Huysmans et les arts ed. by Jérôme Solal (review)

The wide-ranging contributions to this volume, the fourth in the Huysmans series published by La Revue des Lettres Modernes, address his lifelong engagement with the world of art: contemporary painting in particular, but also sculpture, architecture, and music. Solal, in his introductory remarks, characterizes Huysmans as"oeil avant tout," someone who, though not himself a painter,"prend plaisir à rêver à partir de la vision d'oeuvres picturales" (9). Aude Jeannerod opens the first part of the volume by tracing Huysmans's reactions to the emerging Impressionist movement, particularly the work of Monet and Pissarro, and noting the impact on his own "mûrissement esthétique" (17). For Éléonore Sibourg, it is especially Degas, among the Impressionists, with whom Huysmans shared a penchant for transgressing generic expectations. Nicolas Valazza documents the admiration of Huysmans, as well as Zola, for the work of Gustave Moreau, while Delphine Durand focuses more particularly on the latter's Salomé dansant devant Hérode, which occupies a central place in the private pantheon of Des Esseintes in À rebours. Relationships with figures less widely remembered today—the Naturalist painter Jean-François Raffaëlli and Jean-Louis Forain, who illustrated the first fictional works of Huysmans—are treated by Clément Siberchicot and Chantal Vinet, respectively. Ludmila Virassamynaïken follows Huysmans's interest, from 1884 on, in the work of Whistler, at a time when Huysmans was pivoting away from the tenets of Naturalism; in En rade, published three years later, she finds "cette même balance entre naturalisme et fantastique qui caractérise les portraits de Whistler" (143). During that same period, argues Arnaud Vareille, the provocative music of Wagner also had a significant impact on the aesthetic evolution of Huysmans, as the latter's "L'ouverture de Tannhäuser" (1885) reveals. In the first contribution to the second, shorter part of the volume, Solal himself looks at the late collection of critical writing, Trois primitifs (1905), in which Huysmans seems to turn away from the modern world to explore"des alentours médiévaux qu'il revisite et mythifie largement" (177). By contrast, both Bertrand Bourgeois and Jonathan Devaux work with his first publication, Le drageoir aux épices (1874), which Bourgeois sees as an ambitious attempt to realize "la transposition d'un genre pictural bien établi, celui de la nature morte, dans le genre littéraire encore balbutiant et en quête de forme du poème en prose" (207). Taking a broader perspective, Gaël Prigent reflects on the efforts of Huysmans, after his eventual conversion, to forge "un réalisme formel au service d'une révélation inspirée" (254). Joëlle Prungnaud brings the volume to a close by demonstrating that Huysmans, even post-conversion, remained in touch with the contemporary world, witness his architectural writings, including sharp criticism of the Tour Eiffel. While this volume will obviously appeal first and foremost to those interested in the work and influence of Huysmans, there are contributions that throw light more generally on the state of literature and the arts in France through the last quarter of the nineteenth century into the early years of the twentieth.