Visualizing the Revolution: Politics and Pictorial Arts in Late Eighteenth-Century France (Reaktion Books - Picturing History)

298 Pages·2008·4.95 MB·English

by  Hubertus Kohle

spine 24mm
[c ]
Rolf Reichardt is Head of the French Research The French Revolution was marked by a wealth
Collection at the University Library of Mainz. picturing history Visualizing the Revolution of imagery and visual symbolism that inspired
the masses to fight for freedom. Visualizing the
Hubertus Kohle is Professor of Art History at Series Editors
Politics and Pictorial Arts in Late Eighteenth- Revolutionsurveys the rich and multifaceted
the University of Munich. Peter Burke, Sander L. Gilman, Ludmilla Jordanova.
artistic culture of the time, exploring its creation
century France
and how it conveyed the new revolutionary
Rolf Reichardt and Hubertus Kohle sensibilities.
Unlike most studies of French Revolutionary
art, this book embraces a wide range of artistic
V genres – including prints, paintings, sculptures
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was
Picturing Historypresents a new kind of historical writing in
i and buildings – and also draws on archival
which images form an integral part. Embracing the use of s the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the
u
documents and other historical literature to
pictures as direct evidence about the past, this challenging series a epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was
l investigate the period’s aesthetic concerns.
also examines ‘images’ in the wider sense, revealing them as active i
z the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness . . .
tools of negotiation, parody and resistance – as spaces in which in Rolf Reichardt and Hubertus Kohle break
history is made and enacted, as well as recorded. g charles dickens, A Tale of Two Cities new ground in methodology and interpretative

t practice as they trace the intricate web of
in the same series h
e connections between these various historical

R artefacts and argue for the central place of
Men in Black Pictures and Visuality in Early
e
john harvey Modern China v the arts in the transmission of ideas and the
craig clunas o political manipulation of the populace – both
Global Interests l
Renaissance Art between East and Mirror in Parchment u educated and illiterate. Visualizing the Revolution
t
West The Luttrell Psalter and the Making i translates the provocatively new visual language
o
lisa jardine andjerry brotton of Medieval England n revealed in these artworks and writings and
michael camille
The Destruction of Art shows how its emphasis on metaphor, allegory
Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the Landscape and Englishness
R and symbolism transformed mass visual culture
French Revolution david matless
dario gamboni o in France. Visualizing the Revolutionis a valuable
l
The Thief, the Cross and the f
new contribution to scholarship on the French
Maps and Politics Wheel R
jeremy black Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment e Revolution and the history of French art.
i
in Medieval and Renaissance Europe c
Trading Territories mitchell b. merback h
Mapping the Early Modern World a
jerry brotton Bodies Politic rd
Disease, Death and Doctors in t
Picturing Empire
Britain, 1650–1900 a
Photography and the Visualization of roy porter n
the British Empire d
Jacket: ‘Destruction of the Bastille after the Victory won james r. ryan Eyewitnessing H
from the Enemies of Liberty on 14July 1789’, 1789, TheUsesofImages as Historical u
Evidence b
coloured etching. Private collection. peter burke e
r
Photograph courtesy of the authors. t
Art The Lives of Images u
peter mason s

K
Sport in the ussr o With 187illustrations, 46in colour
Physical Culture – Visual Culture h
reaktion books ltd mike o’mahony le uk £25.00 rrp
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk us $45.00

