Balzac and the Model of Painting: Artist Stories in “La Comédie humaine” (review)

Carefully focused, tightly written, and well-presented, this volume of close readings of Balzac’s artist stories is a solid and valuable addition to the Research Monographs in the Legenda series. The volume pulls together stories, dispersed throughout the Comédie humaine, that treat fictional artists and hinge on the “creation, replication, donation, or circulation of fictional works of art” (1). Knight argues in her introduction that these stories provide particularly valuable “test cases for issues of representation” within a corpus that has been the focus of theoretical debates about realism since the 50s. A crucial reference in Knight’s engagement with these debates is Roland Barthes’s reading of Balzac’s Sarrasine in S/Z, and the metaphorical “modèle de la peinture” he elaborates as a false premise of realist æsthetics. Knight’s title directly alludes to Barthes’s “modèle,” even as it also refers to the artists’ models – both male and female – in Balzac’s stories, models whose relationship to the artist has both an æsthetic and erotic dimension that rings changes on the Pygmalion myth.

Knight’s crucial first chapter, which analyzes both Sarrasine and Le Chef d’œuvre inconnu, provides an important critical counterweight to Barthes’s analysis of Sarrasine as a tragic figure who, obsessed with the Italian singer who embodies his ideal of feminine beauty, is destroyed by the discovery that his model is a castrato. While Barthes reads Sarrasine’s story as emblematic of the inadequacy of a real model to guarantee the æsthetic wholeness and coherence of the artist’s vision, Knight’s analysis suggests the limitations of Barthes’s analytic perspective in its more exclusive identification with the perspective of Balzac’s isolated and troubled artist. In broadening the consideration of the “modèle” to include the relationships between artists and models, Knight argues that Balzac’s artist stories provide a privileged entry into the portrayal of a homosocial system where art and prostitution are linked through the artist’s model, who then serves as the “focus and vehicle of Balzac’s lucid critique of the gender politics institutionalized by the 1804 Civil Code” (3). Knight’s aim to “refill the supposed theoretical emptiness at the core of ‘le modèle de la peinture’”(4) with the social realities of sexual politics leads her through readings of La Bourse, La Vendetta, and La Maison du chat qui pelote, stories which all involve the marriage between the artist and the model. They are followed by a consideration of the career of the fictional painter Joseph Bridau in La Rabouilleuse – another key work in Barthes’s reading of Balzac’s realism – and other texts where Bridau appears episodically: Un début dans la vie, Pierre Grassou, Illusions perdues, and La Cousine Bette. Knight’s “Afterward” briefly takes up the case of the prostitute Valérie Marneff, in La Cousine Bette, who assumes the role of artist’s model in order to seduce the artist and destroy his marriage. While, as Knight acknowledges, the model’s manipulation of the sculptor and his art initially appears to run counter to her other analyses of artist stories, it is precisely Valérie’s real role that reveals the complicated links between artistic, financial and sexual arrangements that the model embodies, and the artist’s marriage had both sealed and concealed.