Imagining the motherland: Puvis de Chavannes, modernism, and the fantasy of France - Puvis de Chavannes' mural 'Summer'

If there is one word that, today, seems to express a noble and pure idea, it is the word patrie; governments know how to manipulate this word with singular cleverness, and men who sincerely detest tyrannies allow themselves, nevertheless, to be tyrannized without protest in the name of la patrie. Who would dare confess themselves nonpatriot?

- A-Ferdinand Herold, 1893(1)

What Rembrandt is to Holland, Puvis de Chavannes will be to France, he is ours; thanks to his "thusness," our art will become national again. - Alphonse Germain, 1891(2)

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes occupied a remarkable place in the culture of late-nineteenth-century France.(3) The quotations I have chosen as epigraphs give us some sense of both the admiration he elicited in the last two decades of the century and the complex political and aesthetic background into which Puvis's art must be set if we are to understand fully the significance of his work. There is no better place to begin than with the painting that was widely seen as Puvis's crowning achievement: Summer, 1891. This mural marked the culmination of an artistic career. Indeed, the critical responses it generated provide a window onto some of the most important aesthetic and political controversies of fin de siecle France. Summer was part of a decorative scheme for the Hotel de Ville in Paris, to which the artist contributed several works.(4) More than any of Puvis's murals, Summer was imagined by its viewers to embody a vision of France and to give a sense of Frenchness.

However, such a task was particularly difficult to achieve at a moment when French culture was marked by political division. The end of the nineteenth century was characterized by the emergence of both syndicalism on the Left and extreme forms of exclusionary nationalism on the Right. France saw the consolidation of trade unionism in the form of the Confederation Generale du Travail, but also the codification of the racist and anti-Semitic nationalism that would become Action Francaise. This was the time of anarchist bombs exploding in Paris and the beginning of the Dreyfus Affair. While the mid-1880s saw a return of both the extreme Right and Left in France to parliamentary political power, it was not merely that the different political factions disagreed on matters of policy.(5) The division went much deeper. Along with opposing political positions went very different conceptions of what Frenchness was. There was disagreement about which regions best represented France and which historical moments were authentically French. For example, those on the Right believed the French Revolution of 1789 was an aberration that had put the country on the wrong course. Republicanism seemed to them to be a form of government at war with the true nature of France. Others saw the Republic as the founding moment of the nation, the beginning of a tradition of democracy that defined Frenchness itself. During this period, the republican government did its best to instill its own version of Frenchness in the citizens of France. The centennial celebration of the French Revolution (which coincided with the Paris International Exposition in 1889) and the reconstruction and decoration of the Hotel de Ville in Paris were among the grand gestures employed as part of this ideological strategy. The state commissioned work by Puvis on both occasions.(6)

If the definition of France was an ideological battleground in the 1880s and 1890s, the visual and literary arts were polarized in ways that had complex and often contradictory relationships to the politics of the time. Naturalism was out of fashion in avant-garde circles, but so, too, were the old academic paradigms of idealization and transcendence. These academic paradigms were still promoted, however, by a legion of conservative critics with legitimist leanings. The development of a dealer-critic system, combined with a relaxation of publishing laws, led to the proliferation of avant-garde practices and the promotion of individual artists and styles by critics.(7) In this climate there was little agreement, even within self-consciously advanced artistic circles, about the direction painting should take. Artists and critics had strong opinions about the proper direction for art and the proper relationships between culture and politics, but even within particular avant-garde circles there were few simple correspondences between aesthetic and political positions. For example, critics who championed symbolist form paradoxically might hail from the extreme Left or from the neo-Christian Right.(8) What is particularly striking about this moment for our purposes, however, is that virtually all the artists and critics of the day admired Puvis de Chavannes. His admirers hailed from the political right, left, and center, from the avant-garde, the academy, and the state. Almost everyone agreed that Puvis de Chavannes was France's greatest national painter.(9)

Art historians have long been puzzled by Puvis's wide appeal. Until recently he was dismissed as a watered-down symbolist or academic hack (despite the fact that he had almost no academic training) - an artist who pleased everyone by inoffensive compromise. With the exceptions of Margaret Werth and Claudine Mitchell, art historians who have recently endeavored to write extensively about his work have, for the most part, not fully elaborated the intersections between aesthetics and politics that define it.(10) The catalogue of the Puvis de Chavannes exhibition held in Amsterdam in 1994 alludes to some of the issues that are central to Puvis's oeuvre: classicism, nationalism, and modernism.(11) However, because the catalogue maintains a monographic perspective it fails to change our perspective on the political and artistic importance of the artist's work.(12) Even after one has read the most recent published materials about Puvis de Chavannes, one is still left with the sense that Puvis de Chavannes's wide appeal in his own day derived not from aesthetic innovations but from aesthetic conservatism - from what Robert Goldwater described fifty years ago as "the neutral character of [Puvis's] style."(13)