)UDJRQDUGLQ'HWDLO (ZD/DMHU%XUFKDUWK differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Volume 14, Number 3, Fall 2003, pp. 34-56 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\'XNH8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dif/summary/v014/14.3lajer-burcharth.html Access provided by Harvard University (16 Dec 2015 18:32 GMT) ewa lajer-burcharth Fragonard in Detail I would like to evoke Naomi Schor’s notion of detail as a trope through which to investigate—and put pressure on—the relation between aesthetics and femininity. It is precisely this relation that Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s pictorial practice addresses in a most suggestive, though in my view still misrecognized, way. Fragonard’s fascination with femininity is of course well known. It would be hard to ignore the fact that the female body is at the very core of the painter’s erotic enterprise and that it functions as the privileged locus of sex within his pictorial imaginary. It is enough to look at, for example, his Useless Resistance (fig. 1), or the Louvre pendants Removing the Chemise and All Ablaze to be reminded of this privilege (see Cuzin 181, Rosenberg cat. nos. 72 and 73). Confronting canvases such as these, one may well be tempted to ask the usual question: why is it the woman who is being repeatedly ravished, with indeed useless resistance, in these images of seduction? Are we not witnessing here, yet again, the classic pictorial scenario—the female body as the passive object receiving the gaze and attentions of the active looking subject, who is also the invisible but controlling agent of Fragonard’s erotic fantasy? Copyright 2003 by Brown University and d i f f e r e n c e s : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14 :3 35 d i f f e r e n c e s Figure 1 Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Useless Resistance, c. 1775. Oil on canvas, 45 × 60 cm. Courtesy of the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Such a reading of Fragonard’s project, focused on his erotically charged Bathers (fig. 2), has been offered by Mary Sheriff, and I find it convincing as far as it goes.1 What this exegesis does not sufficiently acknowledge, though, is Fragonard’s peculiar mode of painting that, in my view, importantly complicates the erotic argument his canvases may be seen to formulate. Sheriff, to be sure, has not ignored the formal qualities of the Bathers, but she sees the openness of Fragonard’s manner as only confirming, as opposed to challenging, her overall reading of female flesh in this and other of his paintings as available, staged for the viewer’s imaginary possession. Yet, to my eyes, the very morphology of the Bathers—its frothing, ebullient surface that testifies to an internal agitation, as if some force were pushing the masses of pigment from behind—suggests a play of sexual difference that cannot be fully accounted for in scopic terms, be it in the sense of relations obtaining within the field of vision defined by this image or in its mode of address to an imaginary viewer. I want to suggest, more generally, that Fragonard’s paintings are animated by something deeper and ultimately more important, for 36 Fragonard in Detail Figure 2 Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Bathers, 1765. Oil on canvas. 64 × 80 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Daniel Arnaudet. which his visual stagings of female seduction or abduction by the forces of irresistible (and presumably male) desire are only a front or a pictorial facade. In order to grasp this, though, we must recognize the function of the female body in these compositions not from the point of how it relates to the viewer as much as where it comes from, so to speak, to address us. It is, in other words, what I would call the anteriority of the image that we must consider insofar as it materializes itself on the canvas and bears on the organization of its surface, informing also the play of sexual difference in these paintings—from within, as it were. It is, unexpectedly, from Fragonard’s landscapes that we get a better grasp of how in his practice a picture actually emerges into being. The sheer number of landscapes produced by Fragonard—both paintings and drawings—testifies to a kind of passion for views, particularly for a certain kind of view to which the artist repeatedly returns: usually parks, many of them around half-ruined Italian villas, where vegetation and architecture mingle in studied disarray and where nature is always constructed as a peculiarly intimate setting, as in his drawing titled Among 37 d i f f e r e n c e s Figure 3 Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Gardens of the Villa d’Este, also called The Little Park, c. 1762–63. Oil on canvas, 38 × 46 cm. By kind permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection, London. the Ruins of the Hadrian Villa (see J. H. Fragonard cat. no. 75). What I want to focus on is a curious structuring habit that Fragonard displays in the construction of many, if not all, of his views, a compositional strategy that he tends to use to secure this effect of intimacy. The Wallace Collection’s painting of The Gardens of the Villa d’Este, also called The Little Park, epitomizes this habit (fig. 3). 