[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 foundations come into question. Consider Paris in 1844, where we begin our study. France had seen five regimes in sixty years. Men asked: what kind of government should we have? what role should religion play? the class structure? do we more highly value reason or emotion? the individual or the collective? Comment vivre? How to live? This no-longer idle question revealed that ground zero that had been reached. “All that is solid melts into air,” to quote a contemporary. At such moments, two things happen: culture seem to matter greatly — society turns to writers and artists to imagine the new future — and the personal can no longer be distinguished from the political. This opens the door to invective.

Because French censors kneecapped explicitly political commentary, cultural criticism mattered more than ever, art criticism especially. Art was dynamic, it embodied the era’s uncertainty; its audience, economic model, power structure, goals, genres, and styles were all changing. The state lavishly funded and carefully regulated art and artists, considered a national treasure, even a cornerstone of French civilization, which made art-world doings de facto referenda on state ideology and policy. Art’s spectacle commanded attention: the Salon drew thousands of men and women of all stations. Every publication from the daily newspaper to the women’s knitting journal to the union newsletter covered art. Intellectuals’ reputations were forged in those columns. Tempers could flare higher there, issues be debated more frankly, given the relative lack of censorship. When, in the early 1880s, censorship withered together with the state’s involvement in the art world, so too did invective art criticism. 1881, the year the École des Beaux-Arts ceded control of the Salon, seems a natural place for us to conclude.
The invective took its flavor from the uncertainty out of which it is born. In France, decades of tumult had ginned anxiety, over the fragility of the body (over violence, disease, and death) and the precariousness of social position (over illegitimacy, humiliation, and threatening marginal groups). These themes emerge time and again in the invective art criticism of this time. Also: apocalypse. Fear either paralyzed men, pitted them against uncertainty as such, or made of them utopians who embraced the chaos as an opportunity to start afresh. The latter two groups shared an apocalyptic fervor, that all might be lost should the wrong course be taken, a passion essential to mobilizing the still-paralyzed. Invective lashes out against uncertainty, drives toward resolution, even as it feeds off chaos. It exhorts action as bold as itself. It is a dramatic personal appeal from the terrified man to his fellow citizen.

Invective was a kind of surrogate violence, one that sought to erase one party to the confusion, to deny its very ability to signify. Between its periods of actual, violent struggle, which were brief, France contested its dilemmas in the periodical press, which had been greatly expanded by new technology. Littré’s 1863 dictionary defined “invective” as “discours injurieux, expression injurieuse contre quelque personne ou contre quelque chose” (1863). It is injurious, it is percussive, it is disjunctive, it is disorienting, it is silencing, it is erasing, it is humiliating. Its very length, its “going on and on,” is a kind of assault. How much misunderstanding of this material has resulted from its inevitable abridgement! The powerful used it as one more arm of power; for the weak, it was often their only arm.

Invective was a personal appeal, where historical uncertainty was obscured by personal certainty, whose authority derived from the gradual Western elevation of the individual that culminated in Romanticism. It told a personal story, if implicitly, drawing the listener into a novelistic narrative in which both are implicated. As one scholar has observed, “Polemic doesn’t unfold between two pure reasons, but between two desiring beings who want both to be right and to be right to … Polemic presupposes a dose of logic and one of ‘pathology,’ without which it dies – it dies if it is identified as insult, because that the zero degree of interlocution, and it dies if it is identified as logos, because it becomes a speech without a speaker.”

We begin in 1844 because that is the year that the French art-critical invective genre, pioneered by Denis Diderot, came of age, when Journal des Artistes editor Andre-Hippolyte Delaunay attacked Eugene Delacroix in a series of articles.

