The French Art Novel, 1900–1930 by Katherine Shingler (review)

While the French art novel is often considered a genre proper to the nineteenth century, particularly by way of the examples of Balzac, Zola, and the Goncourt brothers, Katherine Shingler begins with the fruitful premise that the genre continued to echo, though undergoing substantial transformation, through the first half of the twentieth century, in works such as Apollinaire’s Poète assassiné (1916), Cendrars’s Dan Yack (1946), or Aragon’s Anicet, ou, Le panorama (1921). Like the ‘standard’ art novel of the previous century, these works interrogate the meaning of spectatorship and connoisseurship, and investigate the relationship between the visual arts and literature. Among this book’s qualities are its attention to lesser-known works such as those of Paul Bourget, Michel Georges-Michel, and Camille Mauclair. Shingler consistently locates attempts by the book’s all-male cast to represent women as basically passive muse-figures whose creativity, where it exists at all, appears threatening. One wonders how Shingler might construe, to mention just one example, the novels of Valentine de Saint-Point, which probably bear some likeness to the art novel genre, and in which female creativity—including motherhood—plays a starring role. In other words, Shingler uncovers an approach to twentieth-century novels that bears pursuing further. Shingler investigates such gender issues thoroughly and with great clarity, but she also locates other anxieties in the work of these writers. One may be surprised to find Apollinaire, for instance, demonstrating some wariness towards painting as a potential ‘ally’ to poetry. And in Georges-Michel’s Montparnos (1924), Shingler identifies a double discourse: on the one hand, Georges-Michel’s once highly successful novel seems to plead the cause of avant-garde art; on the other hand, underneath this surface avant-garde advocacy, Georges-Michel actually depicts these painters as part of the post-war retour à l’ordre for whom tradition, emblematized by the painting of Raphael, has primacy over no-holds-barred innovation. Additionally, Georges-Michel bears traces of a nationalist tendency that also haunts Mauclair’s 1903 Ville lumière (Mauclair would later adopt openly xenophobic positions in his art criticism). Mauclair, for his part, declares the ‘natural’ as an aesthetic value in painting: avant-garde art, in its excessive theorizing tendencies and its focus on individual vision at the expense of all moderation, exceeds the ‘natural’ and thereby perverts the art, while a lack of individual vision leads to sterility or servile conventionality. Shingler locates the same notion of juste milieu in the art criticism of François Fosca, a contemporary of Mauclair. One might contrast this discourse on the ‘natural’ to Apollinaire’s avant-garde declaration that the painter ought to throw off the yoke of ‘nature’ and the natural (Méditations esthétiques: les peintres cubistes, in Œuvres en prose complètes, ii (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), p. 2). In Proust and Bourget’s work, Shingler observes the construction of connoisseurship and the importance, particularly for Proust, of the act of seeing, and this too is traceable throughout the book: rather than ekphrasis, these writers seem most concerned with the subjective viewing of the art—the spectator’s reactions to the art object, and how knowledge or intuition inform these.