It is improbable that more nonsense has been written about aesthetics than about anything else: the literature of the subject is not large enough for that (Clive Bell)

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Friday, January 29, 2021

NORMAN BRYSON : Word and Image, Chapter Five

    

This is Chapter Five of  NORMAN BRYSON's  : Word and Image,  French Painting of the Ancien Regime. (1983). Text in Yellow are quotes from the author, Text in Orange are  quotes from others.


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GREUZE and the PURSUIT of HAPPINESS


Greuze, L'Accordée de Village, 1761





OF ALL THE painters whose work this book discusses, Greuze is the most remote from ourselves; so remote as to be almost irretrievable. Even LeBrun is more accessible, since his enquiry into the process whereby the physical body becomes a place of articulated meanings is an interest many of us share, whether we are sociologist seeking to understand the nonverbal presentation of the self in its social world, or ethologists studying the transactions of information-exchange that occur outside language, or critics analyzing how certain forms of art manage to structure patterns of meaning without ever seeming to break with illusionism. In its peculiar and specialized attitude towards the erotic, rococo painting is so alien to the eroticism of the late twentieth century that it no longer annoys us as it did Diderot, or titillates us as it was still able to do at the beginning of the present century; and because its content tends to leave us indifferent, we are free to attend to its qualities of formal design. But Greuze does not allow us this position of indifference, because his work insists on an ideology of family life that we are still hotly debating. On one side range its defenders, who see in the family the basic civilizing unit of our traditional culture, and even the only institution strong enough to resist an encroaching centralized state. On the other side range the critics of the family, who see it as the natural opponent of the individual's right to choose the pattern of his or her adult life; the central institution for the oppression of women; the natural political ally of conservatism and reaction; and even as a prime incubator of mental disorder. The issue of the family is so much with us that it is almost impossible for us to put Greuze's ideology into suspension, and apply the magical, dissolving gaze of the twentieth century, which can recast almost any image into pure constituent form. With Greuze that magic fails. and even the most enthusiastic supporters of Greuze tend to feel embarrassed by him, as though they had fallen into low company, and to offer apologies for what seems almost a secret vice.



In this chapter introduction, Bryson makes some sharp comments about earlier chapters. I can well believe that LeBrun is of interest to his colleagues who study  the "articulated meanings" of the physical body - though I would be surprised if they could offer any insights into them.  And I agree that most of rococo eroticism does not stimulate late twentieth century males -  like myself, for instance.  But why didn't Bryson explore the cultural specifics of rococo eroticism back in chapter four ?  Instead,   he launched an ill-conceived investigation of pictorial space. 


Caravaggio,  Sacrifice of Isaac


 Greuze does feel remote and inaccessible to me.  As Bryson notes, many people of our time do not accept the obligations of adult children towards their parents. Yet there are other cultural norms expressed by historical art that I find more strange if not abhorrent - like the many depictions of  "The Sacrifice of Isaac" - and that strangeness has not affected my enthusiasm for the art.  What I cannot stand about Greuze is where his work feels small, cluttered, clunky, claustrophobic, grim, and pathetic. Other than in his portraits, he often presents a world from which I would like to escape - right into the fantasies of Watteau or Fragonard.  And yet,  as Bryson tells us, Greuze  was quite popular in his time - so he might serve as a window into the the twisted historical roots of the modern body politic.               


A third factor in the neglect of Greuze is our current ignorance of the cultural context of which he is a part. The manifesto painting of sensibilite, Greuze's L 'Accordee de village , appeared at the Salon of 1761 and became a colossal overnight success: Greuze was the most discussed painter in Paris, droves of spectators crowded round the painting every day of its exhibition (even Diderot, who became Greuze's most influential supporter, had to elbow his way through the mob to see the painting for the first time) and in terms of sheer public impact the only rival to L 'Accordee before the Revolution will be David 's Oath of the Horatii of 1785. But the phenomenal success of this work should be understood as part of the whole situation of triumphant sensibilite, for 1761 is the year also of Rousseau's great novel La Nouvelle Heloise, which similarly took Paris by storm.  Something we tend to forget is that, after Voltaire's Candide, La Nouvelle Heloise was the most widely read literary work in France until r8oo: it ran through a number of editions that seems to us quite incredible and its appreciation was  very broadly based.