“The great French critics, watchdogs of the joint demands of idealism and naturalism on figurative integrity, violently opposed this free composition, which could only be interpreted as ‘disorganization’ and ‘disintegration of style.’ Simon Boubée, the author, who presented the new trend in the clerical Gazette de France, patriarch of French journals, described it as ‘a destructive system,’ the historian Henry Houssaye called it ‘the negation of art,’ and Paul Mantz ‘anarchy.’ Marius Chaumelin christened impressionism ‘the school of spots’ and complained that the abrupt technique thoroughly tried the eyes. To Charles Bigot, the painters’ canvases were ‘a shimmering chaos of brutal brush strokes’ and Émile Bergerat, too, accused them of brutality … In 1880, Huysmans was equally baffled by these ‘fluttering spots, luminous points distributed without reason.’ … Félicien Champsaur called them the clowns of painting; the dotting technique was their entry number. Philippe Gille interpreted it as the performance of a monkey who had got hold of a box of paints, while Roger Ballu, Edmond Lepelletier and Marc de Montifaud, the pseudonym adopted by the highly gifted Marie-Amelie Chartroule, attributed it to children daubing with paint … Many critics rejected the new touch as treachery. Richard Graul vehemently repeated that the ‘visible brushstroke technique’ of impressionism was humbug, Henry Houssaye described it as ‘charlatanism’ and Émile Cardon, pictured the impressionist entrusting the disciple with his recipe: ‘Dirty three-quarters of a canvas with black and white, rub the rest with yellow, then dash on haphazardly green, red or blue spots and you will finally attain a true impression of spring.” [Oscar Reutersvärd, Impressionism in Perspective {originally appeared in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism X, no. 3 (march 1952) pp 273-78}, 1952, pp. 44-46]
 

All the following quotations are taken from Hamilton unless otherwise indicated:

“[Théodore Duret, in his 1878 brochure Les Peintres impressionistes] And Manet! One could say that criticism has gathered up all the insults which it has poured on his precursors for half a century, to throw them at his head all at one time.”

 

“[Louis Etienne, in his brochure Le Jury et les exposants] A commonplace woman of the demimonde, as naked as can be, shamelessly lolls between two dandies dressed to the teeth. These latter look like schoolboys on holiday, perpetrating an outrage to play the man, and I search in vain for the meaning of this unbecoming rebus … This is a young man’s practical joke, a shameful open sore not worth exhibiting this way … The landscape is well handled …, but the figures are slipshod.”

 

“[Edmond About in the Petit-Journal on June 3, 1864] We shall not discuss the two duds which Manet couldn’t bring off. This young man who paints with ink and constantly drops the inkwell will eventually not even irritate the public. He may caricature angels or paint a wooden toreador killed by a horned rat, but the public will go its own way saying ‘Manet is still having a good time. Let’s see the real paintings!”

 

“[Charivari caption] Since he had to complain to his paint seller, Manet has decided to use only his inkwell.”

 

“Manet must suffer from an acute affliction of the retina.”

 

“[Gautier, in June 25, 1864 Moniteur] Manet’s [Angle at the Tomb of Christ] seems never to have known soap and water. The livid aspect of death is mixed with soiled half tones, with dirty, black shadows which the Resurrection will never wash clean, if a cadaver so far gone can ever be resurrected.”

 

“[Gautier, in June 25, 1864 Moniteur] …like the preliminary sketches of a master. Unhappily, Manet intentionally abandons them at this stage and doesn’t carry his work very far.”

 

“[Raoul de Navery in June 7 1864 Gazette des Etrangers] We have never seen such audaciously bad taste, the negation of scientific anatomy, spoiled color, lampblack abused and applied to the fact of the most beautiful of men, carried so far as by Manet in the Dead Christ.”

 

“[Ernest Fillonneau, in Moniteur des arts, on Olympia] An epidemic of crazy laughter prevails … in front of the canvases by Manet … [It is] a subject of general surprise that the jury accepted these works … Olympia is a nude, recumbent woman to whom some sort of Negress offers a bouquet voluminously wrapped in paper. At the foot of the bed crouches a black cat, its hair on end, who probably doesn’t like flowers since it cuts such a pathetic figure. Moreover, the heroine herself seems indifferent to the homage of the Negress. Is Olympia waiting for her bath or for the laundress?”

 

“[Ernest Chesneau, May 16 1865 Constitutionnel] I must say that the grotesque aspect of his contributions has two causes: first, an almost childish ignorance of the fundamentals of drawing, and then, a prejudice in favor of inconceivable vulgarity…. He succeeds in provoking almost scandalous laughter, which causes the Salon visitors to crowd around this ludicrous creature called Olympia … In this case, the comedy is caused by the loudly advertised intention of producing a noble work, a pretension thwarted by the absolute impotence of the execution.”

