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  • The Joy of Life: The Idyllic in French Art, circa 1900
  • Ellen McBreen
The Joy of Life: The Idyllic in French Art, circa 1900. Margaret Werth. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002. Pp. xviii + 330. $60.00 (cloth).

When Paul Signac exhibited his anarchist manifesto In the Time of Harmony (1893-1895), one of the more sensitive criticisms came from Henry van de Velde, a painter who had recently broken ranks with the neo-Impressionist group that Signac now led. As a vision of utopian idyll, van de Velde thought, Harmony missed its ideological mark with bad figuration and ridiculous wardrobe choices that he found "off-putting . . . Such a get-up has nothing to do with the future . . . and is a matter of puritanical anarchism . . . If these figures had been nude, the joy of painting them would have doubled . . . ."1

For van de Velde, clothing marked the momentary fashions and typologies of class too clearly; nude figures might have been able to transcend them entirely. A decade later, his complaint of "puritanical anarchism" would seem to find its response in Henri Matisse's Bonheur de Vivre (1905-1906), a dreamier idyll of languorous nudes far less specified by time, place or politics. But at the 1906 Salon des Indépendants, Matisse's Bonheur unleashed a torrent of critical hostility that made van de Velde's objections seem rather quaint. Sympathetic critics condemned Bonheur as a lifeless theory of painting, while the more belligerent ones recommended Matisse exile himself to the "land of the Bushmen," where he'd surely be "taken for a master."2

For a theme that was, on the surface of things, about humans finding harmony in nature, the idyll certainly generated a great deal of disharmony. Why here and now, in France during the decades before World War I? This is the central question posed by Margaret Werth's ambitious study. The author convincingly demonstrates how representing an imaginary paradise in paint was intimately connected to real, and urgently posed questions of national, social and individual identity. Although she remains tightly focused on just three works of art (Signac's Harmony, Matisse's Bonheur, and Puvis de Chavannes's Summer of 1891), the scope of her inquiry successfully transforms the book into a comprehensive survey of French culture and politics circa 1900.

Her first chapter examines Puvis de Chavannes, arguably the most influential painter of idyll in fin-de-siècle France. She begins with a thoughtful account of the layered and complex reception of Puvis's work, demonstrating how images can rarely be secured as ideological texts. Puvis's [End Page 596] Summer, for example, was a banner held high by many different critical camps. In its home in Paris's newly re-constructed Hôtel de Ville, this large-scale decoration served as an affirmative metaphor for a restored and healthy Third Republic. Outside of City Hall, however, right-wing nationalists like Charles Maurras appropriated Puvis because the artist's classically inspired odes to Latin ancestry confirmed their racial definition of "Frenchness." But the artist was also adopted by left-leaning socialists like Jean Jaurès, who saw in Puvis's idyll a progressive paradise where individuals, reconciled with both nature and their past, found refuge in a kind of pre-capitalist collective.

In an interpretive move that characterizes Werth's methods throughout, her own analysis gives equal time to the contradictions in Puvis's project, uncovering loss and morbidity beneath his joie de vivre nostalgia. Her prose is especially captivating when describing how Puvis's weirdly inflated figures struggle against their unified ground; how decomposition and distortion threaten the overall decorative synthesis.

This kind of dialectical inquiry structures Werth's second chapter on Signac's Harmony, which moves back and forth between the painting's potentials and its aesthetic and critical failures, and more generally, from a consideration of visual utopias against textual ones (e.g.: William Morris's contemporary News from Nowhere). Signac's subtitle, "The golden age is not in the past, it is the future," emphasized how forward-looking his vision of society was meant to be, as a place where man and woman, artist and...

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