Middle Chapters Discussion: The Salon de Refusés

[Jessica]

Do you think the Emperor Napoleon III had a political motive in instituting the Salon des Refusés in 1863? In any case, what does his institution of the Salon des Refusés -- and his involvement in the art world more generally -- tell us about him as a politician?

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[Mariposa]

Do you think the Emperor Napoleon III had a political motive in instituting the Salon des Refusés in 1863? In any case, what does his institution of the Salon des Refusés -- and his involvement in the art world more generally -- tell us about him as a politician.


I think he definitely had a political motive. As I remember, he was involved in an unpopular war in Mexico at the time and I believe an election was coming up soon.

" Louis-Napoleon was nothing if not a shrewd politician. His decree to let the people decide had pleasingly democratic overtones in the weeks before an election, providing a reposte to those who complained about the illiberal nature of his regime.... If his subjects could be entertained, he reasoned, then perhaps they would fail to notice or to care about the fact that most of their liberties had vanished" (69).

Lizabeth

[Mariposa]

I don't quite know where to put this comment and it is in reference to something in Chapter 19 so I am placing in the middle section discussion.

I was totally fascinated by Manet's comments about Cezanne. Manet's views of Cezanne are the same kind of reactions that people had toward Manet himself.

From page 179:
Cezanne's unrestrained brushstrokes and heavy handed work with the palette knife, not to mention his rather grotesque visions, did not appeal. Manet later confessed that he found the younger artist uncouth and his work as sophisticated as something produced with a "bricklayer's trowel."

You would think that Manet might...just might... have some degree of sensitivity to innovation considering the reception his work had received!

Lizabeth

[ross_king]

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dianearbus wrote:
I was totally fascinated by Manet's comments about Cezanne. Manet's views of Cezanne are the same kind of reactions that people had toward Manet himself.

From page 179:
Cezanne's unrestrained brushstrokes and heavy handed work with the palette knife, not to mention his rather grotesque visions, did not appeal. Manet later confessed that he found the younger artist uncouth and his work as sophisticated as something produced with a "bricklayer's trowel."

You would think that Manet might...just might... have some degree of sensitivity to innovation considering the reception his work had received!

Lizabeth

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One of the many curious and maybe unexpected things about Manet was his sometimes uncharitable attitude toward his fellow painters. Even though many of the Impressionists looked to him as their leader, he seems to have been (as we’ll see later in the book) genuinely horrified by their paintings and seems to have had little sympathy with their plights - which, as Lizbeth points out, were very similar to his own. Possibly he felt a bit competitive toward Cézanne, who was a younger man. But I do think he was prejudiced by Cézanne’s boorishness. Manet was very elegant and sophisticated, whereas Cézanne most definitely was not. Or at least Cézanne worked hard to give the impression of being vulgar and earthy (even though, like Manet, he came from a very wealthy family).

In fairness to Manet, some of Cézanne’s early works (with scenes of rapes, murders and violent orgiastic feasts) were quite startling and disturbing. Check out these paintings from the 1860s and very early 1870s, and you’ll see why there was little chance of a Cézanne canvas gracing the walls of the Salon:

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/C/cezanne/cz_121_abduction.jpg.html

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/C/cezanne/cz_165_murder.jpg.html

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/C/cezanne/cz_128_feast.jpg.html

By the way, isn’t Mark Harden’s artchive.com a great resource?

[Mariposa]

I found the paintings of Cezanne during that time period very surprising. Murder? Strangulation? Autopsies? I had never seen them. I associate Cezanne with beautiful and calming landscapes. I am curious to know what made him transition from scenes of such violence to his later paintings. Was it because he wanted to gain acceptance and make some money? Or did he change as a person?

Lizabeth

[ross_king]

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dianearbus wrote:
I associate Cezanne with beautiful and calming landscapes. I am curious to know what made him transition from scenes of such violence to his later paintings. Was it because he wanted to gain acceptance and make some money? Or did he change as a person?

