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COPYRIGHT 2007 Modern Humanities Research Association
The first exhibition of the Association des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, architectes et graveurs, held in the Bazar Bonne-Nouvelle in January-March 1846, is best known for Baudelaire's review 'Le musee classique du Bazar Bonne-Nouvelle', published in Le Corsaire-Satan. This article examines the hitherto largely unexplored wider critical reception of the work of Jacques-Louis David on show at the exhibition, with particular reference to his representation of the death of Marat, painted in 1793. It argues that reaction to this work brought to the surface underlying tensions among both conservative supporters and reformist and republican opponents of the July Monarchy.
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Il [David] s'est agenouille devant une nature haineuse, feroce, hideuse, et a force de genie il a su l'ennoblir, sans mentir un instant, l'elever a toute la hauteur des plus beaux ouvrages de l'antique. Niera-t-on le pouvoir des arts? (1)
On 29 March 1846, at the AGM of the Association des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, architectes, graveurs et dessinateurs, Adrien Dauzats reported on the success of its activities since the founding of the Association eighteen months earlier. (2) The exhibition of paintings mounted in the galleries of the Bazar Bonne-Nouvelle for nine weeks between 11 January and 15 March that year had attracted 25,000 visitors and generated 31,000 francs from catalogue sales, admission charges, and donations. (3) A lavish society ball, the 'fete dite de l'association des artistes', had taken place on 31 January in the Salle de l'Odeon and here too the receipts after deduction of costs had risen to the occasion. (4) The proceeds from both events had been used to purchase additional government stock which, by the time Dauzats reported to the AGM, was paying an annuity of 12,000 francs into the combined Caisse de secours et pensions of the three associations of artists, musicians, and playwrights. (5) Due homage was paid to the members of the royal family who had honoured the exhibition with their presence and with further unspecified 'marques splendides de leur munificence' (Dauzats, pp. 31-32). (6) All who had contributed to its organization and management were warmly thanked, and as an example of the many handsome philanthropic gestures that the event had encouraged, Dauzats read out a letter, 'qui honore egalement celui qui l'ecrit et ceux qui la recoivent', and in which the art critic Etienne-Jean Delecluze informed him that he was donating to the Caisse de secours the 100 francs fee that he had received from the Journal des debats for his review of the exhibition. (7) Little wonder that, as Dauzats put it (p. 35), 'la lecture de ce Rapport, ecoutee avec le plus vif interet, souvent interrompue par des temoignages d'approbation, se termine par des applaudissements de l'Assembae'.
Exhibitions of contemporary art in aid of charity were few and far between during the July Monarchy, and the success of the Bonne-Nouvelle exhibition was unprecedented. (8) The patronage of the July Monarchy's social and professional elites and the willingness of distinguished collectors to lend their works were important factors in this success, but the key element was the prestige of the artists whose work was exhibited there. Chronologically the earliest work on show was Greuze's 1763 Portrait de Johann Georg Wille, the latest, Ingres's La Vicomtesse Othenin d'Haussonville, completed in 1845, but the exhibition eventually contained ninety-six works by nineteen artists, six living and thirteen deceased, the majority of whom were more or less closely associated with the 'ecole de David'. (9) On the morning of the opening, an anonymous author, in all likelihood one of the exhibition's organizing committee (and whose comment on the power of arts is quoted at the beginning of this article), explained in the Journal des artistes: 'L'idee-mere de l'exposition etait de captiver l'attention publique par quelques oeuvres de nos derniers grands maitres et celles des artistes qui, retires dans leurs tentes, n'avaient pas paru au Salon depuis quelques annees', by which he meant 'des oeuvres seules de MM. Ingres, L. [sic] Delaroche, A. Scheffer, L. David, Gerard et Girodet'. (10) This declared aim of bringing together for philanthropic reasons six big names in a pleasing symmetry of three modern and three contemporary, each possessing major crowd-pulling, fund-raising potential, is, however, nowhere mentioned in the minutes of the Association's meetings and has all the signs of