay, Baticle acknowledges that one should look to political and cultural factors, not just Spanish painting, for the evolution of Realism (189).18 However, like most authors, she ignores that broader historical context for the Galerie Espagnole. The departure of the Galerie Espagnole from the Louvre to Louis-Philippe's heirs is also extraordinary and deserves further investigation, for no other deposed European ruler, then or now, recovered art works that had already entered a public museum. Moreover, if French taste for Spanish painting were so dominant by 1848, why didn't the Second Republic maintain the Galerie Espagnole? In the final paragraph, the author seems to justify this nineteenth-century collection with general claims of the modern-day public's appreciation for Spanish old master pictures in Paris (189). Such nationalist apology and celebration have no place in modern scholarship. | ||||
| The seventh essay by Stéphane Guégan, "From Ziegler to Courbet: Painting, Art Criticism, and the Spanish Trope under Louis Philippe," is refreshing in its novel emphasis on lesser-known artists and art criticism of the 1830s and 1840s, and in its critical methodology and intelligent ideas. Guégan is interested in how Spain and Spanish art were imagined by French critics and artists during the years 1830-1848. Ultimately, he refutes Léon Rosenthal's long-standing claim that the conception and influence of Spanish painting changed dramatically with the opening and closing of the Galerie Espagnole (193). Instead, Guegan sees continuity, for example, in the reception of the art of José de Ribera, and he is also prepared to explore the political resonance of the Galerie Espagnole and French taste for Spanish painting (198). In his study of Jules Ziegler's Charles V, after preparing his funeral rites (1848), he found that the artist himself disclaimed that his painting was a typically chivalric and morbid Spanish subject, but instead, a visual analogy to the recent dethroning of Louis-Philippe (192). | ||||
| To most eyes, Ziegler's work appears conservative in its linearity, narrative, and modeling, but Guégan meticulously explains the ways in which contemporary critics admired an Ingresque linearity along with a dark palette and obscuring shadows that were considered the principal qualities of Spanish painting. The author then demonstrates that Ziegler's work received some hostile criticism, even from conservative critics. While some French nineteenth-century commentators on Spanish art feared the deleterious effects of its extreme characteristics on young, impressionable artists, other voices did not. In a report that seemed to respond to such fears, the assistant director of museums Alphonse de Cailleux countered that the Spanish Gallery had a salubrious and moderating influence (195). It is also fascinating to learn that Millet, Courbet, and Whistler all copied works by Ziegler, who seems to have been a bridge between artistic generations interested in Spanish painting. The only amplifications I would have wished for in this thoughtful and well-written essay are illustrations of the paintings by Brune, Heim, and others that are little known, and some attention to their master Ingres's interest in and contact with Spanish art and artists. | ||||
| In her essay "American Artists' Taste for Spanish Painting," Barbara Weinberg recounts the European training or careers of four "great masters" of American art: Whistler, Eakins, Chase, and Sargent, who have long been cited as having been influenced by Spanish art. The addition of Mary Cassatt to that foursome is new, but unjustified. Although she did make a trip to Spain in late 1871 to mid-1872, her early anecdotal Spanish pictures, On the Balcony (1872) and Offering the Panal to the Bullfighter (1872-73), and her mature Impressionist work In the Loge (1877-78) have nothing to do with old master Spanish painting and very little to do with Goya. Moreover, the reader does not learn how Spanish art and culture were represented in the United States, even before 1850. Hints of it appear in the later Chronology, such as Washington Irving's writings on the Alhambra, Joseph Bonaparte's art collection in New Jersey, and the exhibition of Spanish paintings in Philadelphia (372-373; 366; 366). | ||||
| An unusual kind of "document" is published here: a photograph of a detail of Las Meninas that was owned by Whistler (264). Although the photographer probably had distinct goals in making it, his photograph accomplished what Whistler, Degas, and their circle were attempting in paint in the late 1850s and 1860s: the fragmentation and isolation of reality. As scholarship by Joel Isaacson and Anne McCauley has demonstrated, it was often such widespread commercial imagery that provided sources of the innovative forms and compositions of Manet, Degas, and others.19 The author is mistaken that Gérôme's 1868 trip to the Middle East was for the opening of the Suez Canal; it was an artistic expedition with friends, including Bonnat (271-272 fn. 53). When the Suez Canal opened in 1869, Gérôme made another trip, Bonnat did not, and this is why Eakins studied with the latter while his master Gérôme was absent. The correct name of the Madrid art academy is Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (not Academia Reale; 282, fn. 92). | ||||