All of this is interesting - especially if I ever get around to reading the novels of Rousseau and   Richardson - but this blog is art-centric --  so I'll proceed to Bryson's discussion of a painting:






Let us turn to Greuze's L'Accordee de village. All the roles and epochs are there. Childhood - in the little brothers and sisters of the village bride, who do not yet understand the significance of what is going on, and whose attention drifts off elsewhere- the girl on the left, attending to her hen and chicks; her younger brother, bored and tired, leaning on the arm of the notary; and the eldest brother, behind the mother's chair, gazing vacantly at the ceiling. Old age - the mother is worn out by it, with her red and swollen hands, and exhausted expression; the father, a venerable, white-haired ancient for whom the ceremony is another nail in the coffin. And maturity- the betrothed couple who form a distinct and separate central group. To make absolutely plain the ensemblisation of happiness, Greuze has created specialised somatic types - so specialised, in fact, that the scene becomes perplexing. How can this aged, defeated man possibly be father to the horde of young children who swarm the painting? How can the mother, whose hands and features are those (I am citing contemporary commentary) of a fishwife, be the mother to such an exquisite daughter? To appeal to 'col tempo' is not enough: time does not behave in this way. But the temporal exaggerations are necessary, because for the tableau to work, for it to produce the requisite charge of emotion, it must be completely legible; and at this point Greuze joins company with LeBrun. The Greuze child is all child: the figure at the lower left edge of the painting has cheeks that are just too chubby, a head that is disproportionately large, and arms that are far too short for the body - because only by carrying further than nature the 'marks of childhood' can the legibility of the stereotype be guaranteed. The young couple seem to belong to a different social and somatic world from the other figures: their idealization clashes with the gross, caricatural handling of the rest of the family. The girl struck certain visitors to the Salon of 1761 as a chic Parisian shop girl entirely out of place in the Lyonnais peasant interior;  and her young man is similarly too refined or effeminate (though there may be private reasons for this, as we shall see) -he will never age into the physical type of the notary, for example, whose heavy jaw, pronounced nose and sunken mouth belong to a different bodily species. But the stereotype of 'youthful maturity' is defined by the attribute of 'physical gracefulness', and to guarantee the legibility of the scene Greuze will go to almost any lengths; just as he inflicts on the parents failing sight, arthritis, loss of mobility, and all the other recognizable marks of decline, and again with an excess that ends up by interfering with the credibility of the scene.




This makes me think of television dramatic comedy - something like "All in  the Family".  There is the gentle humor of  the toddler staring at the chicks and the drama of exchanging the bag of coins for the girl.  It's not so much a glorification of this life-changing event -- it's more like a presentation of what is real.

There is something like a halo behind the stooping young groom’s head - created by the uneven tones of the grubby plaster wall in the background.  By halo and central location at the apex of a great triangle, he appears to be the primary character in this drama - so we might allow that all of the other characters are presented as they might appear to him.  It’s to him that the bride appears so sweet and innocent, (is she even fifteen ?) the father-in-law so generous (or longwinded?) , and the notary so sharp.  This is his coming-of-age story. He has ambled - or perhaps stumbled -into manhood  - and he and his bride still look like a puzzled kids.


It’s that stark sense of reality that might have struck viewers as almost shocking in an age when so much secular painting was escapist fantasy. Perhaps that’s why it  attracted so much attention.








By contrast, consider this upscale porcelain variation.  The real-life drama is gone - this is fantasy land. Everyone is better dressed and better looking.


This genteel diversion is much closer to the pictorial world of Gainsborough (b. 1727) than Greuze (b.. 1725) - and I confess that I do enjoy it more.  (note:  the auction house that sold this fine piece could not specify its origin - probably German, c. 1900)



Norman Rockwell, Meeting the Date


I also prefer the manic clutter, and claustrophobia of this illustration of middle class courtship from 200 years later.  It has something that Greuze mostly lacks:  a sense of humor.  And these are happier people.


Greuze, The Paralytic and His Family  ( or "Filial Piety" or "The Benefits of Good Education" - or "The Dying Grandfather" (as Bryson calls it)), 1763 


