Pen vs. Paintbrush: Girodet, Balzac, and the Myth of Pygmalion in Postrevolutionary France (review)

Alexandra K. Wettlaufer. Pen vs. Paintbrush: Girodet, Balzac, and the Myth of Pygmalion in Postrevolutionary France. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Pp. 323. ISBN 0-312-23641-7

Alexandra Wettlaufer's book transcends the parameters of her title and makes a significant contribution to the study of artistic and political culture in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century France. At the core of her study is "the competition between pen and paintbrush," which she locates "in the perceived threat of an invasive and ambitious Other, and in changes, conflicts, and controversies sur-rounding the production and consumption of art at the outset of the nineteenth century" (2). Her well crafted introduction outlines the historic and theoretical rivalry between the arts and focuses on the theme of Pygmalion and Galatea, which she traces in subsequent chapters divided equally between a reconsideration of Girodet's painting and an analysis of Balzac's responses to Girodet. Pygmalion from Greek mythology sculpted a statue more beautiful than any living female and then fell in love with his own creation brought to life by Venus. Writers interpreted Pygmalion as a lowly craftsman, idolater, and madman, whereas painters celebrated him as artist and lover. And artists viewed the theme as the embodiment of their mystical power to create life through art and as a symbol of the visual image's power over the viewer.

For Girodet and the revolutionary period, these issues coalesced around the ideal nude embodied in images like his Pygmalion. Wettlaufer's first chapter on Girodet actually focuses on Girodet's painting Le Sommeil d'Endymion (1791), which she links to the rivalry between pen and paintbrush. Girodet's canvas depicts a reclining Endymion, a shepherd whom Diana, goddess of the moon, has made to sleep for her passionate nocturnal visits. Yet, Girodet subverted the myth and reduced Diana to a symbolic presence in the moonlight; the poetic meaning of this work "lies then both in Diana's absence to the viewer and in her presence to Endymion, in the realm of sleep, dream, and imaginative inner vision" (59). We learn from subsequent chapters, whether in his writing or later painting, that Girodet, appropriating the authority of the poet, set out to create a new kind of poetic painting. Wettlaufer also analyzes the intersection of Girodet's painting with other discourses important to art in the Revolutionary period, focusing on the body as a site for aesthetic, gendered, and political meaning. Girodet's art challenged David's theatrical Roman Neo-classicism and posited a new aesthetic based on Winckelmann's poetic reading of Greek art. This new ideal, like David's aesthetic, opposed the feminized Rococo and offered new models of gender and Republican politics. Returning to Le Sommeil d'Endymion, for instance, the physical absence of Diana negates the goddess gaze and therefore female power. Girodet hoped that the public, by contemplating the ideal nude Endymion which he transformed into poetry, would be led to higher knowledge and perhaps even Republican freedom. Wettlaufer analyzes such major subsequent works as Mlle Lange as Danaë (1799) and Pygmalion (1819) along these same lines and reads in Girodet's art his political transformation from Republican during the Revolution to conservative monarchist during the Restoration.

The second part of her study treats Balzac's reaction to Girodet, his painting, and the politics of aesthetics and gender at the dawn of the July Monarchy in three early stories: La Maison du chat-qui-pelote (1829), Sarrasine (1830), and Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu (1831). Wettlaufer argues that "If the nineteenth-century painter hoped to allegorize his genius through the representation of the ideal female form, highlighting his cerebral prowess and creative potency, the nineteenth-century author insistently read these creative productions in terms of their materiality, as fetishized repro-ductions of a desirable body, rather than elevated intellectual creations" (217). For instance, in the earliest...