| The second essay on an American topic, Mitchell A. Codding's "A Legacy of Spanish Art for America: Archer M. Huntington and The Hispanic Society of America," is a new and contextual study of Huntington's collecting of Spanish art and the founding of the Hispanic Society of America in New York (which lent a painting to this exhibition). The author provides a measured and thoughtful discussion of Huntington's strengths and weaknesses, as well as how he seems to have acquired his knowledge and made his mistakes in his collecting. Codding also underscores Huntington's originality, for example, his self-imposed limitation of buying Spanish art only outside of Spain, as he wanted Spain to preserve its existing artistic heritage in situ, if possible. In another indication of his deep respect for Spain and Spanish culture, Huntington relied on contemporary Spanish painters to help him locate and purchase Spanish art. More unusual was his simultaneous patronage of contemporary Spanish art; he organized exhibitions in his museum to promote artists such as Zuloaga and Sorolla, both in 1909. Further comparisons between Huntington's collecting of Spanish art and that by American museums during the nineteenth century would complement the new material and ideas presented here, and most readers would benefit from having current values of the prices paid by Huntington, such as the $35,000 for Goya's Portrait of the Duchess of Alba (1797), a huge sum in the early 1900s (316). | ||||
| Both appendices offer much new, rich, and useful material and ideas. In the first, "Nineteenth-Century French Copies after Spanish Old Masters," Dominique Lobstein makes a fresh contribution to our understanding of copies commissioned by the French state, as it relates to the French taste for Spanish painting. She integrates the short-lived Musée des Copies into her discussion, makes convincing suggestions concerning the destinations and distribution of other copies, and addresses the dominance of religious painting, all the while providing thoughtful interpretations of the quantitative figures she supplies (337-330). Her data shows that the largest number of these state-commissioned copies of Spanish paintings was produced between the years 1841-53 (allowing a few years after the opening and closing of the museum for artists to complete what were usually full-scale copies) due to the presence of so many Spanish religious paintings in the Galerie Espagnole. However, she also notes that these copies were predominantly made after works of the same thirteen Spanish painters, which reflected the limitations of French knowledge of and taste for Spanish painting at that time (332). The State-commissioned copies were supposed to be painted in front of the original, as this practice was—and still is—believed to produce a more accurate copy. However, Lobstein reveals that a copy of Velázquez's Christ on the Cross (ca. 1635-38) by Charles Porion, commissioned in 1853 and painted in Madrid, probably served as the model for a number of French copies (335). My one quibble is that the reader does not learn the functions of such copies until late in the article (337-338). Knowing that most copies went into storage and then were dispersed to hang in religious buildings in the provinces would satisfy any questions the reader would have as to why the copies were primarily religious subjects and why such journeyman artists received government commissions (quality didn't really matter). Some editing is needed in the paragraph concerning de Geniole's commission; the dates do not follow and the translation is rather awkward, if not incorrect (336). The caption for the illustration of Copy after Velázquez's "Dwarf and a Mastiff" (1865) requires correction; the author is Alexandre Prevost (330). | ||||
| The second appendix by Matthias Weniger, "The Dresden Remains of the Galerie Espagnole: A Fresh Look (at the) Back," is one of the most exciting contributions to the catalogue. It provides a potential means for identifying or confirming other paintings as having once hung in the Galerie Espagnole. It is also one of the few essays to examine closely the material objects, and then support or confirm those findings in archival research. Weniger found consistency among certain stamps and marks, as well as types of canvas and stretchers, on the backs of some Spanish paintings in the Dresden Gemaldegalerie. Comparing these material features on the Dresden canvases to those on other pictures known to have been part of the Galerie Espagnole, he was able to trace all of them back to the Standish collection, which was donated by its English owner Frank Hall Standish to the Galerie Espagnole in 1842. Thus, Weniger is able to add three more pictures from the Dresden museum to its twelve already identified by Baticle and Marinas as having belonged to the Spanish Gallery: Saint Matthew, formerly attributed to Luis Tristán or Herrera the Elder; The Last Communion of Saint Onophrius, by Vasco Pereyra; and, The Death of the Virgin, by Nicolás Borrás, from the Bocairente altarpiece by Vicente Maçip. In so doing, he provides a set of criteria by which one could confirm paintings that Baticle and Marinas only posited as possible candidates for the Spanish Gallery. Along with much unpublished information concerning the various restorers, their methods and materials, Weniger is constructing a more specific portrait of the Galerie Espagnole. | ||||
