Modern Art E-Book

J.-k. Huysmans

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Dedalus European Classics
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 438

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

First published in 1883, but never before translated into English, this collection of J.-K. Huysmans' art criticism reveals the author of Against Nature to be as combative in his aesthetic opinions as he was in his literary ones. At a time when the Impressionists were still being ridiculed, or worse still ignored, Huysmans defiantly proclaimed Degas to be the best painter in France. He filled his pages with analyses of the works of artists whose genius and popularity have been confirmed by time: Gustave Caillebotte, Paul Gauguin, Mary Cassatt, Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau.Huysmans intersperses his reviews of these independent artists with those of the annual Official Salon, whose conventional and dryly academic works he lambasts with his customary gusto and invective.This is the first complete translation of L'Art moderne, and includes 200 black and white illustrations, notes and a glossary of artists.

Leseprobe

J.-K. Huysmans at home, 11 Rue de Sèvres, Paris. Behind him on the wall is a picture by Jean-Louis Forain. See here.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

MODERN ART (L’ARTMODERNE)

THE SALONOF 1879

EXHIBITIONOFTHE INDEPENDENTSIN 1880

THE OFFICIAL SALONOF 1880

THE OFFICIAL SALONOF 1881

EXHIBITIONOFTHE INDEPENDENTSIN 1881

APPENDIX I: EXHIBITIONOFTHE INDEPENDENTSIN 1882

APPENDIX II: THE OFFICIAL SALONOF 1882

GLOSSARYOF ARTISTS

ABOUTTHE TRANSLATOR

COPYRIGHT

INTRODUCTION

First established in 1667 by Louis XIV, over the course of the 18th century the biannual Salon des Beaux Arts became the most important institution in the French art world, the means by which artists acquired their reputations and sold their work – and also the means by which a powerful establishment controlled the representation of the world to its citizens.

By the 19th century, the institution had become an annual event. The Salon ran from May to July, and attracted tens of thousands of visitors who would flock to see the thousands of works of art on display, especially on Sundays when entrance was free. During the 1880s, the number of exhibits averaged around 5,000, including sculpture, engraving, watercolour, and fine art painting. The Salon was surrounded by a whole superstructure of cultural production, of illustrated books and newspapers in which journalists and writers reviewed and promoted the work being shown, and explained its significance to the public. For a writer, writing about the Salon became a way to attract attention, to become known and to influence the public debate. During the 19th century it was practically a literary rite of passage: Stendhal, Baudelaire, Gautier, Goncourt, Zola, all turned their hand to reviewing the Salon at important stages in their careers.

Although better known today as a novelist than as an art critic, J.-K. Huysmans (1848-1907) was no exception. In the 1870s and early 1880s, when he was still trying to make a name for himself in the literary world and to reach a wider readership, he too assumed the mantle of art critic and began to write reviews of the Salon.

In the past, writers often tried to justify their decision to write about the Salon through their own personal connection to art: Gautier made much of the fact that he was a former art student, the Goncourts were known to be passionate art collectors (and Edmond’s younger brother, Jules, was himself an accomplished watercolourist), and when Zola came to publish his ‘Salon of 1866’, he dedicated it to his childhood friend, Cézanne, reminding him that they’d “been talking about art and literature for the past ten years.”

Again, Huysmans was no exception. In interviews and profiles during the early 1880s he would play on his artistic ancestry, claiming that he was descended from the Flemish painter Cornelis Huysmans (1648-1727), and that he was the “last descendant” of a long line of painters, running from father to son down through the generations. In an autobiographical profile written for the press in 1885 he described himself, only half tongue-in-cheek, as “an inexplicable amalgam of a refined Parisien and Dutch painter”.

Indeed, art played a significant role in the construction of Huysmans’ public image, and his early career both as a writer and a journalist revolved around art and art criticism. His first published piece of writing was a review of a landscape exhibition in 1867, and throughout the early 1870s he would write a string of reviews of art exhibitions, profiles of painters and analyses of paintings – mostly for Brussels-based journals.

Huysmans’ fiction was equally art-centred, either making specific references to painters or works of art, or practising what Théophile Gautier termed transpositions d’art – literary passages that described or invoked through the written word, real or imaginary works of art. The prefatory poem to Le Drageoir à épices (The Dish of Spices), Huysmans’ first collection of prose poems published in 1874, described the “principal subjects” treated in the book – which included fictionalised stories from the lives of painters such as Adrian Brauwer and Cornelius Bega – as “old sculpted medals, enamels, faded pastels, etchings and prints”. In 1880, when Huysmans published his first collection of stories, he aptly entitled it Croquis parisiens (Parisian Sketches), and with its descriptive scenes of café-concerts and circuses, its evocations of suburban Parisian landscapes, and its sketches of working-class characters such as the baker, the chestnut-seller and the streetwalker, Huysmans seemed to be doing with the pen what Edgar Degas and the Impressionists were doing with the brush. Even his novels didn’t escape this imaginative fascination with the artistic image, and some of the most striking scenes in his fiction revolve around iconic transpositions d’art, such as that of Gustave Moreau’s painting of Salomé in À rebours (Against Nature) of 1884, Matthias Grünewald’s Crucifixion in Là-bas (Là-bas: A Journey into the Self) of 1891, and Fra Angelico’s Coronation of the Virgin in La Cathédrale (The Cathedral) of 1898.