The ensemblization of happiness - bringing every kind  together into a single place - asks for a gamut, a totality of  human types from whose variety the idea of 'humanity' with its powerful emotional and didactic charge, can be generated. Greuze's next great Salon success - The Dying Grandfather - repeats the formula: every age group is present in its specialized somatic representative, and from the gathering together of the divergent types there emerges a mysterious sense - one of Greuze's more original perceptions of the body as contemplated under genetic time. Greuze never painted landscapes, and his petit- bourgeois families are entirely cut off from the world outside their happy (or unhappy) home; no views of streets, no exteriors - not even doors or windows; the family is hermetically sealed. In this isolation from society, genetic relationships take over and at once dominate the image, since everyone is linked by procreative ties: grandmother, grandfather, father, mother, sister, brother- the biological roles are the only ones available, and curiously the insistence on familial definition is so intense that the emotional atmosphere of the Greuze family, even in its moments of joy, is cold, because friendship and amicability seem to have no possible place - the Greuze family has no neighbours or friends, only servants. This cordon or cartouche thrown around the family again enables a heightening of narrative clarity. Without it, the figures might be taken simply as children, old people, people in their prime; and in fact there are no recognisable marks that in our culture correspond to such meanings as 'daughter', 'son', 'father', 'mother' - no badges or cues which ensure that a figure taken alone can be read as belonging to these positions within the family. With LeBrun's Queens of Persia, a whole code of gestures and facial expressions enabled us to translate the image into discourse; but Greuze does not have to rely on elaborate reading techniques such as those LeBrun exploits- all he needs to do is seal his group off from the outer world, throw his cartouche around the image, create a system of somatic typing by age, and 'father', 'sister', 'parent', 'child', and the rest will emerge spontaneously. To be sure, the vanishing of the outer world corresponds to a certain view of the characteristic social experience of the petit bourgeoisie - its sense of exclusion from the greater society, its recourse to self-sufficiency in the absence of social support. But although we can reclaim the hermetic atmosphere of the Greuze household along class lines, this should not conceal from us the narrative usefulness of enclosure. When combined with Greuze's 'ageist' body-typing, the enclosure makes narrative legibility certain. 


For Bryson, happiness must be more of a concept than a feeling - so few of Greuze's characters actually appear to be happy. 

This drama is quite different from the marriage scene shown  before it. The room behind it is lost in the shadows - and all of the figures, even the toddler,  are expressing the same heartfelt emotion of concern.    It's melodramatic and  heroic - as if the father were a gallant general dying on the field of battle.  It's much more idealized- and less realistic.  In  reality - it's not likely that every family member would be equally dismayed upon the death of its patriarch.


 It's interesting that so many different titles have been attached to this painting. Presumably the artist did not  specify one - or if he did, viewers felt free to ignore it.  We might also note that Greuze made no paintings concerning the death or infirmity of an old woman.  This is an homage to patriarchy - as is the previous painting that showed the groom giving a bag of coins to his new father-in-law.  I appreciate Bryson's observation that there are no doors or windows in the room - adding to the claustrophobic feeling that I get.



Edvard Munch, Death Struggle, 1915

European art is replete with scenes of death -but very few are secular and hardly any are not connected to a battle.  Who wants to look at and contemplate such a grim, depressing,  and inevitable fact ?  The ones by Munch are the only ones I could find on a quick search of the internet.  Perhaps Greuze's morbid reality was intended to be as shocking to the public as Manet’s brazen prostitute, Olympia, would be a century later.  On first viewing it delivers surprise and emotional impact.  But aesthetically, it's more of an illustration than a painting - a collection of formally isolated figure studies, discursively appropriate for theme. Who would want to see it every day - or  even ever again ?  It has the discomfort and unavoidable certainty of a toothache.












A great drawing of a man about to meet his maker.



Very sharp, expressive, economical figure drawing
with many strong lines.

Greuze, The Charitable Woman, 1772-6




The hospitality in Greuze is, of course, a family affair: strangers are not on the whole admitted. But in The Charitable Woman, he does tackle Laclos's theme of economic separation - a woman of means, accompanied by her little daughter, visits the sick-bed of one of her impoverished charges. A fusion occurs across the division between riches and poverty; and at the same time a second, much more Greuzian fusion, of biological epochs - age, maturity, and childhood, somatically distinct, and reunited at the level of shared humanity. 

It is this moment of fusion that fascinates Greuze, and his interest in that moment is much stronger than his feelings of sentimentality about old age. The problem of age, like the whole issue of the family, is so much with us that paintings such as La Dame de Charite or The Dying Grandfather are likely to cause us considerable embarrassment: our society does not feel much real respect for the condition of age; on the other hand, it tends to feel guilty about the oppression and exclusion from the social mainstream of its elderly population, and as a result of our mixed feelings of disdain and guilt we have at the moment no stable or confident iconography of age at all: at the level of mass communication, the elderly are represented through an imagery that blends a patronising condescension with the unease of the liberal conscience contemplating any oppressed group. And because the contemplation of old age tends to arouse confusion and anxiety, our present reaction to The Dying Grandfather is likely to be dismissal: we do not believe in its reverence towards age; we do not ourselves practise it, while at the same time we feel guilty about not practising it. In such a situation it is helpful to rethink Greuze's painting as not being about age at all, but an essential humanity that Greuze believes can be glimpsed at certain liminal biological moments. The moment when death approaches- and The Dying Grandfather really is dying; he can no longer eat, the Bible is out, and if this were a Catholic family the priest would be round - is one such moment.  Another is the moment of marriage. L 'Accordee is also a non-Catholic scene- a Protestant Lyonnais marriage, with a notary in the priest's place. Greuze freezes his painting at exactly the moment of the threshold, as the dowry purse changes hands, and as the girl passes from the state of spinsterhood into the estate of marriage. Just as opera can protract a fraction of real time into the length of an aria, Greuze expands the moment of transition, because it is then that essential humanity, higher than its component estates or categories of age, can be seen. The girl in L'Accordee is neither daughter nor wife; she is both of these, and so she is neither, but simply a point of Humanity. She experiences at the same moment the fullness of happiness that comes to her as daughter and as sister, and that second happiness which is des tined to sever her from the first, but has not yet done so. The image ensemblises the two incompatible moments of happiness, fuses them, and allows us to see past the biological categories (wife, daughter) to a category-less state that transcends those divisions. And similarly The Dying Grandfather insists on its exaggerated somatic typing and distinct familial roles, but by focusing on the moment between life and death it also opens a vista that overcomes those lesser, ageist divisions of humanity by epoch in a higher unity of human essence.


