Fragonard in Detail

I would like to evoke Naomi Schor's notion of detail as a trope through which to investigate—and put pressure on—the relation between aesthetics and femininity. It is precisely this relation that Jean-Honoré Fragonard's pictorial practice addresses in a most suggestive, though in my view still misrecognized, way. Fragonard's fascination with femininity is of course well known. It would be hard to ignore the fact that the female body is at the very core of the painter's erotic enterprise and that it functions as the privileged locus of sex within his pictorial imaginary. It is enough to look at, for example, his Useless Resistance (fig. 1), or the Louvre pendants Removing the Chemise and All Ablaze to be reminded of this privilege (see Cuzin 181, Rosenberg cat. nos. 72 and 73). Confronting canvases such as these, one may well be tempted to ask the usual question: why is it the woman who is being repeatedly ravished, with indeed useless resistance, in these images of seduction? Are we not witnessing here, yet again, the classic pictorial scenario—the female body as the passive object receiving the gaze and attentions of the active looking subject, who is also the invisible but controlling agent of Fragonard's erotic fantasy?

Such a reading of Fragonard's project, focused on his erotically charged Bathers (fig. 2), has been offered by Mary Sheriff, and I find it convincing as far as it goes. ¹ What this exegesis does not sufficiently acknowledge, though, is Fragonard's peculiar mode of painting that, in my view, importantly complicates the erotic argument his canvases may be seen to formulate. Sheriff, to be sure, has not ignored the formal qualities of the Bathers, but she sees the openness of Fragonard's manner as only confirming, as opposed to challenging, her overall reading of female flesh in this and other of his paintings as available, staged for the viewer's imaginary possession. Yet, to my eyes, the very morphology of the Bathers—its frothing, ebullient surface that testifies to an internal agitation, as if some force were pushing the masses of pigment from behind—suggests a play of sexual difference that cannot be fully accounted for in scopic terms, be it in the sense of relations obtaining within the field of vision defined by this image or in its mode of address to an imaginary viewer.

I want to suggest, more generally, that Fragonard's paintings are animated by something deeper and ultimately more important, for which his visual stagings of female seduction or abduction by the forces of irresistible (and presumably male) desire are only a front or a pictorial facade. In order to grasp this, though, we must recognize the function of the female body in these compositions not from the point of how it relates to the viewer as much as where it comes from, so to speak, to address us. It is, in other words, what I would call the anteriority of the image that we must consider insofar as it materializes itself on the canvas and bears on the organization of its surface, informing also the play of sexual difference in these paintings—from within, as it were.

It is, unexpectedly, from Fragonard's landscapes that we get a better grasp of how in his practice a picture actually emerges into being. The sheer number of landscapes produced by Fragonard—both paintings and drawings—testifies to a kind of passion for views, particularly for a certain kind of view to which the artist repeatedly returns: usually parks, many of them around half-ruined Italian villas, where vegetation and architecture mingle in studied disarray and where nature is always constructed as a peculiarly intimate setting, as in his drawing titled Among the Ruins of the Hadrian Villa (see J. H. Fragonard cat. no. 75). What I want to focus on is a curious structuring habit...