All of which, if it didn’t exactly constitute a comprehensive, academic training in art history, put Huysmans in a better position than most when it came to discussing works of art. To his sense of a personal connection with art he added two vital qualities: a unique, not to say idiosyncratic, writing style, and an acute perception of the visual world, which seemed to fix itself indelibly on his retina: “Huysmans is an eye”, as Rémy de Gourmont succinctly put it in The Book of Masks (1896). He not only knew what he liked – and more vehemently what he didn’t like – he had the power to convey his emotional and aesthetic feelings through his writing: “Huysmans describes in the same way others paint”, noted the French critic Brigitte Cabirol.

In many ways Huysmans couldn’t have chosen a better time to launch himself into art criticism, or indeed a better method than the one he used in L’Art moderne, the first collection of his art criticism published in 1883. In the second half of the 19th century the art world began to change. It was no longer the case that the Salon represented the sole means of access to – and the all-powerful arbiter of – the artistic output of the nation. Instead, the Salon was increasingly being seen for what it had become, part of a State apparatus that defined and limited what art could be, and narrowly determined how people could see it. Unsurprisingly, an increasing number of artists were becoming more and more dissatisfied with the situation.

The first major crack in the edifice came in 1863, when so many paintings were refused by the Salon jury that to quell the subsequent outcry, Napoleon III established a Salon des Refusés. If anything, this exacerbated the situation. One of the paintings exhibited at the Refusés was a provocative and incendiary work by Édouard Manet, Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe, a contemporary scene of a naked woman who stares unabashedly out at the viewer and who is sitting and talking with two clothed men, while another naked woman bathes in the river behind them. The subsequent newspaper outcry against it helped turn the work into an attraction that rivalled anything on display at the official Salon. But Manet’s controversial painting also showed that a new style and movement in art was taking place, one that didn’t conform to the conventions, rules and traditions of the École des Beaux Arts, the training ground of so many artists, and of the small cabal of men who formed the Salon’s selection juries and ran it as an institution.

By the early 1870s, a group of artists who saw themselves as outside the Salon tradition, the ‘Independents’ as they called themselves, began to come to the fore, eventually organising their own exhibition in April 1874. It was in the wake of this watershed event, after a dismissive journalist referred to the “mere impressions” which, in his opinion, was all their pictures amounted to, that the group acquired the name that stuck with the public: the Impressionists.

Given how universally popular Impressionism is today – indeed, it has almost become a byword for art that is ‘nice’ and ‘pretty’ – it might be difficult for some people to conceive just how radical, how unpopular, and how controversial the paintings of the Impressionists were at the time. To many critics – as well as to a conservative, politically reactionary public – the pictures seemed garish, unfinished and morally suspect, the products of artists who were untalented, if not even a bit sick in the head. (Indeed, it was suggested that the Impressionist style was a result of poor eyesight or some form of neurological disease afflicting the painter’s sense of colour, something that Huysmans, swayed by contemporary researches in physiology and psychology, gave a certain credence to. See Note 8 on here for a fuller explanation.)

An article that appeared in Le Figaro just after the opening of the first ‘Impressionist’ exhibition, gives a flavour of the abuse that was heaped on the movement and its practitioners:

The Rue le Peletier is certainly unlucky. After the fire at the Opera, here is a new disaster afflicting the neighbourhood. An exhibition at Durand-Ruel has just opened which is described as being ‘painting’. But if an innocent passerby, drawn in by the flags decorating the façade, should enter, an appalling spectacle presents itself before his fearful eyes. Five or six lunatics, one of them a woman, misfortunates suffering from the madness of ambition, have come together to exhibit their art works.

Some people burst out laughing in front of these things; as for me, I’m aghast. These so-called artists call themselves ‘the Intransigents’, ‘the Impressionists’; they take a canvas, paint and brushes, throw a few colours together at random and imagine the result is a masterpiece. In the same way that lost souls in the Ville-Évrard insane asylum pick up a pebble in the road and imagine they’ve found a diamond. A frightful spectacle of human vanity straying into dementia. It should be made clear to M. Pissarro that trees are not purple, that the sky is not the colour of fresh butter, that in no country can we see the things he paints and that no intelligent person should give themselves up to such aberrations…

And just think of the fatal consequences that exposing the public to such a heap of philistinism can lead. Yesterday, a young man stopped at the Rue le Peletier, and on leaving bit a passerby.

(Le Figaro, 3 April 1874)

However, as with many artistic movements that are derided at their inception, the Impressionists, encouraged by a few critics who took up their cause, gradually began to attract a wider public. Huysmans was fortunate enough, or perceptive enough, to throw himself in with the new art movement at the right time, and as the Impressionists grew in popularity and in reputation, his name was increasingly associated with theirs. So much so, in fact, that one critic, the journalist Félix Fénéon, referred to Huysmans as “the inventor of Impressionism”.

Whether it was a result of deliberate choice or whether it was simply a reflection of the widening fracture running through the art world at the time, Huysmans’ decision to divide L’Art moderne into successive reviews of the Salon and the exhibitions of the Independents was inspired. It is the binary nature of the articles that gives the collection its animus, with Huysmans being alternately stimulated to paroxysms of derision at the tired, cliché-ridden works displayed in the Salon, and to outbursts of enthusiasm for the work of the Independents – or some of them at least. This is one of the reasons why Huysmans’ art criticism – and L’Art moderne in particular – remains so fascinating, bringing to life as it does a significant moment in art history, a shift in power that marked the decline of the establishment system and the rise of a group of independent artists who formed what would become the first great movement of modern art: Impressionism.

The writing and preparation of L’Art moderne.

