Uncategorized Category Archives
Beginnings of an introduction
19 February 2008 | Uncategorized
[Delacroix] was showered with insults more offensive and ignominious than would ever have been addressed to a thief or an assassin.” –Théophile Gautier, 1864
Why did Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, and the Impressionists, who also had their defenders, receive such virulent abuse? History shows that invective thrives when uncertainty prevails to such a degree that society’s basic [...]
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Impressionist Criticism
30 October 2007 | Uncategorized
“…I led him before the Ploughed Field of M. Pissarro. At the sight of this astounding landscape, the good man thought that the lenses of his spectacles were dirty. He wiped them carefully and replaced them on his nose. “By Michalon!” he cried. “What on earth is that?” “You see … a hoarfrost on deeply [...]
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Manet Criticism
30 October 2007 | Uncategorized
“Throughout the twenty-four years of his active artistic life Edouard Manet continually sent his paintings to the Salon where he met criticism which in constancy and bitterness surpassed that directed against any of his nineteenth-century predecessors.” [George Heard Hamilton, Manet and His Critics, p. 4]
All the following quotations are taken from Hamilton unless otherwise indicated:
“[Théodore [...]
Courbet Criticism
30 October 2007 | Uncategorized
“To the exhibition of paintings by Courbet. I was amazed at the strength and relief of his principal picture–but what a picture! what a subject to choose! The vulgarity of the forms would not signify, the vulgarity and futility of the idea is what is so abominable, and even that might pass if only the [...]
Delacroix Criticism
30 October 2007 | Uncategorized
“Badly maimed horses in a more than foreign land, beneath an impossible sky, an incredibly dirty colouring and drawing which is wilfully inaccurate.” [by Vergnaud, taken from Art Criticism and Its Institutions In Nineteenth-Century France, p. 74]
Even his defenders seem horrified by him at times: “Quelle pâleur pestiférée ! quel ciel étrange et malade, vert [...]
Corot Criticism
30 October 2007 | Uncategorized
Vol. 2 of Corot, raconté par lui-même et par ses amis (Vézenaz-Genève: Pierre Cailler, 1946) has a chapter entitled “Sottisier” [pp. 195-199]. I’ll include here my rough translations, sometimes together with the French originals:
C’est un malheureux qui promène sur sa toile une éponge qu’il a trempée dans la boue. (Définition de Corot par M. de [...]
Art Criticism in the 1830s
30 October 2007 | Uncategorized
The notion of 1830 as a turning point toward virulence in French arts criticism seems born out by my reading. “Even Ingres, so often regarded as the archconservative, was disgusted with the treatment which the critics accorded his work at the Salon of 1834 and refused to exhibit there again.” [George Heard Hamilton, Manet and [...]
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Is there an art of invective?
30 October 2007 | Uncategorized
In his article, “Comment fonctionne la polémique ,” Artur Greive argues that lexicographers have defined polemics as hostilities, excesses, or art.
In the Meyers Konversationslexikon of 1890, polemic is not dispute itself, but rather “the art of conducting a dispute” (”Streitkunst”). The majority speaker rebuking the opposition for indulging in “small-bore polemics,” does he think of [...]
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Observations on Invective Art Criticism
30 October 2007 | Uncategorized
“Now that calm has settled over this grand name – of those that posterity will not forget – it is difficult to imagine the tumult, the scorching dust, in which he lived. Each of his works occasioned deafening clamors, storms, furious discussions. The artist was showered with insults more offensive and ignominious than would ever [...]
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Insults
30 October 2007 | Uncategorized
Insults are of course related to invective. They are usually oral, whereas invective is usually written. as Robert M. Adams’ argues in Bad Mouth: Fugitive Papers on the Dark Side (Berkeley and L.A.: University of California, 1977). He notes that in the Greek epics, the hero insults his foes before battle, presumably to steel his [...]
Censorship and Art Criticism
30 October 2007 | Uncategorized
I have a certain hypothesis: when censorship is applied much more strongly to political commentary than to artistic commentary, the latter will absorb some of the energy of the repressed political debate (Wrigley advanced a similar notion in passing). In one manifestation, the quality of a nation’s art is treated as a referendum the welfare [...]
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Invective Nostalgia
30 October 2007 | Uncategorized
Have we lost the art of invective? In the 1979 Traité d’injurologie, Robert Edouard wrote
One need only take a few steps down the street, travel a few kilometers down our clogged highways, receive a “free warning” from the finance minister, listen to the radio, watch the television … or even flip through certain women’s magazines [...]
Why Study Invective Art Criticism?
30 October 2007 | Uncategorized
So much invective criticism we now consider to have been badly wrongheaded. So why study it? In Bad Art (London: Chatto & Windus, 1989), Quentin Bell writes [p.9]
… history, so it seems to me, cannot afford to neglect any major historical phenomenon … [and] our perception of the goodness in art is determined by some [...]
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Polemic and Violence
15 October 2007 | Uncategorized
In their 1999 book Polemicization: The Contingency of the Commonplace (NY: NYU Press), Benjamin Arditi and Jeremy Valentine write:
… argumentation should not be confused with a purely non-violent exchange between equals. From different perspectives Lefort and Fraser challenge the belief that speech is the sole medium of persuasion and that it cannot transmit inequality of [...]
Marc Angenot, La parole pamphlétaire
6 August 2007 | Uncategorized
From Marc Angenot’s La parole pamphlétaire (Paris: Payot, 1982):
This work is dedicated to the theoretical description of what is usually called the “literature of combat.” It’s built up from an examination of a corpus of polemical texts — pamphlets and satires — that appeared in France and the Francophone world in the modern era. They [...]
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‘Polemic: Critical or Uncritical’
24 July 2007 | Uncategorized
When did critical reading, criticism, and critique begin to be discussed? Is there such a thing as “uncritical reading”? Hypercritical reading? (Viewing?) Is this (mere) entertainment?
Is there room in scholarship for discussion of “character”? Amanda Anderson:
We have become accustomed to hearing pragmatists called smug, or rationalists depicted as defensive and uptight. The hermeneut of suspicion [...]
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Morini on Invective
19 July 2007 | Uncategorized
In her preface to L’invective: Histoire, formes, stratégies (Saint-Etienne: Université de Saint-Etienne, 2006), Agnès Morini writes:
All the contributors to the colloquium whose proceedings we’re publishing here ran up against the same paradoxical reality: namely, the great bibliographical poverty surrounding this “genre of discourse designated as invective [...] without ever finding attached to this term a [...]
Zola, Mes Haines
18 July 2007 | Uncategorized
Here is a piece Zola published in May 1866 in Le Figaro, which became the preface to his 1866 collection Mes Haines, tr. Palomba Paves-Yashinsky and Jack Yashinsky, My Hatreds (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1991), pp. ix-xiv:
Hate is holy. It is the indignation of strong and determined spirits, the militant disdain of those angered by [...]
“What’s Good About Bad Reviews?”
9 July 2007 | Uncategorized
[According to this source, Joan Acocella's piece below "originally appeared in the now-defunct Dance Ink in the spring of 1992."]
Criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading. It is the capacity for making good or bad art a personal matter that makes a man a critic. The artist who accounts for my disparagement by [...]
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“Invective” by Desmond McCarthy
9 July 2007 | Uncategorized
“THE late Lord Morley, when he was editing the Pall Mall, was amused by a young journalist who, when asked his particular line, replied `Invective.’ `Invective? May I ask against what?’ `Oh … anything—general invective.’ One recognizes that impartial faculty for getting angry. It can produce sneers, tropes, tremendous metaphors; out of it some pages [...]
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