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A Physiology of the Inglorious Artist in Early Nineteenth-Century Paris

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The Mediatization of the Artist

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Abstract

Henri Murger ’s Scènes de la vie de bohème, published piecemeal in Le Corsaire-Satan between 1845 and 1849, provides historians of art and literature with an elaborate representation of bohemianism in Paris during the July Monarchy. Murger’s text is here brought into conversation with an unstudied corpus of approximately 500 satirical images of artistic life and 50 objects of popular theater. This contribution expands upon Murger’s artistic typologies, exploring their inheritance in images and stagings of the delusional bohemian, the shop sign painter, and the carefree artist.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Scènes de la vie bohème was first edited and published as a single volume in 1851. From 1845 to 1849, Murger published a new short scene in Le Corsaire-Satan every three or four months. Henry Murger, Scènes de la vie de bohème, ed. Sandrine Berthelot (Paris: Flammarion, 2012).

  2. 2.

    Nathalie Heinich , L’élite artiste: excellence et singularité en régime démocratique (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 28; Mary Gluck, Popular Bohemia. Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 16; Jean-Claude Yon, Histoire culturelle de la France au XIXe siècle (Paris: A. Colin, 2010), 49.

  3. 3.

    A notable exception is the most recent editor of Scènes de la vie bohème, Sandrine Berthelot. See note 1.

  4. 4.

    Heinich briefly acknowledges the popular fiction and theater that preceded Murger’s Scènes in L’élite artiste, 27–29.

  5. 5.

    See my dissertation that explores this corpus of satire at Duke University, entitled “Art, Commerce, and Caricature : Satirical Images of Artistic Life in Paris, 1750–1850.” In her study of artists in fiction in the nineteenth century, Nathalie Heinich discovered 11 examples for 1800–1849, however her census excludes opera, theater, and short fiction. “Artistes dans la fiction. Quatre générations,” in Pascal Griener and Peter J. Schneemann, Künstlerbilder–Images de l’artiste (Bern: Peter Lang, 1998), 205–20.

  6. 6.

    Gluck, Popular Bohemia. Nathalie Heinich began to identify much of this satirical, popular representation in fiction and theater; see “Artistes dans la fiction. Quatre générations” and Du peintre à l’artiste. Artisans et académiciens à l’âge classique (Paris: Les Ed. de Minuit, 1993), 27–45.

  7. 7.

    On Aaron Martinet, see Louis Hautecoeur, “Une famille de graveurs et d’éditeurs Parisiens. Les Martinet et les Hautecoeur (XVIIIe et XIXe siècles),” Paris et Ile-de-France Mémoires 18–19, no. 1967–1968 (1970): 205–340. On the history of nineteenth-century popular imagery in general, see Patricia Mainardi, Another World. Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Print Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).

  8. 8.

    For more on panoramic literature and physiologie publications see Martina Lauster, Sketches of the Nineteenth Century: European Journalism and Its Physiologies, 1830–1850 (Basingstoke and New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

  9. 9.

    Several historians and librarians recommended caricatures of the Paris art world for historical study between 1852 and 1918. Most recently Laurent Baridon and Martial Guédron echoed this recommendation in “Caricaturer l’art: usages et fonctions de la parodie,” in Ségolène Le Men, ed., Les arts en correspondance. L’art de la caricature (Paris: Presses universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2011), 87–108. Recent work has been done on satirical images as criticism of individual artworks via the post-1850 Salons caricaturales. See Yin-Hsuan Yang, “Les premiers Salon caricaturaux au XIXe siècle,” in L’art de la caricature , 53–72; and idem “Les salons caricaturaux au XIXe siècle: des origines à l’apogée” (PhD, Paris 10, 2012). Also Julia Langbein, “Salon Caricature in Second Empire Paris” (PhD, The University of Chicago, 2014).

  10. 10.

