Certain Artists E-Book

J.-k. Huysmans

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 273

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Certain Artists makes for compelling reading. Huysmans' idiosyncratic assessments throw light on his aesthetic preoccupations, past and present, and hint at the spiritual journey he was about to undertake. It includes over 140 black and white illustrations, as well as an introduction, setting the book in the context of its time, comprehensive notes, and a glossary of the artists mentioned.First published in 1889, but never before translated into English, this second collection of J.-K. Huysmans' art criticism serves as a companion to the author's iconoclastic Modern Art (L'Art moderne) of 1883. Unlike the earlier volume, Huysmans wastes little time lambasting the art of the establishment, the Academic painters whose work had lined the annual Salon for years. Instead, he concentrates on a series of his own artistic enthusiasms, which he explores with his trademark spleen and invective. There are extended analyses of Edgar Degas's controversial portraits of women at their toilette; of Odilon Redon's monstrous and disturbing engravings, of Gustave Moreau's heiratic paintings that had such a powerful influence on Against Nature; and of Félicien Rops, whose Satanic engravings, particularly his images of women as agents of the devil, would haunt Huysmans' subsequent novel, Là-bas, of 1891.

Leseprobe

ABOUTTHE TRANSLATOR

Brendan King is a freelance writer, reviewer and translator with a special interest in late nineteenth-century French fiction. His Ph.D. was on the life and work of J.-K. Huysmans.

His previous translations of Huysmans’ work for Dedalus include Là-Bas: A Journey into the Self, Parisian Sketches, Marthe, Against Nature, Stranded, The Cathedral (a revised and updated edition of Clara Bell’s 1898 translation), The Vatard Sisters, Drifting, and Modern Art.

He also edited Robert Baldick’s definitive biography The Life of J.-K. Huysmans, which was published in paperback by Dedalus in 2005.

CONTENTS

ABOUTTHE TRANSLATOR

INTRODUCTION

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

CERTAIN ARTISTS (CERTAINS)

I.         DILETTANTISM – PUVIS DE CHAVANNES – GUSTAVE MOREAU – DEGAS

II.        BARTHOLOMÉ – RAFFAËLLI – STEVENS – TISSOT – WAGNER – CÉZANNE – FORAIN

III.       CHÉRET – WHISTLER

IV.        FÉLICIEN ROPS

V.         PRICES – JAN LUYKEN – THE MONSTER

VI.      THE MUSEUMOF DECORATIVE ARTSAND WELL-COOKED ARCHITECTURE

VII.     IRON – MILLET

VIII.GOYA AND TURNER – THE STATE HALLATTHE LOUVRE – BIANCHI

NOTES

GLOSSARYOF ARTISTS

BOOKS BY J.-K. HUYSMANS AVAILABLE FROM DEDALUS

COPYRIGHT

INTRODUCTION

Published in 1889, Certains (Certain Artists) was J.-K. Huysmans’ second collection of art criticism. In many ways it can be seen as a companion volume to the first, L’Art moderne (Modern Art), which appeared six years before, and Huysmans himself described it as ‘completing’ his earlier book. Like L’Art moderne, Certains comprises a mixture of previously published reviews and specially written pieces, with many of the artists whose work Huysmans found particularly compelling, such as Gustave Moreau, Edgar Degas, Jean-Louis Forain, Jean-François Raffaëlli and Odilon Redon, featuring prominently in both volumes.

Despite these surface resemblances, however, the two collections are strikingly different in tone and intent. L’Art moderne established a clear dichotomy between the official, effectively State-sponsored art of the annual Salon and the new group of Independent artists who would come to be known as the Impressionists, with Huysmans unequivocally condemning the former and giving his aesthetic support – albeit not always unqualified – to the latter. By contrast, Certains makes little reference to Academic art, and Huysmans’ artistic bêtes noirs, William Bouguereau, Antonin Cabanel and Jean-Léon Gérôme, barely even merit a passing insult. Part of the reason for this was that by the end of the 1880s the battle between the Academic art institution and Independent artists had been all but won. When he came to prepare his previously published reviews of the Salon for inclusion in Certains, Huysmans saw no need to reprint his attacks on painters such as Bouguereau and Gérôme, who he had not spared in L’Art moderne, and instead concentrated on the artists whose work truly fascinated him. The death of Cabanel – a frequent target of Huysmans’ abuse over the years – in the same year as the publication of Certains seems symbolic in this regard: for Huysmans to have spent his time berating the stalwarts of the Salon with the same venom he had in L’Art moderne would have been to flog a dead horse.