2 The whole scene is centered around a voided core topped by the arching trees and illuminated from within. Split in half, this arcade of inner light bustling with life is governed in the lower part by the presence of a seated female statue, her head swathed in the veil of darkness, while the upper oval opens up to a distant view, with some human silhouettes etched against it. It is not just the way in which Fragonard makes such an exterior setting look cozy but, more specifically, the effect of interiority it produces that deserves our attention. Note the care Fragonard puts into fleshing out the richness of the leafy thicket, the secret life of the tree branches forming the niches in which some matchstick figures hover about. But 38 Fragonard in Detail above all, note the oddness of light that comes from below, as if from underneath, installing an enclave of a luminous “somewhere else” at the core of this image, a kind of hearth, or an internal cauldron that heats up this representation from within. What we may first take simply for a topographical accident— this inner core centering the whole composition could have been specific to the site—returns as a morphological principle of Fragonard’s numerous landscapes, though not all are as rigorously symmetrical as the Little Park. In the View of the Park at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, we find a similar arrangement, where a canopy of trees rises above a female statue not unlike the one in the Wallace painting (see Williams cat. no. 36). In the well-known view of the Great Cypresses of the Villa d’Este (1760), now at Besançon, the thick waves of cypresses frame a barely defined architectural specter in the distance, its contours diluted to contrast with the meaty foreground presence of the trees (see Rosenberg cat. no. 30). Then there are the several painted and drawn versions of the Shaded Avenue (fig. 4), elegantly receding into the abyss of nowhere in the background (see Rosenberg cat. nos. 186 and 187, Massengale 72–73). The Horvitz Collection’s Garden of an Italian Villa, with a Gardener and Two Children is particularly intriguing because of its apparent compositional dispersal (see Clark cat. no. 88). But if the composition is far less structured here—no perspective plunging back, no shaded alley, no clearly defined center, but, instead, the gardener’s tools scattered in the foreground epitomizing the randomness of the whole arrangement—it, too, seems infused by light. We almost get a sense of this view as being haunted, that is, as being informed by something that cannot be seen but whose implicit presence can be felt somehow—the statues point to it, turning backwards to the incoming light as if something else were there, a sense of hidden presence. Or perhaps it is the memory that weighs upon this scene—not of Italy, to which it ostensibly refers, flaunting all the typical signifiers of Italianicity, such as the scattered remnants of antiquity, the overgrown vegetation of its informal parks, all of which reappear repeatedly rearranged in other views, confirming their status as fantasies rather than any real sites—not of Italy, then, but of something it does not show at all, the unsaid or unseen of this image. And if the whole scene is a souvenir, it is a souvenir of this unseen. A rough drawing from Fragonard’s sketchbook now at the Fogg Museum gives us an insight into the fundamental role of that “unseen” in the construction of a view (fig. 5, see Williams cat. no. 15). The site has 39 d i f f e r e n c e s Figure 4 Jean-Honoré Fragonard, A Shaded Avenue, also called The Grove, c. 1775–76. Oil on canvas, 29.2 × 24.1 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Jules Bache Collection. Photograph, all rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. just barely been blocked out in red chalk lines that divide the space into the “here” of the trees and the “not here” of the empty center framed by their scalloped outlines. It is this primal compositional division that we see in this embryonic “sketch before sketch” that clearly matters most to the artist. He starts out from the edges, building up around the nucleus of a vacuum that he seems to need to establish first in order to proceed further, a necessary void that may thus be seen not simply as the reserve but as the generative core of the image. Cavities are the most prominent structural element of the Island of Love, previously known as the Fête at Rambouillet, a painting from the Gulbenkian Collection in Lisbon (fig. 6). 3 The whole space here buckles under the weight of the bizarre, cavernous mass of the hedges, so suggestive that they, rather than anything else, seem to constitute the very subject of this representation.4 The usual comparison made between this scene and Watteau’s Embarkation for Cythera only makes the more clear the paramount importance of scenery over people in the Fragonard. 40 Fragonard in Detail Figure 5 Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Sketch of a Park with Tall Trees, c. 1773–1775. Red chalk on off-white antique laid paper, 16.5 × 24.3 cm. Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Louise Haskell Daly Fund. Photo credit: Allan Macintyre. What exactly are these huge, dark-green spongiform molds limned by light and soaring above the small human figures scattered on the terrace? They have nothing to do with the standard forms of garden architecture and the far neater arrangements of the then fashionable jardin pittoresque. 