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Modernism/Modernity 8.2 (2001) 369-371



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Book Review

Passionate Discontent: Creativity, Gender, and French Symbolist Art


Passionate Discontent: Creativity, Gender, and French Symbolist Art. Patricia Mathews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp. 313 + xii. $35.00.

Passionate Discontent is an ambitious book, entering a field--fin-de-siècle Symbolism in France--strangely neglected in art history in the last two decades. Most scholars of this period have repeatedly focused on the major figures of Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh, considered in varying degrees of isolation from the larger Symbolist movement.1 And no major synthetic study [End Page 369] of French Symbolism, with its large and fascinatingly contradictory range of artists and critics, has been published since Robert Goldwater's Symbolism (New York: Harper & Row) was posthumously assembled in 1979. Probably the most difficult modern movement in the visual arts to grasp, French Symbolism initiated a body of theory that shaped all subsequent manifestations of modernism in France at least to the First World War, including, most significantly, Fauvism and Cubism. Mathews's book, though in no sense a 'survey,' lives up to this daunting critical challenge, forcing us to reconsider French Symbolism as well as modernism broadly conceived.

Mathews's aim is to analyze notions of creativity, genius, and gender central to debates over hierarchically determined categories of the masculine and the feminine. (In beginning her book with an overview of Symbolist theory, she offers the clearest introduction to the subject I have seen.) Focusing on art criticism between 1885 and 1895, she situates theories of creativity in the broader debates over creativity and gender, especially those operative within the fields of science and medicine. Her analysis of the interrelation of these discourses clarifies for the first time the institutional and cultural stakes behind competing definitions of creativity and the failed effort, on the part of Symbolism's apologists, to counter attempts by the scientific community to pathologize art and creativity. In her consideration of the Symbolist feminization of models of creativity, she analyzes the gendered trope of the androgyne within the valorization of the masculine over the feminine. The full import of her findings is brought to fruition in the series of case studies that follow. Her readings of the art of Camille Claudel, Gauguin, and, especially brilliantly, Suzanne Valadon offer the first view of French Symbolism that incorporates its female artists. This book ambitiously asks us to reconsider the nature of Symbolist art and thought and to situate them anew in a more densely interwoven cultural environment.

Reading through Mathews's new landscape of Symbolist art and criticism--one revealed as deeply enmeshed with larger myths of its time and place--renders more urgent and problematic the widespread naturalization of the concept of "autonomy" in definitions of modernism in the visual arts. No reading of the art criticism from the 1880s to World War I offers the same concept of the autonomy of art evident in either Clement Greenberg's influential art criticism (beginning in 1939 in the Partisan Review) or in the contemporaneous Frankfurt School debates (Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, and Walter Benjamin) that have been amplified by related contemporary theorists (Peter Bürger, Fredric Jameson, Perry Anderson, T. J. Clark, and Thomas Crow). This view entails the modernist artist substituting the twin poles of "self" and "nature" for those of "self" and "medium," in full though usually dimly sensed retreat from the contradictions of capitalism, and now constitutes the dominant theoretical model of modernism in the visual arts within art history, literary theory, and cultural studies, at least.2 Mathews subscribes to this view herself, despite what I take as proof, within her own discussions of Symbolist theory, of fundamental differences in the Symbolists' notions of the independence of art ("autonomy" was not their word) and the inherent meaning in abstract form and color as a "universal language of truth" (38ff, 7, 20).

It is a related aspect of her book that anarchist aesthetic theories and their centrality for many Symbolist artists and critics, most notably Félix Fénéon...

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