| The essays are followed by a copiously illustrated and annotated chronology that was compiled by Deborah L. Roldán, research assistant to Gary Tinterow. This 52-page chronology begins in 1779 with the Spanish government ban on the exportation of art by deceased Spanish masters, and ends in 1904. It allows the reader to make various links and parallels between diverse activities and art works related to the taste for Spanish painting. For example, it is intriguing to consider that the French taste for Spanish painting emerged at the same time that it was made illegal, and therefore more desirable, to procure it. To my mind, it is one of the more valuable parts of the catalogue, and will serve scholars for many years to come. | ||||
| The 226 entries on paintings and prints are separated into Spanish (90 works), French (109 works), and American (27 works) sections, in which the works are ordered alphabetically by artists' names. Surprisingly little formal analysis or comparison is done in any of them. Had the exhibition's wall labels guided viewers in such analysis, one would be happy to read the biographical information and provenance history provided in the catalogue's entries, but this same information was what mostly appeared in the wall text of the show. The 34-page bibliography will also provide scholars with a solid base from which to pursue further study. I will just mention two oversights: Schölzel's 2002 publication was omitted, and the Spadafore title needs correction (cited 343, fn. 1; 572). | ||||
| My final specific comment concerns the catalogue's lay-out. Its designers almost always placed the reproductions on the same page or opposite the page on which they are mentioned in the text, which is surprisingly uncommon in art history books, but deeply satisfying for a reader. With the notes which appear in the outside margins—a format that I personally find quite handy—the designers did not achieve the same synchronization, and notes often lag as many as three to seven pages after their numbers in the text, which is awkward and frustrating for the reader. | ||||
| Without wishing to depreciate the usefulness of this catalogue or denigrate its original material, I will enunciate three general problems concerning a lack of engaged visual analysis, the concept of influence and taste, and the practice of copying. A 600-page catalogue should be able to prove fully its claim to "map a fascinating shift in the paradigm of painting from Idealism to Realism, from Italy to Spain, from Renaissance to Baroque, from carefully finished, porcelain-like surfaces . . . to an excessive emphasis on brushy technique" (3). This is not a new story—it appears in countless survey books—but the catalogue's spare visual analyses and uneven comparisons do not address how a supposedly revolutionary French modernist painting technique evolved from looking at Spanish seventeenth-century pictures. Moreover, the catalogue's authors do not differentiate between modernist and other nineteenth-century paintings, in relation to their shared taste for Spanish painting. Manet clearly serves as the benchmark for French modernist response to Spanish art, but painters trained at the French academy like Henri Regnault were also influenced by Spanish masters. Wouldn't it have been fruitful, not to say incumbent upon the authors, to compare Regnault's paintings to those of Manet? No examination of this revolutionary technique or definition of key terms such as French modernism or Realism is made, and this vague notion of modernism becomes even more confusing when the term "modernist" is also applied to a seventeenth-century Spanish painting by Valdés Leal, Brother Alonso of Ocaña ca. (1656-58 | ||||
| For a fuller comprehension of taste and influence, a broader historical investigation and critical discussion is necessary, one that embraces political, commercial, and other non-aesthetic factors, as well as the nineteenth-century conflation between what today we consider historical research and popular journalism. In his essay, Tinterow is satisfied to enumerate the growing number of Spanish paintings in France to explain French painters' greater interest in and borrowing from them, but this doesn't explain why radical artists would be inspired to innovate, and in the specific ways they did. Moreover, Tinterow does not mention Raphael until page 13 of a 66-page essay, and then, without any interpretation. In Tinterow's conception of taste and how it works, we would expect that a dominant taste for Raphael in eighteenth-century France would translate into French emulation of his art's visual characteristics. In the works of various leading artists, Watteau, Lemoyne, Boucher, Pierre, Vigée-Lebrun, and David, do we see this? This way of writing aesthetic taste as though one artist or school "dominates" all others, can lead to unbalanced views of how art is made and appreciated.20 Artists rarely had one aesthetic ideal, even more rarely for their entire careers; Ingres indeed venerated Raphael, but he was also interested in Velázquez, purchasing a portrait attributed to the Spanish master in Rome decades before the Galerie Espagnole came into existence, and later requesting prints after Velázquez's paintings from Madrid.21 When Tinterow concludes that, despite all the Spanish paintings in Paris, artists were more likely to go to Spain to see Spanish painting after the Spanish Gallery closed, he seems to undermine his own argument (49). Because he sees this taste in purely aesthetic terms, he does not take into consideration the growing tourist industry between the two countries, and the French production of Spanish subject paintings to exploit that tourism. The reader is left to figure out how this collecting and exhibiting of Spanish old master painting, which was predominantly official and conservative, was transformed by certain artists into independent, radical art. | ||||