Although it wouldn’t be published until May 1883, Huysmans originally conceived the idea of a book about art in the spring of 1881. He was almost certainly influenced in this by Émile Zola, the de facto head of the Naturalist movement whose own collection of writings on art, Mes Haines. Causeries litteraires et artistiques (literally ‘My hates: discussions on literature and art’), which included a review of the 1866 Salon and an essay on Édouard Manet, had been published in a new edition just a year previously.

Huysmans outlined his initial plan for the book in a letter to his Belgian friend, the poet Théodore Hannon:

My dear Hannon,

I am busy on an art book, which will be interesting I think, though it’s giving me some difficulty. I’ve reworked my Salons of 1879 and 1880 from top to bottom, I’m now dipping into an enormous study of the Independents. In oil paint up to my neck! I’m going to add to it a piece on modern architecture, the architecture of iron and steel. I’ll then add the Salon of 1881 and try to serve it up hot.

(Huysmans to Théodore Hannon, 29 March 1881)

The intention was to offer it to his new publisher, Georges Charpentier, to whom he’d been introduced by Zola and who was himself an avid art collector. Huysmans may have had the idea of compiling a collection of previously published reviews, but as it turned out this was more problematic than it first appeared, and the material ultimately included in L’Art moderne shows the somewhat unsettled, itinerant nature of his work as an art critic up to that point. It’s true that Huysmans had written numerous reviews and articles about art for newspapers, but they tended to be small, Brussels-based publications, rather than the larger, more prestigious Paris-based journals that would have signalled to his literary peers that he should be taken more seriously as an art critic.

Huysmans’ problem is perhaps best exemplified by the opening review, ‘The Salon of 1879’, originally published in twelve parts by La Voltaire, a Republican journal popularly referred to as ‘le Figaro républicain’ that also included Zola and Goncourt as contributors. If Huysmans had hoped his review of the Salon would become a regular feature he was to be disappointed – the paper unceremoniously ditched him after his first attempt. Reading the piece, which is not so much a review of official art as a demolition of it, it is clear why. Huysmans’ promotion of the then-unfashionable Impressionists, his diatribes against academic painters and the Salon system, and his intemperate language, were practically designed to rub the newspaper’s readers up the wrong way. Complaints were not long in coming – along with threats to withdraw subscriptions. Huysmans’ position became untenable and he later learned that the editor had chosen a more compliant, less controversial critic for the following year’s review of the Salon.

In truth, Huysmans wasn’t exactly surprised by this turn of events. Even before his articles were published he had told Hannon that he and Henry Céard – another ally in the Naturalist movement who had been hired by the newspaper at the same time – “were going to try their hand at great Parisian journalism and turn Le Voltaire into an organ of Naturalism”. Two weeks later, after sending Hannon the first two instalments of his Salon, Huysmans’ described the effect it was having on the paper’s readership:

It’s rattled a few cages here!! The anger and hatred I’m harvesting are unspeakable – Le Voltaire was furious, Zola had to use his influence to make them back down, and they were obliged to put up with my attacks, even the most ferocious – what fun!

(Huysmans to Théodore Hannon, 24 May 1879).

Huysmans had little more luck the next year, when he published his review of the 1880 Salon in La Réforme politique et littéraire, a Naturalist-friendly journal with close ties to Zola. Although Huysmans’ review didn’t spark the same controversy as the year before, he was again out of luck: by 1881 the journal had ceased publication, or at least had changed its focus in order to concentrate on theatre criticism. Huysmans’ review of 1880, was the last ‘Salon’ the paper ever published.

The following year, Huysmans’ attempts to get his Salon review placed satisfactorily in a suitable journal reached an impasse. Aside from some short reviews of individual paintings by James Tissot, Félix Ziem and Léon Belly at the Musée du Luxembourg, the only substantial piece of art criticism he published in 1881 was an essay on the English illustrators Randolph Caldecott, Walter Crane and Kate Greenaway, which had no connection at all with the Salon.

Frustratingly for Huysmans, he was unable to place his review of the Salon that year, and it would remain unpublished until it appeared in L’Art moderne, some two years later. However, not one to waste material he’d already written, when it came to compiling the book, he shoehorned his essay on English illustrators into the 1881 Salon review anyway.

The rest of 1881 was taken up with other writing projects. Huysmans spent several months struggling to write his novel about Paris during the 1870-71 seige, La Faim (Hunger) – which he would abandon shortly afterwards and which remained incomplete – and during the autumn and winter he composed his novella, À vau-l’eau (Drifting).

In the spring of 1882, with the approach of the Salon season, Huysmans returned to his art book idea again, and he updated Hannon on its progress:

My dear friend,

For the moment I am busy preparing a big volume on modern art, comprising the Impressionist aesthetic, the exhibitions of the Official Salons and the Independents for the past three years, the English annuals, iron and steel architecture in modern Paris, and the printing of illustrated books etc. I hope it’ll appear in May…

(Huysmans to Théodore Hannon, 25 March 1882)

But once again, Huysmans’ plans were delayed, initally by a long bout of illness, as he explained to Zola:

I was affected by a methodical cough, beginning at 3 o’clock in the morning precisely, and which continued mechanically until 7 o’clock…This was a cause of stupefaction to the men newspapers call the ‘Princes of Science’. They tapped me on the back, declared in chorus that the chest was good, the bronchi intact and finally, not having found my case related in the medical books, they gave up. Then one of them discovered I must be suffering from a disease of the nerves. At this I was given valerian, asafoetida, bromide – all the antispasmodics. Result: nothing. Finally, they resorted to icy showers, with water at 0˚ centigrade. This was more successful – thanks to this regime, the mechanical cough has stopped. So I spend my time at the public baths, exhibiting my shivering skeleton to the gaze of a fireman, who pulverises my spine under columns of freezing water. My disgust for this ridiculous and painful treatment exceeds the limits of the possible…I still have persistent insomnia…I read in bed, alternately swallowing laurel-cherry water and laudanum…