The Charitable Woman is just as dreary and gray as the Dying Grandfather - with the additional discomfort of condescension.  (it's not the wealthy lady who is giving alms - it's her social class -  via the hand of its most recent generation).  I wonder whether Greuze felt that way.  The orderliness of the piece suggests such behavior is appropriate - but the grimness of tone makes that appropriateness  feel depressing.


Bryson feels that Greuze has touched on our "essential humanity"  and the "higher unity of human essence" - while I feel that the social obligation he portrays as well as the erotic fantasies of the rococo both point toward the same founding principle of human society -  but it's a  higher unity that both have lost: that  shared hope  that might be called "agape"





Greuze, "Broken Pitcher", 1771










And the same is true of the most perplexing of all the Greuze images, the so-called 'Greuze girl'. The Louvre The Broken Pitcher is one of the more acceptable examples. The oppositions here are manifold. The girl is a stereotypical Greuze child, with her infantile and 'innocent' hand- gesture, her wide eyes and disproportionately enlarged head. But at the same time she is obviously Woman: the marks of initiation and availability - carmine lips, tumescent breasts - are as exaggerated and hyper-legible as the marks of childhood. Just as the moment of death and the moment of marriage established thresholds where categories that normally cancel each other out can be experienced simultaneously, so here Greuze dwells on-and prolongs the hymenal moment when the female is at the same time Child and Woman, Innocence and Experience. the image ensemblises both varieties of happiness and both estates, and we can sec it exploiting the strategy of 'divide and elide' present in the Laclos scene: the two distinct somatic stereotypes are superimposed on one place.


Isn’t this girl unmarried?  Wasn’t a girl’s virginity considered a treasure in that time and place?  Wasn’t it’s loss outside of marriage considered a defilement?  Hasn’t she lost her purity  and honor?  Wouldn’t it make her feel ashamed and vulnerable?  Why did Bryson limit his discussion to the polarities of child/woman and innocence/experience?  If this image "ensemblizes both varieties of happiness"  , it does so in contradiction to a long running meme  in European culture.




Jacob Cats (1577 - 1560)


Here's an earlier appearance of the same trope- published in the ever popular emblem books of Jacob Cats. The accompanying text admonishes young virgins not to lose that which, once broken,   can never be made whole.  Note the dog sniffing the broken pot. Disgusting.



Poseidon and Amymone, Paphos, Roman, 2nd Century 

Here’s the earliest image that I could find linking a lusty, transgressive male, a young unmarried woman, sex, and a pitcher.




Bouguereau, The Broken Pitcher, 1891


More vulnerable and  more ashamed than Greuze’s version.
Note the phallic spout on the pump.



Lidderdale,  The Broken Pitcher,  1875

With a pitcher that’s been totaled beyond repair - the expression is more  like sadness than guilt. Is this child even ten years old ?



Leon Bonnat, The Broken Pitcher

Another totally wrecked pitcher, this girl is more puzzled than anything else. She could be thinking about breaking some more pitchers. 


Debucourt, Fortune and Misfortune, or The Broken Pitcher,  1787

A light hearted rococo treatment - the young man as if to say "Oh, your pitcher is broken?  Can we break it some more!"



In contrast to the other versions, this Greuze girl seems frankly self aware of her sexuality somewhere between resigned and defiant about it. She carries her broken pot as she might carry a basket of apples from the market. It's a matter of fact -  she shows  neither shame nor regret. Yet I don't see any happiness here either.