 

“[Jules Claretie, May 15 1865 L'Artiste] We find him again this year with two dreadful canvases, challenges hurled at the public, mockeries or parodies, how can one tell? Yes, mockeries. What is this Odalisque with a yellow stomach, a base model picked up I know not where, who represents Olympia? Olympia? What Olympia? A courtesan no doubt. Manet cannot be accused of idealizing the foolish virgins, he who makes them vulgar virgins. I had promised myself not to speak of it any more.”

 

“[Jules Claretie, June 20 1865, Figaro] “…you scarcely knew whether you were looking at a parcel of nude flesh or a bundle of laundry.”

 

“[Gautier, père] Olympia can be understood from no point of view, even if you take it for what it is, a puny model stretched out on a sheet. The color of the flesh is dirty, the modeling nonexistent. The shadows are indicated by more or less large smears of blacking. What’s to be said for the Negress who brings a bunch of flowers wrapped in a paper, or for the black cat which leaves its dirty footprints on the bed? We would still forgive the ugliness, were it only truthful, carefully studied, heightened by some splendid effect of color. The least beautiful woman has bones, muscles, skin, and some sort of color. Here there is nothing, we are sorry to say, but the desire to attract attention at any price.”

 

“[Zola in May 7 1866 L'Evénement] I also saw Olympia again, she who has the serious fault of closely resembling young ladies of your acquaintance. There, isn’t that so? What a strange madness not to paint like the others! If, at the least, Manet had borrowed Cabanel’s powder puff and powdered Olympia’s face and hands a bit, the young lady would have been presentable.”

 

“[Zola in May 7 1866 L'Evénement] You know what effect Manet’s canvases produce at the Salon. Quite simply they burst open the wall. All around them stretch the sweets of the fashionable artistic confectioners, sugar-candy trees and pastry houses, gingerbread gentlemen and ladies made of vanilla cream. The candy shop becomes pinker and sweeter, and the artist’s living canvases rake on a certain bitterness in the midst of this river of milk. Also, one must see the faces made by the grown-up children passing through the gallery. For two cents you will not make them swallow true flesh having the reality of life, but they stuff themselves like famished people with all the sickening sweetness served them…”

 

“[Zola in Jan 1 1867 Revue du XIXe siècle] I cannot repeat too often that we must forget a thousand things in order to understand and enjoy this work. It is no longer a question of the search for absolute beauty; this artist paints neither story nor sentiment. So-called composition does not exist for him. His self-imposed task is not to represent such and such a historical idea or event. For this reason we must judge him neither as a moralist nor as a man of letters. We must judge him as a painter.”

 

“[Zola in Jan 1 1867 Revue du XIXe siècle] Art is a solemn affair, it is profoundly boring. So it is necessary to enliven it a bit, to find a canvas at the Salon that can be made ridiculous. And recourse can always be had to an unfamiliar work which is the mature product of a new personality … The public has not even tried to understand the work. It has stayed, so to say, on the surface. What shocks and irritates it is not the essential structure of the work but the general and superficial aspects… The worst horror is originality. Unknown to ourselves we are all more or less creatures of habit who stick stubbornly to the trodden path. Every new road frightens us; we suspect unknown precipices and refuse to go forward. We always have to have the same view; we laugh at or are irritated by things we do not know…We are like skittish horses who rear in front of a tree fallen across the road, because they understand neither the nature nor the cause of the obstacle, and they don’t try to explain it for themselves.”

 

“[Zola in Jan 1 1867 Revue du XIXe siècle] Is it not profoundly sad today to think that Delacroix was hissed, that this genius who has triumphed only in death was driven to despair?”

 

“[Gustave Vattier in June 5 1868 Nain jaune] “coarse and ugly eccentricities, the fruit of vanity and impotence”

 

“[Stop, aka L.P.G.B. Morel-Retz, in cartoon legend, in May 25 Journal amusant] Without caring for the everyday bourgeois laws of perspective, Manet has had the ingenious idea of giving us a vertical section of the ocean so that we can read on the fishes’ faces their impressions of the battle taking place above them.”

