Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror. - book review

EWA LAJER-BURCHARTH

Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror

New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. 400 pp., 11 color ills., 165 b/w. $60

Since the works of Robert Rosenblum (Transformations in Late Eighteenth century Art, 1967) and Hugh Honour (Neo-classicism, 1968), we have witnessed a spectacular renewal in British and American studies of the Western art of the late 18th century. Books by historians as diverse as Michael Fried, Thomas Crow, Norman Bryson, Timothy J. Clark, and Alex Potts show how research in Neoclassical art has profited from the theoretical interests marking the last three or four decades in structural, combinatory theories of the sign and representation, psychoanalysis, and gender studies.

Ewa Lajer-Burcharth's book Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror participates in this renewal, which had its moment of glory in 1989 with the international colloquium organized at the Musee du Louvre, Paris, by Regis Michel on the occasion of the exhibition Jacqnss-Louis David 1748-1825, at the Louvre and the Musee National du Chateau de Versailles, and the official celebrations of the French Revolution. (1) It was during the course of this colloquium, where the most antithetical art historical points of view had the opportunity to emerge, that Lajer-Burcharth presented an analysis of David's painting The Sabine Women that caused a sensation and that one might consider the core of her book.

Necklines studies David's dark years, between the fall of Robespierre, which was also his own, in 1794, and the advent of the Consulate. These six years followed a five-year period during which the career of the painter was increasingly associated with the Revolution. At the time, David became a political man, engaged in leftist forces (the party of the Montagnards), and attempted to realize the dream of many ambitious artists in the modern world of transforming society through his art. It was during these years that the image of David as renewer of historical painting was replaced by that of "the Raphael of the sans-culottes" (as he was called in 1799 when he exhibited the heroic nudes of The Sabine Women). As David became caught up in exceptional events, Belisarius, the Horatii, and Brutus in his work made way for the heroes and martyrs of the present Revolution, the deputies of the Jeu de Paume, Le Peletier, Marat expiring, and the young Bara. Etienne-Jean Delecluze, one of David's students who published t he first comprehensive book on the artist and who strove to depoliticize him, compared these works to that of a somnambulist. (2)

With the fall of his friend Robespierre, David narrowly escaped the guillotine and was imprisoned twice. The resulting political and personal trauma lasted several years, and during this period David produced none of the historical paintings that, until the Revolution, he had habitually put out, slowly but steadily. Necklines is concerned with these years from 1794 to 1800, the long unproductive months and the artist's painstaking efforts to regain his hold. These efforts are primarily manifest in unfinished portraits and projects: the unfinished self-portrait of 1794, the project of Homer reciting his verse, the unfinished painting of Psyche abandoned, the portraits on wood (3) of his brother-in-law and sister-in-law (the only paintings he would show at the Salon during this period), those of the Montagnards imprisoned after Thermidor, and finally, after a long gestation period, the large canvas of The Sabine Women, the first historical painting to be completed in ten years.

The contextual method of Necklines is particularly well suited to the David of these agitated years. Yet while relying on a considerable mass of facts, some totally new, the author lets her factual and theoretical biases show. There is hardly any mention, for example, of the portraits of two Dutch plenipotentiaries (1795), Gaspar Meyer and, especially,Jacobus Blauw, a patriot of the left with Babouvist sympathies. The very figure of Gracchus Baheuf, the communist revolutionary guillotined in 1797 after the Conspiracy of the Equals, is absent from the book (his name appears only on p. 114 in the caption to the frontispiece of his pamphlet against the Montagnard Carrier). It is rather amusing that Antoine Schnapper, a scientifically and politically reactionary art historian, should be the one who mentions the fact that in 1796, while he worked on The Sabine Women, David subscribed to Babeufs newspaper the Tribun du Peuple. (4) In Necklines, the enormous issue of the painter's political position and thought afte r Thermidor remains scarcely addressed.

Instead, Lajer-Burcharth highlights the interaction of David's art and certain psychocultural aspects of Thermidorian society shaken by the Terror. A new bourgeoisie sought to forge an image of itself by staging its language, dress, social life, entertainments, and debaucheries. It is the self-representation of this society that is confronted in David's art.