5 And what are we to make of the vastly overgrown and foaming vegetation spreading like lava down the stairs and into the river? Nothing that mere neglect by the gardener could ever have produced: there is a sense of excess, of things spilling out of control, heightened by the drama of the storm conveyed by the lightning that strikes the withered tree in the background. In a clearing at the back of the picture, the by now familiar motif of a shaded female statue looms ominously in a hollow—as if in a kind of cave. What kind of island is this, then? What love thus imagined from within, as it were? It seems that the little pockets of interiority that we have observed growing from within the space of Fragonard’s landscape sketches have taken the upper hand, the whole scenery becoming here a sort of phantasmatic interior. Yet it is not enough to say that it represents a fantasy world—so does Watteau’s Cythera. The peculiar formations in the 41 d i f f e r e n c e s Figure 6 Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Island of Love, c. 1770. Oil on canvas, 71 × 90 cm. Courtesy of the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon. Fragonard suggest, rather more specifically, a bodily interior opening up to view, a cavity of some imaginary organ, with its walls covered by the barnacles of tissue, with its veins and arteries—the zigzagging branches of the withered tree could be seen as just that—and its frothing secretions flowing from the hollow compartments into the main basin below. The travel of associations along this route—between landscape and anatomy—was, of course, not uncommon at the time. It is enough to look at the early-eighteenth-century sceneries made of human skeletons and internal organs prepared by the Dutch anatomist Frederik Ruysch (see Luyendijk-Elshout). But if Ruysch’s example suggests that the early modern anatomical imagination fed on the visual form of landscape in order to, in a sense, moralize anatomy (his are clearly vanitas scenes), the anatomical eloquence of Fragonard’s view serves no such purpose. In contrast to Ruysch, it produces no clear-cut message but only enhances, if not engenders, the enigmatic quality of this painting. The veil of this enigma may begin to lift if we realize the cultural specificity of Fragonard’s vision of nature. Few commentators have failed to notice the prominence given to vegetation in Fragonard’s work and its peculiar rendition, not just in the Lisbon painting but in his oeuvre 42 Fragonard in Detail at large, where one encounters “these insane trees with crowns toppling like snowdrifts,” as Yves Bonnefoy has noted (211, my translation).6 But the attempts to make sense of it have not gone beyond the most general remarks, such as Pierre Rosenberg’s description of the Lisbon painting as “enchanting,” but also “disquieting, and even somewhat frightening” (357). Is this indeed a pantheistic vision, as Rosenberg has suggested? In my view, the unusual and compelling aspects of Fragonard’s vision—so distinct from the rococo images of his predecessors, such as Watteau, and more immediately, of his teachers, Boucher and Chardin— had to do with a major shift in the understanding of nature that was taking place at the time Fragonard was painting. To put it crudely, God was making his exit from the natural realm as the Enlightenment thinkers submitted its expanse, both visible and invisible, to scientific scrutiny. This is not to say that eighteenth-century natural science was entirely or uniformly atheistic—far from it—but that it switched the focus of attention from the Creator to the creation and to the specific laws that governed its functioning. Thus, it would be hard to assume that a painting of nature produced at the time could be in any straightforward or traditional sense “pantheistic.” Rather, one may reasonably expect the opposite: some version of the materialist view of the world, permeated not by an omnipresent God but by new principles discovered through scientific inquiry. The key figure in the formulation of this new view was GeorgeLouis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, both because of the scope of his enterprise—the thirty-six volumes of his Histoire naturelle published from 1749 to 1788—and because of its intellectual ambition.7 Buffon’s major contribution consisted in the description of nature as a living whole, a vast continuum of organic life the different forms of which depended solely on the mode and degree of organization of matter. Such a view, of which Buffon was not the only but certainly the most consistent and articulate promoter, marked an important shift within the materialistic outlook on the world. In place of the earlier, mechanistic understanding of nature as an immutable, perfectly ordered, and self-maintaining system—in Voltaire’s words, a clock made by the Divine Clockmaker—there emerged a concept of nature as “a living power, immense, which embraces everything, animates everything” (Buffon 7). 8 The picture of the natural order as a static design imposed from without was thus displaced by a new vision of a creative force operating from within, organizing matter—or what Buffon called the organic molecules—into shape, and transforming the world into a theater of continuous change. 