AESTHETICS AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE AGE OF DREYFUS: MAURICE DENIS’S HOMAGE TO CÉZANNE K AT H E R I N E M A R I E K U E N Z L I The Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906) and the doctrines of right-wing nationalism that it spawned in France decisively changed the political landscape of modernist painting. In the decades before the Affair, modernism’s interpreters and critics aligned this political landscape with left-wing, progressive republican or socialist, politics. In the early 1890s Camille Pissarro and Paul Signac both noted signs of political reaction in the art of Paul Gauguin and the young symbolists.1 However, ideological positions on the right were not neatly defined, and the political heterogeneity and ambiguity of much of symbolist art did not decisively alter the public perception of advanced painting’s politics.2 However, modernism’s political fractures grew into deep divides at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, which polarized and politicized every aspect of French political, cultural and intellectual life from 1898 until 1906. One of the most lasting consequences of the Affair was the birth of right-wing nationalism. In the face of widespread division, Charles Maurras, Maurice Barrès and Adrien Mithouard formulated right-wing doctrines of national unity based on principles of hierarchy, order and the subordination of the individual to principles of authority and tradition.3 These calls for unity often went hand-inhand with anti-parliamentarian politics and anti-Semitism. Right-wing nationalism encompassed both politics and culture: all three theorists were successful poets and writers before they became politicians, and their definitions of French identity often rested on claims to France’s literary and artistic patrimony. Maurras’s, Barrès’s and Mithouard’s seductive and powerful constructions of a modern France in touch with its glorious traditions attracted numerous artists and intellectuals, among them Paul Valéry, Edgar Degas, Camille Claudel, Auguste Renoir, Maurice Denis and Vincent d’Indy. During and after the Affair, right-wing nationalism competed with leftist political doctrines in actively shaping the practice and conceptualization of modernist painting. Condemnations of advanced painting as politically reactionary abounded after 1900. In ‘La Réaction nationaliste et l’ignorance de l’homme de lettres’ (1905) for instance, Camille Mauclair accuses avant-garde artists of trafficking in right-wing politics. He writes, ‘[o]ne wants to turn one’s DOI:10.1111/j.1467-8365.2007.00573.x ART HISTORY . ISSN 0141-6790 . VOL 30 NO 5 . NOVEMBER 2007 pp 683-711 & Association of Art Historians 2007. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 683 AESTHETICS AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE AGE OF DREYFUS back on all that we have accomplished, because nationalism has intervened in art, and its clever sophisms have disconcerted, troubled, and finally seduced our artists at the age when they needed to consolidate their youthful work and embark on new pathways.’4 Although many of Mauclair’s specific claims were subsequently contested, his principal argument – that significant factions of advanced painters had become political reactionaries – speaks to the new political landscape of Dreyfus-era Paris. Writer and politician Léon Blum writes in his memoirs of the Affair, ‘[i]t seems to me that even in [the 1914–18 war] we did not experience such brutal separations and, in consequence, such sudden alliances formed on the basis of a common conscience.’5 While the Dreyfus Affair is generally acknowledged to have aborted collaborations and sundered friendships, its effects on the practice of painterly modernism during the period of the Affair’s most intense ideological struggles, 1898–1901, have yet to be uncovered.6 Scholars have identified the Salon d’Automne of 1905 as a key moment when modernism became yoked to rightwing politics.7 This exhibition featured retrospectives of Édouard Manet and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres alongside contemporary paintings, and provoked vigorous debate amongst critics over the nature and status of a French artistic and cultural tradition.8 Right-wing nationalists made a strong showing in these debates as they sought to identify classical currents in recent painting or to decry anti-classical elements as signs of national decadence. Scholars have demonstrated how classicism became closely linked to French tradition and right-wing nationalism as a result of these debates. Focusing on 1905 has led historians to overlook how the association between classicism, French tradition and right-wing nationalism grew out of the ideological struggles surrounding the Dreyfus Affair in and around 1898. Maurice Denis articulates how political struggles took on an aesthetic dimension in a journal entry dated Christmas 1898. Referring to conversations with close friends Adrien Mithouard, Jacques Lerolle and André Mellerio, Denis conceives of the Affair in terms of a struggle between principles of impressionism and anarchism on the one hand, and classicism and authority on the other: As far as the Affair is concerned, I am pleased to take note of the scepticism and ingenuity it has taught me . . . Mithouard maintains that it is the struggle between principles of individualism and solidarity; between Impressionism and collective ideas! J. Lerolle – between anarchists of all stripes and those who respect the principle of authority. Along with Mellerio, I also see in it an opposition between, on the one hand, those with a predilection for nervousness and dream, and on the other those whose minds are balanced and practical.9 Denis appropriates his friends’ arguments in order to construct a series of oppositions between competing artistic and political principles. He associates individualism with impressionism, anarchism and anti-Dreyfusism. Solidarity is aligned with collective ideas, principles of authority and pro-Dreyfusism. The terms of the artist’s oppositions take their meaning from the Dreyfus conflict. Most immediately, the Affair (1894–1906) concerned the fate of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish Alsatian army captain who, in 1894, was falsely accused of spying for the Germans. The Affair erupted into a mass-media event in 1898 when Émile Zola wrote an editorial in Georges Clemenceau’s newspaper L’Aurore; Zola 684 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 AESTHETICS AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE AGE OF DREYFUS & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 685 1 Maurice Denis, Homage to Cézanne, 1900. Oil on canvas, 180  240 cm. Paris: Musée d’Orsay. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, New York. AESTHETICS AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE AGE OF DREYFUS accused the French military of wilfully miscarrying justice. The question of Dreyfus’s guilt or innocence sparked a larger public polemic over concepts of race, identity and nation.10 Dreyfus’s Jewish ethnicity, combined with his origins in a province lost in 1870 to the Germans, ignited France’s anxieties concerning the strength of its military as well as the legacy of religious and ethnic tolerance born of the French Revolution. Battle lines were drawn between those who placed the army and French traditions above the individual, and those who felt that the legitimacy of the nation depended on its ability to safeguard individual rights, regardless of a person’s ethnic or religious affiliation. In his journal entry Denis conceives of the Affair in aesthetic terms and reads art through the lens of the conflict. Denis responded so quickly and explicitly to the Affair because it posed a greater threat to his group of artists (known as the Nabis) than to any other artistic group in the 1890s. Neo-impressionist painters took part in the Affair, but they sided uniformly with Dreyfus.11 Impressionist artists fell on opposing sides of the issue, but this posed no challenge to group solidarity, which had ended in the late 1880s, long before the Affair became a burning issue.12 However, the Dreyfus Affair deepened existing rifts among Denis’s Nabis. Symbolist painters inspired by the example of Paul Gauguin, the Nabis rallied behind the cause of representing emotions in art.13 Denis had joined the group in 1888, and distinguished himself over the course of the 1890s as its most prominent painter and theorist.14 A believer in group solidarity, he worked tirelessly throughout the 1890s to articulate and solidify a sense of collective purpose through organizing exhibitions and writing manifestoes, beginning with his famous ‘Définition du Néo-Traditionnisme’ (1890). Despite his efforts, Nabi unity suffered over the course of the second half of the 1890s due, in part, to mounting methodological differences between its members. Paul Ranson, Paul Sérusier and Maurice Denis grew critical of early symbolism, and subordinated individual sensation to the search for a collective, unified method that would connect modern painting to a Western, Christian tradition. Another faction of the group consisting of Édouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard and Ker-Xavier Roussel avoided theories, creating works based on the primacy of individual sensation. In 1898 and 1899 Denis confirmed these tensions, conceiving of his friends as split between rationalists and sensualists.15 These divisions extended beyond the immediate Nabi group to include their friends and supporters. In 1899 Denis includes Nabi mentor Odilon Redon among the ranks of the sensualists. Aesthetic factions amongst Nabi artists corresponded to political positions: Vuillard, Bonnard, Redon and Roussel, the so-called empiricists who maintained the inviolability of individual sensation, defended Dreyfus. Rationalists Denis, Sérusier and Ranson, who upheld the supremacy of hierarchy and tradition, threw their weight behind France’s military and hierarchical institutions.16 Denis was well aware of these aesthetic and political divisions affecting his group, and the Dreyfus Affair weighed heavily on his mind over the course of 1898 and 1899.17 The artist politicizes the methodological differences dividing his friends in a journal entry responding to Durand-Ruel’s 1899 group exhibition that featured paintings by the Nabis and Redon among others. Denis characterizes Vuillard’s, Bonnard’s and Redon’s art based in nature as ‘Semitic’ whereas Sérusier’s, Ranson’s and Denis’s increasingly rule-bound paintings are identified as 686 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 AESTHETICS AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE AGE OF DREYFUS 2 Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Fruit Dish, 1879–1880. Oil on canvas, 46  55 cm. Private collection. Photo: The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/ART Resource, New York. ‘Latin’.18 Such racial labels could not fail to take