But the differences between the two books go beyond the polemic about Academicism in art, and reflect not just the broader social, cultural and economic developments of the 1880s – the impact of entrepreneurial, privately-owned art galleries on the art market for example, or the fin-de-siècle fascination with spiritualism and the occult – but also, on a more personal level, the progressive change in Huysmans’ political and existential outlook on life.

Huysmans’ estrangement from Zola’s materialist-based conception of Naturalism was marked by a corresponding drift rightwards in political terms. He came to see democratic reform as a pollution of social and cultural values, a prostration to the gaudy, commercialised tastes of the masses. Turning his back on Zola’s progressive, albeit bourgeois, brand of Republicanism, Huysmans’ views became increasingly reactionary, something reflected in his choice of literary friends during this period: Léon Bloy, Auguste Villiers de l’Isle Adam, and Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, all three of whom were Catholics and whose political views, if unorthodox, could be described as anti-progressive and illiberal.

While in L’Art moderne, Huysmans had claimed that the vast field of contemporary reality was open for modern artists to explore and represent, there is no such optimism in Certains. Instead, he inverts Hippolyte Taine’s theory of the social milieu and its influence on an artist’s work, and his contention is not that artists represent their period, but rather that the best artists work in reaction against the detestable times in which they live. Here, revulsion and hatred are the keywords that animate an artist’s vision, more than truthfulness or verisimilitude. In Certains, the vein of pessimism and misanthropy that can be traced in Huysmans’ fictional work across the decade, from À vau-l’eau (Drifting) of 1882, to En rade (Stranded) of 1887, found a corresponding expression in the work of the artists he admired – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he interpreted their work in the light of his own increasingly negative and reactionary feelings.

Comparing the analyses of works by Degas in the two books, for example, there seems to be a world of difference in approach. In L’Art moderne, Huysmans praised Degas’ truthfulness to life in his depiction of music hall singers and ballet dancers, vaunting the artist’s refusal to prettify or romanticise his images of women, as Academic artists tended to do. But in Certains, this kind of verisimilitude in terms of external representation is no longer sufficient. Instead, Huysmans sees in Degas’ portraits of women at their toilette images that reflect his increasingly misogynistic vision of women as irredeemably degenerate – not to say demonic – creatures.

The longest essay in the book, an extended analysis of the work of Félicien Rops, is a case in point. Rops had a certain vogue among a particular class of bourgeois male, partly because he produced a significant quantity of erotica which could be accessed via a hermetic network of ‘bibliophiles’ who dealt in privately-printed limited editions of his more risqué work. In 1882, at a period when his renown in Paris was at its highest, Rops produced a series of five engravings issued under the title Les Sataniques (Satanics). The theme of the plates was the infernal coupling of Satan and Woman, in which Satan represented the principle of Lust, and Woman represented human perversity, the intermediary between the Devil and mankind. It was through Woman that man became possessed by the spirit of Lust, and as Woman was the servant of the Devil she contaminated every man she touched. In such a symbolic schema it is easy to see a link between moral or spiritual contamination and contemporary social issues – the economic and social threat to bourgeois values posed by the rise of feminism and the ‘New Woman’, for example, or the spectre of syphilis, which at the time was popularly assumed to be transmitted by women, together with the allied problem of prostitution, which attained record levels during the Belle Époque.

Through images like those in Les Sataniques, Rops provided Huysmans with a potent icon of Woman, that of the succubus, who attacks men’s minds as they sleep and saps their bodily strength through illicit sexual intercourse. Although Huysmans’ dissatisfaction with Naturalism was obviously part of a larger cultural and political reaction, the readiness with which he adopted the iconic image of the succubus in his work – it would become a central motif in his 1891 novel Là-bas, for example – clearly shows that this discontent was linked to the literary and artistic movement’s failure to provide an adequate symbolic representation of women. Indeed, Huysmans makes the point explicitly himself:

At a time when materialist art sees nothing but hysterics consumed by their ovaries, or nymphomaniacs whose brains beat in the region of their loins, [Rops] celebrated not the contemporary woman, not the Parisienne, whose affected graces and dubious adornments eluded his dexterity, but the timeless, Essential Woman, the poisonous and naked Beast, the mercenary of Darkness, the absolute servant of the Devil.

