Scapeland : writing the landscape from Diderot's Salons to the postmodern museum

237 Pages·2012·41.578 MB·English

by  Pierce, Gillian Borland

Scapeland
FAUX TITRE
383
Etudes de langue et littérature françaises
publiées sous la direction de
Keith Busby, †M.J. Freeman,
Sjef Houppermans et Paul Pelckmans
Scapeland
Writing the Landscape from Diderot’s Salons
to the Postmodern Museum
Gillian B. Pierce
AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2012
Cover Illustration: Giorgio de Chirico, Il contemplatore (1976). © Roma,
Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico.
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of
‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence’.
Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions
de ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents -
Prescriptions pour la permanence’.
ISBN: 978-90-420-3594-2
E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0869-7
© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2012
Printed in The Netherlands
Contents

Acknowledgments 7

Introduction 9

Chapter 1: Landscape and the Sublime, 23
or The Art of Nature

Chapter 2: Les Limites de l’imitation: 63
Diderot and the Salons

Chapter 3: Baudelaire’s Parisian Cityscape: 111
Charles Meryon and Le Spleen
de Paris

Chapter 4: Mapping the City as Dreamscape: 149
André Breton and le point sublime

Chapter 5: “Scapeland”: The Sublime and 193
Lyotard’s Les Immatériaux

Conclusion 225

Bibliography 229
List of Illustrations

Ch. 2 Gabriel de Saint-Aubain, Le Salon de 1765 (1765).
Claude-Joseph Vernet, Le Midi, les baigneuses
(1772).
Hubert Robert, Vue imaginaire de la Grande Galerie
du Louvre en ruines (1796).
Ch. 3 Gustave Courbet, L’Atelier de l’artiste (1855).
Charles Meryon, Hotel Dieu of Paris Before Its Des-
truction (Le Petit Pont) (1850).
Le Stryge on a Balustrade of Notre Dame de Paris
(photograph from 1915).
Ch. 4 Yves Tanguy, Le Palais aux rochers de fenêtres
(1942).
Reconstruction of the wall of André Breton’s studio
on rue Fontaine, Paris (2000).
Roberto Matta, Untitled (Personnages transparence)
(1941–2).
Ch. 5 Marcel Duchamp, Le Grand Verre (1915–23).
Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to the many generous col-
leagues and friends who have helped shape this work into its current
form. James Porter, Timothy Bahti, William Paulson, Ross Chambers,
and Santiago Colás all helped guide the project in the earliest stages of
its development in the Program in Comparative Literature at the Uni-
versity of Michigan. Their critical insights and careful guidance have
been invaluable to me over the years. A Rackham Fellowship at the
University of Michigan and a summer travel grant from Ashland
University gave me time for research and writing when it was most
needed. I also received support from my colleagues in the Department
of Foreign Languages at Ashland University and in the Division of
Rhetoric at Boston University. I thank them all for their thoughtful
insights and for always being available for conversations that helped
bring new and important perspectives to the work. I also thank the
Boston University Center for the Humanities for supporting the
project. I am enormously grateful to Paul Pelckmans for his kind
encouragement and to the Boston Athenaeum for providing such an
agreeable environment for the final stages of writing.
Lindsay Guth offered invaluable help with copyediting and
proofreading; Bill Pierce applied his considerable editorial experience
and skills to the final formatting of the manuscript. Liz Kurtulik at Art
Resource, N.Y., helped to facilitate the reproduction of many of the
images in the volume. I would also like to thank the Fondazione
Giorgio e Isa de Chirico in Rome for providing the cover image.
Most of all, I would like to thank my family. They have given me
time, space, and their unconditional belief in the value of my work.
Without their patience and continued faith in the project, it most cer-
tainly would not have reached completion. This book is dedicated to
them.
Introduction

The works we admire . . . are ours because we are
artists.
— André Malraux, Le Musée imaginaire