Lizabeth

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Cézanne is an interesting psychological study, to say the least. A key moment in his transition to more “acceptable” scenes was his move, in 1873, to Auvers-sur-Oise, in the countryside a few miles northwest of Paris. (Auvers would later become artistically significant as the place where Vincent Van Gogh committed suicide in 1890.) Camille Pissarro seems to have taken Cézanne under his wing and persuaded him to move to the country to paint landscapes and village scenes rather than his phantasmagorical visions. Even then, though, something of the macabre lurked in Cézanne’s works: one of his first paintings in Auvers was The House of the Hanged Man, a picture of a quaint thatched house that had formerly belonged to an executed murderer.

One of my favorite early Cézanne’s is a portrait he did of his father in about 1866. His father was a stuffy old political conservative who disapproved of his son’s choice of career, but when Cézanne painted him, he showed his father earnestly reading L’Événement, the scandalous new newspaper that covered gossip and avant-garde artistic matters. It’s a nice little joke on the part of Paul, since Papa Cézanne never would have touched such a newspaper. The portrait can be seen on artchive:

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/C/cezanne/father.jpg.html

It was a brave person who would sit for a Cézanne portrait in those days. One of the friends who was bold enough, Antony Valabrègue, claimed that Cézanne painted portraits as though he was taking revenge on the sitter for some perceived insult or injury.

[Mariposa]

Now I recall where I saw that painting before. I believe it was at the Cezanne and Pissarro exhibit at MOMA. It was a fascinating exhibit showing some of the works of Cezanne and Pissarro side by side. Often they worked together on the same landscape, but sometimes, if I recall correctly, one would copy the other's work and then "improve" it. The most interesting part was how Pissarro stayed in a certain "genre" while Cezanne moved on becoming more abstract. At least that is how I remember it...

http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2005/cezanne_pissarro.html


Lizabeth

[ross_king]

Unfortunately I missed the Cézanne/Pissarro exhibition ... but I imagine it gave evidence of the "calming" effect that the kindly Pissarro had on Cézanne.

There’s another great example of two Impressionists painting side-by-side: Monet and Renoir in 1869 at La Grenouillère, or "The Frogpond," a few miles downstream from Paris on the Seine. I describe the episode in Chapter 29. It's a crucial moment in the history of Impressionism.

[marlohill]

Emperor Napoleon III was a shrewd politician, but according to the book, he did bring prosperity to France. Still, has Ross points out there was no freedom of the press. The people were basically manipulated, kept entertained with fireworks and (yikes!) beheadings. Who was the magician Robert Houdin that Napoleon sent to Algiers? Was he related to Houdini? Was he the same man?
Michelle

[ross_king]

"Robert-Houdin" was Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin (1805-1871), a famous French magician from whom Harry Houdini (who was an admirer) took his name. Robert-Houdin was skilled at creating illusions, conjuring things or making them disappear, etc. - the David Copperfield or David Blaine of his day. He was persuaded by Napoleon III to come out of retirement in the mid-1850s to quell a revolt in French Algeria by mesmerizing the locals with a series of magic tricks. Robert-Houdin had a kind of magic duel with the Marabouts, Algerian holy men who were likewise adept at tricks such as eating glass. The episode is interesting for what it reveals about Napoleon III’s dedication to showmanship, illusion, spectacle, etc. He believed that if the people (whether French or Algerian) were entertained, then they wouldn’t rebel against him - and in some ways he was proved right. Things quieted down in Algeria, for a time at least, after Robert-Houdin’s magic feats, and Napoleon III held onto power in France for a total of 22 years.

Art obviously played a part in the spectacle of Napoleon III’s reign, and I think he used the Salon des Refusés as an amusing distraction from, for instance, the problems he was having in Mexico. Politicians today still use these sorts of distractions - though maybe paintings aren’t necessarily their chosen medium anymore.

[Jessica]

In a related thought, how was Napoleon III viewed by the rest of Europe? I think he had some big ideas for modernizing France (and hosting the World's Fair in 1855 and 1867 was a part of the PR for that). But given that France was one of the most powerful nations in Europe in the mid/late 1800s, was Napoleon III seen as a bully, was he generally well-respected, or were there clear divisions of love/hate for him? (I know Victor Hugo hated him!)