Greuze,  Girl with Dove, La Colombe Retrouve, 1790


In another version of the Greuze girl, La Colombe Retrouvee, the strategy is carried to unacceptable lengths. The oppositions are Child/Woman and Innocence /Experience (or Available/Unavailable), as before, but to these is superadded a further pair- Sacred/Profane - which makes the image finally unbea rable. The diadem is clearly religious, just as the pineal stare is spiritual; but the dove cannot possibly be glossed as 'Holy Spirit ', nor even as ' dove', because it so coyly unites an idea of childhood game ('she has found her pet bird ') with an idea of sexuality (the dove, in its suggestive position, establishes connotations of palpitation, smoothness, roundness, that are dangerously close to 'virginal breast'). The image yokes these oppositions together in a scandal at once of logic and of sexuality, where the fused happinesses of sensibilite have become open transgression.





Bernini, Ecstasy of Saint Theresa

This might be the ultimate fusion  of sacred and profane.  Whether viewers are thrilled or offended might depend on how they relate to their own spirituality and sexuality. 


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Greuze, First Lesson in Love, 1760

Here is one of the artist's earliest presentations of a girl with dove. There's no suggestion of the sacred here... and perhaps none was intended in the more voluptuous 1790 version either.  Greuze never painted a religious theme that I could find.





Greuze, La Mere Bien Aimee. 1765



The felicity of sensibilite can only exist by denying the possibility of fractures or incompatibilities within le bonheur. But strangely Greuze does nothing to conceal the idea of incompatibility in one of his most disturbing images, La Mere Bienaimee ; indeed, he seems shockingly unaware of the incompatibility that must strike every viewer. The mother, I need hardly say, is all mother: Diderot remarked that the painting 'preached population',  and Madame Geoffrin spoke of a fricassee d'enfants. And the father is all father, lost in rapturous contemplation of his progeny. But at the same time the two are very clearly man and wife: Greuze shows them in a state of amorous undress - although the husband has merely returned from shooting, his clothes seem as ready to fall to the ground as his wife's, and there is an actual discarded dress in the foreground.  The additive logic of sensibilite, like the eliding imagination of Julie D 'Etanges, believes that you can simply place one happiness over another. But not in front of the children: that is that irrationality of the image - it brings together in one place that which must be kept apart, like incest ~ (which might be described as an extreme instance of 'ensemblisation') . Greuze cannot resist his dangerous fusions, and it begins to emerge that for him the image is the place where the happinesses that reality keeps separate m ay be returned to blissful unity. Commenting on his painting of a married couple snuggling up together over the cradle of their offspring, the Goncourts voiced their united shock : 'When he would depict conjugal happiness .. . the parents seem to smile with the smile of sensual pleasure, the gesture of the mother is the caress of the demi-mondaine'; and Diderot had no doubts at all about the atmosphere of perversion in La Mere Bien-aimee: 'that half-open mouth, those swimming eyes, that relaxed  position, that swollen throat, that voluptuous mixture of pain and pleasure, obliges all decent women in the place [the Salon] to lower their eyes and blush with shame'. But for Greuze it is simply Abundance: he has no sense of qualities and incompatibilities amongst the varieties of happiness, or if he has that sense it has been suppressed. In painting his beloved Greuze girls, he shows no awareness at all, that he has become the Humbert Humbert (Nabokov's "Lolita") of painting.

First - we might note that the Goncourts were commenting on a different painting - one that showed the parents smiling over an infant in the cradle - and their given quote does not express shock.

Then - we might note that Diderot's commentary about the blushing viewers referred to a sketch - and concludes with admiration,  not dismay.  Here is the complete quote:


Here, my friend, is evidence of how much ambiguity there may be in the best picture. You see this lovely fish wife, rather plump, who has her head thrown back, her coloring pale, her elaborate bonnet in disarray, with her expression a mixture of pain and pleasure, revealing a moment of ecstasy sweeter to experience than suitable to paint? Now then, this is the sketch, the study of the beloved mother. How is it that here a figure is decent and there it ceases to be? This half-open mouth, these watery eyes, this thrown-back pose, this swollen throat, this voluptuous mixture of pleasure and pain causes eyes to be averted and all decent women to blush. Besides, if women quickly pass by this work, men stop in front of it for a long time; that is, those men who are connoisseurs and those who, pretending to be connoisseurs, come to enjoy a spectacle of powerful voluptuousness, and those who, like myself, combine both motivations. There are, on her forehead, and between the forehead and the cheeks, and from the cheeks to the bosom, incredible total passages; this teaches you to see nature and reminds you that there is such a thing. You must see the details of that swollen throat, which words cannot describe. This is absolutely beautiful, true to life, and scientifically 



Diderot went on to note that the women who blushed and avoided viewing the sketch, felt much differently about the painting - due, perhaps, to the familial context into which the woman's head was placed.