Like his study of Degas, Huysmans’ analysis of Rops is as much a product of his own state of mind as it is an objective account of the artist’s work. Rops himself recalled how, when Huysmans came to see him in his studio in Belgium, despite the fact that Les Sataniques represented a very small percentage of his total output, it was only this series of engravings that Huysmans was interested in looking at, and which he would later make the cornerstone of his essay.

Although today Certains is one of the least well-known of Huysmans’ books, it remains a significant one in terms of his development as a writer. It sheds light on a decisive period in Huysmans’ literary career, and can be seen as a bridge between two phases of his stylistic evolution: a shift from the Decadent iconography that had permeated À rebours and which gave it its distinctive appeal, to a darker, more extreme spiritual vision that would reach its culmination in Là-bas, which delved into the controversial theme of contemporary Satanism in Paris. Huysmans’ descent into the occult world, and his subsequent conversion to Catholicism, are both prefigured in the subject matter and iconography of Certains.

If L’Art moderne was the high-water mark of Huysmans’ progressive modernity, Certains embodies the reaction against it. Again, the example of female representation is instructive: while L’Art moderne featured generally positive assessments of work by Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Eva Gonzales and Kate Greenaway, not a single female artist is mentioned by name in Certains.

In hindsight, the book effectively represents Huysmans’ farewell to modern art. With the exception perhaps of his enthusiasm for the work of the young Catholic painter Charles-Marie Dulac, on whom he pinned his hopes for a renewal of mystical art until the painter’s untimely death in 1898, Huysmans would progressively turn away from contemporary art. After 1889, he would concentrate instead on the religiously-inspired works of the Primitives. This would eventually culminate in the publication of Trois primitifs (‘Three Primitive Painters’), his studies on Matthias Grünewald, the ‘Master of Flémalle’ (now generally considered to be Robert Campin), and the unknown artist of a painting in the Frankfort Museum. Published in 1905, this would be the last volume in Huysmans’ ‘trilogy’ of books on art.

The Writing ofCertains

Certains concentrates more on individual artists than on exhibitions, and includes a more diverse range of subjects than L’Art moderne. Alongside extracts from Huysmans’ reviews of the 1884, 1885 and 1887 Salons – notably pieces on Puvis de Chavannes, Bartholomé, Raffaëlli and Whistler – and a number of short articles that had appeared in La Revue indépendante, La Cravache Parisienne, and La Revue illustrée between 1880 and 1888, Certains also contains a series of more in-depth essays, the most significant of which – those on Moreau, Degas, Chéret, Rops, Redon and Jan Luyken – were written between 1888-89, and amount to over half the book.

Huysmans first reference to the idea of a new collection of art criticism was in the spring of 1888. For the past year he had been working on a novel set on ‘the fringe of the clerical world’, about Karl-Wilhelm Naundorff’s claim to be the legitimate heir to the French throne. In the course of his researches into this Monarchist conspiracy which, as Robert Baldick puts it in The Life of J-K Huysmans, ‘owed much to supernatural revelation, and which had attracted a considerable following of prophets, spiritualists and miracle workers’, Huysmans would encounter an assorted collection of mystics, spiritualists, conspiracy theorists, unfrocked priests, and those on the margins of the occult – a portent of things to come.

By March of 1888, however, the book had stalled. Possibly Huysmans’ interest in Naundorff’s political intrigues paled in comparison to the stories of contemporary occultism he was now beginning to uncover, but whatever the reason for his writing block, he decided to use the occasion to take out his frustrations with his new publisher, Pierre-Victor Stock. In Huysmans’ eyes Stock’s lacklustre promotion of his recently-published novella, Un dilemme (‘A Dilemma’), had resulted in abysmal sales. As he complained to his Dutch friend, Arij Prins:

As for me – I’m fed up. Stock is a complete imbecile. He’s done nothing in the way of promotion. I’m irritated with him – I’ve almost a mind to break our contract. For this reason, and to annoy him – as he hasn’t kept his promises and to stick a couple of fingers up at him – I’m going to do a book on art – reprint a few good articles from La Revue independante, then write some studies on Rops, Chéret, Wisthler [sic] – rework one on Moreau – and a few notes on some other painters. It will complete my book on modern art. That’s tempting enough for me, even though it’ll delay my novel – but I was only on the second chapter anyway.

