The New World of Henri Saint Simon Review

If one takes an interest in the role of art in society, one is spring to speak of the Saint-Simonians. And oft one does so without knowing it. The English language art historian Neil McWilliam deserves credit for having taken stock of the origins of a French line of thought that is far from expressionless and that has been renewed under other forms, in the by too every bit today.
While artists now no longer run across themselves as an "avant-garde" that would be spreading new ideas by appealing "to the imagination and to the sentiments," this is more than a affair of a change in vocabulary than of a shift in foundations. As Neil McWilliam concludes in his talk, the cultural system of modern society still contains, ane hundred and fifty years afterwards, quite a few elements of "Saint-Simonianism." Art has expanded into new spheres that express the metamorphoses and adaptations of these elements, sometimes to the point of suffocation.
Nada that was being thought at the beginning of the nineteenth century is to exist laughed at today when examined in lite of what we at present know about art's ability to fit into a postmodern culture. While the onetime utopian dreams accept been abandoned, the function of fine art is really in the process of being redefined within the inflexible framework of the imperatives of consumer order and of the society of the spectacle.
The ambition of this Letter, which nosotros shall publish every two months, is to be a site of word. The give-and-take will center around the status of art, which is henceforth to be viewed in the light of history. While the debate is already underway, it can likewise gain past imagining its historical depth.
Our seminar sessions at the French National Political Science Foundation's Middle for History volition precede each publication of this Letter of the alphabet. At least two lectures will be included every time. And this fourth dimension, the second talk, in echo of the kickoff, comes from Eric Michaud of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Michaud is well known for his work on art and totalitarianism. We are in his debt for his investigation into a line of thought that sought salvation through images and that tended to make art the docile servant of a unitary and authoritarian earth view.

Laurence Bertrand Dorléac
Seminar of Oct 11th 2004

A Revolutionary Aesthetic?
The Politics of Social Fine art in France c. 1820-1850

Neil McWilliam

In December 1824 a modest tract in the grade of a dialogue appeared—very discreetly—in Paris that was to marking an important phase in the development of the modernistic formulation of the artist and his social condition. Entitled "L'Artiste, le savant et l'industriel" (The Artist, the Scientist, and the Industrialist) and published in the collection Opinions littéraires, philosophiques et industrielles, the text was the work of a former blueblood, Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon. For twenty years, Saint-Simon had devoted himself to elaborating a political system that would reconcile textile progress and social gild while at the same fourth dimension ensuring the welfare of the most disadvantaged classes. The transformation of his philosophy toward a mystical humanism was accompanied by a privileging of the arts that reached its highest expression in 1824. Saint-Simon portrayed the representatives of the three classes that were to be granted the leadership of the lodge he envisioned for the hereafter : the scientist, whose intellectual abilities guarantee the rational management of the customs ; the industrialist, who exploits natural resources and seeks out scientific innovations ; and the artist, who summarizes as follows his own duties in addressing his two other interlocutors:

"It is we artists who volition serve as your vanguard; the ability of the arts is indeed most immediate and the quickest. We possess artillery of all kinds : when we want to spread new ideas amid men, we inscribe them upon marble or upon a sail ; nosotros popularize them through verse and through song; we employ by turns the lyre and the flute, the ode and the song, the story and the novel; the dramatic stage is spread out before us, and it is in that location that we exert a galvanizing and triumphant influence. We address ourselves to man's imagination and to his sentiments. We therefore ought always to exert the nearly lively and decisive action. And while today our role seems nonexistent or at least quite secondary, that is because the arts are missing what is essential to their energy and to their success, a shared impulse and a general idea."[ref]"L'Artiste, le savant et l'industriel," Oeuvres complètes de Saint-Simon et d'Enfantin, vol. 10 (1867), p. 210. The attribution of this work has been the subject of discussions ; see the assay provided in Neil McWilliam, Dreams of Happiness. Social Art and the French Left 1830-1850 (1993), p. 45.[/ref]