43 d i f f e r e n c e s What we see in the Gulbenkian picture is how such a recognition of nature as a living force might look when put into paint: a molecular continuum animated from within, in constant movement and ceaseless proliferation. But Fragonard paints not just that. If there is a frightening dimension to his Island of Love, it is because it formulates what haunts this newly emergent conception of the natural realm: the question of who or what is behind it. If not God, what exactly is responsible for this continuous growth, this ceaseless natural production of life as matter? It is this interrogative function that the ominous statues in Fragonard’s landscapes, such as the female figure looming in the background of the Lisbon canvas, perform. They call forth the idea of feminine presence but refuse to deliver an answer, their shapes remaining vague and distant, impossible to identify. But the distant femininity presiding over Fragonard’s composition also informs it in another, morphological sense. For, within the molecular continuum of this Island, matter seems to have morphed into mother (an etymologically related term), the anatomy implicit in Fragonard’s view suggesting more specifically a kind of womb. There was, to be sure, a long tradition, reaching back at least to the late Renaissance, of imagining the womb in topographical terms as a landscape or location where life originates. One example is Severin Pineau’s late-sixteenth-century medical treatise, where the uterus is represented as a sort of lake with a small fetus floating in it (145). Another is a seventeenth-century anatomical illustration from Fabrici’s treatise on the formation of the fetus, depicting the womb as an internal basin of fluid in which the fetus swims (Fabrici; see also Roberts and Tomlinson). By the eighteenth century, though, the conception of the female body as the origin of human life had changed significantly, and the anatomical illustrations convey this change. While in Pineau and Fabrici the womb was imagined as a separate world in which the fetus lives dissociated from the rest of the woman’s body, by the mid-eighteenth century this discrete chamber has been integrated with feminine anatomy and the fetus’s existence shown to be dependent on the bodily apparatus of the mother. 9 The 1774 Van Riemsdyk illustration in William Hunter’s well-known obstetric atlas represents a five-month-old embryo thoroughly ensconced in the womb, its incipient form swathed in the placenta. As the view next to it indicates, the uterus itself was being depicted with far greater concern for anatomical detail and morphological specificity.10 Moreover, it was integrated with the female body as a whole, as a sequence of color plates 44 Figure 7 Charles-Nicolas Jenty. The Demonstrations of a Pregnant Uterus of a Woman at Her Full Term. Pl. 1, after Burgess. London, 1757. Courtesy of the Boston Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine. Figure 8 Charles-Nicolas Jenty. The Demonstrations of a Pregnant Uterus of a Woman at Her Full Term. Pl. 2, after Riemsdyk. London, 1757. Courtesy of the Boston Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine. Fragonard in Detail 45 d i f f e r e n c e s Figure 9 Charles-Nicolas Jenty. The Demonstrations of a Pregnant Uterus of a Woman at Her Full Term. Pl. 3, after Riemsdyk. London, 1757. Courtesy of the Boston Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine. from Charles-Nicholas Jenty’s 1757 Demonstrations of a Pregnant Uterus of a Woman at Her Full Term suggestively conveys (figs. 7–9).11 As has been observed, these eighteenth-century representations of the pregnant body did not simply mark a step forward in anatomical and obstetric knowledge but had broader philosophical ramifications for the understanding of the origins of the individual as an autonomous self. For example, the increased integration of the fetus with the mother’s body raised the issue of separation from the mother, necessary for the development of the human subject.12 It has also been argued that a specific “cultural logic of individualism” at work in these images bestowed on the mother’s body the status of a mere support or background from which the incipient subject emerges—a move that disenfranchised the mother and, by extension, the woman as a subject.13 Yet this visual material also invites other readings. One could speak of the surging of the maternal body into view, both in the sense of its pervasive presence as an image in the new anatomical treatises and in terms of the internal dynamics of these illustrations. Look again at the distended belly in the illustration in Jenty, with its meaty excess rushing forth and threatening to spill out its content. Is this a map of yet another 46 Fragonard in Detail territory of femininity conquered by knowledge, or is it, rather, a proof of the emerging awareness of this body’s autonomous creative capacity?14 (Let us note that although Jenty’s maternal torsos were based on cadavers, their rendition as seated rather than supine insinuated that they were alive.) If these representations helped produce a new recognition of the generative power of the female body, though, they did it in an ambiguous way. The fact that these were female cadavers