(Huysmans to Arij Prins, 10 March 1888)

But no sooner had he started working again there were more problems. During periods when he was writing Huysmans frequently suffered from bouts of ill health – throughout his life references to insomnia, indigestion, neuralgia, rheumatism, toothache and problems with his eyes appear like a refrain in his correspondence – and Certains was no exception, as he told the Belgian writer Jules Destrée:

I was working on this [book of art criticism], but another two-week interruption – my left eye is ill. Forbidden to work in the evening, ordered to read as little as possible during the day… I’ve got a sort of conjuntivitis which at the moment is resistant to eye-drops and ointments.

(Huysmans to Jules Destrée, April 1888)

The degree to which these ailments were psychosomatic is difficult to say, but certainly Huysmans’ sense of well-being was affected by events around him, and during this period he felt that death, disease and misery were afflicting everyone he knew. In another letter to Destrée written shortly afterwards, he returned to the same theme, this time elaborating on the various problems plaguing his literary friends – Léon Bloy, who seemed to be in a continual state of poverty and misfortune, Villiers de l’Isle Adam, who had been diagnosed with cancer and was living in a precarious state, Paul Verlaine, who was lapsing into alcoholism, and Barbey d’Aurevilly, who was ill and who would die from a haemorrage less than a year later:

I told you about the horror of my existence at the moment, my distressing state of spirit, my distaste for work, everything. Others here are doing little better. Bloy works, but is not what you’d call happy. Villiers passes his time prostrate in bars, amid idiots and piles of beer glasses, poor Verlaine is sick in mind and spirit, d’Aurevilly is subsiding into old-age after the illness that recently struck him. I see nothing but misfortune and ruin in all the people around me who I love…

I’m still, not being able to work on account of my eyes and my problems with a long-standing work [Là-bas], in the middle of a book on art [Certains] – but everything’s at a standstill. I’ve got stuff to do for a book on Raffaëlli, and for an English magazine, but nothing comes out, and I’m suffering.

(Huysmans to Jules Destrée, 19 June 1888)

But it wasn’t just his own health and that of his literary friends that contributed to Huysmans’ depressed state of mind during the composition of both Là-bas and Certains. His long-standing mistress, Anna Meunier, was suffering from a degenerative disease that progressively incapacitated her and disturbed her mind. The psychological effect this had on Huysmans is reflected in the gloomy forebodings of En rade (1887), in which the notion of general paralysis became a literal metaphor, with the crumbling Chateau de Lourps serving as a symbol of Meunier’s deleterious mental and physical state. Two years after the publication of Certains, Meunier was committed to the Saint Anne asylum in Paris, where she died in 1895.

Such painful experiences could not but have an impact on Huysmans’ emotional state and on his writing. Léon Bloy, who was a close friend at the time but who would shortly fall out with him, gives a revealing portrait of the writer during this period:

If you only knew what sad events were occurring only two steps from me. Poor Huysmans, who has shown himself to be the most admirable friend, came and spent Sunday evening with me. We ate and talked together, tête-à-tête, for several hours. The unfortunate man had just left poor Anna, who seems to be on the point of dying. You can imagine how happy our conversation was…I was suffering like one of the damned. I saw, Henriette, what I’ve never, ever seen, something that very few people would even believe possible… I saw the author of À rebours cry. Oh, he must have such a weight of sorrow pressing on his heart, because he’s not like me and tears don’t come easy to him. In truth, it is too sad…

(Léon Bloy to Henriette L’Huillier, 27 October 1887)

Although Huysmans had mapped out the major pieces he planned to write as early as March 1888, in the event he did not get around to writing them for almost a year. Nevertheless, he completed some short pieces on Tissot, Wagner and Cézanne, and one on auction prices, as well as preparing pieces previously published in La Revue independante, on Bianchi, Millet, Goya and Turner, and two additional pieces on architecture.

Huysmans’ annual summer leave was taken up with a trip to Germany, which would also have its influence on the new book. ‘I have a good friend in Hamburg,’ he told Zola in July, ‘and I shall go and see the paintings of the Primitives in Cologne, Berlin and Dresden.’ The good friend was Arij Prins, and in between sampling the brothels of Hamburg, the two men took in the art museums. It was during a visit to Cassel with Prins that Huysmans saw Matthias Grünewald’s Crucifixion. Grünewald’s depiction of Christ gripped his imagination and formed the inspiration for his conception of ‘supernatural realism’ or ‘mystical Naturalism’, which he later expounded in Là-bas. ‘The Primitives are art in its highest form,’ he told Destrée on his return, ‘and supernatural realism is the only formula, the only true formula, which can exist for me.’