For Saint-Simon, the artist therefore fulfills the part of an intermediary who can translate his partners' abstract conceptions into a linguistic communication likely to touch and to mobilize all sectors of lodge. Understood in this manner, fine art can influence public opinion and, ultimately, people'southward behavior through the force of sentiment it exerts over minds that are themselves incapable of responding to the appeals to reason. In conceiving the role of the arts every bit being that of "dashing ahead of all the intellectual faculties," Saint-Simon was outlining a program of social engagement for the artist that would later be worked out in detail past his ain followers as well every bit by such dissident Saint-Simonians as Philippe Buchez and Pierre Leroux during the July Monarchy. That programme would also have an repeat in the oppositional movements that adult during the 1830s and 1840s, in particular among the republicans and the Fourierists. The ideological outlook peculiar to each thinker or political tradition brought meaning nuances to the way they conceived the social role of fine art. Beyond these differences, however, 1 can discern some common concerns relative to the transformational potentialities of art, to the psychological process of aesthetic reception, and to the mechanisms of peaceful social modify. It is with such theoretical concerns in mind that a generation of critics would come to engage artistic production in the mid-nineteenth century and elaborate a diagnosis of the scourges of contemporary society and a plan of cultural action for facilitating the advent of a new world.

The theorists of the period following the French Revolution inherited a tradition that privileged the social duty of fine art and that had its roots in the Ancien Régime, peculiarly in the work of Diderot. Developed in the years subsequently 1789 under circumstances that were more than pressing, these ideas had a directly influence upon the aesthetic debates of the post-obit century, in particular among republicans. At the same time, new concerns emerged that helped shape competing ideological models during the 1830s and 1840s in certain directions, and they transformed conceptions of individual psychological makeup and altered the function assigned to the creative person in the social construction. Already in Saint-Simon, the stardom between the creative person, the scientist, and the industrialist reflected the new psycho-physiological theories that were being heralded around 1800 by Georges Cabanis and Xavier Bichat. In their inquiry, Cabanis and Bichat had challenged the psychological model inherited from John Locke, which had causeless a basic equality in individual potentialities that would later on be modified past the contribution of experience to each person'southward sensory appliance. They proposed instead a conception of homo that underscored the importance of innate variations in abilities and character and divided social club forth the lines of a typology organized around ascendant psycho-physiological qualities. Such a model emphasized sentiment, understood as the characteristic most highly developed in the majority of people. Moreover, it fostered the conviction that social stability rests upon a organization of shared beliefs that were addressed to individual sentiment and that overcame selfish instincts. Religion was thus conceived as a primal element for a more but world, though the [onetime Saint-Simonian and subsequently Christian Socialist] Philippe Buchez was the but 1 for whom Catholicism retained its moral dominance in post-revolutionary society.

 The French Revolution's challenge to traditional beliefs brought about a crunch of values that inspired a profusion of radical movements and played a decisive role in privileging the personality of the artist so characteristic of the first half of the nineteenth century. What Paul Bénichou has called, in a brilliant study, the "induction of the writer [sacre de l'écrivain]," also contributed to the glorification of painters and sculptors, whose work seemed particularly well fitted to print a big and often uncultivated public. As Georges Matoré has shown, the term artist became the object of unprecedented attention in the Romantic era and outstripped its blandly professional connotations to designate a creator with transcendent powers. According to Balzac—who was himself attracted by the Saint-Simonians—"The artist is the campaigner of some truth, the organ of the Almighty who makes utilise of him." In the same spirit, the author Félix Pyat declared in 1834, "Art is about a form of worship, a new faith that arrives at just the right moment when the gods are departing, and kings besides."[ref]Honoré de Balzac, "Des artistes," in La Silhouette (April 22, 1830) ; Félix Pyat, "Les Artistes," Nouveau Tableau de Paris, iv (1834), p. 7.[/ref]

While today the analogy betwixt art and religion has become a commonplace that no longer exerts anything more than a weak metaphorical force, amongst the supporters of social art who were contemporaries of Balzac and Pyat the notion of art as a religious vocation and of the artist as a reincarnation of the priest was widely debated. The weight granted to this idea varied according to the social and psychological models developed by the theorists of the different movements. The philosophy of labor elaborated past Fourier and his followers, for instance, macerated the status others had granted to the artist. Co-ordinate to their theory of "attractive piece of work," happiness in a harmonious society necessitates a continual modify in activity and so every bit to satisfy all aspects of the private personality. Such an outlook is incompatible with the kind of specialization implied by such a term as artist. Indeed, for Fourier the distinction betwixt art and labor is mitigated if not completely abolished, and each member of society is conceived as being, at least potentially, an artist.