illustrating the creation of life was only one aspect of their ambiguity. Another had to do with an increased theoretical uncertainty about generation as a process that framed these views. A major shift was occurring in the understanding of generation in the mid-eighteenth century. The theory of preformation, based on the belief that a nucleus of human form preexists conception, was then beginning to cave in under the growing pressure of the epigenetic accounts that recognized conception as a process of fusion of two different, male and female, components taking place in the womb. The very formation of the fetus was thus perceived as dependent on the functioning of this organ.15 Combined with the increased anatomical precision and visual suggestiveness of medical book illustrations, epigenetic theory gave the maternal body an entirely new, creative and dynamic aspect bound to have broader cultural resonance. But despite the pressure of the epigenetic view, the belief in preformation persisted in the course of the eighteenth century, and generation remained an epistemological problem, a nagging secret. This is precisely what turned the womb, as both the vessel and the agent of life, into an object of wider cultural fascination and fantasy. In the context of this anatomical material, the cavernous landscape of Fragonard’s Island of Love becomes even more striking in its arbitrariness and eccentricity. It is hard not to notice the shallowness of the basin of water and its entirely flat, rocky bottom that make it difficult to imagine how any boat could sail in these waters without getting wrecked. The boats are indeed pushed to the side, as if to make a place for the surging flatness of a round plateau of the riverbed. What else could this oddly unmotivated shape be but the internal bed of an imaginary womb, swathed in a slimy film of something like a placenta being slushed away, the birth waters having been broken and spilling out? This intrauterine landscape may thus be seen to represent a vision of nature impregnated by the new understanding of the maternal body as a material, anatomical, and physiologically specific instrument of generation. The sense of a womb as a locus of activity, of continuous molecular production, is what the Gulbenkian painting shares with some 47 d i f f e r e n c e s of the new eighteenth-century maternal anatomies. But there is one important difference from most of these illustrations: there is no fetus here; this “uterus” is empty. The plateau is pregnant with an absence. The analogy I have been trying to establish here suggests a connection between what the Island of Love spells out as feminine morphology and that hollow around which Fragonard tended to construct his views, the generative core of the unseen sketched by the landscape being only vestigially defined as feminine—remember the female statues that tended to appear in them—but that we may now understand in more specific terms as a maternal interior, a space of becoming. Some intuition of the connection I am suggesting here informs the Goncourt brothers’ description of Fragonard’s landscape sketches as “furious embryos” (289). One such “furious embryo” may indeed be found on a page from Fragonard’s sketchbook, now in Amsterdam (fig. 10). It is a view of one of those shaded alleys that, as we have already noted, Fragonard repeatedly Figure 10 Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Amsterdam Sketchbook Folio 12. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 48 Fragonard in Detail rendered in his work (see fig. 4). But this particular folio allows us to catch a glimpse of how he did it, perhaps even of the reasons for his fascination with this particular motif. For it was clearly done while the artist was walking under the canopy of the trees, pencil in hand. The jagged, angular, interrupted lines, so different from Fragonard’s usually fluid strokes, speak to it quite bluntly—traces of the draftsman’s hand unsteadied by the movement of his body.16 Now, we may ask, why would Fragonard need to sketch as he walked? Evidently, there was no topographical necessity to do so, the site having been much easier to render while sitting or standing under the trees. But if the artist chose to walk, was it not because he was interested in precisely that movement from within that was then perceived as being at once nature’s and mother’s? In other words, what he was doing here was letting the page itself give birth to an image. By drawing as he moved, Fragonard was coming as close as he could to enacting the process of generation, his sequence of progressing or receding arches mapping out a process of becoming—of an image. What I am saying is not that this page looks like a maternal body, but rather that it behaves like one, the process of image-construction being defined here in terms of organic growth. As such, the sketch provides, in the roughest possible form, an image of what may be called the internal mold of Fragonard’s vision (“le moule intérieur”; the term is Buffon’s), a matrix that shapes his art—from within. This is the void at the core of the Gulbenkian painting: a belated echo of the mother’s body, a reminder of a loving, if also somewhat anxious, attachment—an attraction laced with a worry about autonomy and belonging—that produces not babies but a