on political significance amidst the anti-Semitic rhetoric of the Dreyfus Affair. This article examines a painting which grew out of this charged political and artistic situation: Denis’s Homage to Cézanne of 1900 (plate 1). The artist painted the work in an effort to shore up group identity in a moment of crisis. Members of the Nabi group, as well as their friends and supporters, gather in Ambroise Vollard’s gallery around Paul Cézanne’s Still Life with Fruit Dish, painted some twenty years earlier (plate 2). From left to right stand Odilon Redon, Édouard Vuillard, the critic André Mellerio, Ambroise Vollard, Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier, Paul Ranson, KerXavier Roussel and Pierre Bonnard. Denis’s wife, Marthe, is positioned along the right margin of the canvas, seemingly disconnected from the group, her lace veil acting as a screen that softens her features. Marthe frames the group on the right; on the left a window pierces the left wall of Vollard’s gallery, offering a view of what is most likely the rue Laffitte, a Haussmann-era boulevard. Hanging along the back wall are examples of paintings by Gauguin, Renoir and Vuillard. Denis paints recognizable types of their works rather than quoting specific canvases. Although Homage to Cézanne has long been acknowledged as a watershed moment in modernist painting, we have yet to understand its message. On permanent display at the Musée d’Orsay, this large work is well known and & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 687 AESTHETICS AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE AGE OF DREYFUS frequently cited. However, the dominant tendency amongst scholars has been to view it as a document of Cézanne’s rising reputation rather than as a painting with its own formal tensions and interests.19 Hindsight as to Cézanne’s significance for early twentieth-century modernism has led scholars to take for granted the appearance of Still Life with Fruit Dish, extracting it out of the complex artistic and political context in which it was appreciated. For Denis, aesthetic matters were never divorced from social and moral concerns. He writes in his journal in 1890: ‘[a]ll the connections are coming together between artistic theories, passionately defended, philosophy . . . the dream of social justice . . . and immortal Faith, the supreme principle underlying all of my efforts.’20 Denis’s social and philosophical vision of art became explicitly politicized during the ideological struggles surrounding the Dreyfus Affair. In Homage to Cézanne he presents a view of French painting as an attempt to synthesize opposing aesthetic and political factions. Denis formulated his dualistic approach to painting in conversation with his close friend, the Catholic poet and right-wing politician Adrien Mithouard. Close analysis of the painting and its historical moment reveals that Denis’s formal choices and narrative structure in Homage were informed by right-wing nationalist cultural politics. ART AND POLITICS Homage to Cézanne differs from most of the art directly associated with the Dreyfus Affair because Denis refuses all explicit reference to political actors and events.21 The artist would certainly have been aware of the forms of visual polemic inundating the French capital. Two of the most noted producers of political imagery were recognized Nabi artists: Félix Vallotton and Henri-Gabriel Ibels. On 23 January 1898 Vallotton, an ardent pro-Dreyfusard, published The Age of Paper (plate 3) 3 Félix Vallotton, The Age of Paper. Published as the cover for the periodical Le Cri de in Le Cri de Paris, 23 January 1898. PhotoParis. Vallotton depicts the Affair as mechanical print, 28.5  19.5 cm. Paris: a media event, showing top-hatted Bibliothèque Nationale. Photo: Bibliothèque bourgeois men engrossed in daily Nationale de France. reports of the sordid events. However, this print amounts to more than neutral reportage: a copy of Zola’s ‘J’ Accuse’ appears most prominently in the foreground, making the artist’s sympathies clear. Even more partisan is Vallotton’s He is Innocent!, one of twelve prints comprising an album entitled Homage to Picquart (1899). In 1898 Lieutenant Colonel Picquart was accused of forgery and 688 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 AESTHETICS AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE AGE OF DREYFUS violation of the espionage law after he had produced evidence of Dreyfus’s innocence. Twelve artists defended his actions in an album of lithographs. In his print, Vallotton depicts former president and anti-Dreyfusard Jules Méline haunted by Picquart’s cry at Zola’s trial, ‘He [Dreyfus] is innocent.’22 Ibels’s activism in the Affair was no less strident. One month after Zola published ‘J’Accuse’, Ibels founded an illustrated journal, Le Sifflet, the main purpose of which was to campaign for juridical revision. His cover for the February 1898 edition of Sifflet, entitled Let’s Go! (plate 4), depicts an army officer kicking the scales of justice. The caption reads, ‘And we put up with it!’ The cover commented bitterly on the guilty verdict handed down to Zola at his trial for libel earlier that month. Denis rejected Vallotton’s and Ibels’s polemical approach on the grounds that it represented a form of artistic journalism, a practice which he readily denounced. The contrast between Homage to Picquart and Homage to Cézanne makes Denis’s refusal particularly apparent. Not only has Denis avoided all iconographical or allegorical reference to the Dreyfus Affair, he also omits his two colleagues from his painting in order to distance his practice from theirs. In his journal entries and critical essays written in 1898, Denis articulates his desire to undertake works of long duration, which could not be reduced to a single event, moment, or experience. Ibels confirms Denis’s more traditional approach to painting, reflecting in his reminiscences that Denis excluded him from Homage because Ibels privileged politics over art.23 While Denis avoids reference to recent political events in Homage, his own political views nevertheless informed his approach to form and composition.24 Denis sided against Dreyfus and embraced right-wing nationalism. He joined the conserva4 Henri Gabriel Ibels, Let’s Go! Published in Le Sifflet, tive republican anti-Dreyfusard Ligue no. 2, 24 February 1898. Photomechanical print. de la Patrie française in 1901.25 When New York: Collection of Mr and Mrs Herbert the Ligue’s founder, Gabriel Syveton, D. Schimmel. Photo?? committed suicide in 1904, amidst political and personal scandals, Denis shifted his allegiance to the Action française, which represented the most reactionary form of nationalism in its embrace of monarchism and anti-Semitism.26 The artist’s political engagement led him into political conversations with nationalist theorists and writers Adrien Mithouard and Maurice Barrès, whose views on art and culture ultimately influenced his own. & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 689 AESTHETICS AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE AGE OF DREYFUS Of all the forms of right-wing nationalism on offer in and around 1900, Denis sympathized most with the version put forward by Mithouard, his close friend and collaborator. Mithouard proposed a more inclusive understanding of tradition than did Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès, whose cultural politics have so far dominated discussions of art and nationalism around 1900.27 Both Mithouard and Maurras conceived of culture as a battleground between Latin and Anglo-Saxon/Germanic races, classicism and romanticism, reason and emotion, stasis and fluctuation, hierarchy and anarchism, monarchy and revolution. However, Mithouard sought to synthesize these opposing currents, whereas Maurras exclusively privileged Latin tradition.28 Barrès initially formulated a more flexible and inclusive understanding of tradition which incorporated aspects of romanticism and revolution. However, the theorist embraced Mithouard’s narrow, rigid and exclusive definition of Latin tradition in a speech delivered in 1901.29 Mithouard’s views on art and politics are worth retracing for what they reveal about Denis’s conception of modern painting in Homage to Cézanne.30 In his aesthetic treatise Le Tourment de l’unité (1901) Mithouard conceives of art as the product of a struggle between ‘expressive’ and ‘harmonious’ aesthetic sensibilities. Expressive sensibilities create variety and spark ideas, lending works of art immediacy and humanity. Expressivity originates in emotions, which are inherently unstable. Mithouard characterizes these natures as feverish, doubtful, even suicidal, and continually driven to revolt. The heady emotions which constitute the content of expressive art are most effectively conveyed through colour. Mithouard identifies the great colourists Peter Paul Rubens, Eugène Delacroix and the impressionists as representatives of the expressive method.31 ‘Harmonious’ sensibilities oppose expressive types in every respect. Whereas expressive artists adopt extremely individual and subjective modes of expression, harmonious artists are motivated by principles of race and esprit de corps. According to Mithouard, ‘harmonious’ sensibilities counter the anarchic tendencies of individualists by subscribing to principles of hierarchy and authority. Reason, reflection and balance are the hallmarks of harmonious art, in which artists subordinate their emotions to objective principles derived from mathematics and tradition. The clarity of their thought favours linear expression. Mithouard invokes Didier Lenz and the School of Beuron, Ingres and Poussin as representing the harmonious urge towards simplification and generalization.32 Rather than favouring one tendency over the other, however, Mithouard strives to synthesize them. The writer conceives of the creative process as an eternal dialectic: an initial spark of insight or inspiration, followed by a calmer period of careful deliberation. In order to preserve and sustain their sensations, artists organize them, stabilizing them through line and rational arrangement. Beauty, according to the author, stems from the struggle to unify these two tendencies, hence what Mithouard refers to as ‘the eternal anguish of art’.33 Mithouard’s discussion of aesthetic struggles takes on particular urgency in a chapter of Le Tourment de l’unité entitled ‘Le Phantôme magnétique’ which was devoted to art and the Affair. In this chapter Mithouard conceives of the conflict in aesthetic terms: those for Dreyfus and the rights of the individual demonstrate ‘expressive’ sensibilities, whereas those defending principles of solidarity are characterized by ‘harmonious’ mentalities.34 Mithouard 690 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 AESTHETICS AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE AGE OF DREYFUS 5 Maurice Denis, Mithouard Family Triptych, 1899. Oil on canvas, central panel 88  66 cm, lateral panels 88  35 cm. Private collection. Photo: 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. characterizes the struggles surrounding the Dreyfus Affair as stemming from contradictory sensibilities: It is analysis versus synthesis, observation versus the system, reality versus abstraction, criticism versus dogma, revolt versus discipline, independence versus communal forms of society, cosmopolitanism versus the spirit of race, the particular versus general ideas, the literal versus the given, social atomism versus human cohesion.35 The Affair, according to Mithouard, is not a question of guilt or innocence, but rather of competing methodologies or impulses. Mithouard signals his intention to have art serve as the grounds for reconciliation in his recommendation that art be essentially dualist, alternating between expressive and harmonious, pro- and anti-Dreyfusard modes in an unrealized striving towards cultural and national synthesis.36 Despite Mithouard’s seemingly inclusive approach to art and politics, the very structure and terms of his argument place him in the nationalist camp. ProDreyfusards would never have envisioned a potential reconciliation with antiDreyfusards, whom they considered to defend base criminals. While Mithouard at first seems to legitimize the pro-Dreyfusard stance, he misrepresents it as merely individualist. For pro-Dreyfusards, the Affair turned on the treatment of an individual, but raised questions of ‘what kind of political and legal order do we wish, as a people, to live by?’ ‘What hold does society have over individuals?’ Many pro-Dreyfusards conceived of the question in terms of a clash of social ideals: justice versus hierarchy, rule of law versus organic solidarity, and so on. In & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 691 AESTHETICS AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE AGE OF DREYFUS associating anti-Dreyfusards with revolt and anarchism, Mithouard refuses to see how they, too, proposed a vision of the Nation. Denis deeply admired Le Tourment de l’unité when it was published, and his painting the Mithouard Family Triptych (plate 5) further demonstrates the close relationship that the two men enjoyed in and around 1900.37 Mithouard’s treatise sheds light on the ways in which Denis read aesthetics into politics at the height of the Affair. Denis’s Christmas day journal entry and Mithouard’s treatise are structured according to similar arguments. Both men reveal their antiDreyfusard bias when they associate impressionism with anarchism, individualism and pro-Dreyfusism, and relate artistic tradition to principles of authority, solidarity and anti-Dreyfusism. It remains to be seen how Denis’s cultural politics influenced his painting of Homage. MODERNISM AND TRADITION In Homage to Cézanne (plate 1) Denis proposes a flexible, dynamic and inclusive understanding of artistic tradition that resonates with Mithouard’s arguments. Denis conceives of Homage as straddling different, and often conflicting, painterly idioms in a Salon review that he wrote on the occasion of the painting’s exhibition at the Salon Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1901. The artist invokes El Greco, Poussin, and Ingres as important sources for Homage.38 Despite the seductiveness and authority of his references, Denis confuses the reader by the seeming eclecticism of his choices. What do Ingres and Cézanne have in common, let alone Redon, Poussin and El Greco? Redon’s and Cézanne’s hostility towards Ingres is well known, as well as their coolness towards each other. Furthermore, Poussin’s cerebral method seems far removed from El Greco’s passionate distortions. Denis’s attempt to combine these disparate sources speaks to Mithouard’s view of beauty as an alternation between expressive and harmonious methods. Critics who saw Homage exhibited in 1901 commented with greater explicitness on the painting’s unorthodox relationship to tradition. As they struggled to make sense of the painting, critics were confounded by the variety, and even irreconcilability, of Denis’s stylistic references. The critic Gustave Geffroy comments on Homage’s indebtedness to a realist tradition: Cézanne is one of the representatives of this fugitive and eternal vision, and I commend Mr Maurice Denis for having made visible his admiration and that of the group of artists to which he belongs. Denis did it in a very simple way, in a manner employed by previous artists. To mention only the modern precedents with which this work shares idea and sentiment, there is Courbet’s Studio, in which one could say that the franc-comtois artist paid homage to himself . . . Fantin-Latour also made two masterpieces of this order: An Atelier in the Batignolles . . . and Homage to Delacroix . . . 39 Geffroy emphasizes Homage’s relationship to tradition as a way of legitimizing Denis’s tribute and arguing for its relevance. His analysis was astute, for Courbet’s, Fantin-Latour’s and Denis’s paintings shared more than just subject matter. All three artists invoked artistic tradition in order to justify contemporary experiments widely perceived by their first viewers as wild, destructive and aberrant.40 692 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 AESTHETICS AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE AGE OF DREYFUS 6 Henri Fantin-Latour, Homage to Delacroix, 1864. Oil on canvas, 160  250 cm. Paris: Musée d’Orsay. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, New York. Geffroy identifies sources for Homage in his criticism, but does not elaborate on Denis’s relationship to them. Those critics who did probe into the artist’s uses of the past were perplexed by the ways in which Denis seemed wilfully to distort a realist painterly tradition. Fantin-Latour’s Homage to Delacroix of 1864 (plate 6) proved an inevitable point of reference for the critics in 1901; however, they emphasized how Denis broke with realist precedent. Fantin-Latour carefully integrated his portrait of Delacroix into his composition by dressing his figures almost identically and depicting them in the same illusionistic idiom. The series of calculated concordances between Delacroix and his self-proclaimed pupils suggests a formal and intellectual consensus which belied existing tensions between the depicted artists.41 If Fantin-Latour’s stylistic consistency had connoted sameness of ambition and vision, then the apparent heterogeneity of Denis’s composition was seen by the critics as a sign of conflict or contradiction. First they cited the obvious difference of subject matter: whereas Denis’s Homage contains monumental figures, Cézanne’s depicted still life is inanimate. Second, whereas Still Life with Fruit Dish is characterized by vivid colour, Denis’s figures appear in sober blackand-white dress. Playing on themes of life and death characteristic of homage portraits, critics remarked on the paradox that Cézanne’s still life (in French nature morte or ‘dead nature’) appeared more lively and vibrant than the living figures gathered to celebrate it.42 Comparison with Fantin-Latour also revealed how Denis departed from the codes and conventions of realist group portraiture. Arsène Alexandre compares Homage to Cézanne unfavourably to An Atelier in the Batignolles of 1870 (plate 7): & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 693 AESTHETICS AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE AGE OF DREYFUS For those of us who know and follow with great interest the evolution of this meritorious artist, this canvas has one failing: apparently realist, it is executed by means wholly discordant with those of realism. To paint such a work, one has to be Fantin and capable of painting ‘An Atelier in the Batignolles’. For this painting of a group of friends, painters or those curious of the new school . . . gathered around a Cézanne still life is neither completely decoration nor portraiture. This uncertainty will not fail to disconcert the majority of viewers. However, this painting is nevertheless of noble intention.43 Alexandre is troubled by how areas of pictorial and spatial illusionism in Homage co-exist with decoration marked by spatial and formal flattening and the expressive use of line and colour. The critic responds to how Denis captures the likenesses of the ten featured figures through a series of scrupulous and exacting portrait heads. Natural light streaming in from the window on the left lends their faces volume through the interplay of light and shadow. Three-dimensionality is further suggested by shadows cast by the figures onto the gallery floor. However, Alexandre is disconcerted by how the figures’ black, unmodelled suits contradict these passages of formal and spatial illusionism. Denis’s use of flat pools of black paint in Homage struck its viewers as deliberately naı̈ve or crude, or, to put it more positively, ‘decorative’. Many critics in 1901 noted Homage’s tapestry-like effect.44 Alexandre’s comments prompt a fuller investigation of Denis’s composition, which is wracked by spatial and formal inconsistencies. Denis renders ambiguous 7 Henri Fantin-Latour, An Atelier in the Batignolles, 1870. Oil on canvas, 204  273.5 cm. Paris: Musée d’Orsay. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, New York. 694 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 AESTHETICS AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE AGE OF DREYFUS the spatial position of Cézanne’s Still Life with Fruit Dish. The diagonal lines of the easel support and the bottom edge of Cézanne’s frame in Homage (plate 1) suggest that Still Life with Fruit Dish has been angled towards Redon, on the left, and awaits his verdict. However, the horizontal line demarcating table from wall in Cézanne’s painting, as well as its upper frame, indicate that it faces the viewer, sharing the same plane as Homage’s canvas. Denis’s composition is further destabilized by contradictions between spatial illusionism and decorative flattening in the gallery’s floor and walls. The artist 8 Maurice Denis, preparatory sketch for Homage to Cézanne, c. 1900. Distemper over chalk drawing on paper, glued onto a canvas support, 180  240 cm. Bremen: Kunsthalle. Photo: r 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. lays the groundwork for linear perspective in the diagonals of the wall and window at the left of his composition, as well as in the easel’s orthogonals. However, the parallel diagonals formed by the side wall and easel seemingly exist independently of the back wall. There is considerable ambiguity in the relationship between the peach colour of the window set into an alcove on the left and the dark brown of the back wall. Whereas one would expect the peach and brown wall planes meeting in the corner of the room to be perpendicular to each other, instead they read as a single surface. Denis’s confusion of illusionistic perspective in Homage appears to have been intentional; in the final version of the painting, he deliberately erases a series of receding diagonals in