The status of the artist is too less pronounced in the work of Leroux. Leroux altered Saint-Simonian ontology by insisting upon the unity of individuals' three capacities : sensation, sentiment, and knowledge. He effected a change in the Saint-Simonians' way of identifying these capacities with singled-out personality types—and social duties—as he insists upon their coexistence in each individual. By privileging man's ontological unity, Leroux besides affirmed social unity and challenged the hierarchization of duties and the infrequent status Saint-Simonians granted to the creative person.

It is Saint-Simon and particularly his followers who about fully develop the notion of art equally a priesthood. The elevation of the artist to the elevation of spiritual power in future society follows from the transformation of Saint-Simonianism from a political to a religious system. This change was broached effectually 1824 past the master himself and accomplished in December 1829 with a Saint-Simonian proclamation of faith past the two new leaders of the movement, Prosper Enfantin and Saint-Armand Bazard. While Saint-Simon had foreseen "a positive power, a true priesthood"[ref]"Fifty'Artiste, le savant et l'industriel," p. 216.[/ref] for artists, this promise was expanded and they were now endowed with a real influence whereby they became "tutors of humanity." This glorious destiny was the outcome of the ever more fundamental role granted to sentiment in Saint-Simonian philosophy. It is sentiment that develops the artist's heightened sense of awareness and that gives to him the intuitive ability to foresee the hereafter ; the artist thus becomes a prophet. At the same time, among the people sentiment is the kinesthesia most probable to be touched and to transform impressions into activeness. In a famous sermon delivered in March 1830, the Saint-Simonian orator Emile Barrault solicited the support of artists in an undertaking that would transform lodge through the concord they have over the popular imagination:

"And then come, come up to us, all those whose hearts tin can love and whose brows may bonfire with noble promise ! Let us combine our efforts so as to bring humanity toward this time to come. Let us be united among ourselves, similar all the harmonious strings on the same lyre. Let united states of america begin, starting today, to sing those holy hymns that will be repeated by posterity; henceforth, the fine arts are the organized religion, and the artist is the priest."[ref]Émile Barrault, Aux artistes. Du passé et de l'avenir des beaux-arts (1830), p. 84.[/ref]

This alluring vision is, all the same, contradicted past an ongoing tension between the theoretical promise of an artistic priesthood and the practical subordination of the artist to a more exclusive class of priests who relish superior authority in doctrinal matters. This tension itself echos the desire of the Saint-Simonians to observe what they chosen "a scientific discipline of sentiment"—that is to say, an artful linguistic communication whose pedagogical effectiveness is guaranteed by an objective understanding of the psychological motivations upon which it plays. Thus the Saint-Simonian Léon Halévy declares in 1825:

"The time is coming when the painter, musician, and poet, having reached the summit of their powers of feeling, will possess the chapters to move or to delight with as not bad a certainty as today the mathematician is able to solve geometrical problems or the pharmacist to decompose a item substance."[ref]Léon Halévy, review of Les Martyrs de Souli past Népomucène Lemercier, in Le Producteur, 1 (1825), p. 83.[/ref]

 Although such ambitions were eclipsed with the transformation of the doctrine into a religion, the tension between the artist's creative freedom and his enslavement to ideological imperatives was not reconciled. This tension was all the more real as the Saint-Simonians had as their top doctrinal priority the elimination of individualism and the creation of a unified and coherent society. This ambition took shape through their promotion of collective glasses reminiscent of the revolutionary festivals and in their architectural fantasies, in which technological innovations transformed infinite through a sort of pyrotechnics that melded the individual into a totalizing feel of the sublime.