(Huysmans to Émile Zola, 19 June 1882)

Despite this, Huysmans managed to finish his manuscript and handed it to Charpentier in June. This wasn’t, as he might have hoped, the end of his problems with the book – indeed, the process of preparing the book for the press turned out to be a contentious, ill-tempered and time-consuming one. As had been the case at Le Voltaire, Huysmans found that speaking his mind so freely in public had its drawbacks. Charpentier, as an art collector and a publisher who frequently used artists and engravers to illustrate his books, was put in a difficult position by the manuscript of L’Art moderne, which ferociously criticised many of the artists he had personal and business relationships with. The result was a conflict over what should or shouldn’t be included – or more specifically which artists could or couldn’t be attacked – as Huysmans complained to Zola:

Saw the good Charpentier…I gave him my volume on art. Now he begs me to carry out deep cuts, since I attack painters who give him free drawings for La Vie Moderne [a weekly art journal that Charpentier edited]. We finally came to an agreement with mutual concessions…

(Huysmans to Émile Zola, 19 June 1882)

Huysmans may have been trying to strike a more conciliatory tone with Zola, who had long been friends with Charpentier. Later, he would express himself more forthrightly on the matter to the art critic Gustave Geffroy, complaining that the cuts were hardly mutally agreed and that they’d had a detrimental effect on his text:

It’s full of gaps, of things unexplained, things unconnected, rough bits…but there you go. Emasculated by order of the publisher, this book had whole pages struck out at the proof stage. You can imagine the impossibility of joining it together. Things that should be completed by examples have been completely suppressed. Everything concerning Henner and Cot was mercilessly slashed, and given the impossibility of finding in the streets of the capital two publishers willing to print this piece of wreckage that passes for an art book, I had to submit and, what is more, sprinkle some ash on my sentences here and there.

(Huysmans to Gustave Geffroy, 9 August 1883)

But as with many of Huysmans’ vituperative complaints, his statements need to be taken with a pinch of salt. The two first pieces in the collection were published substantially unchanged from their periodical appearances, so whatever cuts he made were to previously unpublished pieces. It is true that the name of Jean-Jacques Henner (1829-1905) – a painter who relied too heavily on chiaroscuro for Huysmans’ tastes – doesn’t appear in the book, nor does that of Pierre Auguste Cot (1837-1883), a pupil of Alexandre Cabanel and William Bouguereau whose nauseatingly saccharine pictures would have received pretty short shrift at Huysmans’ hands, but while it is a pity not to be able to read what would probably have been entertaining demolitions of the two artists, the existing book still includes plenty in the way of Huysmans’ trademark invective.

By the autumn of 1882, Huysmans was thoroughly fed up with the whole business, as he told Hannon:

There are times when things are so unspeakably mad one can’t even joke about them. I spent an abominable winter with bad, incurable nerves, which incapacitated me for any work and which required cold showers and suffusions of valerian. Try and write an amusing letter in the midde of such a shambles, aggravated by annoyances at the Ministry and with my family! Beginning last winter, continuing through summer, right up to this accursed autumn.

There, my dear friend, are the reasons for my silence – I’m hunkered down in the shitstorm of my own existence, feeling disgust to the highest degree at everything that happens.

(Huysmans to Théodore Hannon, 13 September 1882)

This process would drag on for almost another six months. In the end, the book wasn’t ready to go to press until April of the following year, and was finally published in May. But even then Huysmans’ problems weren’t over. Unsurprisingly, Charpentier wasn’t wholly committed to the book, and Huysmans learned from his friend Léon Hennique that the publisher had been deliberately dragging his heels as regards marketing and distributing it. Again, he wrote to Hannon to give him the full story:

I am shaking off my fearful idleness a little in order to write to you; you ask me for information about the effect produced by the art book. That is quite a story. Charpentier, terrified, despite the cuts he’d imposed on me regarding Henner etc. didn’t put it on sale! It was like this: scared in advance of complaints by those who were attacked and by the reproaches of his friends Gervex and Bastien-Lepage etc, he didn’t even announce its publication, and he finally admitted to Hennique that he would prefer to lose money on it rather than put it on sale; in short, he did his best to kill it. Unfortunately for him, the book nevertheless found its way into the hands of some painters; thereupon there was a general uproar in the studios. The booksellers, who they requested the book from, had to go out and get copies; in short, in spite of everything, the said book has exploded like a bomb in an oil depot – which has also brought me a series of letters, quite badly expressed, but above all stupid and badly spelled!

Whatever happens, the sales will be almost nothing under these circumstances; deep down, I don’t care – it’s a collection of articles; I wanted, in the face of the cowardice and stupidity of French criticism, to state my opinion, to express what I believe to be the truth – in short, to be the first to write how great Degas’ personality is; it’s done, so all is for the best.

(Huysmans to Théodore Hannon, 28 May 1883)

Contemporary responses to L’Art moderne

Charpentier’s reluctance to distribute L’Art moderne seems to have had an impact on the book’s initial coverage in the press, something reflected by the fact the scrapbooks Huysmans filled with newspaper reviews contain fewer clippings devoted to L’Art moderne than to his other books.