The current study traces a history of art criticism from the eighteenth-
century French Salons and Denis Diderot’s art criticism through to the
twentieth century, to Jean-François Lyotard’s writing on the sublime
and his Pompidou Center exhibition, Les Immatériaux. The work first
considers Diderot and his contemporaries in their theories of art, spec-
tatorship, and the sublime, and then traces the development of these
conceptions through the nineteenth century and Charles Baudelaire’s
art-critical writings, through André Breton’s writing on art in Le Sur-
réalisme et la peinture and his own personal collection of art on the
rue Fontaine, to Lyotard’s postmodern museum.
In tracing this literary and critical tradition, it becomes clear that
these authors have in common an interest in the ways in which art
dematerializes and becomes immaterial, even “non-retinal,” ultimately
residing in the individual subjectivity of the viewer and in his or her
own projections, imagination, and impulses toward fiction. The idea
of the museum itself transforms from the physical spaces of the Salons
Diderot and Baudelaire describe to the rotating private collection
of Breton—very much his own, personal work of art, perhaps his
greatest masterpiece—to Lyotard’s Pompidou Center exhibition, Les
Immatériaux, a philosophical experiment in which works are no long-
er even visible, but have been dematerialized. Even Diderot was work-
ing within a framework of absent paintings in the sense that when he
wrote his descriptions of the latest paintings at the Salons for a hand-
ful of readers of the Correspondance littéraire, they referred to an ab-
10 Scapeland
sent model and thus functioned both as supplements to and replace-
ments of the works themselves. As Diderot’s project developed over
the years, so did his awareness that without paintings to refer to, his
descriptions increasingly became the works for his readers, a real-
ization he exploits most fully in his well-known experiment of the Sa-
lon de 1767, the famous “Promenade Vernet.”
Beginning with Diderot, all the authors in this study explore the
subjective aspect of art criticism as perhaps its most valuable element,
for that subjectivity represents a form of ownership, whether of virtual
pictures, a private collection, or a personal pathway through a museum
exhibition as a flâneur, following the dictates of personal whim and
fancy.1 Diderot, Baudelaire, Breton, and Lyotard are all fascinated
with the figure of the flâneur, and use walking—through a canvas,
figuratively, through the city, or through the museum—as a governing
trope for their critical work and for the work of the spectator. As Jo-
hanne Lamoureux writes in “The Museum Flat,” describing a recent
tendency for artists to stage exhibitions at venues throughout the city,
rather than in traditional gallery settings, “event specificity is linked
with the enhancement of pragmatic habits developed through contact
with works . . . requiring the spectator to move—to move literally in
space itself, but also to displace the very notion of ‘spectator.’”2 For
Lamoureux, the dissipation of the exhibition and its blending into the
city itself suggest a shift toward personal itineraries and a more pri-
vate, subjective role for the spectator, where “the tableau is ex-
changeable not only for money or for another painting: its circulation
as an aesthetic value is moreover increased by the fact that it can also
be transformed into a garden or a ‘natural’ landscaping experiment, a

1 In her work on human relations to the world of objects in On Longing: Narratives of
the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Susan Stewart considers the
collection (and the museum is a collection on a grand scale) as the ultimate attempt to
stage the personality of the collector: “When objects are defined in terms of their use
value, they serve as extensions of the body into the environment, but when objects are
defined by the collection, such an extension is inverted, serving to subsume the envi-
ronment to a scenario of the personal. The ultimate term in the series that marks the
collection is the ‘self,’ the articulation of the collector’s own ‘identity’” (Susan Stew-
art, On Longing [Durham: Duke University Press, 1993], 162). As Stewart shows, this
attempt to domesticate one’s environment is closely linked to the dynamic of the sub-
lime.
2 Johanne Lamoureux, “The Museum Flat,” in Bruce Ferguson, Reesa Greenberg, and
Sandy Nairne, eds., Thinking about Exhibitions (London: Routledge, 1996), 116.