    Although I often employ Howard Becker’s term “art worlds,” I favor Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the “artistic field.” Whereas the notion of an “art world” might lead us to believe that all participants can gain membership, Bourdieu reminds us that fields are limited, membership is restricted, and even once a member, individuals and groups engage in position taking to exercise influence and effect change. Since this corpus of satirical criticism tends to target the artist’s relations to art world systems, Bourdieu’s notion of the “artistic field” is more appropriate. Howard Saul Becker, Art Worlds, 25th anniversary ed. (Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 2008); Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York : Columbia University Press, 1993).

  11. 11.

    Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Frank Jellinek (New York : H. Fertig, 1973).

  12. 12.

    The most well-known exploration of this shift in the political economy of the Paris art world is Harrison C. White and Cynthia A. White, Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World (New York : Wiley, 1965). More recent scholarship has nuanced White and White’s exploration of the “dealer-critic” system, which does not adequately describe early nineteenth-century modes of artistic production. See Neil McWilliam, “Art, Labour and Mass Democracy: Debates on the Status of the Artist in France Around 1848,” Art History 11, no. 1 (1988): 64–87; Jean-Claude Bonnet, ed., La carmagnole des muses. L’homme de lettres et l’artiste dans la Révolution (Paris: Armand Colin, 1988); Jean-Claude Bonnet, ed., L’Empire des muses: Napoléon, les arts et les lettres (Paris: Belin, 2004); Marie-Claude Chaudonneret, L’état et les artistes: de la Restauration à la monarchie de Juillet (1815–1833) (Paris: Flammarion, 1999); Séverine Sofio, Artistes femmes: la parenthèse enchantée, XVIII e –XIX e siècles (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2016). Recently, Christophe Charle has explored the deregulation of the European cultural sphere across the nineteenth century. La dérégulation culturelle. Essai d’histoire des cultures en Europe au XIXe siècle (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2015).

  13. 13.

    To view this image on The Daumier Register Online Database, see http://www.daumier-register.org/werkview.php?key=999.

  14. 14.

    All translations are mine.

  15. 15.

    For more on illustrators in the nineteenth century see Philippe Kaenel, Le métier d’illustrateur (1830–1880): Rodolphe Töpffer, J.-J. Grandville, Gustave Doré (Genève: Droz, 2005).

  16. 16.

    I discuss satirical frontispieces to albums at greater length in a forthcoming article in INHA Les Collections électroniques, entitled “L’autoréflexivité dans l’Album Comique: Les illustrateurs et les éditeurs contre eux-mêmes dans la Restauration.” For more on the brothers Gihaut, see Corinne Bouquin, “Les frères Gihaut: éditeurs, marchands d’estampes et imprimeurs lithographes (1815–1871),” Nouvelles de l’estampe 10 (1989): 4–13.

  17. 17.

    On the various formats and serialization of early nineteenth-century satirical imagery, see Bouquin, “Les frères Gihaut,”; Ségolène Le Men, Pour rire!: Daumier, Gavarni, Rops: l’invention de la silhouette (Paris: Somogy, 2010).

  18. 18.

    To view these images on The Daumier Register Online Database, see http://www.daumier-register.org/werkview.php?key=827 and http://www.daumier-register.org/werkview.php?key=825.

  19. 19.

    Elizabeth Wilson is attentive to the origins of the Bohemian myth as the country from which the city’s liminal vagrant population was believed to have originated. See Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000).

  20. 20.

    The following texts have been particularly influential in my thinking on the relationship between target and criticism in satire : Daniel Sangsue, La Parodie (Paris: Hachette, 1994); Ivo Nieuwenhuis, “Enlightenment Subverted: Parody as Social Criticism in Pieter van Woensel’s Lantaarn,” in Marijke Meijer Drees and Sonja de Leeuw, eds., The Power of Satire (Amsterdam: John Benjamin’s Publishing Company, 2015), 217–34.

  21. 21.

    Heinich, Du peintre à l’artiste; Heinich, L’élite artiste.

  22. 22.

    Thierry Laugée, Figures du génie dans l’art français (1802–1855) (Paris: Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, 2016).

