THE SALON OF 1874
AND THE DUSTbIN OF ART HISTORY
BY MELVILLE HOLMES
While doing research recently for an article I began last year, I came upon a website that didn’ t exist then. The idea was to discuss some of Denis Diderot’ s insightful and influential criticism of the art in the 18th-century Paris Salons. That proved a bit of a challenge because he was talking about paintings that were not easy to locate today. But now what I found is a complete history of the Salon, year by year, from its inception in 1673 under the aegis of the French Academy until 1881 1, along with other sources such as the complete Salon catalogues 2, and photographs in the French National Archives of works from the Salon purchased by the state from 1864 to 1900. 3
All this brought back recollections from when I was an art student in the‘ 70s. The only thing we ever heard about the“ Salon” was that it was bad because they wouldn’ t let Monet show his early work there and because two paintings by Édouard Manet created a public uproar: his Luncheon on the Grass, rejected by the official jury but exhibited at the Salon des Refusés of 1863, and his notorious Olympia that appeared in the Salon of 1865. As for the Salon itself and the officially accepted artists, we were largely left in the dark. If they were mentioned at all it was to say their work was superficial and dead. They were just out.
Just how“ out” they were can be illustrated by the coverage of 19 th-century French art in one of the most widely trusted survey texts, H. W. Janson’ s History of Art. The author describes what individual artists( e. g. Manet, Monet, etc.) were doing, but his thought was essentially framed in their roles as precursors to Modern Art. He offers nary a word concerning the artists in the Salons, who were receiving critical acclaim favor at the time, when the early Impressionists were out in the cold. Janson( 1977) had edited the Catalogues of the Paris Salon 1673 to 1881, so he was surely familiar with what was in the Salons. Yet they effectively found no place in his history of art at all, and this became the norm throughout the 20 th century; 19t h century academic art was irrelevant to the progress of modernity.
But something began to break through about the time when book publisher H. N. Abrams somewhat boldly published a coffee table book in 1974 titled Some Call it Kitsch which did illustrate some of those“ forbidden” Salon artists’ works. Around that time a Bouguereau exhibition was mounted in the museum in San Francisco. One piece memorably struck me there, for its clarity, dignified serenity, and pathos, his Virgin of Consolation, illustrated here. I felt uncannily that I was in the presence of greatness. Was I? Or not...?
The proverbial pendulum has swung back. Nineteenth-century academic art has become a hot item of late on the prestigious auction blocks. A two-volume book on Bouguereau with catalogue raisonné appearerd in 2010. The Musee d’ Orsay, which houses much of France’ s 19 th-century art, has been in the process of restoring and displaying works by significant academic artists that have not been on view for over a century. 4
Why did the Salon juries reject works by upcoming artists like Claude Monet, why were the officially recognized artists relegated to the dustbin of art history, and should they have been? H. W. Janson offers an oblique answer to the second question in a short but insightful philosophical essay introducing the fourth and last section of his volume:“ The Modern World.” The word“ modern,” he explains most simply means what is present, the way things are now in contrast to the way they used to be. In the previous age, the Renaissance was the“ rebirth of antiquity,” when the“ ancients,” that is to say the classical Greek and Roman and biblical writers and church fathers, were the revered authorities. But with the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of democracy, the old certainties were being challenged. To oversimplify it, modernity or modern consciousness looks not to the past but to the future.
Writer and critic Charles Baudelaire, in“ The Painter of Modern Life”( 1859), defines modernity in a somewhat different way that has everything to do with the present subject,“ The aim for him [ the artist ] is to extract from fashion the poetry that resides in its historical envelope, to distill the eternal from the transitory. Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable...” and goes on to say that,“ There was a form of modernity for every painter of the past...”
38 ART CHOWDER MAGAZINE