At the beginning of 1889, Huysmans turned his attention to the studies that would form the nucleus of the book, those on Redon, Degas, Chéret, Whistler and Rops. But as he began to write again, Huysmans’ familiar complaints about illness returned:

The truth is that I’ve been slowed down for the last fortnight, with a horrible mucal inflammation, all of which is complicated by a rheumatism in my right leg. In the end, my doctor ordered me to rest completely, regular baths, poultices and mineral water. To the extent that I am now shut up in my bedroom […] And my belly is irritable too, to add to all that.

(Huysmans to Bloy or Gustave Guiches, 15 February 1889)

Nevertheless, Huysmans still managed to complete a succession of pieces during this period. His essay on Redon and the monstrous in art was written during April and May:

I’ve finished an interesting piece on the monstrous in art – about the gargoyles of Notre-Dame, Christian symbolism, and Odilon Redon […] I’ve still got work to do on the Eiffel Tower and the Machine Hall at the Universal Exhibition – a piece on Wisthler [sic], a piece on Degas, and perhaps one on English painting – after which I’ll have practically finished my book of art criticism. I’m thinking therefore that it’ll be published towards the end of the year.

(Huysmans to Arij Prins, 14 May 1889)

Although the essay on English painting was ultimately abandoned – in the event Turner was the only representative of the English artists to appear in Certains – the other pieces were either newly written or, in the case of Whistler, adapted from previously published articles. During June, Huysmans worked on pieces about the Eiffel Tower and the Universal Exhibition – which had just opened the previous month – before turning to what would become the book’s tour de force, his study of Félicien Rops:

I’ve plunged into an infernal – and that’s the appropriate word – work on Rops. I’ve seen his etchings, of which Les Sataniques are admirable. But it’s a hell of a business to convey the complete obscenity and diabolism of his work.

But enough! Once that’s done my book on art will be finished. In the next issue of La Revue independente you’ll find a piece on the Eiffel Tower. I’m pleased with it because all the newspapers have been bought off to promote this piece of pig-iron – no other article in the press has appeared against it.

(Huysmans to Arij Prins, 21 June 1889)

The in-depth study of Rops’ work would take a further two months to complete, delayed no doubt by the on-going saga of Villiers’ terminal illness:

At the moment, I’m overwhelmed with sadness and problems. Villiers is in a hopeless state and is dying […] So, there you have it my friend, I’m running backwards and forwards between my place and the Maison de Santé, all the while expecting to come across Villiers in his death agony – you can imagine how pleasant that is…

I am still working, despite all these problems. I hope to have finished my book of art by the end of the month. Phew! I could do with a holiday – and with not having to go in to work at the office.

(Huysmans to Prins, 8 August 1889)

Less than two weeks later, Huysmans again wrote to Prins, to inform him of Villiers’ death and, coincidentally, the completion of his book:

My dear friend, poor Villiers is dead, and Mallarmé and I buried him yesterday. […] I’ve finished my book of art. I’ve only a few retouches to do, I’m hoping it’ll be done and come out in the shops in October or November. I’m exhausted, worn out, sick of all these goings on with Villiers – I’m off to bed at 8 for a couple of days…

(Huysmans to Prins, 22 August 1889)

Fortunately for Huysmans, the process of proofing and printing was infinitely quicker and smoother with Stock than it had been with his previous publisher, Charpentier, who had held up the publication of L’Art moderne with continual requests to suppress material he felt was injurious to his artistic friends. During the manuscript stage, the new book’s provisional title, Plusieurs (‘Several’), was changed to Certains (literally ‘a few’), and on 15 September, less than a month after it was finished, Huysmans wrote to Odilon Redon to say that the proofed book was ‘now at the printer’.

Critical response

Certains was published by Tresse & Stock at the beginning of November 1889. After the somewhat dissappointing sales of both En rade – the first book to appear under the new imprint two years before in 1887 – and Un dilemme, Huysmans was pleased with the initial reaction to Certains, even before the press reviews had kicked in:

Certains – in the absence of any mention in the press – has caused a violent reaction in the art world, and sold 1200 copies up to the present moment. Which is unheard of for a book of art criticism.