Bryson may be all alone in being offended by some suggestion of incest and pedophilia.
I see no incompatibility at all - perhaps because I take this image as a window onto how the mother feels -- rather than a window onto an actual  conjugal bedroom.   As with the groom in "Accordee", she is the main character and this is how that main character feels about her family.  She is loved - and  there's no shame in her enjoying it.






Clothes coming undone around his waist,
 rifle primed and ready to fire yet again.

 


Greuze, sketch (detail) for the  Well Loved Mother


Looks more like anxiety than sexual ecstasy to me.  Beautifully done.  One writer has reported that  the model was the artist's wife for whom  there was another portrait in the show that Diderot discussed.


Walter Friedlander ( "David to Delacroix"), found a  different incompatibility within these Greuze girl paintings:

Everything is haunted by an effete and washed-out rococo which, in ridding itself of overt eroticism, has produced a more painful volupté décente, a kind of lascivious chastity. Chastity and the related virtues were portrayed with half-nude bosoms and draperies clinging to the body in the manner of the antique. Greuze’s innocently voluptuous young maidens are typical examples of this sort of erotic prudery.

I feel  "erotic prudery"  more often in Bouguereau than Greuze - who  sometimes appears  more concerned with the character of his subject than with how a male viewer might be aroused.



Greuze

But this piece seems to have been created
strictly for the male gaze.





Prudhon, "The First Kiss"

This illustration, also appearing on the book's cover, presents that moment in Rousseau's "La Nouvelle Heloise" when the heroine,   Julie d'Etanges, faints away while being kissed by her tutor whom she has lured into the garden with the help of her cousin standing behind her. Her hopeless attempt to be both the daughter of a wealthy father and the lover of her impoverished tutor echoes Greuze's attempt to simultaneously display both childhood and womanhood in "The Broken Pitcher".  Pleasure is a rational good  - but as a goal it can be problematic. Or so Bryson tells us.



Greuze,  Bonaparte,  First Consul, 1803


Bryson also tells us that Greuze had difficulty portraying the virility of  men  -  as when he portrayed a father of young children as if he were senescent. And especially when he portrayed Napoleon as effete. The lusty young  husband in the Well Loved Mother is a counter example to the first assertion.

The masculine ideals in the following are counter examples to the second.



Greuze, Joseph, model at the  Academy, 1755


Greuze, portrait of Diderot, 1766


(detail)




Greuze, Florentius van Ertborn, 1804

Here are several male portraits, done over a period of  fifty years, that show a wide range of masculinity.


Gros, Bonaparte, First Consul,  1802

In1804, Greuze was among four other artists who were commissioned to paint the First Consul so that his image could be distributed to major cities recently added to the empire.  It appears that Napoleon wanted to be presented to his defeated opponents as reasonable and non-threatening.  Greuze, perhaps, went a little too far in that direction.

Robert Lefrevre



Charles Meynier, 1804



Ingres, 1804



Greuze,  Severus and Caracalla,  1769



Greuze's anxiety in the presence of the virile male is responsible for a remarkable stock of gestures. They often resemble those in David, who is closer to Greuze than we tend to think; though it must be said that in David the excessiveness of the gestures is defused by making the whole context consonant with their intensity. The key gesture- which will dominate the Oath of the Horatii , the Oath of the Tennis Court  and the Distribution of the Eagles, is the outstretched arm - the thunderbolt of potency. The Paternal Curse shows it in its full, Zeus-like power; in a milder form it becomes the commanding come-hither of the curate. Another variant is the arm of the Emperor in Severus and Caracalla . , as he inflicts the patriarchal curse on his renegade son, a curse that reduces him to swooning effeminacy. This is a painting that caused Greuze a lot of trouble: he submitted it to the Academie and hoped thereby to be raised to the rank of History Painter; but his plan misfired, the Academie admitted him only to the rank of genre painter, ignoring the wider claim of Severus and Caracalla, which became the butt of much critical ridicule. 'The son is an idiot; I say an idiot because he is not stricken with remorse, as an illustrious criminal should be, but shamefaced, as if he had been caught stealing lead from a roof' The thunderbolt gesture has miscarried and it was observed that 'the Emperor stretches out an arm a yard long, and in the process dislocates his wrist'. Because the arm is so disproportionate Greuze has been forced, it was said, to lengthen the Emperor's leg 'beyond all reason; the right thigh and leg seem to go on forever'. Everyone could see the absurdity of the painting except Greuze, who went on and on defending it publicly, and making such a fool of himself that his work after 1769 is far more academic and dignified than before (it even aspires to an early and impressive neo-classicism), as though he were constantly atoning for his lapse. And one possible reason for Greuze's blindness to the inadequacy of his painting is that his feelings about patriarchal power were both so intense, and so unacknowledged, that he was unable to perceive the reality of his image as visual design.