Jessica
Book Club Editor

[ross_king]

Napoleon III had uneasy and sometimes complex relations with the rest of Europe, as you might expect of someone who was so powerful. His relations with the British were generally good: the British and French had been allies in the Crimean War (1854-6). He assisted Italian unification insofar as he supported the Piedmontese in their war against Austria in 1859 (this is the war out of which Meissonier’s painting Napoleon III at the Battle of Solferino comes). But he opposed unification insofar as French soldiers protected Rome (and the pope) from the nationalist forces of Giuseppe Garibaldi. He was unpopular in the United States (or at least with the North) because of his intervention in Mexico, which violated the Monroe Doctrine. He supported (subtly) the South in the Civil War, because anything that weakened the USA's influence would be good for France.

At home, his relations with his subjects were equally uneasy. He came to power thanks to a military coup, something for which many Frenchmen (especially the socialists and republicans) could never forgive him. His rule was authoritarian, but opposition to his rule managed to express itself throughout the regime: riots were a regular feature of life in Paris during the Second Empire. But late in his reign Louis-Napoleon instituted a form of parliamentary democracy and removed some of the restrictions on the press (I describe some of this in Chapters 28 and 29). Despite a very vocal opposition, he went on to win a plebiscite in 1870 (though the election might not have been entirely “free and fair”).

In the end, Napoleon III seems to have stayed in power thanks not only to the support of the army but also by the prosperity that he brought to France as well as the “bread and circuses” he provided (see Robert-Houdin, above).

This is departing a bit from Jessica's question, but the link between Impressionism and politics is an interesting but difficult one. Manet was certainly a republican who opposed Napoleon III’s regime almost from the beginning. His painting The Execution of Maximilian (see Chapter 22) is no doubt a none-too-subtle critique of Napoleon III’s Mexican adventure. Manet’s friend Émile Zola was an extremely vocal opponent of Napoleon III. But the most socially and politically committed of the group of painters was Camille Pissarro, who became an anarchist. The best book on this subject is Philip Nord’s Impressionism and Politics: Art and Democracy in the Nineteenth Century (Routledge, 2000).

As for Meissonier, he’s sometimes seen as a toady for Napoleon III because all of the honors he won during the Second Empire, but (as I hope I show in the book) that’s not entirely fair. He seems to have been a republican throughout his life, a peaceable one who abhorred political violence. However, in Chapter 12 I discuss the way in which Meissonier began “cooperating” with Louis-Napoleon’s regime, that is, by foregoing inflammatory images (such as Remembrance of Civil War) and producing more pleasingly patriotic scenes.

A painter’s responses to the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune were the true tests of his/her politics. I hope we’ll have a chance to discuss both of them in another thread ...

[Mariposa]

I have completed reading through Chapter 33 so I guess I can attempt some comments on the Paris Commune and etc. I thought the whole thing was very tragic.

A wing of the Louvre up in flames with the loss of 100,000 books..murals in the Hotel de Ville turned to ash...It reminds me of my very strong reaction to the destruction and looting of the museum in Iraq during the beginning of the current Iraqi war.

I know I should be more upset about the loss of lives, and that does upset me, but when art and books are looted, defaced and destroyed....not matter what side I am taking politically, I find that disheartening.

Meissoner's response is The Ruins of the Tuileries, while Manet painted The Barricade. Their politics clearly affected what they decided to paint.

There seems in hindsight to have been excess on both sides.

All totalitarian regimes (left and right) have been brutal in regards to freedom of expression and that has always had a dire affect on art.

Lizabeth

[ross_king]

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dianearbus wrote:
I know I should be more upset about the loss of lives, and that does upset me, but when art and books are looted, defaced and destroyed....not matter what side I am taking politically, I find that disheartening.

Lizabeth

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I agree - it’s extremely disheartening. War is always a crime against culture as well as against humanity. The loss of life and the loss of art during the suppression of the Paris Commune are depressing to think about. It’s terrible to imagine how many works of art have been lost over the centuries due to wars, from the art treasures destroyed during the Sack of Rome in 1527 to the Buddhas of Bamyan in Afghanistan that were destroyed by the Taliban and then the looting of the Iraq National Museum. The more things change, the more they stay the same ...