the form of floor boards that can be seen in a preparatory sketch (plate 8). & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 695 AESTHETICS AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE AGE OF DREYFUS Conflicting treatments of form and space lend Denis’s figures an unsettled appearance. The men’s feet suggest that they stand in a semi-circle around Cézanne’s painting. Perspectival space suggested by the side wall would allow for such a configuration. However, this reading of the group arranged in depth is contradicted by their heads, all of which, save one, are placed at approximately the same level and extremely close together. This horizontal alignment, combined with Denis’s compression of space, indicates that the artists stand at equal distances to the viewer. The artist’s simultaneous assertion and negation of pictorial space can be seen in particular in the respective physical relationships between Vuillard and Mellerio (second and third from the left, respectively), and between Ranson and Roussel (seventh and eighth from the left, respectively). The positions of the men’s feet indicate that they stand at a distance from each other; however this distance is contradicted by their heads and bodies, which appear spatially contiguous. These pictorial contradictions leave the figures hovering indeterminately in mid-air. Critics repeatedly commented on the awkwardness of Denis’s figures. The remarks of an anonymous critic in La Justice are particularly pointed: These are solemn persons surrounding a friend, perhaps a celebrity. So many portraits. Is resemblance guaranteed? No, because it would be distressing to human beauty. And what curious painting is that of Mr Denis! One begins to think that the Impressionists are making fun of us.45 Other critics described Denis’s figures as ‘cold’, ‘static’, ‘hieratic’, ‘bloodless’, ‘frozen’, awkward and unpainterly.46 Although one might be tempted to compare Denis’s figures to those of Fantin-Latour’s, which were criticized in 1870 as appearing too detached from each other and awkwardly artificial, Denis’s problems were different.47 Whereas Fantin-Latour’s figures appeared still and lifeless to their first viewers, Denis’s individual figures failed to cohere according to his critics. Homage’s apparent idiomatic inconsistencies disturbed viewers all the more because they appeared to be deliberate. ART AND DUALISM Homage’s formal tensions suggest that Denis’s aims were more complex than simply paying tribute to an esteemed painter. Far from painting a straightforward apotheosis of Cézanne, Denis in Homage stages a highly politicized debate between artists over the nature of painterly methods. Homage’s narrative consists of a lively conversation between its two principal protagonists, Odilon Redon and Paul Sérusier, over Still Life with Fruit Dish’s merits. Sérusier gestures animatedly towards Redon in an attempt to engage the elder painter and bring him to admire Cézanne’s canvas. Whereas Sérusier’s zeal for Cézanne’s painting is obvious, Redon remains more circumspect, standing at a respectful distance. Redon listens with his characteristic politeness and discretion, but rather than joining Sérusier and his friends, he cleans his spectacles in order to have another look. A question mark hangs over Denis’s Homage: will Sérusier and Redon reach a consensus? Sérusier and Redon embody the opposing methodologies and political positions which divided Nabi artists around 1900. Sérusier represents a disciplined approach to painting in which individual sensation is subordinated to 696 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 AESTHETICS AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE AGE OF DREYFUS mathematical principles and rules of proportion. Principles of authority and tradition informed his anti-Dreyfusard position. Redon rose to prominence in the mid-1890s as the head of symbolist painting and devoted his career to the pursuit of subjective sensation. When the Dreyfus Affair struck he defended the framed Jewish army captain. Retracing the terms of Sérusier’s and Redon’s debate reveals how Homage embodies Mithouard’s conception of art as an alternation between harmonious and expressive sensibilities in an unresolved attempt to achieve aesthetic and national synthesis. At the time that Denis painted Homage, Sérusier had moved away from a practice of painting based primarily in the cultivation of individual sensation and towards a method grounded in rational plotting and mathematical proportions. In 1896 Sérusier distanced himself from his Nabi companions in Paris and became enthralled with Desiderius Lenz and the Beuron School of painting.48 Sérusier travelled to the Beuron Benedictine monastery in 1898 where his friend and former Nabi painter, Jan Verkade, resided. Deeply impressed by the collaborative and regimented life and art practised by the monks, Sérusier undertook a translation of Lenz’s theories, which he published in 1905 with a preface by Maurice Denis.49 Lenz advocated strict anti-naturalism in art, prescribing a series of aesthetic values, including the exclusive use of simple angles (33, 45 and 90 degrees), proportional measurements based on a 1:3 ratio, and pure geometric forms. Though Sérusier would ultimately depart from Lenz’s theories in his own paintings, he replaced the monk’s rules with ones of his own creation, stipulating the kinds of proportions, lines, angles and colours that should be used in combination.50 Sérusier admired Cézanne as a modern classicist who revived traditional, rational approaches to composition. Sérusier writes in 1905 of Cézanne’s influence: ‘If – as I dare to hope it will – a tradition is born of our times it will be born of Cézanne . . .We have here, not a new art, but the resurrection of all the solid, pure, classical arts.’51 Downplaying the intuitive, empirical aspects of Cézanne’s painting, which he dismisses as ‘obvious faults’, Sérusier emphasizes how Cézanne was out to ‘rediscover the universal language’ of painting.52 Denis shared with Sérusier a search for tradition and order, which both saw as being revived through the example of Cézanne. A trip to Rome in 1898 had convinced Denis of the need to bring back traditional methods of composition based on self-discipline and premeditation. Upon his return from Rome, Denis vowed to temper impressionist emphasis on individual sensation with seemingly objective principles derived from mathematics and tradition. He believed that the moderns had to embrace principles of reason and discipline in order to paint on the level of Poussin and Raphael, whom he took to represent the greatness of the Western tradition. Denis’s experience of art in Rome and his conversations there with André Gide led him to criticize impressionist spontaneity as nothing more than a form of artistic journalism. Rome convinced Denis of the necessity to undertake works of long duration: The example of the masters: their work was concentrated on great things and not disseminated into a multitude of partial efforts . . . Necessity of digestion. Digestion always slow, sometimes lasting several years, does not make use of novel impressions.53 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 697 AESTHETICS AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE AGE OF DREYFUS Gide affirmed the centrality of their Roman conversations to Homage to Cézanne upon seeing the painting exhibited. He writes in a letter to Denis: ‘In Paris as well as in Brussels, I sensed the virtue of your tableau, and its enormous artistic importance.’54 The terms of Gide’s praise are significant. In finding Homage ‘virtuous’, he endows it with the rational, moral qualities that were essential to his and Denis’s definitions of the Western tradition. Gide purchased Homage as a tribute to the two friends’ shared Roman experience. Sérusier’s prominence in Homage signals Denis’s keen admiration for his friend, but Sérusier shares centre stage with Redon, the leading representative of intuition in painting. Redon is an unmistakable point of focus in Homage: Denis has angled Cézanne’s painting towards him, and the majority of the figures face the venerable older artist, seemingly paying more attention to him than to Still Life with Fruit Dish (plate 9). In fact, Denis first conceived of his painting in 1898 as an homage to Redon and only later added Cézanne’s painting.55 A preliminary sketch illustrating Denis’s first idea (c. 1898, plate 10) depicts Redon on the left wearing a top hat and receiving a younger group of artists that has gathered to celebrate him. At the bottom of the sketch can be seen portrait studies of Vuillard, Sérusier, Denis and Bonnard greeting Redon. Surprisingly, the late addition of Cézanne’s painting does not change the original disposition of Denis’s composition, which had granted Redon such unrivalled importance. Denis’s decision to keep the original arrangement seems counter-intuitive given that Redon harboured serious reservations about Cézanne and his influence.56 In positioning Sérusier as a participant in a larger conversation, Denis suggests that Sérusier alone could not 9 Detail of Maurice Denis, Homage to Cézanne, set the direction for modern painting. 1900. Oil on canvas, 180  240 cm. Paris: Though Sérusier’s intellectual impact Musée d’Orsay. Photo: Réunion des Musées on Denis is undeniable, the latter Nationaux/Art Resource, New York. disagreed with what he found to be 698 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 AESTHETICS AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE AGE OF DREYFUS the artist’s dogmatic reliance on mathematical systems. Sérusier erred on the side of abstract theorization to the detriment of intuition which, Denis believed, should serve as the basis for painting. In a letter of 1897 responding to aesthetic ideas Sérusier had culled from the Beuron monastery, Denis takes his distance from his friend’s current direction, cautioning, ‘[b]ut I am a long way from numbers and geometry.’57 Redon figures in Homage as the leading representative of symbolism and intuition in painting.58 Denis confirms Redon’s importance to the symbolist movement when he writes, ‘It is Redon’s thought, manifested in his lithographs and admirable pastels, which determined the spiritualist evolution of art in 1890.’59 Symbolist artists and critics elevated the subjective faculties of the artist as the basis of art-making, and they expanded the definition of nature to include dreams, 10 Maurice Denis, preparatory sketch for Homage emotions and spiritual sensations. to Cézanne, c. 1898. Chalk on paper, 16  10 cm. Artists moved beyond traditional Private collection. Photo: r 2006 Artists Rights modelling and illusionism, proposing Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. the expressive use of line and colour as a more suitable means for evoking feelings and internal visions. Redon’s seductive and deeply intuitive art can be seen in his pastel, Sita (plate 11), which was shown at Durand-Ruel’s 1899 exhibition. In the 1890s, Redon moved away from the intellectual and recalcitrant material of his works in black-and-white prints and drawings (his ‘noirs’) to produce a more sensuous and spontaneous art whose success depended on brilliant colour effects.60 In a critical essay on Redon in 1903 Denis praises the artist’s embrace of colour, and devotes particular attention to his portraits: ‘he approaches the human figure with a new respect: he differentiates it from the background: he accords it its own plane, that of the foreground. In this manner he respects the hierarchies of Nature.’61 Such comments suggest that Denis saw Redon as potentially moving towards a more traditional approach to composition, and perhaps coming to embrace aspects of Sérusier’s rational programme.62 Despite Denis’s clear admiration for Redon, there is no painting which appears less ‘Redonesque’ than Homage to Cézanne. While Redon’s work takes the form of visual poetry in its expressive use of colour, supernatural light and illogical relationships of scale, Denis’s Homage has the sober appearance of rational argument. In Homage, Denis pays homage to Redon the man while downplaying the idiosyncratic, subjective and elusive nature of his expression. The tone of & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 699 AESTHETICS AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE AGE OF DREYFUS 11 Odilon Redon, Sita, c. 1893. Pastel with touches of black conté crayon over various charcoals, 53.6  37.7 cm. Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago. Photo: The Art Institute of Chicago. Denis’s tribute to Redon approximates that of Thadée Natanson in his review of the 1899 Durand-Ruel exhibition in which he honours Redon as a public figure and teacher: Mr Odilon Redon has taught the young who surround him what liberties talent authorizes . . . He possesses to the greatest degree those primordial plastic gifts for which they have the very greatest concern and respect. That is what gives profound meaning to his presence.63 Both Natanson and Denis take the visionary, haunting and disturbing nature of Redon’s noirs for granted, distancing the artist from his earlier reputation as a 700 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 AESTHETICS AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE AGE OF DREYFUS disaffected revolutionary.64 In Homage, Redon appears as a solid bourgeois, a man of experience who benevolently furthers the art of a younger generation. Once Denis changed the subject of Homage from Redon to Cézanne, however, Redon’s role shifted from being the subject of the homage to embodying one pole of a politicized debate over the nature of art and methods. C É Z A N N E ’ S S Y N T H E S I S Cézanne’s Still Life with Fruit Dish (plate 2) figures in Homage to Cézanne (plate 1) as the grounds upon which Redon and Sérusier, and by extension the whole Nabi group, might resolve their aesthetic differences. Denis’s Cézanne differs from Sérusier’s as Denis does not dismiss Cézanne’s empiricism as an ‘obvious fault’. Rather, he values Cézanne’s attention to nature as one element in what he perceives to be the older artist’s attempt to reconcile individual sensation with general principles of logic and reason.65 If Redon were to identify with Cézanne at all, Denis reasons, it would be on the grounds of Cézanne’s expressive distortions, which underline his art’s subjective origins. In lending Sérusier and Redon equal importance in Homage, Denis articulates what he feels to be the dual nature of Cézanne’s accomplishment. The perceived duality of Cézanne’s method made him ideal grounds for forging consensus among a disparate and divergent group of Nabi artists. Although Denis first encountered Cézanne’s painting in the early 1890s, his favourable opinion of him dates to Vollard’s 1899 Cézanne exhibition and to discussions he had at that time with Vollard and Vuillard.66 A conversation between Denis and Vollard in 1899 speaks particularly to Denis’s hope that Still Life with Fruit Dish might bring Redon and Sérusier to resolve their methodological differences. Vollard, as transcribed by Denis, characterizes Cézanne as an artist who straddles modernity and tradition, and who sought out the example of the Old Masters as well as the immediacy of his own sensations: Vollard poses every morning at Cézanne’s since time immemorial. As soon as he moves, Cézanne complains that he has made him lose his train of thought [ligne de concentration]. Cézanne also speaks of his lack of optical qualities; of his inability to realize [réaliser] like the Old Masters (Poussin, Veronese, Lenain, he also is fond of Delacroix and Courbet); but he believes that he has sensations. In order to bring himself to paint in the morning, he takes afternoon strolls at the Louvre or the Trocadéro where he draws statues from antiquity or by Puget, or he undertakes a watercolour outdoors; he maintains that these exercises help him to see better the next day. If it is sunny he complains and works little: he needs gray days.67 In the scrupulous and painstaking attention he poured into a single portrait, Vollard’s Cézanne seemed to offer Denis an alternative to the alleged immediacy and subjectivism of impressionist and symbolist methods, while still grounding art in individual sensation. Vollard shaped Denis’s view of Cézanne as a modern traditionalist who visited museums religiously and copied antique statuary and paintings by Poussin and Veronese. Vuillard confirmed Vollard’s report of Cézanne, speaking to Denis of the artist’s passion for Veronese.68 Denis’s growing fascination with Cézanne over the course of 1898 and 1899 no doubt accounts for his decision to change the subject of his homage from Redon & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 701 AESTHETICS AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE AGE OF DREYFUS 12 Paul Sérusier, Still Life (The Painter’s Studio), 1891. Oil on canvas, 60  73 cm. Paris: Musée d’Orsay. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, New York. to Cézanne. However, Denis would not meet Cézanne until 1906; hence he centred his homage not on the man, but on a specific example of his painting: Still Life with Fruit Dish (plate 2). This work held special importance for Denis, who copied it in 1899 in Dr Viaud’s private Parisian collection.69 Later, in 1914, Denis executed a lithograph of Cézanne’s composition. Still Life with Fruit Dish offered the possibility of reconciling intuitive and rational methods. Cézanne’s still life belonged to the early history of symbolism because Sérusier first saw it during his formative summers with Gauguin in Brittany. The work played no small role in Gauguin’s and Sérusier’s formulation of a symbolist aesthetic during the late 1880s and early 1890s.70 Gauguin prized Still Life with Fruit Dish, and based a number of compositions on it, among them Still Life, Apples, Pear, and Ceramic Jug (1890, Cambridge MA: Fogg Art Museum) and Portrait of a Seated Woman (1890, Chicago: Art Institute). Cézanne’s Still Life with Fruit Dish constitutes the background of the latter painting. Sérusier followed Gauguin’s lead, painting his own series of Cézannesque still lifes, including Still Life (The Painter’s Studio) (plate 12). Symbolist artists and critics in the 1890s emphasized how Cézanne broke with principles of narrative and painterly illusionism and treated the canvas 702 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 AESTHETICS AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE AGE OF DREYFUS as an expressive surface. Cézanne was praised as a decorator who created subtle harmonies through spatial flattening and rhythmic deployments of line and colour. Viewers tried to make sense of the passages in Cézanne’s painting in which space was compressed and perspective distorted by comparing his works to medieval tapestries and porcelain painting. Of all Cézanne’s work, his still lifes were particularly suited to the symbolist reading of his paintings as harmonious arrangements of line and colour: lacking explicit narrative, his still lifes could easily be construed as meditations on the art of painting itself.71 Denis was both familiar with and sympathetic to the symbolist interpretation of Cézanne as it was put forward by his colleagues, among them Gustave Geffroy, Georges Lecomte and Thadée Natanson. Denis reveals his familiarity by rehearsing the symbolist interpretation of Cézanne in his famous essay on the artist in 1907: His style is a painter’s style, his poetry is a painter’s poetry. The usefulness, even the concept, of the depicted object disappears before the coloured form’s charm. Of an apple by a vulgar painter one says: I would like to eat it. Of Cézanne’s apple one says: it is beautiful! One doesn’t dare peel it, one only wants to copy it. Therein lies Cézanne’s spirituality. I do not use the word ‘ideality’ because the ideal apple is that which appeals to our taste buds, whereas Cézanne’s apple appeals to our eyes.72 Cézanne’s painting exemplifies Denis’s 1890 definition of painting as ‘a flat surface covered with colour and lines arranged in a certain order’.73 In Denis’s description, subject matter cedes importance to the decorative charm of the painted surface. Denis grapples with Cézanne’s symbolist legacy in Homage, surrounding his still life with artists, critics and paintings that were or had been affiliated with the symbolist movement.74 However much Still Life with Fruit Dish belonged to the history of symbolism, it also spoke to Denis’s interest upon his return from Rome in rational method, hence his decision to copy it. Cézanne’s painting revealed the artist to be an exacting master of composition who sought to reconcile individual sensation with a paired-down geometric vocabulary of circles and ellipses. Cézanne’s preoccupation with method sets his work apart from the other paintings by Gauguin, Renoir and Vuillard hanging on the back wall of Vollard’s gallery.75 While Denis greatly admired the work of these three artists, he found it lacking in rigour and structure, qualities that he perceived in Cézanne’s still life.76 He singles out Cézanne’s paintings for special praise in his 1898 essay, ‘Les Arts à Rome, ou la méthode classique’, and insists upon their logic and premeditation: The Impressionists preserved the use of a model, and closely studied nature. The obligation to maintain a model implies a choice, some degree of premeditation. They subjected themselves to the laborious process of analysis. Their works bear the trace of patient and applied craft. It is from this point of view, amongst others of equal importance, that Cézanne’s example is so beneficial.77 ‘Choice’, ‘premeditation’, ‘analysis’, ‘patient application’: these were not words typically associated with painterly symbolism or even with Impressionism. Read & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 703 AESTHETICS AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE AGE OF DREYFUS within the context of Denis’s 