Le Choc des œuvres d'art by Julien Bigras (review)

une etape dans la critique de la litterature haitienne et indique les possibilites d'un renouveau de la critique caraibeenne. II a fallu attendre Laroche pour avoir une definition sociolinguistique du mot haitien 'neg' et son opposition au mot fran~ais 'negre: Ce n'est pas qu'on ignorait cette difference rnais Laroche a su s'en servir pour faire ressortir la signification precise de certains textes ou Ie fran~ais sert de vehicule ala pensee haitienne. Nous attendons du professeur Laroche une analyse egalement detaillee de Dezafi mais cette fois-ci en haitien car, comme il a dit lui-meme, 'pale franse pa di lespri.' (FREDERICK IVOR CASE) Julien Bigras. Le Choc des ",uvres d'art Collection Breches Hurtubise HMH 1980. 128 Why are some people immediately struck by some works of art, or by the works of some artists, before the form or content of the work is analysed and understood? Those who expect a psychoanalyst to answer such questions in terms of infant sexual experience will not be disappointed by Julien Bigras. He holds that such an impact occurs when the feminine sexuality that all art embodies is expressed in away that touches some sore point in the viewer's early relationship with the mother who first seduced him with her breasts and later denied him the sight of her nakedness. The author uses his own reaction to Bruegel, who allegedly shared Bigras's obsession with the infant's expulsion from the maternal paradise, to interpret Freud's writing on art, and thereby to diagnose Freud's response to his own painful and bewildering family situation. Bigras's argument is plausible and persuasively presented, though it presumes that the reader is predisposed to accept psychoanalytic exegesis and is probably too incautious in its sweeping assertions to win much favour in contemporary psychoanalytic circles. On first impression Bigras's work seems self-indulgent, arbitrary, and sentimental, but closer examination reveals an extremely subtle and sophisticated tissue of suggestions. The scope of the book is, however, too restricted and too superficial to open new paths in art criticism:its true subject is not that indicated in the title but a celebration of the child's dependence on the mother, combined with an avowed ambition to uncover the nakedness of father Freud. We are not shown how the general thesis might be carried beyond the special examples of Freud and Bigras (this bottle-fed reviewer cannot guess how it should be applied to his own instant fascination with the works of Graham Sutherland); and, since the thesis depends on the covert specificity of the relevant sexual reference, one supposes that it would stand refuted if anyone were ever instantly captivated by specific works of masters of non-figurative art. But perhaps no one ever is. However that may be, Bigras's easy style, poised between the confessionaland theconversational, entertains so charmingly that it would be churlish to disagree with him. (FRANCIS SPARSHorr) Femande Saint-Martin. us Fondements topologiques de la peinture Collection Constantes, no. 40 Hurtubise HMH '980. 184. $9.50 paper Fernande Saint-Martin uses Piaget's researches into the development of the spatial conceptions of children as a weapon against conventional art education. A child's drawings cannot properly be described in geometrical terms but show the growth in his mastery and use of such topological concepts as proximity, differentiation, and sequence. These relationships are later combined into projective schemes that articulate his experience of the world as ranged around him and his sense of how various viewpoints can be experientially co-ordinated. All the complex spaces thus developed are continuously meaningful as they explore the ways in which the self is related to the not-self - a relationship that, Saint-Martin says, it is the sole function of art to explore and affirm. But at the age of ten or twelve all this comes to a sudden end. The child ceases to draw spontaneously and is compelled to substitute for his own vital spaces the impoverished, Euclidean space of vanishing-point perspective , inherently meaningless and full of emptiness, suited only for the presentation of 'images' that are neither experientially relevant nor cognitively valuable. Contemporary non-figurative art...