 

“[Roger-Ballu in his book La Peinture au Salon de 1880; Les Peintres émus, les peintres habiles] “the whites [of the clothes] are dirty”

……………………

“[Berthe Morisot in a 1869 letter] I found Manet, his hat over his eyes, looking bewildered; he begged me to look at his painting since he did not dare himself.”

“[Berthe Morisot in a 1869 letter] Poor manet is unhappy. As usual his exhibition is not appreciated by the public, but for him it is always a new source of surprise.”

“[Baudelaire, in a letter to Manet:] What you demand is really stupid. They make fun of you; the jokes aggravate you; no one knows how to do you justice, etc., etc. … Do you think you are the first man put in this predicament? Are you a greater genius than Chateaubriand or Wagner? Yet they certainly were made fun of. They didn’t die of it.”

“Courbet is saying, ‘There is a bourgeois stopped before my picture. He is not having  nervous attack. My show is a failure.’”    [From a drawing caption, Anonymous?, taken from Courbet in Perspective, p. 43]

“‘He paints pictures,’ said du Camp, ‘as you black your boots.’ His anatomy, both human and animal, was incorrect; he had neither style, nor color, nor form; his figures were wooden; in short any child could do as well.”    [Maxime du Camp, taken from Courbet in Perspective, pp. 43-44]

“Not only were they ugly; they were also revoltingly dirty. Or they were deformed and monstrous. Perhaps the most violent comment of this type emanated form the author of La Dame aux Camélias [Dumas]: ‘Sous quelle cloche, à l’aide de quel fumier, par suite de quelle mixture de vin, de bière, de mucus corrosif et d’oedème flatulent, a pu pousser cette courge sonore et poilue?’ The courge was Courbet himself.” [Courbet in Perspective, p. 45]

“[The caricaturists'] fury expressed itself, so far as their drawings are still intelligible, in the following charges. … (1) Courbet was insincere and painted his pictures to shock people … He was conceited, rude, exhibitionistic, and the victim of a persecution-complex … (2) The second accusation against Courbet dealt with artistic skill … “He paints pictures,” said du Camp, “as you black your boots.” His anatomy, both human and animal, was incorrect; he had neither style, nor color, nor form; his figures were wooden; in short any child could do as well. … This is especially interesting for it illustrates the fact that the opponents of realism could oppose it on the ground that it was not realistic enough. This was, in fact, the accusation of the Goncourts, who maintained that even Courbet’s Femme au Perroquet, was “aussi loin du vrai, du nu, que n’importe quelle académie du XVIIIe siècle.” … (3) When one passes to the subject matter of Courbet’s paintings, one finds that the caricaturists were united in finding it deliberately ugly, coarse, and vulgar … The Baigneuses according to David’s pupil, Delecluze, were such that “not even a crocodile would want one to eat.” … Daumier shows us two art lovers, of typical Daumieresque physiognomy, maintaining that no one in nature could be so ugly as Courbet’s figures. Not only were they ugly; they were also revoltingly dirty. Or they were deformed and monstrous. … (4) The fourth general charge which the caricaturists made against Courbet was his socialism….” [George Boas, Courbet in Perspective, pp. 43-46.]

Even his defenders seem horrified by him at times: “Quelle pâleur pestiférée ! quel ciel étrange et malade, vert et jaune comme un cadavre de ciel ! quelle lueur terne et plombée dans cette toile du Massacre de Scio ! Les lèvres violettes de mille blessures ricanent affreusement aux flancs des corps morts; des mares de sang figé et pris en caillots souillent un terrain lépreux, écorché, piétiné, rude à l’œil comme s’il était peint sur des limes ; des fragments d’armes rompues, des haillons hideusement tachés gisent çà et là ; c’est l’affaissement et l’abrutissement du désespoir rendu avec la plus sombre poésie” (”What plague-stricken paleness! What a sick and strange sky, green and yellow, as if it were a corpse of a sky! What dull, leaden light in this canvas The Massacre of Scio! The violet lips of a thousand wounds titter awfully upon the flanks of the dead bodies; pools of congealed and clotted blood stain a leprous, flayed and trampled landscape, jarring to the eye as if painted on [TK]; fragments of broken weapons and horribly stained tatters lie here and there; it’s the collapse and exhaustion of desperation rendered with most somber poetry.”)