Given Huysmans’ partisan stance in favour of the Impressionists and his intemperate attacks on established Salon painters, it was inevitable that press reaction, such as it was, would be divided. Conservative papers predictably dismissed the book. Some, like L’Illustration, were content to puzzle over Huysmans’ contradictory tastes, finding it difficult to see how a supporter of Manet could also be an admirer of Dutch masters like Van Ostade, and complaining that he seemed to denigrate artists who were held in high esteem by everyone else. Others, such as Le Soir and La Paix, were more pointed in their criticisms:

In no fashion, absolutely no fashion, can we accept the artistic theories of J.-K. Huysmans. As a piece of paradox and as a challenge to good taste, to all that is beautiful, to all that is admired and admirable, the book may seem amusing to some minds. But as a study and as a piece of artistic criticism, we advise the author of L’Art moderne to go back to school and study the real masters in these matters. His book has nothing to recommend it, moreover he disparages anyone who has acquired a reputation, and his aphorisms are far too Naturalistic.

(Le Soir, 21 May 1883)

For Huysmans, the only true artists are the Impressionists, the Naturalists, and the Independents, with their cult of splotches and their skill in reproducing the ugly in its modern form. This new conception of art leaves us absolutely cold, and we mention M. Huysmans’ book simply as a curiosity.

(La Paix, 26 June 1883)

But despite these “howls of protest”, as Huysmans referred to them, the book received support in journals that were more open to the new developments in literature and art represented by Naturalism and Impressionism. Huysmans’ personal connections with the Belgian literary and artistic milieu also helped ensure positive notices in periodicals there:

Feline criticism is not J.-K. Huysmans’ style…on the contrary, his idea is to go straight to the point, unhesitatingly, without mincing his words…I understand that the history painters and the purveyors of illustrations for chocolate boxes have squealed a little. As one would. By God! what verve, what a grip he has! The exact, cutting epithet abounds, the turns of phrase are incisive and picturesque…I noted some of his transcriptions of landscapes, by Pissarro and Raffaëlli among others, which are the work of a subtle and compendious mind. And this avant-garde work, which has a whiff of gunpowder about it, is also full of fine and sensible reflections about Impressionism and the leading painters of that school, among which one could certainly point out a masterful criticism of Édouard Manet’s paintings.

(La Jeune Belgique, c.1883)

Huysmans’ literary connections in Paris also guaranteed him at least some favourable reviews, such as that by Paul Alexis in Le Reveil (13 May 1883), who like Huysmans had contributed to Zola’s anti-war collection of short stories, Les Soirées de Médan in 1880. Predictably, perhaps, Alexis praised the book’s author for his “courageous combat on behalf of truth and audacity in art against received prejudice, easy success and overblown reputations”.

But there were other, more independent reviews, notably a dense, in-depth evaluation by the young Paul Bourget in Le Parlement (31 May 1883), who perceptively noted the aesthetic gulf that separated Huysmans from other writers in the Naturalist school such as Zola and Maupassant, and another by the critic Gustave Geffroy:

[L’Art moderne] is a sincere work by a philosophic and literate man. I don’t think the writer compromises a single time about any of those he meets on his way, whatever their name or whatever their reputation. He is always mercilessly honest; and it’s genuinely in the name of modern art that he makes his enquiry, searching out those who have a passion for their times and praising them when he finds them, and shoving to one side all those who look for easy success, gained at the expense of truth.

(Gustave Geffroy, La Justice, 9 August 1883)

What is perhaps more significant, however, than the notices the book received in the press, whether good or bad, was the response of Huysmans’ peers. Tellingly, he received no messages of support from the two writers he might have expected positive reactions from: Zola and Edmond de Goncourt. While Zola actively criticised Huysmans’ opinions, dismissing his praise of Degas and arguing that Courbet was still the master of the Realist school, Goncourt went one further – he ignored the book entirely.

By contrast, Stéphane Mallarmé, the Symbolist poet with whom Huysmans had recently become friends, wrote enthusiastically:

You are the only commentator on art [causeur d’art] whose Salons of previous years one can read from beginning to end and find them more interesting than those of today…What a fine passion for truth you display, with a penetrating eye and a persuasive voice to serve it.

(Stephane Mallarmé to Huysmans, 12 May 1883)

These shifts in literary allegiance are indicators of the aesthetic direction Huysmans was travelling in, though their significance would only really become apparent in the light of his subsequent book, the iconoclastic À rebours of 1884, which effectively marked his parting of ways with Zola and the Naturalists.

Huysmans as art critic

Huysmans’ criticism had a considerable impact on a number of artists at the time, helping to give a wider exposure to those whose names were barely known to the general public. Paul Gauguin was a relative unknown when Huysmans first wrote about him in L’Art moderne, and Pissarro had yet to gain the widespread reputation he later acquired when Huysmans described him as a master landscape painter. It is hard to imagine what Gustave Moreau’s reputation would be today if it were not for Huysmans’ radical reimagining of his work (and the same could be said of Matthais Grünewald, whose name had been almost forgotten when Huysmans wrote about him in the 1890s). Likewise, Odilon Redon’s early career as an artist was given an important boost by Huysmans’ promotion of his work. Although it’s true the artist would later come to feel that Huysmans’ highly personal interpretation of his work amounted to an ‘appropriation’ of it, he was initially grateful for the exposure: “I’m singularly happy – and proud, too – of the section Huysmans has devoted to me,” he told the critic Émile Hennequin.