Yes - the son (Caracalla) is presented as an idiot or naughty  boy in Greuze's staging of the drama --- and what's wrong with that?  Maybe I've seen too much  expressionism to be concerned with wrists being dislocated or legs being too long. I would  call this as effective an illustration as the rest of Greuze's dramatic painting.  













Greuze, The First Furrow.  1801




It is only in a very late work, The First Furrow, that the patriarchal arm manages to transmit its authority to the succeeding generations haromoniously. The father, standing immediately behind his son, raises his arm into the rhunderbolt position, but the potency is now carried forward w his offspring in this, his first and rather belated attempt to furrow the soil. The image is trying to restore the genetic continuity which had for so long been broken at the point of the father, and significantly, it is an exhausted, enfeebled work: Greuze needed that anxiety to energize his enterprise. In old age he is no longer troubled by the issue, and he really can see the continuum of genetic time; but by now he is out of the running. In an earlier treatment of the same theme, the sketch of the Three Ages of Man at Tournus, he is still agitated, and beneath the sketch there is the following rubric:

Je t'ai porte
Tu me portes
11 te portera

It is rather a riddle, but the 'Je' is the patriarch who is being carried on the shoulders of his Aeneas-like son; the image refuses even in its gloss to identify with the middle-epoch male. And whether they are receiving the wrathful malediction or the paternal blessing, the sons in Greuze are always lesser than their sires. In the Paternal Curse the raised arm and out-turned palm signify helplessness and abjection; just as the returning son in Le Fils Puni seems to have aged a decade since entering the scene, and it looks as though he will never get over the shock.



I would agree that regarding formal energy, this is "an exhausted and feeble work" - but no more than  Greuze's other group scenes.  It's an illustration  much like the social realism of the early twentieth century except for the apparent psychological elements between father and son.    The father figure, with outstretched arm is indeed younger than the dying or cursing fathers of other Greuze paintings.  The son looks up to him  with love,  trust, and admiration as the father  presses his groin  against the son's rear -  a rear which is echoed by the large bright  buttocks of the oxen highlighted in the center of the  scene.   Bryson does not discuss the peasant custom that is being illustrated - but I presume that it is a Spring festival celebrating the first furrow cut into the earth every year - a furrow  that must be carefully straight since all the subsequent furrows will run parallel. It would be an honor  to be the man who makes that first cut - and he honors his son by getting him  to hold the plow handle.





The father sending forth his son to drive both oxen and women.





William Hogarth, scene from  Industry and Idleness, 1747
he Idle 'Prentice return'd from Sea, & in a Garret with common Prostitute


A wonderful detail that reminds me of Charlie Sheen in his bad boy role,
appropriately enough in bed with a sex worker.


The Industrious 'Prentice out of his Time, & Married to his Master's Daughter





The breakdown of discourse under the pressure of that which can be neither admitted  nor abolished makes Greuze a far more figural painter than the painter with whom his is often compared: Hogarth. Greuze was clearly influenced by Hogarth, or at least by the Hogarth of the engravings, which were all he could be known by in France; and in particular by the set of engravings known as Industry and Idleness. There, a systematic contrast of the fates of the 'good' and 'bad' apprentices generates such a powerful semantic field that, in fact, no one believes in it. The device of antithesis, in itself one of the  most powerful mechanisms for the production of meaning, is , so overweening that the viewer becomes skeptical, reluctant to accept the glaring official text (of the rewards of industry, of the terrible punishment that awaits vice), and he begins to look instead for the traces of an inversion of the official text, where industry is criticized (as mercenary, hypocritical, obsequious) and vice admired (as vivacious, tragic, human). The fascination of the series lies in Hogarth's play between ' official' and 'unofficial' readings - he is the great master of shifting textual levels. Greuze comes closer to Hogarth than any other continental artist, and his projected series Bazile et Thibault, ou les Deux Educations seems modelled directly on Hogarth's set. 