[Théophile Gautier, "Exposition du Louvre", in La Presse, 22 mars 1838 (reproduced here)]

“Delacroix has gone down in history as having been especially brutally vilified by the critics. Yet the scathing tone of his critics’ rhetoric should not be read by contemporary standards. We have to relativise the “struggles,” conflicts and verbal explosions that characterised both the “Classicist” and the “Romantic” sides. The “massacre of painting,” executed with a “drunken broom” and “tartouillade” are some of the famous terms, quoted by Tourneux and by most reference texts, to indicate the tone of the “insults” which were said to have been levelled at Delacroix … Poisonous virulence is a weapon which, once removed from its immediate context, loses meaning. Criticism tells us less about the painter who is being eulogised or abused than about the critic himself. And too much aesthetic depth should not be attributed to these hasty and superficial judgements, for criticism is not a unified and consistent discourse. Nevertheless — and particularly in Delacroix’s case — these judgments are informed by certain recondite and recurring motifs: notably that of the two diametrically opposed camps which constituted a real dividing line between critics, along which cliché, banter and wit are used to fuel a profound underlying antimony.” [by Anne Larue, in Art Criticism and Its Institutions In Nineteenth-Century France, pp. 73-74]

(See also the first entry in this post.)

C’est un malheureux qui promène sur sa toile une éponge qu’il a trempée dans la boue. (Définition de Corot par M. de Nieuwerkerke, surintendant des Beaux-Arts, entendue par Frédéric Henriet.)

An unfortunate man who parades across his canvas a sponge that he’s soaked in mud.

M. Corot ne parle la langue du paysage qu’en bégayant: sa touche est lourde et mate; la souplesse, l’humidité, le charme de la nature lui sont étrangers. (Ch. Lenormant, dans un journal de 1835.)

Mr. Corot speaks the language of landscape only in stammers: his touch is heavy and dark; the suppleness, moisture, and charm of nature are foreign to him.

Le Moine de Corot est profond de science,
De sa Fuite en Egypte on disait quelque bien,
Mais du Soleil couchant, l’auteur, en conscience,
Doit être fort heureux que l’on ne dise rien.
(Mauvais vers de J.-F. Destigny sur le Moine du Salon de 1840.)

Corot’s Monk is deeply scientific,
Good things are said of his Escape into Egypt,
But of his Setting Sun, the author, in good conscience,
Should be quite happy if nothing is said.
Nulle vérité dans son invention, nulle variété dans son ton et dans ses lignes: sa composition est uniforme, sa couleur invraisemblable, son dessin faux et perpétuellement lâché. (Castagnary: Salon de 1859.)

No truth in his invention, no variety in his tone and lines: his composition is uniform, his color unbelievable, his drawing false and perpetually neglected.

To tackle the sun, one must have some notion of form and color. Now, Mr. Corot has never been able to draw and his palette has only seen the color of (dare I say it?) bird shit… His trees dissolve into blobby masses, his fields are ashen, and his people, clothed or nude, scarcely belong to the human race. (E. de B. de Lépinois: L’art dans la Rue et au Salon, 1859.)

Corot’s work is perhaps poetic, but it’s not varied. (Th. Thoré: Le Temps, Salon de 1861.)

Turning round in a circle, Mr. Corot finally spun out. (Maxime du Camp: Salon de 1861.)

What is the Lake? A mess of blurred tones, which dirty the canvas the way a child’s scribbling dirties paper. And the Orpheus? Its landscape is the equal of the Lake’s, but the figures are even worse. And the Dance of the Nymphs? … The denizens of this wood, dolls stuffed with grain, barely covered up by rags, are truly painful to behold. (Olivier Merson: La peinture en France, Exposition de 1861.)

This odd doll [the Orpheus], followed by a Eurydice stiff as a doll, would occasion laughter if one could laugh at this excellent Corot, so infatuated with his art and so convinced. (Théophile Gautier: Abécédaire du Salon de 1861.)

