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