Pedagogical Disaster in Romantic Art Fiction

This essay explores the emergence in nineteenth-century French fiction of a new, characteristically modern, attention to the relations between artists and their pupils, to the formation of artistic schools, and to the dynamics of artistic posterity. Broadly speaking, that attention responded to significant changes in material and professional conditions surrounding artistic production, with decisive consequences for the trajectory of an artistic career. The occasion for this transformation matters less for present purposes than its effects: no longer were artists assigned the fixed roles associated with the traditionally artisanal fabric of artistic production. No less compromised was the liberal culture of the academy, whose rhetorical protocols and institutional pressures operated at once in opposition to, but also in tandem with, workshop practice. It is tempting to describe this double decline as bringing new freedoms hence the emancipatory rhetoric that coloured Romantic art criticism, notably in the pages of L'Artiste and other progressive organs. However, we might also characterize those freedoms as having imposed new burdens. Unexpectedly, artists found themselves obliged to forge new kinds of communities, to improvise new notions of influence, and to recalculate the terms and conditions of artistic posterity.

Education offers an important sphere for such concerns, located in particular at the so-called scene of instruction.¹ We might think of that scene as now disenchanted, as if the bonds that traditionally linked master and pupil now constituted constraints. Romantic art critics, for example, often stressed how little students learned from their teachers. Also recall Théodore Géricault's quip upon encountering a child busy drawing on a wall: 'Quel dommage! L'étude gâtera tout cela.'² Even if we treat these remarks as apocryphal, they make the point no less well: education was held to crush what it was supposed to nurture. Just this outlook would colour the views of educators themselves. Against traditional practices that saw art teachers instruct students in their own manners and methods, it now fell to teachers precisely to discourage such imitations-in short to set their students free. To put it another way, the problem of education was a problem of authority, expressed most of all in the character of relations that prevailed between teacher and student.

The revolution in pedagogy was launched by Rousseau, but in the visual arts a better example is the instruction of Jacques-Louis David-specifically the concerns over that instruction evinced by David's Romantic successors. Delacroix, among others, railed against David's seeming tyranny, charging the artist with crushing his followers where he should have nurtured them.³ The charge seemed to carry special force on account of David's political career, the artist's conduct in this sphere reinforcing the suspicion that his instruction was ideologically driven. David's defenders, for their part, as if signing on to the Romantic critique, praised his instruction as precisely keyed to fostering his students' independence.⁴ In a similar vein, we might cite Gustave Courbet's 1861 proposal to open a teaching studio. The school, Courbet insisted, would have no direction: 'Moi, qui crois que tout artiste doit être son proper maître, je ne puis pas songer à me constituer professeur'.⁵ This is not the place to unpack Courbet's vision of himself (Courbet himself would come to employ assistants trained in his own manner). The broader point is the emancipatory project that Courbet, among others, took as axiomatic.

Nineteenth-century fiction about artists betrays similar concerns, authors treating the École des Beaux-Arts, the academy and their affiliates as disabling structures of domination. Take the case of Claude Lantier, the ill-fated protagonist and Cézanne composite whose fortunes Émile Zola traces in L'Œuvre. Across his art criticism Zola had little good to say about the École, and it should be no surprise to discover that neither does Claude: 'Ah! Qu'il les regrettait aujourd'hui, ces six mois d'imbéciles tâtonnements, d'exercices niais sous la férule d'un bonhomme dont la caboche différait de la sienne!'⁶ Bad education, in Zola's account, turns on the arbitrary exercise of instructor power...