symbolic form, an image. It is from this maternal hollow in the scene of love, from the body of a missing Mother, this fantasy of an unembodied uterus (thus essentially psychic, rather than sensu stricto anatomical space), that Eros in Fragonard’s work emerges—as a kind of souvenir from the womb. Thus, as the elaborate drawing of an empty bed eloquently suggests—itself a tour de force staging of an absence (fig. 11)—what really counts in Fragonard is the body that is not there. It is the invisible woman who presses from behind the scenes that indirectly configures the erotic situations Fragonard depicts. This is precisely the object hidden behind the curtains of representation that the Curious Girls in Fragonard’s rather extraordinary little painting seem to be looking at but we cannot see (fig. 12)—a staging of the same absence as in the image of the empty bed, only shown from another side. d i f f e r e n c e s Figure 11 Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Le lit aux amours. Pen, brown wash, and watercolor over black chalk underdrawing, 45.7 × 30.4 cm. Musée des BeauxArts et d’Archéologie, Besançon. Photo: Charles Choffet. Figure 12 Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Curious Girls. Oil on panel, 16.5 × 12.5 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Daniel Arnaudet 49 50 Fragonard in Detail Figure 13 Jean-Honoré Fragonard, La Gimblette, 1760. Oil on canvas, 89 × 70 cm. Collection of the Bayerische Hypound Vereinsbank AG in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich. It is also from within the oddly corporeal alcove that the girl playing with her dog in the well-known Munich variant of the so-called La Gimblette seems to emerge: the large, brown, and carnal pouch of her bed’s canopy looks, in fact, like a giant uterus (fig. 13). Cropped at the top, its soft, ochre materiality dilating to fill the whole space, it suggests the shape of a bodily enclave, in which the woman’s own body is ensconced with her legs bent, not unlike a fetus in its womb. The erotic aspect of this frivolous figure is thus importantly a function of its relation to the latent maternal form rather than to the presumably male viewer. And it—the latent body—is precisely what loosens Fragonard’s famously mellifluous touch, what liquefies his strokes, what shows between the cracks in his images: the maternal nothing (the unseen) as the condition of possibility of these representations. Therein lies Fragonard’s seduction: it is the painting itself, and the painter, that are caught up in the grip of unspeakable desire, seduced by the maternal space from which the image and, in a sense, its subject— insofar as we understand the subject as a form of representation—emerge 51 d i f f e r e n c e s without quite being able to separate. Seduction is, then, not just what the painting is about but, more to the point, it is what secures its existence and shapes its appearance. Fragonard is supposed to have once declared, “Je peindrais avec mon cul”—“I would paint with my ass” (Renouvier 167). It may be a surprisingly crass declaration from the painter known for the lightness and sophistication of his touch, but whether or not he actually uttered it, it does, in my view, uncannily capture the key aspect of his relation to his own work. This relation has evidently something rather childish about it: “I could do anything, it’s a matter of play, a child’s game.” But in its very childishness, Fragonard’s declaration also conveys an important recognition: “I am not in charge of the painting process, I am pulled in, neither my head nor hands seem necessary, any bodily part would do, the more unthinkable—and unthinking—the better.” In sum: “I do not paint—I am painted, I am possessed by the process that drives my body to paint.” The seduction at work in Fragonard’s paintings may be understood, then, as a form of mimicry of the other, as the literary theorists of seduction, from Girard to Baudrillard to Saint-Amand, would insist, but of a specific kind: a mimicry of mom’s interior.17 This is what their morphology repeatedly suggests: an attempt to re-create what is no longer there, the missing inside from which the painting’s subject emerges and on which it continues to lean—the unconscious object-source of Fragonard’s erotic art.18 It is this leaning on the erotic fantasy of the mother’s body that Italian Interior at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with which I want to conclude, registers with a remarkable painterly eloquence (fig. 14). To begin with, this canvas is a proof of the travel of Eros across the boundaries of different pictorial genres in Fragonard. Its structure is almost identical to that of another type of painting, a gallant scene called the The Little Swing : a palpably defined enclosure with a luminous rectangle opening off-center to the outside. The content of these enclosures is, though, quite different: in the New York painting, it is the radiant maternal figure with an infant in her arms that emerges from the inner core of the painting, against the bleached whiteness of the door in which some barely articulated shapes hover about. The thickness of the pigment, its blotchy, fluid application, make the surface of the canvas appear as a kind of membrane on which things are only just taking shape, as if summoned