The two canvases La Pastorale and Le Passeur are sketches exhibited as paintings. Ah! if a newcomer had brought them, the jury wouldn’t have hesitated to show them the door. Certainly Corot puts his heart into his art, but it’s a bachelor heart that has never suffered. Accustomed to stopping at the skin, at the bloom of nature, he only reaches the surface of our hearts, instead of joining with us. These evanescent unfolding mornings, as lively as the morning breeze, and these undulating setting suns, so peaceful, caress pure sensation but don’t set passion vibrating …. (Théophile Silvestre: Le Pays, sur le Salon de 1873.)

(See also ”French Art Criticism and Problems of Change in 1831,” in the 1983 (v.6, n.2) Oxford Art Journal, wherein Nicos Hadjinicolaou identifies important tropes of the period such as ”transitional period,” “the decadence of art,” “fashion,” “individualism,” and “originality”.)

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 those latter as art, if small-bore art? He has only passionately critiqued the form and results of a foreign voyage undertaken by a political figure in the government. And this expression “small-bore,” that we ourselves perceive as polemical, is it a testament to art?

The supposition that polemic is itself a testament to art awakens our skepticism. Does the expression “polémique de bas étage” say it all? However Meyer’s definition isn’t just a relic of the good old days. Others have had the experience that polemicizing produces a certain pleasure. There are, in polemic, veritable master craftsmen. It’s quite possible that there is such a thing as polemical technique and different ways of mastering this technique.

As I noted earlier, in Nicolas Wagner’s “La polémique et le ‘Code de la Nature’ de Morelly (1754),” in the 1985 collection Le Discours polémique: aspects théoriques et interprétations, he writes that “Paradoxically, literature manuals accord no place to the category of polemic; it’s never as part of a genre that a polemical text enters the French literary corpus. To speak more generally, the poetics of the polemical text seem to not exist at all …”]

In Jesse M. Lander’s Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern England, Lander argues that “The demise of polemic as a legitimate form of writing is inextricably bound up with the birth of the literary.” He writes that in the later seventeenth century in England, the polemic genre that arose with the Reformation and the printing press

did not disappear, but it no longer commanded the respect that it had claimed before the Civil Wars. An important new feature of this changed landscape was a restricted notion of the literary. No longer conceived of expansively as that which is written, literature began to assume a recognizably modern form. Politeness and irony, which may work at cross-purposes, become the hallmark of the literary, which is now widely perceived as an antidote to polemic with its fierce enthusiasm and unsophisticated earnestness. [p.1]

See also Acocella / Shaw.

[Théophile Gautier, Le Moniteur universel, 17 novembre 1864 [ck - 18 nov?], taken from Delacroix: The Late Work, p. 36.]

“Art is a solemn affair, it is profoundly boring. So it is necessary to enliven it a bit, to find a canvas at the Salon that can be made ridiculous. And recourse can always be had to an unfamiliar work which is the mature product of a new personality … The public has not even tried to understand the work. It has stayed, so to say, on the surface. What shocks and irritates it is not the essential structure of the work but the general and superficial aspects… The worst horror is originality. Unknown to ourselves we are all more or less creatures of habit who stick stubbornly to the trodden path. Every new road frightens us; we suspect unknown precipices and refuse to go forward. We always have to have the same view; we laugh at or are irritated by things we do not know…We are like skittish horses who rear in front of a tree fallen across the road, because they understand neither the nature nor the cause of the obstacle, and they don’t try to explain it for themselves.”

[Zola in Jan 1, 1867 Revue du XIXe siècle, taken from Manet and His Critics, p. 102]

“Have we not pretended long enough that Delacroix did not know how to draw and that his paintings were only a riot of color? Has not Millet been sufficiently accused of making ignoble and vulgar landscapes and drawings that were impossible to hang in a salon? And what hasn’t been said about Corot’s painting? It isn’t finished enough, it’s only sketchy, it’s a dirty grey, it’s done with palette scrapings….And Manet! One could say that criticism has gathered up all the insults which it has poured on his precursors for half a century, to throw them at his head all at one time.”

[Théodore Duret, in his 1878 brochure Les Peintres impressionistes, taken from Manet and His Critics, pp. 210-11.]

