The Painter's Touch: Boucher, Chardin, Fragonard by Ewa Lajer-Burcharth (review)

Ewa Lajer-Burcharth's new work continues her radical and original accounts of eighteenth-century French painting. In 1999, she published Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror (New Haven: Yale University Press), whose playful title combined 'The Shadow of the Guillotine' (Chapter 1) with 'Psyche in the Boudoir' (Chapter 4) for a serious purpose: to reconceptualize our understanding of David through new perspectives, notably gender studies. In 2011, Lajer-Burcharth again used a punning title in her brief but ambitious Chardin Material (Berlin: Sternberg), in which she presents material about Chardin, to be sure, but it is materiality itself that is given centre-stage in the form of 'the painter's own touch' (p. 31). Her new book expands the scope and range of her methods by juxtaposing three key artists and above all by expanding her arguments about the painter's touch. Touch is both material, being the haptic basis of making paintings, and metaphorical, inviting broad reflections on social, moral, and philosophical issues. Her starting point in analysing all three artists is 'le faire', the handling of medium that reveals the self-individuation of each artist through his practice. This leads to, and enables, investigation of domains of meaning in moral and social dimensions, which have philosophical implications. She invites us to engage both with minutiae of technique and with wide-ranging issues of interpretation and theory. Frequent and high-quality illustrations (154 in colour and 104 in black and white) make close and specific visual analysis possible, while extensive discussions, with copious endnotes, engage us in debates both of the eighteenth century and of today. The opening section, 'Boucher's Tact', connects Boucher's materiality with the rise of consumerism. Boucher operates through 'the commercial imagination', and himself assumes the identity of the artist as consumer. Consumerism, within this context, does not involve notions of moral decline or alienation familiar from studies of modernity in a later historical period, and is celebratory. The second chapter, 'Chardin's Craft', leads to self-individuation of a quite different kind: socially more modest, in other ways no less complex. Chardin's La Raie (1725–26) is the book's dust-jacket image, and is analysed in detail by Lajer-Burcharth with mesmeric skill, combining technical, sexual, and social issues. This lays the foundation for an analysis of the whole of Chardin's work, accounting for his changes of subject matter, and culminating in his late self-portraits. The third chapter, 'Fragonard's Seduction', turns to art that is openly erotic and sexually oriented. Lajer-Burcharth extends this sexuality from works rooted in social subject-matter to Fragonard's often bizarre landscapes, which she links convincingly to contemporary natural science, and specifically to Buffon's Histoire naturelle. Writers form more generally part of Lajer-Burcharth's exploratory arguments, not only in relation to thinkers such as Diderot or Rousseau, but including Marivaux in connection with Boucher and even Montaigne concerning Chardin. The theories and ideas invoked belong both to eighteenth-century contexts and to unexpected modern inclusions, such as the psychoanalytic philosophy of André Green. The reader is involved in a vigorous and at times provocative debate, vital to our understanding of the origins of modernity.