(Huysmans to Arij Prins, 26 November 1889)

What Huysmans left out of this account is just how active he’d been in organising the book’s launch. Although his name was still relatively unfamiliar to ordinary readers, Huysmans’ literary reputation had grown sufficiently in the 1880s that he was now well-known to many influential writers, artists and journalists. Consequently, he used his impressive network of contacts to promote the book, and Stock sent out a large number of complimentary copies to various movers and shakers in the Parisian literary and artistic world, including writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, Émile Zola, Edmond Goncourt, Alphonse Daudet, Paul Bourget and Guy de Maupassant; artists such as Jules Chéret, Albert Bartholomé, Jean-François Raffaëlli, Odilon Redon and Félicien Rops; and art critics such as Théodore Duret, Jean Dolent and Octave Mirbeau – as well as a similar number of prominent writers and artists in Belgium. This advance campaign had the effect of creating a buzz around the book, not least among some of the artists Huysmans either knew or had previously written about, as they searched to see if they’d been mentioned or not. Sometimes, being included was worse than being excluded: Odilon Redon was one artist unhappy about the way in which Huysmans ‘appropriated’ his work in Certains and elsewhere.

Unsurprisingly, given Huysmans’ confrontational style, his unconventional choice of artists (which at the time would have been seen as unrepresentative of the canon accepted by the art establishment), and his sideswipes at fellow art critics – most notably in his opening attack on dilettantism – many reviewers highlighted the book’s controversial aspects:

A book has just been published which is destined to cause a stir in the world of art and artists; it will be much talked about; the author is J.-K. Huysmans, to whom we already owe a very interesting book of art criticism, L’Art moderne, a work of passion and conviction, which had a very big impact on its appearance.

Huysmans is a writer who cannot be read with indifference; he either grips you or revolts you, there is no middle ground; he’s not some eclectic that everyone is interested in; on the contrary, he violently rebels against the promiscuity of admiration, which is one of the most disconcerting symptoms of our era […] As I said at the start, Huysmans’ book will undoubtedly raise storms. But it should be read by anyone with a passion for art.

(Le Moniteur des Arts, 29 November 1889)

Despite the controversial nature of Huysmans’ opinions and the uncompromising style in which he expressed them, many critics nevertheless reacted positively to the book, even when they actively disagreed with him. The reviewer of L’Estafette (a paper whose banner motto read ‘Order and Progress’), for example, took issue with Huysmans’ diatribe against dilettantism, arguing that it was perfectly possible to like both Delacroix and Bastien-Lepage, but such disagreements didn’t prevent him from recommending the book to the paper’s readers:

Here is yet more literature about art! In front of a painting, an engraving or a watercolour, what does it matter to know what any man – even a critic – thinks about it? In this case, however, our interest is a bit keener, as there may be a legitimate curiosity in knowing what J.-K. Huysmans’ preferences are, in accompanying him on the highly original walk he takes through art, and in listening to what a ‘certain writer’ is going to tell us about ‘certain artists’.

Reading this book is very entertaining: at the beginning the author launches a full charge against the dilettanti and the eclectic: he recognises in them nothing but imbecility or cowardice; he disapproves of promiscuity in admiration. If you like Delacroix’s Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, then you cannot tolerate ‘those operetta-milkmaids dressed up by that Grévin of the cabaret, by that Siraudin of the suburbs, the late Jules Bastien-Lepage’. This is the theory of J.-K. Huysmans, which he takes to its extreme with a violence, an exaggeration, and an excess that is, at times, amusing. Personally, I believe one can very sincerely be ecstatic in front of Delacroix while also admiring Bastien-Lepage, about whom the author is too severe….

Here and there a few amusing reflections, a few well-crafted paradoxes, a few curious theories, a few original insights. […] And what’s more, all this is said in a language that enchants me, whatever one thinks about how strange it is; his lively, colourful descriptions alone make Certains worth reading; it is, without a doubt, one of the most interesting books of art criticism.