| The emphasis on collecting and collectors begs another question concerning taste and influence: does the act of collecting, especially of pictures that are later proven to be authentic and highly valued, equal understanding of the art acquired? The example of Ferdinand Guillemardet provides a case study (15). During his brief term as French ambassador to Spain in 1798, Guillemardet was one of the first Frenchmen known to have brought works by Goya back to France, including his own portrait. However, Guillemardet was also removed from his post because even his French superiors recognized that he was unsympathetic to the Spanish people and culture. Is his dashing portrait a reflection of his good taste, or sympathy with the painter, or did Goya see an opportunity to make a name for himself in France? And what does one do with Marshal Soult, who collected Spanish art as his rightful booty as a general, and was considered even by other Frenchmen in Spain to show poor taste in the way he exhibited these religious paintings in an opulent, domestic setting (110-112)? Yet, of all the Frenchmen collecting Spanish art before the Spanish Gallery opened, who got better quality works than this arrogant opportunist?22 The prevailing belief that scholars and artists were those who best recognized authentic and high-quality Spanish art is repeatedly belied by their and others' collections and documented opinions. To that end, the catalogue should have addressed the fact that many of these so-called Spanish pictures were later proven to be of another national school. | ||||
| A quotation from the poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire in 1846 can be used to sum up the nineteenth—and apparently—twenty-first century belief that the French came to understand Spanish art and culture from the Galerie Espagnole: "Two peoples . . . come to know each other and fraternize without arguing" (38). In the Spanish Gallery, of course, no argument was possible, since Spanish culture was represented as mute. And yet, we know that Spain and Spaniards were constantly affecting what the French knew (or thought they knew) about Spanish art and what they acquired of it. | ||||
| Copying is another subject that receives sensitive historical and contextual analysis only from Lobstein, while some scholars seem to condemn it, as they privilege the original compositions by modernist artists who seem to have been inspired by the Spanish old masters. Readers do not learn that copying a work by another artist, especially a recognized master, was a time-honored artistic custom, in which novices could practice skills and more mature painters could find solutions; and it was neither illegal nor shameful. Those artists who were commissioned to make copies were not all students or bad artists; some worked for modest patrons who wanted more convincing reproductions for their homes than prints could provide, and others made copies on speculation, to be sold at fairs or in trade shops. It does not help the reader to come to a historical understanding of artistic copying when Alphonse Legros' Making Amends (1868) is described as "virtually plagiarized it in subject matter, composition, and format" (80-84). Since Legros did not copy the subject, borrowing a composition and format was perfectly acceptable in artistic tradition. On the other hand, many modernist artists did have an ambivalent if not hostile attitude toward copying, seeing it as oppressive, as the nineteenth-century concept of originality evolved into the leading quality for contemporary art. | ||||
| To end, I would strongly recommend that every scholar of nineteenth-century art, and those of nineteenth-century French or Spanish culture, acquire this volume for their libraries, but to read it with caution, while they contemplate the broader problems and specific questions that it raised. | ||||
| Alisa Luxenberg Associate Professor of Art History University of Georgia, Athens allux@uga.edu |
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| 1. See the author's review of the exhibition in this same issue of Nineteenth-Century Worldwide. 2. Henri Loyrette and Gary Tinterow, Impressionisme: les origines, 1859-1869, exh. cat. (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1994). Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, 1994; New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994-1995. 3. Musée Goya, Castres, Les peintres français et l'Espagne: de Delacroix à Manet, exh. cat., 1997, and, Velázquez et la France: la découverte de Velázquez par les peintres français, exh. cat., 1999; Suzanne Stratton, ed. Spain, Espagne, Spanien: Foreign Artists Discover Spain, 1800-1900, exh. cat (New York: The Spanish Institute, 1993); Joel Isaacson, Manet and Spain: Prints and Drawings, exh. cat. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Art Museum, 1969). 