The Nabis and Intimate Modernism: Painting and the Decorative at the Fin-de-Siècle by Katherine M. Kuenzli (review)

viewed chronologically they reveal feminism’s progressive entanglement in colonial strategy; and secondly they plot the emergence of a distinctive French feminist identity constructed in relation to the Muslim-Arab woman” (9). The insights gained from her compelling arguments about these writers’ “colonial feminism” serve as the foundation upon which her ensuing analysis is predicated. Her second chapter explores contemporary feminist discourses about Muslim women that, she maintains, continue to be rooted in a colonial point of view favoring the interests of French Republicanism. Shifting her focus to the recent controversy around the public wearing of the headscarf in France, she asserts: “the feminism of the affair [...] constructed gender equality as a republican achievement under threat, legitimizing neocolonial attitudes and transforming feminism, as a forward -looking political position, into a defense of a reified (and regressive) notion of ‘femininity’” (42). In Kemp’s view, the advocates of this “nativist feminism” equate citizenship with cultural assimilation, promoting those universalist values that are hostile to any manifestation of difference. In perhaps her most controversial passages, Kemp faults the organization “Ni putes ni soumises,” which came into being following the 2004 debate, for encouraging Muslim women in France to abandon their cultural and religious heritage in order to conform more closely to the “French” version of citizenship. Although she acknowledges the very real threats to the freedom and safety of some Muslim-Arab women living in France who have been forced to submit to familial or community pressure to be veiled, she views the political agenda of the dominant anti-veil feminist voices as even more repressive, since they limit these women’s options to two stereotypes: the fully integrated beurette, or the submissive , yet paradoxically highly sexualized, voilée. In the second section of the book, Kemp offers readings of Fawzia Zouari’s Ce pays dont je meurs and Zahia Rahmani’s Moze and ‘Musulman’ roman, novels that she claims call into question the ideological logic underlying the beurette stereotype. With an emphasis on the disadvantaged socio-economic status of the female protagonists and the extreme state of exclusion experienced by the Harkis relocated to France after the Algerian War, these novels illustrate the daunting obstacles to the integration championed by the proponents of nativist feminism. The work concludes with “Rereading the Republic,” a chapter based on interviews with activists supporting the cause of Muslim women in France. While some readers will no doubt contest Kemp’s provocative interrogation of what she sees as French feminists’ harmful constructions of Muslim womanhood, her passionately-argued book fulfills her promise of giving voice to those who have been excluded from the ongoing debate about women and Islam in France. Carleton College (MN) Dana Strand KUENZLI, KATHERINE M. The Nabis and Intimate Modernism: Painting and the Decorative at the Fin-de-Siècle. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. ISBN 978-0-7546-6777-3. Pp. xix + 274. $99.95. Combining intellectual and cultural studies with art history, this book focuses on the decorative paintings, panels, stage sets, houses, furnishings, and grounds produced in France, Belgium, and Germany between 1890 and 1908. It treats Vuillard, Bonnard, Matisse, and lesser-known figures such as Maurice 1180 FRENCH REVIEW 85.6 Denis and Paul Sérusier. The many reproductions and photographs in the volume are closely analyzed, and often preserve images of lost treasures destroyed by war. “Nabis” means “prophets” in Hebrew. These painters rejected both Symbolist allegory and Naturalistic visions. Their paintings lacked action, but Walter Benjamin and Jürgen Habermas after him misinterpreted them as typical of consumer fetishism and escapist fantasy. The Nabis’ work was designed for specific private (interiors or gardens) and public (posters and theaters) sites. Like Bauhaus a generation later, their art sought to soothe the viewer, but also to “overcome the pervasive mood of apathy and directionlessness [of the age], and to reconnect the individual to broader, collective ideals” (17). The Nabis moved beyond easel painting more thoroughly to integrate their art with its surroundings , but they rarely exhibited their creations publicly (unlike, say, the Musée Nissim de Camondo in the Parc Monceau). Kuenzli’s perceptive comments on Bonnard’s “Women in the Garden” (plates 2–5) and her useful footnotes illustrate...