Perhaps the most unequivocal critical judgement Huysmans makes in L’Art moderne is his recognition of Degas as France’s greatest living painter. Like Baudelaire and Zola before him, Huysmans saw it as part of his job as a critic to find the ‘painter of modern life’. Whereas Baudelaire posited Constantine Guys as a possible contender, and Zola looked to Manet, Huysmans boldly staked his claim on Degas. At the time this was neither a universal nor a popular view, even among those in the literary and artistic world. Zola, for example, far from sharing Huysmans’ high opinion of Degas, dismissed him as “nothing more than a constipated artist with a talent for the pretty”.

It would be unrealistic to expect all of Huysmans’ critical opinions to stand the test of time, but it is nevertheless remarkable how many of the painters he singled out for praise are still considered major figures in the canon. Although it might be objected that the tone Huysmans’ adopts in his scathing attacks on academic painters and established Salon artists hardly belongs to the language of traditional art criticsm, he could also be sensitive and acute in his critical judgements when he chose. His distinction between the painters he saw as truly modern – such as Caillebotte, Manet, and Raffaëlli – as opposed to those who painted in what he considered to be a ‘faux-modern’ style that was acceptable to conventional bourgeois tastes – such as Bastien-Lepage, Gervex, and Carolus-Duran – still holds true today, as does his instinctive recognition that a painter like Fantin-Latour belonged with the former rather than the latter.

Huysmans also deserves credit for being one of the first critics to treat what were previously considered ‘lesser’ genres as seriously as the ‘fine arts’. Huysmans saw Jules Chéret, who made his name with his distinctive lithographic posters advertising circuses and café-concerts, as a genuine artist whose work he considered finer than many of the ‘serious’ artists exhibiting in the Salon, and he would compare the skill of the illustrators of certain children’s books, such as Walter Crane and Kate Greenaway, with that of the Japanese woodblock masters of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

But if Huysmans was a partisan critic, he was also a contradictory and idiosyncratic one. This often makes it harder to evaluate his criticism than that of other writers of the same period. Consistency was not one of Huysmans’ strong points – as his life and career trajectory would prove – and the writer who could praise Degas and Forain for presenting life as it really was, could also laud Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon, whose work seemed to represent its complete antithesis.

Arthur Symons, who was instrumental in promoting Huysmans’ work to readers in Britain during the 1890s, was one of the first writers to also recognise his achievements as a critic:

[Huysmans] the most modern of artists in literature, has applied himself to the criticism – the revelation, rather – of modernity in art…No literary artist since Baudelaire has made so valuable a contribution to art criticism, and [Baudelaire’s] Curiosites Esthetiques are, after all, less exact in their actual study, less revolutionary, and less really significant in their critical judgements, than L’Art moderne.

(Arthur Symons, Symbolist Movement in Literature, 1898)

But perhaps the final word should be left to Anita Brookner, who, like Huysmans, was as accomplished as an art critic as she was a novelist. Her critical study on influential literary figures in 19th century art singles out L’Art moderne for praise:

Certainly the reviews in L’Art moderne are a remarkable achievement, not only because in them…Huysmans manages a consistent fidelity to the painted image…but because this collection of essays marks the culmination of the century’s campaigns in search of a new form for a new situation. The essays have written in as their central theme the search for, and, triumphantly, the discovery of, the painter of modern life…It is impossible to close this volume without feeling that Huysmans is for once writing in the best French tradition.

(Anita Brookner, The Genius of the Future, 1970.)

TRANSLATOR’SNOTE

Huysmans was not always very rigorous when transcribing a painting’s title, sometimes referring to it by a shorter title than that given in the Salon catalogue, and sometimes even calling it something else altogether, based on his recollection of the painting’s subject matter. In these instances I have tried to give the full title of the painting as it appeared in the Salon catalogue, both to make Huysmans’ description and analysis clearer, and also to make the picture easier to find if anyone wants to look it up. To this end, in the Notes and the Glossary I have given the full title of paintings in French rather than English. As Huysmans refers to so many painters and artists in the course of his reviews, some of whom are now little known, the Glossary at the end of the book gives some basic information about those mentioned, as well as the titles of works the artist exhibited at the Salon in the year Huysmans wrote about them. Although L’Art moderne wasn’t illustrated, I have included small black and white illustrations for a number of the paintings referred to, some of which are taken from the original Salon exhibition catalogues.

Modern Art (L’Art moderne)

Contrary to popular opinion, I believe that it is good to tell the whole truth. That is why I am bringing together these articles, which appeared, for the most part, in Le Voltaire, in La Réforme, and in the Revue littéraire et artistique.

J.-K. H.1

Note

1Huysmans was not above bending the truth in order to advance his career or put things in a more flattering light. Of the five pieces and two short appendixes that make up L’Art moderne, only the first two Salons of 1879 and 1880 were previously published in full, in Le Voltaire and La Réforme respectively. A section of the 1881 Salon – twenty pages on the English illustrators – also appeared in the Revue littéraire et artistique, but in essence, despite Huysmans’ implication, almost half the book was made up of previously unpublished material.

THE SALONOF 1879

I

If, first of all, I exclude a Herkomer, a Fantin-Latour, two Manets, some landscapes by Guillemet and Yon, a seascape by Mesdag, and several canvases signed by Raffaëlli, Bartholomé and a few others, I don’t see much that, from the point of view of modern art, one can find truly interesting or truly new in the offcuts of canvas unfurled over every wall of the 1879 Salon.