The two scenes seem to be pure Hogarth. But there are crucial differences. In Hogarth there is always that second level of reading - if there were not, we would find the series lacking in interest. At this second, darker level the antitheses of the official text are turned upside-down: the virtuous apprentice, the Thibault-figure, becomes insufferable, and the idle apprentice, the Bazile-figure, emerges an anti-hero. Between these two signifying levels, of official morality and its unofficial counterpoint, the Hogarth image is entirely exhausted: what cannot fit the first level drops to the second and is processed there, and as we gaze at the series we are asked to perform, repeatedly, and in two different registers, an act of extraction which is always the same and ends by finally emptying the image of all of its content. Irony in Hogarth- the interplay between the two textual levels- works as an instrument for subjecting the image to an absolute control by text: despite its apparent playfulness it is authoritarian, expropriative, and entirely anti-figural.
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Greuze has a mania for textuality but it never fully masters the image, because those aspects of his emotional make-up which he cannot fully confront never rise to the explicitness or patency of the Hogarth text. They remain outside discourse, and the viewer registers them by noticing, like the analyst, those things Greuze cannot see or say; by attending to the area of the image unoccupied by discourse - its figurality. The viewer does not drain the image dry, as he does with Hogarth's series, because there is no second text waiting below the first, to accomplish the full disposability of the image. Hogarth has placed the ironic second level in such a way that we trust it: by a process that was discussed in the first chapter, his second level is actually thought more realistic (distance from official text is read is approximation towards the real); more in keeping with the literary context Hogarth found himself working in more 'Hogarthian'. But Greuze has no awareness of a second level; he is painfully self-censored (and humourless). 


Yes -  Hogarth is humorous, Greuze is not. It's too bad Greuze never painted "Bazile et Thibault" so it might be  compared with  Hogarth's "Industry and Idleness".  There does seem to be much more in that series than just  a blunt admonishment to work hard and be honest.  Bryson suggests that there is a counter-discourse that criticizes industry and admires vice -- but that seems exaggerated and too explicit.  As a good Christian might, Hogarth loves both the saint and the sinner - and above all, he just seems to love the anarchic fecundity of life - like the ragtag crowd assembled outside Mr. Goodchild's new home on the morning that he distributes alms - or the enthusiastic greed of the "common  prostitute" who lies  on the broken bed next to the jittery Mr. Idle. Hogarth  has placed his dry instructional morality tale (how things should be) within a vibrantly amoral world (how things really are).

And no -   the  Hogarth image,  just like any other,  is not entirely exhausted after its discursive message has been delivered.  There  can always be some dispute - as I have demonstrated above - about just what that message might be.











In The Broken Pitcher the defloration he wants to contemplate is translated into the rather appalling symbol of the cracked vessel, and in another image from another brush the effect might remain at a level of acceptable banality. Greuze goes on to linger over the exact fracturing into shards of the vessel, and to point to the censored zone of defloration almost with arrows, so that his reticence becomes the vehicle for an insistence that is obsessively overcharged........Greuze does not state into the full consciousness  and visibility of discourse, Greuze is inhibited, and his crude symbolic language is the nearest he can get at all to articulating his erotic interest at all. The image is useful to him exactly because its figurality allows him to contact sexual pleasure without having to make the forbidden sexuality explicit.

Bryson  discussed this painting earlier - and the oddness of the situation does seem to merit more if not endless discussion. Why is this young woman staring at the viewer so openly while she carries the symbol of her lost virginity/purity/girlhood on her elbow and she fingers the folds of cloth that cover the dark and hidden location of her sex ?  What does she want from us ?  What could we possibly do for her ? What do we want from her ? What could she possibly do for us ?   Taking sexual advantage of her trust and vulnerability is one option.  Accepting her trust, acknowledging her situation, and encouraging her to get on with  life is another. Has there ever been another painting quite like it?  Could it have been done in any other time and place ?  Would any other artist have done it ?

Greuze, Girl with Dove

Though there is not much ambivalence here - as the drapes coyly fall off the shoulder and knee. This image is more overtly an invitation for lust - and make "forbidden sexuality explicit". As Bryson suggests, Greuze's work overall has no "didactic center" - and he concludes this chapter as follows:


The real power of Greuze is to embarrass, to disturb our normal categories, to flirt with abomination, to confront us with the libidinal forces Greuze himself will not acknowledge, but the moment we articulate our embarrassment and our distress, Greuze's images have been overcome: it is their sorrowful destiny to be returned to the state of equilibrium Greuze himself probably believed ha always been theirs.

This seems about right regarding the pieces which Bryson has shown. But there is also a formal power in Greuze's drawings and portraits  - and that kind of power does not dissipate no matter much it is acknowledged. 

And  now that we've reached the end of this chapter, we might consider whether "the pursuit of happiness" really serves that well as its title.  Most of Greuze's characters,  as well as the artist himself,  seem driven in other directions.

  "Understanding the human heart" might be more appropriate - and it also fits the rational, post-Christian secularity of that age (as well as our own).  It's a serious undertaking - unlike the escapists like Watteau, Boucher, and Fragonard.   And  since the human heart is often troubled, it summons a response that is more theatrical than contemplative - unlike  Chardin. 


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