  23. 23.

    Vincent Laisney, L’arsenal romantique: le salon de Charles Nodier, 1824–1834 (Paris: Champion, 2002); Alain Bonnet, Artistes en groupe: la représentation de la communauté des artistes dans la peinture du XIXe siècle (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2007); Anthony Glinoer, La querelle de la camaraderie littéraire: les romantiques face à leurs contemporains (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2008); Anthony Glinoer and Vincent Laisney, L’âge des cénacles. Confraternités littéraires et artistiques au XIXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2013).

  24. 24.

    This term is difficult to translate because of the many valences of peuple: people and population; masses and crowds of people; and in a pejorative sense, common.

  25. 25.

    Ivens describes this as a soudure forcée, or a forcibly soldered joint, and draws upon the Baroque notion of monstrosity. Maria Ivens, Le peuple-artiste, cet être monstrueux: la communauté des pairs face à la communauté des génies (Paris: Harmattan, 2002).

  26. 26.

    Philippe-François-Nazaire Fabre d’Eglantine, L’intrigue épistolaire, 2nd ed. (Paris: Moutardier, 1802).

  27. 27.

    Ibid., 43. Monsieur Fougère was so popular that he appeared in Martinet’s endless series, La petite galérie dramatique in 1799.

  28. 28.

    Louis Sébastien Mercier, “Les Greniers,” in Tableau de Paris. Nouvelle édition. Corrigée & augmentée, vol. 1, part 1, 12 vols. (Amsterdam, 1782), 6–8.

  29. 29.

    To view Dunker’s engraving, see the Gallica web edition at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b2000059g/f2.item.

  30. 30.

    Heinich briefly discusses the association of sans-souci to the bohemian . Heinich, L’élite artiste, 36.

  31. 31.

    Paul Ledoux and Gabriel-Alexandre Belle, M. Sans-Souci, ou Le peintre en prison (Paris: Barba, 1818).

  32. 32.

    Pierre-Yves Barré et al., Lantara, ou Le peintre au cabaret (Paris: Fages, 1809).

  33. 33.

    Croûte first appears in this usage in the mid-eighteenth century. See Antoine-Joseph Pernety, Dictionnaire portatif de peinture, sculpture et gravure: avec un Traité pratique des differentes manieres de peindre, dont la Théorie est développée dans les articles qui en sont susceptibles: ouvrage utile aux artistes, aux élèves & aux amateurs… (Paris: Chez Bauche, 1757), 120.

  34. 34.

    Charles-François-Jean-Baptiste Moreau de Commagny and A.-M. Lafortelle, Monsieur Crouton, ou L’aspirant au Salon (Paris: Barba, 1814).

  35. 35.

    Ibid., 38–39.

  36. 36.

    Aileen Ribeiro, The Art of Dress: Fashion in England and France 1750 to 1820 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995).

  37. 37.

    Vincent Milliot, Les “Cris de Paris”, ou, Le peuple travesti: les représentations des petits métiers parisiens (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles), Histoire Moderne 30 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1995); Christiane Dole, Élodie Massouline, and Miriam Simon, Le peuple de Paris Au XIX e Siècle (Paris: Paris Musées Editions, 2011). To view Boilly’s Une loge through the Réunion des musées nationaux, see http://art.rmngp.fr/fr/library/artworks/louis-leopold-boilly_une-loge-un-jour-de-spectacle-gratuit_huile-sur-toile_1830. To view his Elèves de l’atelier du Baron Gros see http://www.carnavalet.paris.fr/fr/collections/eleves-de-l-atelier-du-baron-gros.

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  1. Art & Art History Department, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Kathryn Desplanque

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  1. University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Rachel Esner

  2. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

    Sandra Kisters

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Desplanque, K. (2018). A Physiology of the Inglorious Artist in Early Nineteenth-Century Paris. In: Esner, R., Kisters, S. (eds) The Mediatization of the Artist. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66230-5_13

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