Aside from the few artists I’ve just mentioned, the rest are quietly continuing their humdrum routine. It’s absolutely the same as the exhibitions of previous years, neither better nor worse. The mediocrity of those raised in the State-run farms of the Academy of Fine Arts1 remains unchanged.

One could – and this present Salon proves it once again – divide these painters into two camps: those who are still competing for a medal, and those who, no longer eligible to obtain one,2 are simply seeking to sell their products as best they can.

The former knock out those deplorably hackneyed scenes you know so well. They choose by preference subjects drawn from religious or classical history, and they constantly talk about making it distingished, as if distinction came from the subject itself, and had no connection to the manner in which one treats it.

Admittedly, most of them didn’t receive any education, they’ve seen nothing and read nothing, and for them making it distinguished means quite simply making it so it doesn’t seem alive or making it so it doesn’t seem true. Ah, what an expression! and what about that other one, great art, which is constantly on these wretches’ lips. Tell them that the modern world would furnish the subject of a great work just as well as the classical, and they’re astounded and get indignant. So these painted window-blinds they’ve nailed up in their golden frames, that’s great art is it? Great art, these Ecce homos and Assumptions of Virgins wrapped up in pink and blue like sweet wrappers? Great art, these Heavenly Fathers with their white beards, these Brutuses painted to order, these made-to-measure Venuses, these Oriental scenes painted like Batignolles embroideries3 on a cold winter day? Is that great art? Let’s move on, then, to industrial art,4 and as quickly as possible! Because at the rate it’s going industrial art will soon be the only one we should study if we’re in search of truth and life.

Such are the painters who follow, and apply themselves to, the tradition of the Academy of Fine Arts. Let us now pass to the others. These painters no longer listen to the tenets of their maternal school, they’ve abandoned antiquity as it doesn’t sell any more, and, in order to earn money, they try to flatter, through prettiness and mimicry, the unsophisticated tastes of the public. They sugarcoat their babies, they dress their mannequins in silk as stiff as tinplate, they give a bereaved mother who’s lost her newborn a log wrapped in swaddling to cradle, they put a rifle into the hands of a callow youth, and then they embellish the whole lot with titles of this kind: First Sign of Trouble; Sadness; The One-Year Volunteer;5Can I Come in?, and Daydream – needless to say these latter artists are no more refined than the former, and even if they’ve begun to ridicule great art, they too have similar pretentions to work only in the distinguished.

So one can, without any fear of being mistaken, propose this axiom: the less education a painter has received, the more he wants to make great art or sentimental paintings. A painter from a working-class family will never paint workmen, but rather gentlemen in black suits, about whom he knows nothing. Assuredly, idealism is a very wonderful thing!

And so here we are in the year of grace 1879, when Naturalism has tried to overthrow all the old conventions and all the old formulas. But even though Romanticism is dying, the paintings accepted into the Stock Exchange for oils on the Champs-Élysées6 continue to take it easy, to shut their eyes to everything that’s happening in the streets, to remain indifferent or hostile to the attempts at modernisation being made against it. In painting, as in poetry, we are still on the slopes of Parnassus. It’s all finicky detail and cheap tricks, nothing more.

Much more interesting are those troublemakers, so reviled and decried, the Independents.7 I don’t deny that among them there are some who aren’t familiar enough with their trade, but take a man of great talent like M. Degas, take even his pupil, Mlle. Mary Cassatt, and see if the works of these artists aren’t more interesting, more curious, more distinguished than all those jingling contrivances that hang, from picture rail to parquet, in the interminable rooms of the Salon.

It’s because in their work I find a genuine concern with contemporary life, and M. Degas – on whom I must expatiate a little, because his work will serve me many times as a point of comparison when I arrive at the Salon’s ‘modern’ paintings – is definitely, of all those who followed in the wake of the Naturalist movement, established in painting by the Impressionists and by Manet, the one who has remained the boldest and the most original. He was one of the first to tackle the feminine charms of the common woman; one of the first who dared grapple with artificial lighting, the brilliance of raked stages on which singers with plunging necklines bawled their bawdy songs, or on which dancers dressed in gauze frolicked and pirouetted. Here there’s no smooth creamy flesh, no silky gossamer skin, but real powdered flesh, the painted flesh of the theatre and the bedchamber, just as it is, like flannelette, with its veiny granularity when seen up close, and its unhealthy sheen when seen from a distance. M. Degas is a past master in the art of capturing woman, in representing her with her pretty movements and her graceful bearing, in whatever class of society she belongs.

That people unaccustomed to this style of painting are terrified of it matters little. Their familiar slippers have been changed, but they’ll fit well enough when they’re put on. They’ll end up realising that the excellent methods of painting employed by the old Flemish school to render those quiet interiors, in which maternal women plumply smile, are impotent to render today’s upholstered interiors and those exquisite Parisiennes with their pale complexions, rouged lips and suggestive hips that sway in a skintight armour of silk and satin. Obviously, for my own part,8 I admire Jan Steen and Ostade, Terburg and Metsu, and my passion for certain Rembrandts is great; but that doesn’t prevent me from declaring that today one has to find something else. These masters painted the people of their time with the techniques of their time – that’s now done and dusted, so onto something different! While waiting for a man of genius, uniting all the fascinating elements of Impressionist painting, to rise up and take the battle by storm, I can only applaud the attempts of the Independents, who bring us a new method, an artistic fragrance that is unique and truthful, which distils the essence of their time in the same way that the Dutch Naturalists captured the aroma of theirs; for new times, new techniques. It’s a simple matter of common sense.