“… an article on cubism entitled ‘Le Fumisme’ appeared in the popular Les Annales Politiques et Litteraires, in which publicity was again described as the primary motivation of cubist painting. Here the cubist joins a larger community of struggling young artists, who despairing of recognition, are convinced that bad press is indeed better than no press at all. Moreover, artists will claim that ridicule often attaches itself to audacity and originality (the example of Manet and the impressionists is raised); speciously, bad criticism thus becomes a source of publicity and pride.”

[Jeffrey Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art, New York: Yale, 1994, p. 59]

“Why has almost every progressive artist during the past two centuries encountered an adverse reception when his work was first exhibited to the public? Is continual antagonism between artist and public inevitable in the creation of modern art? Can it be explained on artistic principles alone or does it require an understanding of other cultural factors peculiar to historical time and place?”

[George Heard Hamilton, Manet and His Critics, pp. 2-3]

“Artists have always been threatened by destructive criticism — major 18th-century artists, such as Boucher, Quentin de la Tour, and Jean-Baptiste Greuze, did not exhibit in 1767 out of fear of it.”

[Donald Kuspit, in online Encyclopedia Britannica online entry on "art criticism"]

“A hostile climate for new art is hardly new to cubism, and the provocation of modern style, since the generation of 1830 at least, is an obvious touchstone for the early twentieth century.” “It will be apparent to any student of the modern period that hostility to esthetic change had long been gathering momentum. Between Hernani (1830) and the Salon des Indépendants (1884), expressions and institutions of secession were leitmotifs embedded in the cultural dynamics of nineteenth-century Paris … In retrospect, resistance to the new has become the historian’s common repoussoir of innovation, a negative proof of originality in modern art”

[Jeffrey Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art, pp. xvi, p. 52].

“We suffer, actually, from a kind of mass guilt complex. Because Delacroix was spurned by the Academy until he was old and sick, because Courbet had to build his own exhibition hall in 1855 to get a showing for pictures that are now in the Louvre, because Manet was laughed at, because Cézanne worked in obscurity, because Van Gogh sold only one picture during his lifetime, because Gauguin died in poverty and alone, because nineteenth-century critics and teachers and art officials seemed determined to annihilate every painter of genius — because of all this we have tried to atone to a current generation of pretenders to martyrdom.”

[John Canaday, 1959, taken from Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record, pp. 119-21.]

“The terrible thing nowadays … is that nobody speaks ill of anybody. If we believe all we read, all’s well. In every exhibition there’s something”

[Picasso, 1966, The Grove Book of Art Writing, p. 521].

Between superficial jest and terrible deep earnest, characters in Shakespeare frequently abuse one another as vociferously, as grossly, and as inventively as any student of dysphuism could want. When Kent berates Cornwall’s steward, for example, it is partly because he wants to provoke a fight with a man he despises, but also because his (and perhaps Shakespeare’s) rage with this gross pragmatical pig of a world o’erflows all measure– he must unpack his heart with words, and so he does:

Steward: What dost thou know me for?

Kent: A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue; a one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch; one whom I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition.

…Outrageous insult is here in effect an explosion in behalf of one’s exasperated humanity.

One broaches no great novelty in proposing that insult is surrogate aggression, or that aggression embodies, as often as not, hostility to more than its immediate target, and likely more than hostility itself …

The “conditions of insult” are more numerous and particular than one might think offhand. For example, insult is always a face-to-face affair. You can slander a man in the public prints (and for that his recourse is the law), but you cannot insult him. Further, persistence is a great point of insult. The insulter must be advised, unless it’s completely obvious that he knows already, that what he says is offensive; if he then persists, the insult is “serious.” It’s no accident that the phrase, “Say that again,” plays so large a part in the forming-up of quarrels … Without personal intent on both sides, there can hardly be insult. It is difficult indeed to insult, thought you may despise or ridicule, a collectivity, a corporation, or a legislative body. You cannot readily insult a man who assumes his innate and therefore artificial superiority to you; for insult is an inherently democratic form of address, implying a relation, as we say, of “man to man.” To challenge a gentleman, you have to be a gentleman yourself; you can’t disdain a man whom both of you recognize as a social superior, and he can’t disdain you without rubbing in his advantage unworthily …

The really elaborate insult has to be playful in some degree if it’s not to perish under its own weight … Like stage duellists or antagonists in an opera vowing eternal hatred in an intricately woven duet, insult-contestants generally keep an eye cocked on the audience … Even though it can’t really avoid a tendency toward verbal oversupply, the invective mode needn’t fall victim to it, for self-mockery deftly converts a failing to a point of strength … He cannot repeat, he cannot hesitate, he cannot descend from the whirlwind of his language even to consider the occasion of it.