into being by the sheer pressure of the incoming light. What I want to stress is the role of making, of what Fragonard’s contemporaries called the faire, evident 52 Fragonard in Detail Figure 14 Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Italian Interior, c. 1759–60. Oil on canvas, 48.9 × 59.4 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund. Photograph, all rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. in this canvas, which is to say not just its unusually thick texture but its dynamic deployment of paint, especially the movement of the billowing white shapes that seems to push the maternal figure forward into view. What made this image possible, what presses from behind this scene is, I want to suggest, the eighteenth-century cultural imagination of the maternal body as both an instrument of generation and a repository of its secret. It is a historically specific enigma of the womb that takes shape in the incipient, half-pronounced forms that hover at the white core of Fragonard’s canvas. But it is also Fragonard’s idiosyncratic inflection of this cultural construct that we see in this promise of an image that has not yet taken shape. The inarticulate density of pigment, of what seems like almost blindly applied paint—as if by the painter’s body indeed, rather than by a brush—flesh out a child’s haptic fantasy of its own originary space, a space of an artist’s vision that comes into being not via separation but via reconnection to the imaginary corpus of the Mother. 53 d i f f e r e n c e s What we are looking at may be, then, a vision of Eros flooding the space of self, a pictorial rendition of that threshold of modern sexuality that Michel Foucault spoke about when he declared that modernity “managed to bring us almost entirely [. . .] under the sway of the logic of concupiscence and desire” (78). Yet the force that pushes through and penetrates the most hidden recesses of interiority in this picture is clearly not the invasion of discourse (dear to Foucault) but rather a plastic shape of fantasy, a palpable form given to the pressure of psychic life. As such, Fragonard’s erotic vision is not simply modern; it invites us, rather, to reformulate the history of modern sexuality and thus also reimagine the origins of the modern self. ewa lajer-burcharth is Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. She is the author of Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror (Yale University Press, 1999) and of numerous articles on French eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art and visual culture. She is currently completing a book on the self and the private sphere in eighteenth-century art and culture. The current essay is part of a longer chapter in this book. Notes 1 See ch. 3 and 4, esp. 113–16 and 149–52. 2 There exist several versions of this subject in gouache, drawing, engraving, and etching; see Rosenberg cat. no. 66. 3 4 5 6 See Rosenberg cat. no. 168 and the recent discussion of the painting by Rand. Of the Straus gouache of the Lisbon painting (which, as Williams suggests, was done after the Lisbon painting) Rosenberg writes: “He gave free reign to his imagination [. . .] so that Nature, not the spectator, becomes the true subject of this work” (358). It is precisely this excess that, in my view, distinguishes the vision of nature in this painting from the forms of the jardin pittoresque that Rand proposes as Fragonard’s model in his interesting discussion of the painting. “Arbres insensés, aux cimes croulant comme des neiges.” 7 From the vast literature on Buffon, the works most helpful for this discussion were Buffon 88, Cherni, and Roger. 8 For the mid-eighteenth-century shift in the understanding of nature see Charleton and Gay, esp. ch. 3. 9 See Jordanova, “Gender,” Keller, and Newman. 10 See Jordanova, “Gender” and Thornton. 11 For a discussion of these extraordinary colored plates, see Petherbridge 40–42 and Rodari 133. 12 See Jordanova, Sexual Visions and Henderson. 13 In Newman’s words, “the woman’s body is sacrificed to fetal subjectivity” (88). Jordanova stresses the violence in the rendition of the mother’s body in these anatomical illustrations (“Gender” and Sexual). 54 Fragonard in Detail 14 Works Cited As Henderson observes, in Hunter, “Nature appears as a realm of freedom, of spontaneous growth not bound by hard and fast laws. The fetus is the perfect bourgeois subject—it makes itself and so is neither simply the inheritor of paternal power nor the commodity-like product of its mother’s labor” (112). But, one may note, this view also raises the specter of maternal power insofar as it is the mother’s body that actively contributes to the production and growth of this reconceived, autonomous fetus. It seems clear that the maternal body has become in the course of the eighteenth century a particularly charged site, at once acknowledged to have a great deal of importance and generating a great deal of epistemological uncertainty. This topic certainly warrants further study. 15 For historical accounts of theories of generation, see Correia, Gasking, and Roe. 16 I would like to thank Eunice Williams for her generosity in sharing with me her knowledge of the Amsterdam sketchbook and her expertise on Fragonard’s drawings in general. I owe to her the suggestion that the sheet I am reproducing here was done while the artist was walking. Williams is planning a publication of the Amsterdam sketchbook. 