4. Jeannine Baticle and Cristina Marinas, La Galerie Espagnole de Louis-Philippe au Louvre, 1838-1848 (Paris: Réunion des Musées nationaux and La Documentation française, 1981) and Ilse Hempel Lipschutz, Spanish Painting and the French Romantics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972). 5. Alisa Luxenberg, "The Aura of a Masterpiece: Responses to Las Meninas in Nineteenth-Century Spain and France," in Suzanne L. Stratton-Pruitt, ed., Velázquez's Las Meninas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 34-35. 6. The secular titles may also reflect contemporaneous pressures during the revolutionary period to avoid overt acceptance of Catholicism and its symbols. 7. See the documents in the archives of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid; Documentos CF-1/16 and 34-8/1. Cano Rivero's chronology is also somewhat misleading, when he considers the Spanish government's appropriation of religious institutions and property as "late 18th century" and the 1767 expulsion of the Jesuit order from Spain as "the final years" of the century, thus tying it more closely to Joseph Bonaparte's closing of religious orders on 23 August 1809. A Spanish scholar has recently traced this government practice back to 16th-century Spain. See Josefina Bello Voces, Frailes, intendentes y políticos: Los bienes nacionales, 1835-1850 (Madrid: Taurus, 1997), pp. 22-27. 8. Javier Portús Pérez, Museo del Prado: Memoria escrita, 1819-1994 (Madrid: Museo del Prado, 1994) and La sala reservada del museo del Prado y el coleccionismo de pintura de desnudo en la corte española 1554-1838 (Madrid: Museo del Prado, 1998); María de los Santos García Felguera, Viajeros,eruditos y artistas: Los europeos ante la pintura española del siglo de oro (Madrid: Alianza, 1991). 9. Some of her many publications are: with Pierre Gassier, Goya: His Life and Work (London, 1971); "Goya and the X numbers: The 1812 inventory and early acquisitions of "Goya" Pictures," Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum 31 (1996): 159-174; Voyage en Espagne: Edouard Manet (Caen: L'Echoppe, 1988); and her contributions to Manet, 1832-1883, exh. cat., Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1983. 10. Though one can cite Enrique Lafuente Ferrari, Antecedentes, coincidencias e influencias del arte de Goya (Madrid: de Blass, 1947). 11. Wilson-Bareau states that Goya's name does not appear anywhere in this print series, but it is clearly inscribed on the title page. 12. See, for example, Beatrice Farwell, The Cult of Images:
Baudelaire and the Nineteenth-Century Media Explosion, exh.
cat., University of California * Santa Barbara Art Museum, 1977. 14. Elizabeth Anne McCauley, A.A.E. Disdéri and the Carte-de-visite Portrait Photograph (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 15. Manet's watercolour after a Spanish print by Becquer—probably via Achille Devéria's copy—belongs to a private American collection; see de Caso, fn. 14. Manet's small painted copy after Velazquez's Pablo de Valladolid hangs in the Sirak Collection, Columbus Museum of Art; see Richard Bretell et al., Impressionism and European Modernism (Columbus, OH: Columbus Museum of Art, 1991). 16. See fn. 4 for their books. 17. The essay's opening paragraph creates a questionable lineage that places the Galerie Espagnole into a historical tradition "stretching back" to the French Revolution (175). Other statements throughout the essay seem to lay blame on the Spanish government and citizens for the illegal exportation and purchases of Spanish paintings by the French agents of the king (180-181, 185). 18. "It is difficult to precisely measure the aesthetic impact of the Galerie Espagnole paintings on the French school during the second half of the nineteenth century. However, in seeking the origins of Realism, one must also look at the social and political reaction to the July Monarchy and the Second Empire, which were on the whole rather authoritarian regimes."(189) 19. Joel Isaacson, "Impressionism and Journalistic Illustration," Arts 56; 10 (June 1982): 95-115. 20. It is difficult to sustain this model of taste, and Tinterow contradicts his own argument (15). In a specific example, Goya's The Forge is privileged as artistic influence (151) on Eugene Delacroix's blacksmith etching 1833 (fig. 5.32, cat. 121), when the French artist's own friend Théodore Géricault had painted a powerful blacksmith as a shopsign. The critic reviewing the Galerie Espagnole who applied this derogatory term "shopsign" to Goya's painting and its pendant might have been recalling Géricault's version. 21. José de Madrazo, Letter to his son Federico, 5 September 1833, Madrid: "Respecto a las estampas litográficas que Mr. Ingres desea tener de los cuadros de Velázquez y de Murillo puedes decirle que con mucho gusto se las mandaré . . .". published in José de Madrazo, Epistolario, ed. by José Luiz Díez (Santander: Fundación Marcelino Botín, 1998), p. 43, no. 10. 22. Another interesting aspect of Soult's collecting is that he appears to have chosen his pictures, not agents or dealers. Moreover, he acquired an entire series, Murillo's paintings from the Hospital de la Caridad, Sevilla (111), which, on the one hand, reflects his arrogant pillaging, but, on the other, might mean that he understood the importance of seriality and the works' relationship to each other. His brutal methods led him to do something few other Frenchmen would dare, and to preserve something of the paintings' context, the series. |
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