having been thought up late in the day to counter suggestions that Delacroix had been deliberately excluded to appease Ingres or to prevent the exhibition from descending into an unseemly repetition of the classical vs. Romantic arguments that divided the annual Salon. (11) However the final list of exhibits may have been established, it was not what had originally been intended, as the minutes of the Association's meetings during 1845 make clear. Following the announcement made on 31 May that year that 'M. Ingres accepte le titre de membre honoraire du Comic et qu'il offre toutes ses oeuvres pour l'exposition projetee au profit de l'Association', (12) the Committee was evidently operating on the assumption that the proposed exhibition would consist of a retrospective of the work of Ingres alone. The decision not to limit it in this way was the result of a suggestion apparently made by Ingres himself and reported to the Committee on 7 November, only two months before the exhibition was due to open. (13)
Within weeks of Ingres's change of heart, offers were being received and suggestions made in relation to work by other members of the Association. More important, however, the Committee had by then also accepted an offer from David's daughter, Baroness Jeanin, to make available for the exhibition some of her late father's work in her possession. (14) It may also have been her offer which triggered that made by David's son, Eugene, to lend La Mort de Marat of 1793. (15) Together with the La Mort de Socrate of 1787, made available by the Marquis de Verac, the Marat displayed David's pre-eminence in what Delecluze called 'la peinture d'histoire proprement dite [Socrate]' and 'la peinture d'histoire contemporaine [Marat], dont l'une ete regeneree en France et l'autre instit76e chez nous par lui'. (16) The two paintings had in common the representation of the death of a Davidian 'hero'. (17) Two decades earlier, on the occasion of the sale of David's work after his death, Delecluze had noted in his diary in relation to the Marat: 'Il est facheux pour David que ce soit un aussi triste sujet qui l'ait inspire. Le personnage de Marat, si hideux et qui, de plus, deviendra si obscur, ne permettra guere que ce tableau soit expose.' (18) In 1846, however, it may have seemed to David's heirs that in the context of an exhibition which clearly enjoyed powerful official support from the regime and which, organized in aid of charity by an association whose philanthropic mission and associative principles may have appeared to offer the conditions for a more neutral, less sectarian response to David's work, this was as good a time as any to test the waters again in both the artistic and commercial sense. By the time the exhibition opened, twelve works by David (nine paintings and three drawings) had been made available to the organizers and a self-portrait was later incorporated into the Suite des supplements.
There can be no doubt that, as Shelton states, Ingres's work 'constituted the single greatest attraction of the Bonne-Nouvelle exhibition' and that this attraction was due to the extent to which 'the entirety of the artist's career seems to have been recapitulated' on the walls of the exhibition. (19) No other artist's work, not even the David exhibits, could compete with that of Ingres in terms of the chronological and stylistic range that Ingres had quite deliberately set out to display. Yet for those members of the Association's organizing committee who were hostile to Romantic painting, a second focus for their hostility towards it was provided by the late addition of David's work. The exhibition's consecration of Ingres as France's greatest living painter was, from their point of view, reinforced by the rehabilitation of David, the initiator of modern French art's return to the tradition of 'la grande peinture' which Ingres had inherited. The reviewer in the Journal des artistes, evidently not one for nuances, declared that 'une horde de novateurs, la hache en main, s'est ruee avec toute la ferveur des pygmees ou avortons contre ce colosse [David]' but that now, thanks to the generous collectors willing to 'se dessaisir un moment de si precieux tresors, la gloire de leurs foyers, la douce joie de leur vie', French art would be witness to 'une rehabilitation, a une reaction qui, nous en doutons aujourd'hui moins que jamais, aura une grande influence sur l'avenir de l'art et des artiste'. (20)
Support for David's rehabilitation was not confined in 1846 to conservative elements committed to a neo-classical revival. At the opposite end of the artistic and political spectrum from that occupied...
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