1898 essay, the language Denis uses to describe Cézanne identifies him as a representative of classical method. In Homage, Denis distances Cézanne’s still life from an impressionist tradition by contrasting it favourably to the street scene glimpsed at the left of the composition itself. Fragments of Haussmann-era apartment buildings on the rue Laffitte as well as the rear of a horse pulling an omnibus can be glimpsed through the window. However, not only has nature literally been sidelined in Homage, it also appears flat and artificial. This street scene may refer to canonical impressionist paintings of Parisian boulevards. Such an interpretation would make the window scene function analogously to the quasi-Gauguin, Renoir and Vuillard paintings hanging on the rear wall of Vollard’s gallery. However the windowed scene is to be read, its haphazard appearance compares unfavourably with the balance and deliberation characteristic of Cézanne’s composition and of Denis’s Homage. Nevertheless, the classical Cézanne did not supplant the symbolist Cézanne in Denis’s imagination. Indeed, Denis conceives of the artist as reconciling intellectual and intuitive approaches. In his essays written around 1900, Denis insists that individual subjectivity must be the cornerstone of any successful artistic practice. He writes, ‘No matter what the artist takes as his subject, whether a quotidian incident, a petty anecdote, or an absurdity; what matters is that he puts his soul into it, and that he approaches it as a painter.’78 Wishing to distinguish his method from what he perceived to be the drudgery and mediocrity of the Academy, Denis distinguishes between ‘the vestiges of classicism which are the members of the Institut, and the young masters of the future.’79 However, the successful artist, according to Denis will seek to balance individual sensation and emotions against rational and hierarchical principles of composition. Denis celebrates Cézanne’s Still Life with Fruit Dish in Homage as one instance of classical synthesis. Significantly, however, the terms of Denis’s homage are both unresolved and paradoxical. He depicts an ongoing debate over Still Life with Fruit Dish rather than an unanimous decision.80 Furthermore, the form of Denis’s homage goes against what he knew of Cézanne’s methods. Vollard told Denis of Cézanne’s painstaking empiricism and his close scrutiny of his chosen motifs, whether human figures, still lifes or scenes from nature. In Homage, however, Denis accords intense scrutiny not to nature, but to painting itself. Painting in Homage is the subject of theorizing more than something put into practice. The gulf separating Cézanne from Denis is further apparent in the latter’s The Visit with Cézanne (plate 13). Denis composed this painting upon a pilgrimage he undertook to Aix in the company of Roussel. He depicts Cézanne working directly from nature, whereas he himself sketches Cézanne in the act of painting. Roussel, dressed in his bicycle costume on the left, similarly focuses on the master. The Visit with Cézanne confirms a central contradiction between Cézanne’s practice and Denis’s interpretation of it: whereas Cézanne’s ultimate goal was to realize his sensations on canvas, Denis’s aim, above all, lay in the formulation of a method which could be learned and repeated. The difference between Cézanne’s and Denis’s methodologies suggests that Denis, despite his copying of Still Life with 704 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 AESTHETICS AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE AGE OF DREYFUS 13 Maurice Denis, Visit with Cézanne, 1906. Oil on canvas, 51  64 cm. Private collection. Fruit Dish, did not ultimately mean to imitate Cézanne (as did Sérusier in his still lifes) so much as to use this painting as a means of rallying his group of artists. Denis conceived of Cézanne’s still life as bridging not only aesthetic, but also political divides. Cézanne the man did not escape partisanship in the Affair, but his painting did. His work was admired by anti- and pro-Dreyfusards alike: Renoir and Gauguin, Denis and Vuillard. Even when Vuillard and Denis disagreed about painting and politics in 1898, they came together to discuss Cézanne’s relationship to tradition and his predilection for proportion and balanced arrangement. In appealing to both sides, Cézanne’s art provided an instance of how painting could serve as a rallying point at a moment of cultural crisis. In Homage, Denis articulates the hope that members of his group could resolve their differences based on the work of Cézanne, but this hope remains unfulfilled. Nowhere is the success of Denis’s efforts more in question than in the gulf separating Sérusier from Redon. Sérusier reaches out across Cézanne’s painting to shake Redon’s hand, but Redon demurs (plate 14). The unresolved nature of the debate, combined with the painting’s formal instabilities, lends Homage a degree of uncertainty that resonates with Mithouard’s concept of art as an unrealized striving towards synthesis. Homage’s formal and thematic dualism speaks to its modernist and nationalist ambitions. & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 705 AESTHETICS AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE AGE OF DREYFUS 14 Detail of Maurice Denis, Homage to Cézanne, 1900. Oil on canvas, 180  240 cm. Paris: Musée d’Orsay. Notes I would like to thank the following friends, family members and colleagues for the generous and insightful comments and suggestions that they made to the multiple and varied drafts of this essay: Jean-Paul Bouillon, T.J. Clark, André Dombrowski, Marc Gotlieb, Rudolf Kuenzli, John Paoletti, Michael Printy, Clare Rogan, Joseph Siry and Alastair Wright. A portion of my research for this essay was funded by a Wesleyan University Project Grant during the summer of 2003. This article is dedicated to my daughter Nora. 1 See, for instance, Camille Pissarro to Lucien, 13 May 1891, in Janine Bailly-Herzberg, Correspondance de Camille Pissarro, Paris, 1988, 5 vols, III: 81–2. An Impressionist Comrade, ‘Impressionists and Revolutionaries’, La Révolte, 4, 13–19 June 1891. Reprinted and translated in John Hutton, Neo-Impressionism and the Search for Solid Ground, Baton Rouge and London, 1994, 249–52. 706 2 On the heterogeneity of symbolist politics, see Michael Marlais, Conservative Echoes in Fin-de-Siècle Parisian Art Criticism, University Park, PA, 1992; Eugenia Herbert, The Artist and Social Reform: France and Belgium, 1885–1898, New Haven, 1991. 3 Maurice Barrès, Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme, Paris, 1902; Michael Curtis, Three Against the Republic: Sorel, Barrès, and Maurras, Princeton, & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 AESTHETICS AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE AGE OF DREYFUS 1959; Raoul Girardet, La Nationalisme français, Paris, 1966; René Rémond, Les Droites en France, Paris, 1982; Zeev Sternhell, Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français, Paris, 2000; Robert Tombs, ed., Nationhood and Nationalism in France from Boulangism to the Great War, London and New York, 1991; Eugen Weber, L’Action française, Paris, 1972; Eugen Weber, The Nationalist Revival in France, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1959; Michel Winock, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and Fascism in France, trans. Jane Marie Todd, Stanford, 1998. 4 Camille Mauclair, ‘La Réaction nationaliste en art et l’ignorance de l’homme de lettres’, La Revue, 54, 1905, 167. ‘On veut revenir en arrière, parce que le nationalisme est intervene dans l’art, et que ses sophisms adroits ont déconcerté, troublé, puis séduit ses artistes à l’âge où ceux-ci avaient besoin de voir approuver leur oeuvre de jeunesse, de s’engager plus avant dans les voies ouvertes.’ Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. Mauclair would himself come to embrace right-wing nationalism under Vichy. See Romy Golan, ‘From Fin de Siècle to Vichy: The Cultural Hygienics of Camille (Faust) Mauclair’, in The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity, eds Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb, London, 1995, 156–73; Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars, New Haven and London, 1995, 90, 150–2, 160. 5 Léon Blum, Souvenirs sur l’Affaire, Paris, 1935, 90. ‘Il ne me semble pas que même pendant la guerre, on ait assisté à ces séparations brutales, et, par contrepartie, à ces amitiés soudaines, crées séance tenant par la conscience d’un assentiment.’ 6 Existing scholarship details the political positions adopted by individual artists, but does not investigate the Affair’s effects on individual artist’s painterly practices. See Philip Nord, Impressionists and Politics: Art and Democracy in the Nineteenth Century, London and New York, 2000, 100–107; Linda Nochlin, ‘Degas and the Dreyfus Affair: A Portrait of the artist as an Anti-Semite’, in Norman L. Kleeblatt, ed., The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, Justice, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987, 96– 116; Laura Morowitz, ‘Anti-Semitism, Medievalism and the Art of the Fin-de-Siècle’, Oxford Art Journal, 20:1, 1997, 35–49; Michael Marlais, ‘Conservative Style/Conservative Politics: Maurice Denis in Le Vésinet’, Art History, 16:1, March 1993, 125–46. A second strand of scholarship has examined how right-wing nationalism informed representations of French politics, geography and history in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century visual culture but not modernist painting. See June Hargrove and Neil McWilliam, eds, Nationalism and French Visual Culture, Washington, New Haven and London, 2005; Neil McWilliam, Monumental Intolerance: Jean Baffier, a Nationalist Sculptor in Fin-de-Siècle France, University Park, PA, 2000. & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 7 David Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War: The Avant-Garde and Politics in Paris, 1905–1914, New Haven and London, 1998; James D. Herbert, Fauve Painting: The Making of Cultural Politics, New Haven and London, 1992; Alastair Wright, Matisse and the Subject of Modernism, Princeton and Oxford, 2004, 93–100. See also Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian AvantGarde, Princeton, 1993; Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia; Kenneth Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925, Princeton, 1989. 8 For an account of the retrospective exhibitions at the 1905 Salon d’Automne, see Roger Benjamin, ‘Ingres Chez Les Fauves’, Art History, 23:5, December 2000, 743–71. 9 Cited in Jean-Paul Bouillon, ‘La Politique de Denis’, Maurice Denis, 1870–1943, Lyon, 1994, 97–8. Parts of this journal entry have been omitted in the published version of Denis’s journal. Bouillon repairs the omission: ‘A propos de l’affaire, je me réjouis des méfiances et des adresses qu’elle m’a enseignées. J’y trouve des ressources de vie active (comme pour l’organisation de l’Exposition chez D.