Is it necessary to add now that the official Salon exhibition distils less of the bitter juice of contemporary life than that of the Independents? The first glance is dispiriting. So much canvas and wood used to so little purpose! This whole pretentious motley of decorative wall-hangings9 strikes a false note. Of the 3,040 paintings listed in the catalogue, there’s not a hundred that are worth looking at. The rest are certainly inferior to the advertising posters on the walls of our streets and on the pissoirs of our boulevards, those tableaux that represent little slices of Parisian life: ballet gymnastics, clown acts, English mimes, racetracks and circus arenas.

For me, I’d like it better if all the rooms of the exhibition were papered with Chéret’s chromolithographs, or those marvellous sheets of Japanese paper10 you can buy for a franc a piece, rather than to see them stained by such a sad heap of stuff. Art which lives and breathes for God’s sake, and into the bin with all these cardboard cut-out goddesses and all this devotional trash of the past! Into the bin with all this lick-polished11 rubbish by the likes of Cabanel and Gérôme!

Jules Chéret’s poster advertising the Folies-Bergère c.1880.

Ah, God be thanked, we’re beginning to unlearn our respect for the conventional glories of the past. We no longer bow down before reputations sanctified by special interests or by stupidity; and rather than all the Thomas Coutures and Émile Signols of this world, we prefer the debutant who understands the marvellous spectacle offered by the drawing room and the street, and endeavours to paint them. Even his hesitant first steps are interesting to me because they are the prelude to a new art; but, alas, it’s not a question of a new art at present, since the canvases piled up here in the Palais d’Industrie are the same as those that appeared here ten years ago. It’s like old clothes being passed down from father to son, shortening them or lengthening them, according to their size.

And so, without further discussion, we come to the works themselves; first of all let’s look at the metres of painted canvas destined to cover the yellowing whitewashed walls of churches, to adorn provincial galleries, council meeting rooms and town halls in large boroughs; in other words, let’s start by visiting what my peers have taken to calling ‘history painting’.

II

The brothers Mélingue have drawn from that lamentable ‘hand-me-down’ box of old clothes in order to filch the uniforms and bits of braid that have served to adorn their kind of painting over the years. One of them depicts Edward Jenner, about to inoculate a young boy with a virus gathered from milk infected by smallpox. Alas, the whole seems to have been cut down from a larger sheet of canvas, and one searches in vain for its focal point. His brother’s painting, Provost Etienne Marcel and the Dauphin Charles, testifies to a greater effort, but here it is suffocating and lacks air. I admit the Dauphin might well blanch when confronted by this invasion of men about to cut the throats of two marshals right in front of him; but never, and I mean never, even if he wasn’t overwhelmed with fear, could a drop of blood ever flow beneath that pallid face, beneath that piece of taffeta that serves him as skin. Added to which these fabrics envelop no human frame that ever lived. If a breath of air were to penetrate the room in which this scene occurs, you’d see the wafting robes open and close on a void, only the stick-like armature that supports them would be visible.

Edward Jenner by Gaston Mélingue.

Provost Étienne Marcel and the Dauphin Charles by Lucien Mélingue.

An Ecstatic of the XVIII Century by Georges Moreau de Tours.

Blanche of Castille, Queen of France by Georges Moreau de Tours.

Death of Commodus by Fernand Pelez.

You can see the same thing, except lying down this time, in An Ecstatic of the XVIII Century by M. Moreau de Tours. The woman’s flesh is too flabby, and her torturers, instead of occupying themselves with their patient, seem to be saying: ‘Hmmm, are we dressed elegantly enough?’ M. Moreau would do well to go to Haarlem, he would then see how Hals and Jan de Bray group their figures, and the simple and realistic attitude each of them preserves in the work as a whole. I prefer Moreau de Tour’s other canvas, bought by the State, Blanche of Castille, Queen of France, called ‘Beloved of the Poor’. It is honestly drawn, and in any case as a piece of painting it’s less shaky than those by the brothers Mélingue.

I now come to the dry and glassy Roll Call of the Girondins in the Conciergerie Prison, by François Flameng, and I wonder why this painter who is so young should have wasted his time going down this well-trodden path. He has, at least, shaken off a little of the disastrous influence of his pitiful master; come on, one more effort Monsieur, leave all this behind and test your mettle, see if you don’t have a bit more passion when it comes to the modern!

After the Girondins we now find ourselves here in front of the astonishing Death of Emperor Commodus by M. Pelez. I initially misunderstood the subject of this painting. I thought the gentleman in the green bathing trunks leaning over the other gentleman in white bathing trunks was a masseur, and the woman lifting the curtain was simply saying: ‘The bath is ready.’ It appears that the bathroom attendant is a thug, an expert strangler who is in no way kneading the neck of Commodus in order to help his blood circulation; it is even, if I’m to believe the title in the catalogue, completely the opposite. Either way, it matters little to me. As for the other canvas by the same painter, it is quite frankly a carbon copy of the one by Amaury Duval in the Musée de Luxembourg.

The Prodigal Son by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.

If I were to go through two whole rooms crammed with paintings like these I would end up, God forgive me, experiencing an unreasonable admiration for the work of M. Puvis de Chavannes! Certainly, compared to those tedious pastiches, his Prodigal Son and Young Girls at the Seaside are true marvels. It’s still the same pale colour, the same fresco-like air, it’s still angular and hard, which, as usual, aggravates with its pretensions to naïvety and its affectation of simplicity; and yet, however incomplete he might be, this painter has talent – his frescos in the Pantheon prove it.12