Crise de plume et souveraineté du pinceau. Écrire la peinture de Diderot à Proust by Nicolas Valazza (review)

This far-reaching and thought-provoking study focuses on art criticism to elucidate developments in both painting and writing in nineteenth-century France. Valazza’s primary contention is that various literary trends are inextricably bound to a certain sovereignty achieved by painting—as it frees itself from the constraints of ut pictura poesis—a status admired and questioned by a long line of critics who then sought a similar effect in their own literary endeavors. This initial contention is accompanied by a series of secondary points common to many of the writers: emphasizing color and light rather than line; seeing the incarnation of flesh as the ultimate test of the painter’s craft; finding great art capable of evoking other senses; experiencing frustration at the inadequacy of verbal language to express the uniqueness of modern painting; incorporating into literature not only visual effects but also painters, paintings and theories of art. Rather than focus on analogies between literature and painting, however, as do most recent interdisciplinary studies, Valazza concentrates on the lines of tension and points of friction and fracture between them.

Despite such common points, major differences emerge as Valazza’s study makes its way across the nineteenth century, extending beyond art criticism to a variety of literary genres. After a short introduction initiated by an excellent analysis of Manet’s portrait of Zola, the first chapter concentrates on the Salons of Diderot, the first writer to be dumbstruck by the sublime power of Chardin’s still lives and the enviable though enigmatic effect of self-containment achieved by painting. Valazza then enters the nineteenth century via Balzac’s short story, Le chef d’œuvre inconnu, in which the painters Porbus and Poussin fail to understand their master Frenhofer’s final masterpiece, though intuiting the presence of an actual being on the canvas beneath the wall of paint on the surface.

Whereas the scene is telling in terms of the sovereignty of modern art, Valazza recognizes that extending it to Balzac’s writing is problematic. Despite Baudelaire’s admiration for Delacroix, Valazza convincingly contends that the real “painter of modern life” is the poet, who alone can seize the eternal in the transitory, the spiritual in the visual. The Goncourt brothers were, like Diderot, struck by the imminence attained by Chardin’s still lives as well as by modern landscape art through the “materiality” of color, which they then sought to achieve in their own “écriture artiste.” In his excellent analysis of a passage from Manette Salomon in which the model poses before a mirror, Valazza finds a striking emblem of both painting and literature. In Zola’s L’œuvre, where the painter Claude Lantier hangs himself in front of his “masterpiece,” Valazza aptly identifies a sovereignty of art as in Balzac’s tale, but again, given Zola’s productivity, has trouble extending it to a “crisis” in writing (in my view the term “mise en question” might have worked better). More exemplary is the case of Huysmans, whose fascination for Gustave Moreau led him to reject Naturalism and Modernism in pursuit of a stand-alone universe, first in Symbolism, then in Christianity. It is, however, in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu that Valazza’s argument becomes the most compelling, in part because so many of the previous painters and writers discussed in the book are incorporated into the monumental novel. Among the highlights of this superb chapter are discussions of Vermeer, Chardin, the Goncourts and the fictional painter Elstir, all of whom teach the narrator the value of esthetic experience. He also learns the danger of fragmentation and the potential for transcendence of the metaphor which, synthesizes disparate elements over Time, thus achieving literature’s own sovereignty.

Valazza reasons with depth and clarity and writes with confidence and conviction; his book is a must read...