-R.). Mithouard prétend que c’est la lutte de l’individuel contre la solidarité; et de l’impressionnisme contre les idées générales! J. Lerolle – entre les anarchistes de toute opinion et ceux qui ont le respect de l’idée de l’autorité. Avec Mellerio, j’y vois aussi opposition entre les nerveux, les rêveurs, et d’autre part les esprits très équilibrés, et pratiques.’ 10 The literature on the Affair is vast. Studies that have been particularly helpful to me include Hannah Arendt, Sur l’antisemitisme, Paris, 1967; Pierre Birnbaum, ed., La France de l’Affaire Dreyfus, Paris, 1994; Blum, Souvenirs; Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, New York, 1986; Kleeblatt, ed., The Dreyfus Affair. 11 On neo-impressionist art and politics see Hutton, Neo-Impressionism Robyn Roslak, Neo-Impressionism and Anarchism in Fin-de-siècle France: Painting, Politics, and Landscape, Aldershot and Burlington, 2007. 12 On impressionist artists and the Dreyfus Affair, see Nord, Impressionists and Politics, 100–107; Kleeblatt, ed., The Dreyfus Affair. 13 For histories of the Nabis, see George Mauner, The Nabis: Their History and Their Art, 1888–1896, New York, 1978; Patricia Eckert-Boyer, ed., The Nabis and the Parisian Avant-Garde, New Brunswick, NJ, 1988; Claire Frèches-Thory and Antoine Terrasse, Les Nabis, Paris, 1990; Claire Frèches-Thory and Ursula Perucchi-Petri, Les Nabis 1888–1900/Die Nabis, Propheten der Moderne, Paris, 1993. 14 For monographs on Denis, see Jean-Paul Bouillon, Maurice Denis, Geneva, 1993; Jean-Paul Bouillon, Maurice Denis, 1994; Maurice Denis (1870– 1943), Paris, Montréal and Rovereto, 2006. 707 AESTHETICS AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE AGE OF DREYFUS 15 Maurice Denis, Journal, Paris, 1957, 3 vols, I: 133– 35, 150. 16 Mauner erroneously claims that all the Nabis were pro-Dreyfusard in The Nabis, 134. 17 Particularly vivid is Denis’s discussion of the Affair in his correspondence with Vuillard from Rome. See Denis, Journal, I: 133–5. 18 Denis, Journal, I: 150. Denis equivocates a bit on Redon’s position, finding him to adhere to five of the seven characteristics he lists as belonging to ‘Semitic’ artists. 19 Many studies of Cézanne conclude with a brief mention of Denis’s Homage as evidence of Cézanne’s public reputation. The most recent examples of this include Mary Tompkins Lewis, Cézanne, London, 2000, 319; Nina AthanassoglouKallmyer, Cézanne and Provence: The Painter in His Culture, Chicago, 2003, 248–50. For the Homage in relation to Redon and Sérusier, see Maryanne Stevens, ‘Redon and the Transformation of the symbolist Aesthetic’, in Douglas W. Druick et al., eds, Odilon Redon. Prince of Dreams, New York, 1994, 204, and Carolyn Boyle-Turner, Paul Sérusier, Ann Arbor, 1983, 131. The only person who has begun to treat Homage on its own terms is Bouillon. See his ‘Le modèle cézannien de Maurice Denis’, in Cézanne aujourd’hui, eds Françoise Cachin et al., Paris, 1997, 145–65; Bouillon, Maurice Denis, 1993, 97–102; Bouillon, ‘Vuillard et Denis; le tournant classique de 1898’, 48/14 La Revue du Musée d’Orsay, Autumn, 2003, 85–6. 20 Denis, Journal, I: 81. ‘Tous liens se resserrent entre les théories d’Art, chaleureusement défendues, la philosophie jusqu’à ce jour satisfaisante, le rêve de justice sociale entr’aperçu dès ma prime jeunesse, et la Foi immortelle, suprême raison de tout effort.’ 21 For explicit, iconographical and allegorical connections between art and the Dreyfus Affair, see Kleeblatt, ed., The Dreyfus Affair. 22 See Kleeblatt, ed., The Dreyfus Affair, 221. 23 Frèches-Thory and Perucchi-Petri, eds, Les Nabis, 1888–1900, 177–8. 24 While Denis’s right-wing nationalist political views are well known, there has been considerable recent debate as to how they informed his painting. Some scholars see his worth as ideologically driven. See Wright, Matisse and the Subject of Modernism, and Marlais, ‘Conservative Style/ Conservative Politics’. Other scholars insist that the artist’s nationalist politics have very little bearing on his painting, and de-emphasize Denis’s important dialogue with right-wing nationalist theories of art, politics and culture. See Bouillon, Maurice Denis, 1993; Bouillon, ‘Vuillard et Denis; le tournant classique de 1898’, 80–91. The one scholar who has begun to trace the Christian and conservative roots of Denis’s modernism is Michael Paul Driskel in Representing Belief: Religion, Art, and Society in NineteenthCentury France, University Park, PA, 1992, 227–52. Driskel relates Denis’s modernist aesthetic to 708 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 Byzantine painting and what he terms the ‘aesthetics of ultramontanism’. Denis’s membership in the Ligue de la Patrie française has gone unmentioned in the Denis literature, and it sheds light on his early political engagement, which is otherwise spelled out in Bouillon, ‘La Politique de Denis’, in Maurice Denis, 1994, 95–109. Evidence of Denis’s membership in the anti-Dreyfusard political league can be found in a letter of 1901, which he wrote to Barrès asking the politician for political advice. Denis signs the letter ‘Maurice Denis de la P.F. section de St. Germain-en-Laye’. Denis to Barrès, 28 April 1901, Bibliothèque nationale, Département des manuscrits, Fonds Barrès. Barrès had joined the Ligue in 1899, and in 1901 he actively sought to lend the group a coherent political doctrine through a series of speeches and writings. On the Ligue de la Patrie française and Barrès’s role within it, see Jean-Pierre Rioux, Nationalisme et conservatisme: La Ligue de la Patrie française, 1899–1904, Paris, 1977; Sternhell, Maurice Barrès, 372–80; Barrès, Scènes. See Curtis, Three Against the Republic, and Weber, L’Action française. See notes 3 and 7 above. For an excellent recent discussion of Charles Maurras’s and the Action française’s version of national tradition, see Neil McWilliam, ‘Action française, Classicism, and the Dilemmas of Traditionalism in France, 1900–1914’, in Hargrove and McWilliam, Nationalism and French Visual Culture, 269–92. Barrès, Scènes, I: 129; Curtis, Three Against the Republic, 85. Nationalist theorists Maurras, Barrès and Mithouard are often mentioned in reference to Denis’s career, but no in-depth analysis of specific texts and paintings exists. For discussions of Denis’s painting and right-wing politics, see Mark Antliff, ‘The Jew as Anti-Artist: Georges Sorel, Anti-Semitism, and the Aesthetics of Class Consciousness’, Oxford Art Journal, 20:1, 1997, 50– 67; Morowitz, ‘Anti-Semitism, Medievalism and the Art of the Fin-de-Siècle’; Marlais, ‘Conservative Style/Conservative Politics’; Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War, 63. Theodore Reff, ‘The Reaction Against Fauvism: The Case of Braque’, in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, New York, 1992, 21–2, 24–5; Herbert, Fauve Painting, 129. Wright, Matisse and the Subject of Modernism, 93–100. Adrien Mithouard, Le Tourment de l’unité, Paris, 1901, 65–94. Mithouard, Le Tourment de l’unité, 23–64. Mithouard, Le Tourment de l’unité, 122, ‘l’angoisse éternelle de l’art’. Mithouard, Le Tourment de l’unité, 287. Mithouard, Le Tourment de l’unité, 301, ‘C’est l’analyse contre la synthèse, l’observation contre le système, la réalité contre l’abstraction, la critique contre le dogme, la révolte contre la discipline, l’indépendance contre les formes & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 AESTHETICS AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE AGE OF DREYFUS 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 communautaires de la société, le cosmopolitisme contre l’esprit de la race, l’espèce contre les notions générales, le sens propre contre le sens commun, l’atomisme social contre les cohésions humaines.’ Mithouard, Le Tourment de l’unité, 122. Denis voices his admiration for Mithouard’s book in a letter to Gides that is dated 16 December 1901, Fonds Gide, Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris, MS 8309–36 reprinted in André Gide, Maurice Denis, Correspondence (1892–1945), ed Pierre Masson and Carina Sch.afer with the collaboration of Claire Denis, Paris 2006, 181. Maurice Denis, ‘Le Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts’, La Dépêche de Toulouse, 22, 28 April 1901. Reprinted in his Théories, 1890–1910. Du Symbolisme et de Gauguin vers un nouvel ordre classique, 4th edn, Paris, 1920, 60–1. Gustave Geffroy ‘Salon de 1901. Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts’, La Vie artistique, Paris, 1903, 376– 7. ‘Cézanne est un des représentants de cette vision fugitive et éternelle, et je loue M. Maurice Denis pour avoir rendu visible son admiration et celle du groupe d’artistes auquel il appartient. Il l’a fait d’une façon très simple, d’une manière déjà employée. Pour rappeler des oeuvres modernes, il y a eu, dans cet ordre d’idées et de sentiments, l’Atelier de Courbet, où l’on pourrait observer que le maı̂tre franc-comtois s’est rendu hommage à lui-même [. . .]. Fantin-Latour a fait, lui aussi, deux chefs-d’oeuvre de cet ordre: l’Atelier des Batignolles . . . – et l’Hommage à Delacroix . . .’ Denis admired this criticism, and sent a copy of it to André Gide. See Denis to Gide, 15 May 1901, Fonds Gide, Bibliothèque litteraire Jacques Doucet, Paris, MS 8309–90 reprinted in Gide and Denis Correspondance, 166. The ‘wildness’ of Cézanne’s reputation in the 1890s is well known. Even his most vociferous defenders felt compelled to point out his paintings’ weaknesses. See, for instance, Gustave Geffroy, ‘Paul Cézanne’, La Vie artistique, Paris, 1894, 257; Gustave Geffroy, ‘Paul Cézanne’, La Vie artistique, Paris, 1900, 218; Georges Lecomte, ‘Paul Cézanne’, Revue d’Art, December 1899, 86; Félicien Fagus, ‘Quarante tableaux de Cézanne’, La Revue blanche, 15 December 1899, 627. See Douglas Druick and Michel Hoog, eds, FantinLatour, Ottawa, 1983, 173–80. P. Bouillet writes, ‘M. Pierre Denis [sic], pour rendre un Hommage à Cézanne, a réuni, autour d’une petite nature morte, les disciples du maı̂tre: figures exsangues, barbes postiches: c’est la nature morte qui est la plus vivante du groupe’, ‘Le Salon de 1901’, Le Radical, 26 April 1901. ‘Les Salons de 1901. SNBA’, Le Figaro, 21 April 1901. ‘Pour nous – qui connaissons et suivons avec un grand intérêt l’évolution de ce méritoire artiste – le défaut que nous trouvons à cette toile c’est que, réaliste de fait, elle est exécutée par des & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 moyens absolument discordants d’avec ceux du réalisme. Pour faire un pareil tableau, il faut être Fantin et être capable de peindre L’Atelier de Batignolles. Ce groupe d’amis, peintres ou curieux d’art de la nouvelle école, – MM. Odilon Redon, Vuillard, Sérusier, Ranson, Bonard, Roussel, etc. – réunis autour d’une nature morte de Cézanne, n’est ni tout à fait de la decoration, ni tout à fait du portrait. De là l’impression qui déconcertera la plupart. Cette oeuvre n’en demeure pas moins d’intentions très nobles.’ See, for instance, Thiébault-Sisson, ‘Les Salons de 1901’, Le Temps, 21 April 1901; H. AyraudDegeorge, ‘Le Salon de 1901. Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts’, L’Intransigeant, 22 April 1901. ‘Le Vernissage au Grand Palais’, La Justice, 22 April 1901. ‘Ce sont des personnages graves qui entourent un ami, – peut-être une célébrité. Autant de portraits. La ressemblance est-elle garantie? Non, car ce serait douloureux pour la beauté humaine. Et puis quelle curieuse peinture que celle de M. Denis! C’est à croire que les impressionnistes se moquent de nous.’ See P. Bouillet, ‘Le Salon de 1901’, Le Radical, 26 April 1901; Charles Saunier, ‘Les Salons’, La Revue blanche, 1 June 1901; H. Ayraud-Degorge, ‘Le Salon de 1901. Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts’, L’Intransigeant, 22 April 1901; Anon., ‘Le Vernissage au Grand Palais’, La Justice, 22 April 1901. Even Geffroy remarked upon the Denis’s figures’ ‘uniformité des attitudes et l’ensemble opaque de tous les vêtements noirs’, Geffroy, ‘Salon de 1901, Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts’, 379. Druick and Hoog, eds, Fantin-Latour, 212. On the Beuron School, see Driskel, Representing Belief, 248–50. Pierre Lenz, L’Esthétique de Beuron, trans. Paul Sérusier, Paris, 1905. For Sérusier’s interest in Lenz and the School of Beuron, see Boyle Turner, Sérusier, 111–34. Paul Sérusier, ABC de la peinture, suivi d’une correspondance inéditée et recueillie par Mme Paul Sérusier et annotée par Mlle Henriette Boutaric, Paris, 1950, 15, 24–5, 28–30. Sérusier’s response to Charles Morice, ‘Enquête sur les tendances actuelles des arts français’, Mercure de France, 56:196, 15 August 1905, 538–50. Cited and translated in Judith Wechsler, ed., Cézanne in Perspective, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1975, 47. ‘Enquête’, in Wechsler, ed., Cézanne in Perspective, 47. Denis, Journal, I: 130. ‘Exemple des maı̂tres: leur travail concentré sur de grandes choses, et pas disséminé dans une multitude d’efforts partiels . . . Nécessité de digérer. – Digestion toujours lente, quelquefois plusieurs années, ne pas employer les choses trop neuves.’ Gide to Denis, 1901. Cited in Denis, Journal, I: 169. ‘À Paris encore qu’à Bruxelles, j’ai senti la vertu de vôtre tableau, et toute son importance artistique.’ 709 AESTHETICS AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE AGE OF DREYFUS 55 Denis, Journal, I: 143. 56 Although Denis hoped that Redon in 1900 would join the camp of Cézanne enthusiasts, he was subsequently disappointed. Redon consistently distanced himself from Cézanne after 1900. In 1907 Redon declined an offer to compose an essay in honour to Cézanne. See Kevin Sharp, ‘Redon and the Marketplace after 1900’, in Odilon Redon, Prince of Dreams, 415, note 69. In 1910 Redon adamantly denied any artistic debt to Cézanne, writing to Elie Faure that ‘the aridness of Cézanne’s imagination . . . the impassive calm of his work devoid of the soul, have always left me cold. I respect it, but I do not like it.’ Stevens, in Odilon Redon, Prince of Dreams, 303. 57 Denis to Sérusier, 1897, reprinted in Paul Sérusier, ABC de la peinture, 85–6. Cited in BoyleTurner, Sérusier, 114. ‘Mais je suis bien loin des chiffres et de la géométrie.’ Denis gently ‘corrects’ what he perceives to be Sérusier’s overintellectualization of painting in his biographical account of his once-close friend. See Maurice Denis, ‘Paul Sérusier: sa vie, son oeuvre’, in Sérusier, ABC de la peinture, 82–3. 58 On Redon’s reputation in the 1890s, see Odilon Redon: Prince of Dreams, 195–256. 59 Maurice Denis, La Vie, 30 November 1912, cited in Bouillon, Maurice Denis, 1994, 258. ‘C’ est la pensée de Redon, par ses séries de lithographies et ses admirables fusains, qui déterminera dans un sens spiritualiste l’évolution d’art en 1890.’ Denis further reinforces this understanding of Redon as a painter of dreams in his essay on Cézanne: ‘Odilon Redon avait cherché lui aussi, en-dehors de la nature copiée et de la sensation, les equivalents plastiques de ses emotions et de ses rêves. Lui aussi essayait de rester peintre, exclusivement peintre tout en traduisant les rayons et les ombres de son imagination,’ ‘Cézanne’, L’Occident, 70, September 1907. Reprinted in Maurice Denis, Le Ciel et l’Arcadie, ed. Jean-Paul Bouillon, Paris, 1993, 140. 60 On Redon’s noirs and their difference from his work in colour, see Stephan Eisenman, The Temptation of Saint Redon: Biography, Ideology, and Style in the Noirs of Redon, Chicago, 1992. 61 Denis, ‘Oeuvres récentes d’Odilon Redon’, in Le Ciel et l’arcadie, 72. ‘C’est pourquoi il aborde maintenant la figure humaine avec un nouveau respect: il la différencie des fonds: il lui donne un plan, c’est le premier. Il se conforme, enfin, à la hiérarchie de la Nature.’ 62 Redon resisted Denis’s interpretation. See Le Ciel et l’arcadie, 72, note 27. 63 ‘Une date de l’histoire de la peinture française’, La Revue blanche, 1 August 1899, 505–508. Cited and translated in Annette and Brooks Beaulieu, ‘The Thadée Natanson Panels: A Vuillard Decoration for S. Bing’s ‘Maison de l’Art Nouveau’, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Fall 2002, 15. 710 64 Eisenman characterizes Redon during the 1870s and 1880s as a ‘romantic anti-capitalist’ who resisted bourgeois culture and values, Eisenman, The Temptation of Saint Redon, 227, 232, 234, 244. On the canonization of Redon in the 1890s art criticism, see Eisenman, The Temptation of Saint Redon, 229–44. 65 This view of Cézanne as reconciling empirical sensation and rational method would later inform Denis’s 1907 essay on the artist. For an astute and detailed analysis of Denis’s essay on Cézanne, see Richard Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism: A Study in the Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art, Chicago and London, 1984, 133–40, 165–74. 66 Denis notes in his journal for March 1899: ‘Impression produite par les expositions de Corot, ce printemps, par Cézanne’, Denis, Journal, I: 151. 67 Denis, Journal, I: 157. ‘Vollard pose tous les matins chez Cézanne, depuis un temps infini. Dès qu’il bouge, Cézanne se plaint qu’il lui fasse perdre la ligne de concentration. Il parle aussi de son défaut de qualités optiques; de son impuissance à réaliser comme les anciens maı̂tres (Poussin, Véronèse, Lenain, il aime aussi Delacroix et Courbet); mais il croit avoir des sensations. Pour s’entraı̂ner à peindre dès le matin, il se promène l’après-midi au musée du Louvre ou du Trocadéro et dessine des statues, des antiques ou des Puget, ou il fait une aquarelle en plein air; il pretend être ainsi tout disposé à bien voir le lendemain. S’il fait du soleil, il se plaint et travaille peu: il lui faut le jour gris.’ 68 Denis, Journal, I: 149. 69 Denis, Journal, I: 157. 70 On the construction of Cézanne as a symbolist artist in the 1890s, see Judith Wechsler, The Interpretation of Cézanne, Ann Arbor, 1981, 8–27. 71 Key symbolist interpretations of Cézanne’s painting include Georges Lecomte, L’Art Impressionniste, Paris, 1892, 30–1; Lecomte, ‘Paul Cézanne’, Revue d’Art, December 1899, 81–7; Émile Bernard, ‘Paul Cézanne’, Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui, 3, 387, 1891, reprinted in Propos sur l’art, Paris, 1994, 2 vols, I: 20–3; Gustave Geffroy, ‘Paul Cézanne’, La Vie artistique, Paris, 1894; Geffroy, ‘Paul Cézanne’, La Vie artistique, Paris, 1900; André Mellerio, ‘L’Art moderne’, La Revue artistique, Jan–Feb 1896, 13–15; Thadée Natanson, ‘Paul Cézanne’, La Revue blanche, 1 December 1895, 496–500. 72 ‘Cézanne’, Le Ciel et l’arcadie, 139. ‘Son style est un style de peintre, sa poésie est de la poésie de peintre. L’utilité, le concept même de l’objet représenté disparaissent devant le charme de la forme colorée. D’une pomme d’un peintre vulgaire on dit: j’en mangerais. D’un pomme de Cézanne on dit: c’est beau! On n’oserait pas la peler, on voudrait la copier. Voilà ce qui constitue le spiritualisme de Cézanne. Je ne dis pas, et avec intention, idéalisme, parce que la & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 AESTHETICS AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE AGE OF DREYFUS pomme idéale serait celle qui flatte les muqueuses, et la pomme de Cézanne parle à l’esprit par le chemin des yeux.’ Denis quotes Thadée Natanson’s symbolist reading of Cézanne’s painting of 1895 in the pages of La Revue blanche, a journal to which Denis contributed. See Natanson, La Revue blanche, 500. Reprinted in Wechsler, ed., Cézanne in Perspective, 35–6. 73 Maurice Denis, ‘Définition du néo-traditionnisme’, in Le Ciel et l’arcadie, 5, ‘une surface plane recouverte de couleurs en un certain ordre assemblées’. 74 On Renoir’s relationship to the symbolist movement, see Denis, ‘Notes sur la peinture religieuse’, Le Ciel et l’arcadie, 46–7. 75 In singling out Cézanne from his contemporaries, Denis echoes the viewpoint expressed by Gustave Geffroy some six years earlier: ‘Cézanne has become a kind of precursor to whom the symbolists have referred, and it is quite certain, to stick to the facts, that there is a direct relation, a clearly established continuity, between the painting of Cézanne and that of Gauguin, Émile Bernard, etc. And likewise, with the art of Vincent van Gogh. From this point of view alone, Paul Cézanne deserves that his name be put into the place that is his. It is certain that, in the independent or impressionist group, he revealed, in comparison with his companions, a special talent, an original nature, and there was a bifurcation from his work, a branch-road & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 76 77 78 79 80 begun by him and continued by others’, Geffroy, La Vie artistique, 1903, 249–60. Translated and reprinted in Linda Nochlin, ed., Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, 1874–1904, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1966, 104. Denis criticizes Vuillard’s lack of method in a letter from Rome in 1898. See Denis, Journal, I: 139. ‘Les arts à Rome ou la method classique’, Spectateur catholique, Le Ciel et l’arcadie, 65, ‘Les impressionnistes avaient conservé l’usage du modèle, le travail d’après nature. L’obligation de retenir une poseuse implique quelque choix, quelque premeditation. Ils se soumettaient aux lenteurs de l’analyse. Leurs oeuvres portent la trace d’un métier patient, appliqué. C’est à ce point de vue, entre plusieurs d’égale importance, que l’exemple de Cézanne est si salutaire.’ Maurice Denis, ‘Société des Artistes français’, La Dépêche de Toulouse, 9, 13 May 1901. Reprinted in Théories, 1920, 79. ‘Dès lors, peu importe qu’il se serve d’un fait divers, d’une anecdote niaise, d’une absurdité; mais je veux qu’il y mette son âme, et qu’il soit PEINTRE.’ ‘Le Salon de la Société des artistes français’, 86, ‘les vestiges du classicisme que sont les members de l’Institut, et les jeunes maı̂tres de l’avenir’. George Mauner confirms (in The Nabis, 173) Cézanne’s problematic legacy for the Nabis, observing that Cézanne’s influence served to further weaken group identity further. 711