Crise de plume et souveraineté du pinceau: écrire la peinture de Diderot à Proust par Nicolas Valazza (review)

Reviews 273 Valazza, Nicolas. Crise de plume et souveraineté du pinceau: écrire la peinture de Diderot à Proust. Paris: Garnier, 2013. ISBN 978-2-8124-0863-2. Pp. 357. 33 a. The author proposes to examine a discursive paradigm marking the emergence and eventual waning of a particular critical approach to painting. It is an approach that signals a cultural transformation giving rise to what Valazza terms the sovereignty of the visual over the written. While the notion of sovereignty, as the author points out, is a term little used in histories of art, it turns out to be most useful in helping us understand the dramatic shift in critical attitudes toward art. In this regard, sovereignty serves to designate a certain claim to self-determination achieved by the world of art and artists over time, due to the waning relevance of Horace’s well-known principle ut pictura poesis linking painting to poetry. The newly acquired status of art thus brought out“l’altérité fondamentale du geste du peintre,”an aspect that, by definition, made the visible irreducible to the written (13). It was a turn of events, however, that also brought about a fundamental crisis in the traditional theoretical discourse on painting.What interests Valazza in particular, is the effect the recognition of painting’s sovereignty has had on the writing of critics of art. The first notable indication of a shift occurring in the paradigm is to be found in the series of Salons Diderot writes shortly after the middle of the eighteenth century. His observations on the greatest artists of his time inaugurate a creative kind of critique by turning the mimetic dimension of paintings into a pretext for dramatic narratives hightened by moral interpretations. Diderot’s critique is at its most original, however, when it accepts it is incapable of putting into words the emotion imparted by the art of Chardin in particular and when it is reduced to expressing “la stupéfaction du critique face aux œuvres qui le bouleversent”(34). In the following century, other writers will elaborate on this theme, each in his own way, and Valazza offers insightful and detailed accounts of the ways art criticism is implicated in the writings of Balzac, Baudelaire, the brothers Goncourt,Zola,and Huysmans.The essay culminates in a penetrating study of Proust’s critical involvement with art and, more specifically, with his attempt—by means of his art of writing—at integrating the art of the painter within the written text. With Proust, the art criticism inaugurated by Diderot has come full circle. Like Diderot, he is initially struck by “la même stupéfaction incrédule face à une peinture irréductible aux catégories esthétiques traditionnelles, qui avait fini par réduire Diderot au silence” (275). Proust is not content to remain silent, however. As he attempts to go beyond Diderot and other critics, his intention is to “prolonger, voire transcender le geste du peintre dans sa propre écriture” (290). The net effect of Proust’s achievement was to bring to an end the critical paradigm sustained by the notion of a sovereignty of painting, thus clearing the way for the formation of new paradigms sustained by new and different aesthetic forms and norms. Ohio State University Karlis Racevskis ...