 The Saint-Simonians' anti-individualism is, at least superficially, the antonym of the libertarian position of the Fourierists. The movement'southward founder, Charles Fourier, bequeathed to his followers an apparently infallible systematization of human psychology that, he claimed, immune for the elaboration of social institutions in perfect conformity with the physical and spiritual needs of man. While the master's discoveries were supposed to eliminate social as well every bit psychological conflicts in gild to attain collective harmony, they also offered a formula that attuned individual freedom to the greatest happiness of all. The harmonious coordination of behavior and opinions foreseen by Fourier thus patently eliminates all demand for artistic intervention in social club ; and in the theory of the master himself the office of the artist is limited to collective amusement. For his followers, notwithstanding, fine art was appreciated both every bit a valuable tool in the arduous task of converting the inhabitants of our imperfect world to the future joys promised by harmony and, once that harmony had been accomplished, to glorifying a nature finally restored to its true destiny. Armed with the formulae of what he calls the "social constabulary" ancestral by Fourier, one of his followers, Eugène d'Izalguier, offered in 1836 some thought of what an "aesthetic law" developed according to these principles would be:

 "If, indeed, being an expert in the needs of human nature, Fourier was able to calculate accurately the social atmospheric condition nigh advisable to this nature, most favorable to the satisfaction of those requirements, it will likewise be possible, by profiting from his works on the passions of man, to calculate the artistic conditions nigh in harmony with those passions and most capable of satisfying them or directing them in line with the goal of the creative person. Thenceforth, every artful combination will accept its law and its reason, like every musical combination, like every pictorial combination, similar every combination of numbers, and science will exist grounded."[ref]Eugène d'Izalguier, "Loi de la corrélation de la forme sociale et de la forme esthétique," in Trois Discours prononcés à l'Hôtel de ville, faisant complément à la publication du Congrès historique (1836), p. 127.[/ref]

Such ambitions lose their positivist look in critical reviews of the fine arts published in the Fourierist press during the July Monarchy. For the critic Désiré Laverdant, whose articles on the Salon offered an opportunity to apply a Fourierist aesthetic to exhibited works, artistic harmony exerts a beneficial upshot upon the melancholia apparatus by evoking a world in which there is a perfect correspondence between the class of an object and its "destination," that is to say, the role information technology is called upon to fulfill in the world. Ideal beauty is thus conceived as the artistic expression of a perfect harmony guaranteed when the management of nature has eliminated the moral and physical repression feature of present-day society. Such a formulation therefore invests physical beauty with a political meaning. It allows the Fourierists to see in formal values ideological lessons calibrated upon the priority granted to harmony as the absolute social value. It thus offers artists the possibility to work for the collective welfare while eliminating the need to depict explicitly didactic subjects. As Laverdant explained in 1843, it is the doctrinal priority granted to happiness as the realization of natural harmony that opens such prospects to the arts :

"The goal of art is to brand the states excogitate and love true destiny and to distance us from conditions of life which are false and disordered. The mission of fine art is therefore to reveal to us, in its most general expression, the idea of happiness as ultimate goal and divine consecration of truthful destiny."[ref]Désiré Laverdant, "50'Art et sa mission," La Démocratie pacifique, vol. 1, no. 2, (August two, 1843).[/ref]

 While platonic dazzler evokes a harmonious future, artists are likewise encouraged to bargain with the ravages of present-mean solar day civilisation so every bit to give nascence to a feeling of disgust in the viewer that volition convince him of the need for a radical transformation of society. Here over again, Fourierist critics dismiss direct allusions to poverty and inequality recommended by republican theorists and advocate a more exclusively formal strategy. According to the Fourierists, the pictorial representation of the discrepancy between nature and a earth that violates the basic laws of harmony tin can stimulate feelings of disgust in the viewer that will ultimately provoke a revolt confronting the status quo. It is thus a formal strategy—what Fourierist critics called "ideal ugliness"—that is seen to possess an inherent critical power forceful enough to mobilize the emotions and hasten the advent of a new lodge. The efficacy of this strategy is all the more than assured, in the view of Fourier'south followers, since the master had discovered a circuitous system of analogies betwixt the physical world and the moral world. Exact correspondences between colors and forms and the scale of passions which the chief had identified and endowed with picturesque names thus allows the artist to attune the pictorial qualities of his work to precise moral ideas. Beyond these exact correspondences, the activity engaged in past the artist itself rests on an analogy between aesthetic harmony and social harmony. This notion was expressed past Laverdant in 1846:

"All of the painter'due south work—the marriage and contrast of tones, the opposition and symmetry of groups and masses, the necessary variety of colors, movements, and lines, the layout and execution, in fact the entire pictorial piece of work—rests upon the laws of attunement [accordance], discord, and variety, upon the coordination of the elements of the painting in accordance with the requirements of the 3 passions, composite, cabalist, and butterfly."[ref]Désiré Laverdant, De la mission de 50'art et du rôle des artistes. Salon de 1845 (1845), p. vi.[/ref]

 Thus armed, the artist becomes—oft without beingness enlightened of information technology—a powerful critic of the disorder that disrupts present-day society or an instinctive prophet of the joys of a world ordered according to the infallible laws of harmony. Very often, the Fourierist critic therefore applied himself to revealing the hidden pregnant of a work, to rendering explicit a meaning that is to be read through the pictorial language deployed in order to convey the discipline itself. Thus, the idealized scenes of Italian peasant life painted around 1830 by Léopold Robert became premonitions of a golden age, thank you to the harmony of the colors and forms deployed by the artist.

In comparison to the Fourierists, the theoretical position of republican critics tin can appear narrowly utilitarian. The demand that art become directly involved in the problems of the contemporary world was indeed frequently repeated in the republican printing. Displaying a highly moralizing tone, many republican critics conceived art'due south social function in essentially anecdotal terms: the painter is implored to phase the dramas of popular life, to condemn the powerful who exploit the proletarian, and to defend the underprivileged. Thus, in 1839, the critic Jules Baget calls for art to be "good, useful, moral, and national."[ref]Jules Baget, "Salon de 1839," Journal du peuple, Apr 14, 1839.[/ref] Such priorities shape the disquisitional discourse of many commentators who harken back to the mobilization of the arts during the Revolution in guild to lambast the contemporary situation which was dominated by well-off clients indifferent to the people'southward sufferings. Théophile Thoré vented his acrimony in 1835 when he proclaimed, "Satin, roses, danses, feasts, a great tapestry that is good at the very almost for veiling the tears of thirty one thousand thousand proletarians—that is what our patrons want, since our patrons are bankers and upstarts [parvenus]."[ref]Bearding [Théophile Thoré], "Exposition ambulante de tableaux contre-révolutionnaires et Salon de 1835. Boissy-d'Anglas – Nantes et Boissy-d'Anglas – Paris," Le Réformateur, March 11, 1835.[/ref]

 The ascertainment that the market was favoring a kind of art that was indifferent, if not downright hostile, to all social engagement encouraged some critics to develop a theoretical position more suitable for investing the language of forms with moral meaning. Thoré himself found in Leroux's philosophy an interpretation of nature that allowed him to moderate his support for an explicitly social art. Following Leroux, he avant-garde a pantheistic formulation of God that immune him to see in the very act of representing nature a highly moral gesture. With his heightened perception of the world that surrounds him, the creative person interprets nature and gives a meaning to it with the assist of the fabric resources he has at his disposal. Once again, every bit for the Saint-Simonians and the Fourierists, but for theoretically singled-out reasons, the moral—and mobilizing—effect of the paradigm is to be invested in form, which is itself conceived every bit a pictorial element with ultimately political connotations.

Along the same lines, progressive artists and critics led a campaign confronting the French Academy of Fine Arts, condemning the mystification of artistic conventions taught in the School of Fine Arts and favored at the Paris Salon. These official institutions were accused of having stifled the artistic spirit and of having frustrated all aesthetic expression inspired past a direct and true perception of nature and of the modern world. Such an indictment was indeed leveled by such immature republicans as the critics Gabriel Laviron and Jean-Barthélémy Hauréau, as well as by the young artist and future director of the Louvre, Philippe-Auguste Jeanron, in the review La Liberté, which was published between Baronial 1832 and February 1833 under the motto "Decease to the Plant ! Death to professoriate !" Although short-lived, the journal would take a powerful resonance through affirming the political vitality of an fine art freed from the constraints imposed by what one of its contributors called "nothing merely an aristocracy in the arts."[ref]J. Raimbaud, "Union et liberté," La Liberté. Journal des arts, 2 (August 1832), p. 14.[/ref] For these critics, the liberation of the artist as represented by the affirmation of his personal vision paves the manner for a direct and critical engagement with gimmicky guild. The resulting naturalism is the fruit of the creative person'due south subjective vision and allows him to assume his responsibilities toward his peers. Deprived of this vision, the artist educated by the Academy and working in accordance with the formulae of the market was presented as the tool of a political authorities that flourished through distorting the truth in all areas of life. Thus, in 1850, the critic Auguste de Gasperini revives the arguments advanced twenty years before in the pages of La Liberté. For him, artistic convention distorts linguistic communication and obscures the truth about social relations in favor of the ruling classes. Gasperini argues:

 "It is the part of the ruling order that has created the words corresponding to ideas and that, substituting everywhere the thought of a pocket-sized number, the item idea, the conventional thought for the total, universal, and necessary thought, has everywhere diverted words, the figurative signs of idea, from their real and accented meaning."[ref]Auguste de Gasperini, De fifty'fine art dans ses rapports avec le milieu social (1850), part one, p. 9.[/ref]

This critique of culture as well equally of what could be chosen an Ideological State Apparatus heralds the declaration of independence that would exist proclaimed five years later by a painter for whom the truth serves as the theoretical touchstone for a practice that glorifies artistic independence. In 1855, Gustave Courbet presented his works in a retrospective exhibition under the name of "Realism" and drew up a manifesto that served as the preface to his catalogue. In terms that have since become famous, the artist affirms his freedom with regard to prevailing artistic forms and exalts a subjectivity that has freed itself from social and cultural conventions as the source of his perception of the surrounding world:

"I wanted quite only, with a full knowledge of tradition, to depict upon the measured sense of my own individuality. To know in gild to exist able to do, such was my thought. To exist up to the chore of translating the habits, the ideas, the expect of my era according to my own appreciation, to exist not only a painter but likewise a homo, in a give-and-take, to make living art, that was my goal." [ref]Gustave Courbet, "Le Réalisme," Preface to Exhibition et vente de 40 tableaux et iv dessins de M. Gustave Courbet (1855).[/ref]

Though the living fine art of Courbet stands in a line of descent from social art as it was theorized from the time of Saint-Simon until the Second Republic, information technology is important to resist the temptation to elaborate a direct genealogy that would underscore too simplistic a family resemblance between Realism and its antecedents. There are certainly some ties between Courbet and socialist currents of the 1840s; we know, for example, that the painter from Ornans had been connected with followers of Pierre Leroux around 1845. At the same time, the proclamation quoted above is reminiscent of republican positions during the July Monarchy. It was within this circumvolve, for instance, that the demand for contemporaneity was particularly pronounced. All the same Courbet'southward practice is much more radical, in that information technology calls into question theoretical principles that remained intact amid almost all theorists of social art, whatsoever their ideological affiliation. The altitude he placed between himself and his precursors can be summed upward in a phrase drawn from a letter he wrote to Francis Wey in which he describes The Stonebreakers in Nov 1849 "fine art has to exist dragged into the gutter."[ref]The term used by Courbet is il faut encanailler 50'fine art. In her edition of The Messages of Gustave Courbet (Chicago, 1992), Petra ten-Doesschate Chu translates this every bit "nosotros must drag art downwards from its pedestal" (p. 88). Both T.J. Clark, Prototype of the People. Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (London, 1973), 161 and McWilliam, Dreams of Happiness (p. 333) prefer the current formulation.[/ref]

In the immediate context of this letter, Courbet's injunction concerns the representation of the working classes in art. He lays into "art that is pomaded and tasteful," that is to say, Salon art, which had besides attracted the contempt and provoked the frustration of many radical critics over the previous two decades. At the aforementioned time, it must be noted that this aforementioned period witnessed the pocket-size notwithstanding pregnant production of works that challenged social injustice by showing the selfishness of the wealthy and the unfailing integrity of the poor. Virtually frequently, such works preached the gospel of self-sacrifice and stoicism, encouraging in the viewer feelings of pity rather than a more trenchant questioning of the social hierarchy. This prudent attitude was broadly supported by critics who favored a formula that was expressed in the following way by an anonymous writer, in the working-class paper Fifty'Atelier, in 1841:

"The goal [of the fine arts] is to brand us better individually; they are to inspire in us a love of our fathers, charity, gentleness, the peacefulness of the family, a chaste and pure dear; they are to excite in us a loathing of selfishness and of all the vices that lead societies and families to ruin ; in a word, they must make it easier for us to fulfill all our duties."[ref]Anonymous, "Salon de 1841," L'Atelier, vol. one, no. seven, (March 1841), p. 55.[/ref]

This acceptance of moral codes that themselves contain the inequalities of a world confronting which the partisans of social art wanted to struggle highlights a contradiction that sapped the mobilizing strength of cultural commitment. From the political standpoint, all the diverse republican, socialist, and utopian movements endorsed a morality that, on the artistic level, privileged the glorification of the adept worker as an artistic theme as well every bit sanitizing the view of the contemporary globe on the formal level. The importance granted to beauty is revealing. Amidst the Fourierists, beauty forms office of a broader philosophy that regards harmony every bit an absolute quality enabling collective happiness to flourish. In various ideological contexts, other thinkers of the era—and notably Pierre Leroux—praised harmony as a founding ontological value. Beyond these theoretical affinities, still, ane tin see critics from the entire theoretical gamut of social fine art upholding a normative perception of beauty that reproduces the antinomies between the real and the ideal, the high and the depression, which had traditionally served to define the natural order of the world in the field of ideology. Notions of beauty, harmony, order, and aesthetic propriety implied a item view that governed what could be represented and, more than fundamentally, the way in which the social club could be conceived. Partisans of social art rarely debated the assumptions upon which the artistic values tacitly accepted by artists and recognized critics were really based. They thus accustomed a language of art—and a cultural linguistic communication in general—that was more probable to normalize agreement of the prevailing lodge than to call that order into question in a radical way. Here again, fine art had to descend into the gutter.

It had to descend into the gutter also in order to reach a public that remained at the margins of such dominant cultural institutions as the Salon, toward which the champions of social fine art invariably directed their attention. Artistic commentary, likewise as well-nigh of the cultural initiatives encouraged within the radical movements, continued to give priority to traditional forms of art and traditional outlets. It was the painting and sculpture exhibited in the Salon that held their attention—and that provoked repeated expressions of frustration at artists' indifference to their calls for cultural mobilization. The disability to understand the mechanisms of an fine art market dominated past individual clients encouraged concentration on a domain that was highly resistant to radical aesthetic and social priorities. It thus seems all the more astonishing that, autonomously from a few express attempts sponsored by the Saint-Simonians and the Christian artists around Philippe Buchez, the radical movements under the July Monarchy made very little of the popular arts and, in particular, lithography, in their efforts to win over the working class.

While in terms of its practical achievements the social art of the 1830s and 1840s proved to exist express, the moment remains an important one in the history of fine art too as in the history of ideas. For students of the socialist and republican movements of the era, the artful field represents an aspect of ideological fence that highlights such bones questions as the function they accord to nature, their conceptions of individual psychology, and the condition of sentiment in their epistemological systems. It is the artistic field, too, that allows us meliorate to appreciate their understandings of the mechanisms for achieving peaceful change of the dominant social gild. From the standpoint of the history of art, the July Monarchy initiated a debate on the social role of art whose echoes would resound throughout the post-obit century. One hundred and fifty years after, the cultural regime that characterizes modern order contains a number of elements that could exist characterized equally "Saint-Simonian." From the technological standpoint, the profusion of audiovisual media we have inherited from the twentieth century has facilitated a penetration of our concrete and psychological being past hidden persuaders" that goes far beyond the wildest dreams of Saint-Simon and his disciples. More than by art, as conceived in its narrow nineteenth-century sense, we are today surrounded by a vast and stifling mass culture that has colonized traditional forms of expression and adapted innovative forms to its own ends. Of course, our consumer society has its own norms and forms of behavior that are solicited and legitimized by our pop civilisation; its messages are all the more effective as they reject direct moralism and appeal instead to our senses of pleasure, sensuality, and material well-existence. Promoting an individualism that cultivates the illusion of autonomous judgment and action, (post)modernistic culture has usurped the dreams of happiness of the old utopias in club to delude us with "dreams that money can buy."