(L’Estafette, 17 November 1889)

The reviewer of La Revue des Deux Mondes, a politically conservative journal that saw itself as the guardian of ‘high culture’, was more grudging, taking Huysmans to task over his book’s somewhat arch, enigmatic title, and its stylistic ‘faults’:

Under cover of this bizarre title – a little pretentious, moreover, and above all obscure – Huysmans has quite simply gathered ‘certain’ articles on ‘certain’ painters that he has published in ‘certain’ magazines: on Gustave Moreau, on Degas, on Wisthler [sic], on Félicien Rops, etc. We find here all of Huysmans’ usual faults, which we are careful not to reproach him with, since they constitute almost all his originality: a coldly furious style, more drole than truly humorous, and paradoxes that are, in general, more amusing than risqué. However, amid all this, a few just ideas surprise one or strike one, and you ask yourself, a little anxiously, if Huysmans, who was born with an innate capacity for reason, has not deliberately destroyed his own natural common sense – assuming at least that he’s not concealing it for fun, in order to exasperate the ‘bourgeois’ even more, or to amuse a few dilettantes.

(La Revue des Deux Mondes, 1 December 1889)

Émile de Molènes in La Liberté – whose masthead carried the portentous tag, ‘All social institutions must have as their goal the amelioration of the moral, intellectual and physical destinty of the poorest and more populous class’ – took a more moralistic view. De Molènes’ criticisms of the book, the subject matter of which he saw as having a deleterious effect on the reader’s state of mind, recalled the moralistic outrage that had generally greeted Huysmans’ Naturalist novels. De Molènes also attacked Huysmans pretension to have ‘discovered’ certain artists whose talents he felt were already recognised. De Molènes might have been on stronger ground here if La Liberté had itself done anything in the way of promoting new artists, but the review of Certains was practically the first time Odilon Redon’s name had even appeared in the paper. Likewise, de Molènes repetition of Huysmans’ erroneous spelling of Whistler’s name implies that the artist and his work was unfamiliar to him, despite his protestations to the contrary:

M. Huysmans has just devoted a book, entitled Certains, to several artists of our time, those he prefers, it goes without saying, or at least those whose talent corresponds most directly to his preoccupations as a thinker and to his aesthetics as a writer. Because M. Huysmans is both a thinker and a writer. I could also add that he is a painter, so great is his obsession with a particular form and his search for the right image applied to thought […].

That said, I feel obliged to note, first of all, that M. Huysmans seems to be striking a great blow in order to force open doors that are already open – open in the sense that this armed and helmeted champion had no need of any of these trappings. However contemptible it may be in the eyes of M. Huysmans – who does not allow any eclecticism in matters of art – critics have not been waiting for the book entitled Certains in order to render full and complete justice to the merits of artists who make up Huysmans’ gallery.

Who are these artists? Gustave Moreau, Degas, Wisthler (sic), Rops, Redon, Chéret, all painters and engravers to whom, for years, we have always lavished praise and encouragement. M. Huysmans, therefore, has no basis in posing as Christopher Columbus vis-à-vis these talents, who have been variously appreciated, it is true, but always recognised, each at his proper level, with perfect sincerity. […]

Coming too late to this party, M. Huysmans was therefore only able to distinguish himself by the particularly studied and brilliant form with which he invested his admiration for the artists of his choice. In this respect, his book is extremely curious, not so much for the whole as for certain chapters – among others, the one devoted to Félicien Rops, and the one entitled ‘The Monster’ – chapters in which the author has appropriated the works he exalts, and has transformed the material into new pen paintings, as vibrant as masterpiece etchings themselves.

Unfortunately, I cannot insist on this point, because Satanism and Lust enter directly into these works, and I do not wish to encourage readers with an art whose main idealism is to be demonic. I even believe that those with too much of a taste for such research and for such evocations are to be pitied. Living in good health and in a balanced mental state with obsessions like these is a problem that it is not always safe to resolve. In any case, it is much wiser to choose healthier and more refreshing food for your mind.

(Émile de Molènes, La Liberté, 17 November 1889)

Despite de Molènes’ criticism, it is indisputable that Huysmans’ constant promotion of artists such as Moreau, Redon, Degas and Forain, both in his fiction and his art criticism, was at least part of the reason they had become so well-known in the first place.

Proof of this can be seen in a review of an exhihibition of Jules Chéret’s work shortly after the appearance of Certains. Writing in Art et Critique, Jules Antoine noted that ‘Chéret has seen his reputation growing day by day’, and referenced ‘the remarkable study that J.-K. Huysmans devoted to him in Certains’.

A few months earlier, a generally positive review of Certains