17 See Baudrillard, who stresses the mimetic aspects of seduction in De la séduction, Girard, and Saint-Amand. 18 For the psychoanalytic notion of the object-source and its role in the psychic process of seduction see Laplanche ch. 3. Baudrillard, Jean. De la séduction. Paris: Denoël/Gonthier, 1979. Bonnefoy, Yves. L’Improbable. Paris: Gallimard, 1980. Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de. “Histoire naturelle.” Œuvres philosophiques. Ed. Jean Piveteau et al. Paris: puf, 1954. Buffon 88: Actes du colloque international pour le bicentenaire de la mort de Buffon (Paris, Montbard, Dijon, 14–22 juin 1988). Ed. Jean Gayon. Paris: J. Vrin, 1992. Charlton, D. G. New Images of the Natural in France: A Study in European Cultural History, 1750–1800. New York: Cambridge up, 1984. Cherni, Amor. Buffon, la nature et son histoire. Paris: puf, 1998. Clark, Alvin, ed. Mastery and Elegance: Two Centuries of French Drawings from the Collec tion of Jeffrey E. Horvitz. Cambridge: Harvard University Art Museums, 1998. Correia, Clara Pinto. The Ovary of Eve: Egg and Sperm and Preformation. Chicago: u of Chicago p, 1997. Cuzin, Jean Pierre. Fragonard: Life and Work, Complete Catalogue of the Oil Paintings. New York: Abrams, 1988. Fabrici, Girolamo. De formato foetu. Padua, 1604. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990. Gasking, Elizabeth. Investigations into Generation, 1651–1828. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins up, 1967. 55 d i f f e r e n c e s Gay, Peter. The Science of Freedom. New York: Norton, 1977. Vol. 2 of The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. Girard, René. “From Mimetic Desire to the Monstrous Double.” Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins up, 1977. 143–68. Goncourt, Edmond and Jules de. French Eighteenth- Century Painters. Trans. Robin Ironside. 2nd ed. Oxford: Phaidon, 1981. Henderson, Andrea. “Doll-Machines and Butcher- Shop Meat: Models of Childbirth in the Early Stages of Industrial Capitalism.” Genders 12 (1991): 100–19. Hunter, William. The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus Exhibited in Figures. Birmingham, 1774. Jenty, Charles-Nicolas. The Demonstrations of a Pregnant Uterus of a Woman at Her Full Term. London, 1757. J. H. Fragonard e H. Robert a Roma: Villa Medici, 6 dicembre 1990–24 febbraio 1991. Roma: Fratelli Palombi Editori and Edizioni Carte Segrete, 1990. Jordanova, Ludmilla. “Gender, Generation, and Science: William Hunter’s Obstetrical Atlas.” William Hunter and the Eighteenth- Century Medical World. Ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge up, 1985. 385–412. . Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries. New York: Harvester, 1989. Keller, Eve. “The Rhetoric of Seventeenth- Century Embryology and the Construction of Early-Modern Identity.” Eighteenth- Century Studies 33.3 (2000): 321–48. Laplanche, Jean. New Foundations for Psychonalysis. Trans. David Macey. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Luyendijk-Elshout, Antonie. “Death Enlightened: A Study of Frederik Ruysch.” Journal of the American Medical Association 212.1 (6 Apr. 1970): 121–26. Massengale, Jean. Jean-Honoré Fragonard. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1993. Newman, Karen. Fetal Positions: Individualism, Science, Visuality. Stanford: Stanford up, 1996. Petherbridge, Deanna. “Art et anatomie: la rencontre du texte et de l’image.” Corps à vif: Art et anatomie. Ed. A. Carlino, D. Petherbridge, and C. Ritschard. Geneva: Musée d’art et d’histoire, 1998. 15–48. Pineau, Severin. Opusculum physiologum et anatomicum in duos libellos distinctum. Paris, 1607. Rand, Richard. “Fragonard dans le jardin d’amour.” L’art et les normes sociales. Ed. Thomas Gaethgens et al. Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2001. 493–508. Renouvier, Jules. Histoire de l’art pendant la Révolution considéré principalement dans les estampes. Paris: J. Renouard, 1863. Roberts, K. B., and J. D. W. Tomlinson. The Fabric of the Body: European Traditions of Anatomical Illustrations. New York: Clarendon, 1992. 56 Fragonard in Detail Rodari, Florian, ed. Anatomie de la couleur: l’invention de l’estampe en couleurs. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1996. Roe, Shirley A. Matter, Life, and Generation: Eighteenth- Century Embryology and the HallerWolff Debate. New York: Cambridge up, 1981. Roger, Jacques. Buffon: A Life in Natural History. Trans. Sarah Lucille Bonnefoi. Ed. L. Pearce Williams. Ithaca: Cornell up, 1997. Rosenberg, Pierre. Fragonard. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and H. N. Abrams, 1988. Saint-Amand, Pierre. The Libertine’s Progress: Seduction in the Eighteenth- Century French Novel. Trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage. Hanover: up of New England, 1994. Schor, Naomi. Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine. New York: Methuen, 1987. Sheriff, Mary. Fragonard: Art and Eroticism. Chicago: u of Chicago p, 1990. Thornton, John L. Jan van Rymsdyk: Medical Artist of the Eighteenth Century. New York: Oleander, 1982. Williams, Eunice. Drawings by Fragonard in North American Collections. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1978.