I would like to thank Laurence Bertrand Dorléac and Eric Michaud for their applied and intellectual back up.

---

Bibliographie

BENICHOU, Paul, Le Temps des prophètes. Doctrines de l'âge romantique. Paris, Gallimard, 1977.

BORRELL, Joan, Fifty'Artiste-roi. Essai sur les représentations. Paris, Aubier, 1990.

Chartres, Musée des beaux-arts, Exigences de réalisme dans la peinture française entre 1830 et 1870. 1983.

CLARK, Timothy, The Absolute Conservative: Artists and Politics In French republic, 1848-1851. Berkeley, CA : University of California Press, 1999.
CLARK, Timothy, Image of the People : Gustave Courbet and the 2nd French Commonwealth 1848-1851. Greenwich, CT : New York Graphic Society, 1973.

GRATE, Pontus, Deux Critiques d'art à fifty'époque romantique : Gustave Planche et Théophile Thoré. Stockholm, Almqvist & Wiksell, 1959.

Chase, Herbert James, Le Socialisme et le romantisme en France. Étude de la presse socialiste de 1830-1848, Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1935.

KELLEY, David, "Fifty'Art : fifty'harmonie du beau et de l'utile," Romantisme n°. five (1973), pp. 18-36.

LOCKE, Ralph, Les Saint-Simoniens et la musique. Liège, Mardaga, 1992.

MCWILLIAM, Neil, Dreams of Happiness. Social Fine art and the French Left 1830-1850, Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1993.
MCWILLIAM, Neil, "Art, Labour and Mass Democracy : Debates on the Condition of the Artist in France around 1848," Art History, vol. 11, no. ane (March 1988), pp. 64-87.
MCWILLIAM, Neil, "Peripheral Visions : Class, Cultural Aspiration and the Artisan Customs in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France." In Politics and Aesthetics in the Arts. Ed. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell. Cambridge, England : Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 140-173.

MATORÉ, Georges, "Les Notions d'art et d'artiste à l'époque romantique," Revue des sciences humaines, vol. 16, n. 62-63 (April-September 1951), pp. 120-137.

RANCIÈRE, Jacques, The Nights of Labor : The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, Trans. John Drury, with an introduction by Donald Reid. Philadelphia, Temple Academy Press, 1989.

RÉGNIER, Philippe, "Les Saint-Simoniens et le mouvement romantique." In A. Billaz & U. Ricken (eds.), Romantismes et socialismes en Europe (1800-1848). Études de littérature étrangère et comparée, n. 82 (1987), pp. 207-223.
RÉGNIER, Philippe, "Les Saint-Simoniens, le prêtre et fifty'artiste," Romantisme, n. 67 (1990), pp. 31-45.

ROSENTHAL, Léon, Du romantisme au réalisme. La Peinture en France de 1830-1848. Reprint. Paris, Macula, 1987.

RUBIN, James Henry, Realism and Social Vision in Courbet & Proudhon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Academy Press, 1980.

TERDIMAN, Richard, Soapbox/Counter-Discourse : The Theory and Do of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France. Itaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1985.

N.B.: This translation of McWilliam's text has been reviewed and, on some minor points, contradistinct by the author. The nowadays English-language version thus differs slightly from the French original in the wording of certain phrases.

---

Neil McWilliam is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Art and Art History at Knuckles University (United States).  A specialist in criticism and aesthetics and in its connections with nineteenth-century French political theory, he has published Dreams of Happiness. Social Art and the French Left 1830-1850 (Princeton Academy Press, 1993).Monumental Intolerance : Jean Baffier, A Nationalist Sculptor in Fin-de-Siècle France (Pennsylvania Land Academy Press, 2000), every bit well as the Bibliography of Salon Criticism in Paris from the July Monarchy to the Second Commonwealth 1831-1851 (Cambridge University Press), 1991.  With June Hargrove, he has edited Nationalism and French Visual Civilisation 1870-1914, which volition appear in early on 2005 in the Studies in the History of Art series (National Gallery of Fine art, Washington, D.C.).  His current enquiry is devoted to the aesthetics of the nationalist Far Right in France during the 1870-1914 flow.

arnettbizin1998.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.sciencespo.fr/artsetsocietes/en/archives/3034

Share this post