Ornate and vociferous insults may thus extend themselves magnificently, but at the expense of depth and dignity; the rush of particulars gives no time for implications to sink in, and the prominence of the insultor, as a mannered or even ridiculous speaker, slips him toward easy identification with the insultee. The Insult Majestic, or baroque insult, may or may not involve subtleties, but its weight and dignity set the speaker immediately on a plane wholly different from his victim’s …

A proper insulter rises above his own insult; it should be grossly rude, foul if possible, but happy in its delivery …

Below or alongside the insult direct (which, as we’ve implied, is a noble and therefore an increasingly peripheral art form) exist all sorts of slights and put-downs which rankle like insult but ought to be distinguished from it. Odious familiarity … abominable rudeness … The pseudo-listener and his counterpart the monopolistic nothing-sayer … the buried insult, or insult reflexive. It generally rises from the implied perception that the insulter is so far superior to the insulted that he must make enormous efforts to prevent that obvious fact from becoming socially painful. Yet he can’t be associated with the folly of the insultee; he must set himself apart. This he does by yielding to the victim’s aims and intents, endorsing them, approving them, and yet pushing them ever so slightly toward the ludicrous … An allied device (used, for example, when an outside is introduced into a group of insiders) is an excess of politeness, such a profusion of polite forms and formulas, that their purpose becomes plain–that is, the prevention of any other form of converse …

Stupidity used to be the ground-bass of insult …[but it] implies an assurance that an established wisdom exists … To say the least, that view is much less defensible now than it used to be. In addition, the whole notion of “wisdom” is a lot more dubious than formerly, since the individual has so much less command of his own destiny, and his own qualities count for less. In a tribal society, wisdom and experience yield a man authority; in a democratic megalopolis, they qualify him for social security and medicare. Stupidity has even taken on special positive values in our day [sincerity and unpretentiousness] … Finally, words like “cretin,” “moron,” and “idiot” have taken on new colorings as a result of a new humane attitude toward mental disease. They make us think of misfortune and misery, rather than complacent foolishness. Here, as with sexist jokes and insults, or racial stereotypes, we come up against the fact that “controversial” really is a disqualifying word, all by itself. This is simply because, amid explanations and qualifications and retractions, the joke and insult alike wilt and wither and lose point … holding mere stupidity against a man is certainly undemocratic and probably un-American as well.

The historical record is full of often amusing insults that were recorded, who knows how accurately, by judicial scribes. In for example Trevor Dean’s May 2004 Social History article (v. 29 n. 2, pp. 217-31), “Gender and insult in an Italian city: Bologna in the later Middle Ages,” we find catalogued the following imprecation:

You’re laughing and enjoying yourself, you rotten, shitty ruffian. Look to your wife and sister who are getting themselves fucked by friars and priests. If you were outside this area, I would hit you so hard you’d froth at the mouth. [p.219]

One 1352 insult, sadly not reproduced in Dean’s article, “combined references to bodily functions (farting), bastardy, animals, and social derogation (the victim was called the son of a water-carrier). Dean notes that much insulting was gender-specific:

Women were insulted overwhelmingly through their sexuality, through unacceptable sexual appetite and behavior. Men were insulted through their masculinity: their lack of mastery over their women, their failure to repay trust. This meant that men could use their sexual prowess and their knowledge of prostitutes to insult other men, but women could not. Conversely, both men and women could use accusations of prostitution and pimping to besmirch women. The game of sexual taunting was thus one in which men were always the winners and women always the losers.

[See also the December 2004 issue of Langue Française devoted to "Les insultes: approches sémantiques et pragmatiques" edited by Dominique Lagorgette and Pierre Larrivée.]