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Visualizing the Revolution
p001_005_visualizing_Prelims:p001_005_visualizing_Prelims 23/5/08 15:38 Page 2
picturing history
Series Editors
Peter Burke, Sander L. Gilman, Ludmilla Jordanova,
†Roy Porter (1995–2002), †Bob Scribner (1995–8)
In the same series
Health and Illness Landscape and Englishness
Images of Difference david matless
sander l. gilman
The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel
Men in Black Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in
john harvey Medieval and Renaissance Europe
mitchell b. merback
Dismembering the Male
Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War ‘Down with the Crown’
joanna bourke British Anti-monarchism and Debates about
Royalty since 1790
Eyes of Love antony taylor
The Gaze in English and French Painting
and Novels 1840–1900 The Jewish Self-Image
stephen kern American and British Perspectives
1881‒1939
The Destruction of Art michael berkowitz
Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French
Revolution Global Interests
dario gamboni Renaissance Art between East and West
lisa jardine and jerry brotton
The Feminine Ideal
marianne thesander
Picturing Tropical Nature
nancy leys stepan
Maps and Politics
jeremy black
Representing the Republic
Mapping the United States 1600‒1900
Trading Territories
john rennie short
Mapping the Early Modern World
jerry brotton
Bodies Politic
Picturing Empire Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain
1650‒1900
Photography and the Visualization of the
roy porter
British Empire
james ryan
Eyewitnessing
Pictures and Visuality in Early The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence
peter burke
Modern China
craig clunas
Sport in the USSR
Mirror in Parchment Physical Culture – Visual Culture
The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of MIKE O’MAHONY
Medieval England
michael camille
p001_005_visualizing_Prelims:p001_005_visualizing_Prelims 23/5/08 15:38 Page 3
Visualizing the Revolution
Politics and the Pictorial Arts in Late
Eighteenth-century France
Rolf Reichardt and Hubertus Kohle
reaktion books
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Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
33 Great Sutton Street, London ec1v 0dx, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2008
Copyright © 2008 Rolf Reichardt and Hubertus Kohle
English-language translation ©Reaktion Books Ltd, 2008
Translated from the German by Corinne Attwood
Translations from the French by Felicity Baker
All artworks/photographs of artworks reproduced in this edition
are in the authors’ collections.
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publishers.
Printed and bound in China
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Reichardt, Rolf
Visualizing the Revolution : politics and the pictorial arts in late
eighteenth-century France. – (Picturing history)
1. Art, French – 18th century 2. Art – Political aspects – France
– History – 18th century 3. France – History – Revolution, 1789‒1799
– Art and the Revolution 4. France – Intellectual life – 18th century
I. Title II. Kohle, Hubertus
709.4'4'09033
isbn-13: 978 1 86189 312 3
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Contents
Introduction: On the Threshold of a New Era for the Arts 7
1 Staging the Revolution 13
2 Contemporary Images of Revolutionary Change 35
3 Scenes of the New Political and Cultural Order 91
4 Reorganizing the Artistic Sphere 131
5 From Aristocrat to New Man 150
6 Between Terror and Freedom 183
7 Visualizing the Revolution 212
Chronology 240
References 251
Bibliography 278
Index 291
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Introduction:
On the Threshold of a New Era for the Arts
So impressed was Goethe by a collection of French caricatures he saw
in Frankfurt in 1797 that he began writing a treatise on the subject.
The ‘Olympian’ of Weimar, a long-time connoisseur and collector of
elaborate, classical-style French engravings (antique landscapes,
vedute, historie and genre prints),1found himself both attracted and
repelled by the distorting, even vulgar metaphors of some of the
prints in circulation at the time of the Directoire, conflicting as they
did with traditional ideals of beauty.2 Although Goethe never
completed his treatise, he did return to the theme in Die guten Weiber
(1800), a novella in the form of a dialogue. In one episode featuring a
debate on the subject of caricatures, even the opponent of these new-
fangled cartoons grudgingly concedes their strong impact on her.3
Goethe’s ambivalence would appear to be symptomatic of the
prevailing crisis of aesthetics at a time when even an academy trained
British artist like James Gillray was abandoning historical and genre
painting in favour of caricatures of contemporary events, and
German painters were developing pictorial satire into a more expres-
sive form.4 (It should be noted here that at that time, caricature
denoted not only visual satire but any characteristic graphic
portrayal.) There were no longer any definite criteria for what consti-
tuted a ‘good’ picture. Recent research in art history confirms that
during the years 1760–1810 the arts underwent a seismic structural
upheaval, with France being perhaps the foremost laboratory for this
cultural experiment. Werner Busch has provided a particularly
profound analysis of the stages of this process of transformation.5
As academic ‘high art’ was being subjected to increasingly strin-
gent criticism, so classical theory was gradually losing its universal
validity. Traditional iconography was being cut loose from its cultural
moorings and the safe refuge of the ‘Ancients’ being abandoned,
metaphysical values were in crisis, and the sacred was coming under
attack from both sides by reality and authenticity. This secularization
and contemporization had a dual effect on the pictorial arts.
7
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First, the function of allegory was being diminished, and trad-
itional iconography was being relativized. In order to ensure recogni-
tion for their work, artists customarily utilized the traditional
iconography and classical symbolism of figures and forms when
portraying particular themes. Now, however, they began taking liber-
ties when utilizing ancient Christian models, giving rise to a conflict
between old forms and new content, and at the same time the devel-
opment of a new iconographic archive. Second, the classical hierar-
chy underwent an upheaval, so that the boundaries between
historical, genre, landscape and portrait painting became blurred,
giving rise, for example, to genre paintings with historical meaning.
This was especially the case with caricatures, which were for the most
part produced anonymously, a fact which, combined with their force-
ful realism, meant that they were ideally suited to the expression of
contemporary experiences and, above all, the sense of rupture with
the past.6 This was also the case with the new type of ‘popular
picture’, the history of which remains to be written.7
Werner Hofmann has characterized this process of transformation
as a rejection of the classical rule of unity of place, time and treat-
ment; in the transition to the Early Modern, the picture lost its trad-
itional ‘monofocus’, becoming instead ‘polyfocal’, in Hofmann’s vivid
metaphorical neologism.8This new perspective, briefly outlined here,
on the artistic revolution that occurred during the transition to a new
era (1760–1810), sheds new light on what has long been the
Cinderella of art history. The 1790s are still something of a blind spot
in this new comprehensive examination, at least in the case of France,
either in that the decade is ignored altogether, or because the focus is
on prominent individual works of representational art in themselves,
without taking into account their connection with a particular period
of time. Whereas the French Revolution may not have been the
primary artistic event of the late eighteenth century, the premise here
is that it did function as an essential catalyst of the process of trans-
formation outlined above. Artists became highly politicized, and
conscious of contemporary events; innovative symbolism was intro-
duced, leading to experimentation with provocatively expressive and
emotional processes of representation, which was further developed,
given form, and ‘ennobled’.9It was hardly coincidental that Goethe’s
aesthetic crisis was triggered by socially critical prints emanating
from revolutionary France.
8